An article written by Ira Chernus, History News Network.
My knee-jerk reaction:
A charming collection of generalizations floating above class and history and explaining nothing: 'national identity,' 'way of life.'
The article quotes with approval the concept that forUS and Israel in the 1950s 'the crucial ties were a common commitment to "democracy, human rights, respect for other nations and human solidarity." Now the two nations are bound by "a new set of mutual interests: war, bombs, threats, fear and trauma."' How can one take this kind of statement seriously? The US in the cold war a respecter of other nations and human solidarity? Tell it to Guatemala. Or the people of Suez.
Another odd reading of US history by the artickle's author, in order to equate what he sees as the bunker mentalities of the US and Israel:
No, we did not endure a Holocaust. But the fear of a German invasion of the U.S. homeland was very real in the early 1940s. And Franklin D. Roosevelt did everything he could to fan the sparks of that fear into an anti-German fire. It was a crucial part of his strategy to build political support for his program of supporting the British war effort with everything short of sending U.S. troops to Europe. That was before December 7, 1941.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the fear for the homeland that Roosevelt had created was immediately, seemingly effortlessly, extended from Germany to Japan. Resistance to war, which had been strong enough to remain Roosevelt's number one political concern, evaporated as a politically significant force overnight.
These ideological rationalizations are not punctured by the article's writer, but reinforced. The actual material basis for US support for Israel, its Ulster in the Middle East, is never approached. Instead everything is reduced to the level of emotionalism and left there, as though the anxieties bred by the nightly news were the ONLY real version of reality.
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