“It’s complicated” is a fair way to describe Israel’s relationship with the United States of America – as a people and as a state. Over its 250 years, there have been highs, but also painful lows.
There were years when we sheltered beneath the wings of the American eagle, protected and aided by it. There were also moments when those wings cast a shadow.
America’s 250th anniversary comes at another turning point in this relationship, after the joint confrontation with Iran revealed both the depth of the alliance and the tensions within it.
Heavy gray clouds are gathering on the horizon. And yet, from an eagle-eye view, and despite more than a few dark chapters, we would do well to pause and say to “one nation under God”: Thank you.
Among the citizens of the young republic, Jews were a tiny minority. Even so, they played a role in the founding of the United States. One of the most notable was Jewish financier Haym Salomon, who used his own money, along with funds he raised from others, to support George Washington’s revolutionary army – the army that won America its independence.
A few years after its founding, while the Jews of Europe were still confined to ghettos and subjected to persecution, president Washington assured the Jewish community that “the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance… everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
America’s Founding Fathers, devout Christians for the most part, saw themselves as the Children of Israel, and their journey from Europe to freedom on the new continent as an Exodus from Egypt to Canaan. But some of them also supported the real Jews – those suffering pogroms on the “old continent.”
Long before Herzl conceived political Zionism, there were Americans who supported the idea of the Jews’ return to Zion. As early as 1819, president John Adams wrote to Jewish leader Mordecai Manuel Noah: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.”
One hundred and twenty-nine years later, president Harry Truman recognized the new State of Israel 11 minutes after its Declaration of Independence took effect. After some three-and-a-half decades of good but distant relations, punctuated by several ruptures, the US stood by Israel in its most difficult hours.
During the Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s military stockpiles were dangerously depleted, it was the US that launched an airlift, supplying desperately needed weapons and equipment. Since then, America has consistently supported Israel, both financially and diplomatically.
Of course, this support, which has been substantial and deeply appreciated, also bolstered American interests. In real terms, the US has provided Israel with approximately $310 billion in civilian and, primarily, military assistance.
This has come alongside a long-standing commitment to preserving the IDF’s “qualitative military edge” over the armies of the region.
This shared history also contains painful chapters. Even in the Goldene Medina – the “golden land” to which millions of Jews streamed from Europe – antisemitism was a fact of life.
Enrollment quotas at universities, unabashed antisemitism in major newspapers, accusations of dual loyalty: all of these were part of the America that promised liberty and equality to all.
That antisemitism, pushed to the margins after the Holocaust, is regrettably returning to center stage. America’s passivity in saving Jews during World War II remains one of the gravest moral failures in this history. Even amid pleas to bomb the railways to Auschwitz or the machinery of death itself, Washington chose not to act.
Relations with the State of Israel have also had their painful low points. In Israel’s early years, the US imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state. Later, after Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula in Operation Kadesh, the US forced its unconditional withdrawal.
Since then, the relationship has more than once approached a breaking point – for example, when America prevented Israel from launching a preemptive strike on Yom Kippur, or when it declined to veto a harsh United Nations Security Council resolution against Israel in 2016, among other cases.
And yet, despite the sting, in the broad sweep of history, the United States was, and remains, a central pillar of support – at times the only one – in an international system often hostile to Israel. It is also a warm and welcoming home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world.
True, the future – both for the Jews there and for American support for Israel – is clouded by uncertainty. But at this moment, as our great friend marks 250 years, the honest Jewish and Israeli response is not amnesia, but gratitude.
Thank you.
The writer is director-general of the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a senior lecturer in law at the Peres Academic Center.