Shaul Mitelpunkt's impressive study of the three decades bookending the entrenchment of the United States as Israel's main arms supplier is notable for blending the tools of elite-based analysis with cultural analysis, and for demonstrating how bilateral relations serve the needs of each party in sometimes surprising ways. Using a wide array of sources, Mitelpunkt recounts how the State of Israel became firmly situated in the American political-cultural imaginary, tracing the content of those representations and the function they served to shore up America's own shifting global identity.
Chief among these tropes was the perception, in American consciousness, of Israel as a “society of citizen-soldiers,” where “individual liberal pursuits were not compromised by frequent military call-ups, but rather enhanced by them” (7). As Mitelpunkt describes the image, “Israeli soldiers supposedly moved with a smile from tank to discotheque, university seminar to the trenches, and family camping trip to artillery training” (7). This view was crucial in solidifying the position of Israel in the American mind as being committed to a cause, just as the United States was emerging from the consensus around World War II before nearly buckling under the weight of the divide over the Vietnam War.
Yet what is most intriguing in his analytical framework is the story of how these images were mutually constituted and reinforcing: both nations had an interest in cultivating these representations in American collective consciousness, and indeed Israel's state machinery actively worked towards this end. The film Exodus, he demonstrates, should not only be seen as an American fantasy of Zionism. Coproduced with the State of Israel, the film should also be seen as an Israeli attempt to shape Americans’ views of Israel's founding story. (The result of this state support was a chagrined domestic Israeli film industry whose filmmakers felt neglected in comparison. Some expressed their pique through the Israeli film I Like Mike, which Mitelpunkt analyzes as well.)
While the United States had an identity-shattering war in the carnage in Southeast Asia, Israel, too, experienced wars and battles that challenged its view of itself—three times, and in different directions and with different effects. The 1973 Yom Kippur War exposed Israeli intelligence complacency; the 1982 Israel-PLO war in Lebanon widely became known as Israel's Vietnam, with a broken national consensus about the justness of the mission; and the First Intifada saw Israeli soldiers face off against unarmed Palestinian civilians. Mitelpunkt demonstrates not only how America held up a mirror to the face of Israelis whose military was acting in a way that defied the national identity of the country (a process I detail in my own book), but also that the holder of that proverbial mirror had its own motives for wanting to view Israel and Israelis in a particular light. This dual frame of analysis makes the study particularly rich and textured.
Mitelpunkt shows that America's move to try to shepherd Israelis towards seeking peace with the Arab states (and possibly the Palestinians) helped the United States position itself as “moral powerhouse,” while Israel's sometimes tepid response soon was seen, in the American imagination, as reflecting a “country defunct as a vehicle for nostalgia” (195). These diplomatic efforts, while succeeding on the Israel-Egypt front—and helping “Americans to see themselves as a nation of peacemakers” (277)—ultimately yielded little in the way of achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace and justice. In fact, Mitelpunkt persuasively argues that the Camp David agreement served to forestall progress on the Palestinian issue. All this has followed a growing neoconservative trend in the United States—echoed in part by Israel's contemporary leadership—that divides society and elites into “the militarily committed and the diplomatically naive” with Israel standing in as the “Uzi-carrying canary” (283).
The writing is lively and precise, and Mitelpunkt has a storyteller's knack for colorful details: the tortured choreography of an American-government gift of concert-hall patronage in the fifties; the challenge of filming Exodus in a city whose young residents stole the mirrors off Paul Newman's scooter; the “American standard toilets” that were advertised at the opening of the Tel Aviv Hilton; and the defecating white Finnish horse at that hotel's opening gala. The author deftly complements the depictions of larger-scale cultural offerings and diplomatic forays with useful depictions of smaller cultural productions. Two examples are Roger Fisher's PBS documentary Arabs and Israelis and a description of a 1973 CBS television special about Israel, narrated by Amos Elon, that had to be slightly revised as a result of the shock of the Yom Kippur War.
Tracing dominant narratives and representations is always a risky endeavor given the inevitable heterogeneity in any group. Mitelpunkt indeed nods to these important subsets of American society, each with their own vantage points when it comes to perceiving Israel: Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, the New Left, evangelical Christians, liberals, conservatives, and neoconservatives. Neither does he gloss over divisions in Israeli society regarding diplomacy (namely between the Israeli peace movement and the various governments) as well as broader structural inequalities around race, ethnicity, class, and gender that characterize Israeli society. (Though here, the curious reader might wish for more public-opinion data at pivotal historical points around particular issues, data that could be further broken down by gender, class, race, party affiliation, or ethnicity.)
Still, Mitelpunkt effectively distills the dominant imagery in the eyes of mainstream Israelis and Americans, in the process demonstrating the degree to which representations can be a powerful force for shaping bilateral relations and for pushing states and societies to come to terms with their own collective identity struggles.
