Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance

by Amy Kaplan,
The Jerusalem Post, October 12, 2018

Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Richard Crossman, a Labor MP and member of an Anglo-American Committee investigating the impact of mass immigration on the inhabitants of Palestine, attributed the enthusiasm of Americans for Zionism to their “frontier mentality.” The idea of a Jewish state ruling over an Arab majority did not offend Americans’ democratic ideals, Crossman declared, because they had long ago concluded that if the cause of “red Indians” had prevailed, “half of the United States would still be virgin forest today.” Other things being equal, he predicted, Americans “will always give their sympathy to the pioneer and suspect an empire which thwarts the white settler in the name of native rights.”