WE ARE NOT ONE

Professor Alterman traces how Israel became the political hot-button issue that it is today.

Israel is a small strip of land that plays an outsized role in American politics. The amount of money the United States gives to Israel dwarfs the foreign aid it offers any other nation, and for decades Americans' support for Israel was universal. In recent years, however, a contentious debate over Israel's treatment of Palestinians has erupted among activists, the political establishment, pro-Israel lobbies, and Jewish Americans. How did we get to this point?

We Are Not One traces how Israel became the political hot-button issue that it is today. As historian Eric Alterman reveals, the fate of Jewish state hardly registered at all in American political debate between tits establishment in 1948 and the Six-Day War nineteen years later. Following the shock of Israel's six-day victory, however, Jewish Americans' deep fear that Israel might have been conquered by rival nations gave way to an emotional embrace of Zionism. Through powerful lobbying groups such as AIPAC, Jewish-American activists, politicians, and donors launched a decades-long campaign to secure the support of successive American presidential administrations for Israel's right to self-governance. They found some initial success, but it took an alliance with evangelical Christian groups in the 1980s to make the pro-Israel lobby one of the most powerful forces in all of American politics, one politicians resisted at the risk of their careers.

For this reason, Alterman shows, US policy today remains as pro-Israel as ever, even as Americans have found themselves divided on the future of the state that they once supported unequivocally. Israel's increasingly right-wing government has alienated many liberal, secular Jewish Americans, putting them at odds with those in Orthodox or Conservative communities whose Zionism remains unwavering. Meanwhile, many Americans progressives have begun to consider Israel an apartheid state, calling for boycotts of Israel products, an end to military aid, and the imposition of international sanctions. Far from showing any signs of resolution, the U.S. debate over Israel's treatment of Palestinians has grown only more acrimonious and polarizing.

Deeply researched and revelatory, We Are Not One uncovers how the United States came to embrace Zionism and reveals why our consensus on the Israel-Palestine debate is fracturing today.

Eric Alterman is a CUNY distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College and holds a PhD in US history from Stanford University. A contributing writer to the Nation and the American Prospect, he is the author of eleven previous titles, including the New York Times bestseller What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News. He lives in New York.