Israel Studies

A fter devoting himself to a penetrating analysis of the events during the narrow period of the Six-Day War, Shalem Center historian Michael Oren takes on the daunting task of describing the entire history of U.S. Middle East policy, which he dates back to before American independence. As in his earlier work, Oren has done a masterful job of surveying available documents and writing with a narrative flare that briefly put the 672-page tome on the bestseller list.

Given that so much of the media’s attention, and substantive U.S. Middle East policy, is focused on Israel, it may be surprising to find that fewer than 100 pages of Power, Faith, and Fantasy discuss Israel, Palestine, or the conflict in any detail. Oren states that this was intentional because so much has already been written and relatively few historical documents are available for the modern period.

Oren’s major contribution is in describing little known or unknown episodes in America’s early connection with a region that was founded in large measure on fantasy and faith. Americans developed over the years a mythological and stereotypical image of the Arab world, shaped by images books and, later, movies such as The Arabian Nights and Lawrence of Arabia. The latter refers especially to Christian missionaries who unsuccessfully exported their faith and in many cases wound up as the interpreters and defenders of Islam and its adherents.

In the revolutionary era, Oren notes that the Middle East played a disproportionate role in Founding Fathers’ decisions. He argues that concerns about pirates played an important role in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. He seems to equate the Federalist Papers with an obscure work of fiction, The Algerian Spy in which Rhode Island is to be a base for Algerian operations, which influenced the constitutional debate and the decision to establish an American navy. [End Page 183]

A little understood aspect of contemporary U.S. policy is the antipathy most Americans feel toward the people of the Middle East. Polls consistently show that Americans sympathize three to four times as much with Israel as with the Palestinians, for example, and I have argued that one reason U.S.–Israel relations are strong and will remain so is that Americans generally do not like Arabs or Muslims. Oren reveals that this hostility dates back to the 17th century, but never connects the animus of Christians toward Islam to the modern period.

Christian Americans took an interest in Hebrew long before most Jews did. Hebrew logos appear on the emblems of schools such as Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia and the language was mandatory at colleges such as Princeton, where Oren James Madison majored in the subject. Ironically, a colleague told me that when working on his doctorate at Johns Hopkins twenty years ago, he was told that he could not study Hebrew to satisfy his language requirement.

As others before him, Oren documents the long history of American interest in restoring the Jews to Israel since the early 19th century, which in part was attributed to the Christian desire to facilitate the Second Coming. In making the case that prominent Americans, such as presidents, made sympathetic statements about the idea of Jews returning to their homeland, he overlooks their broader agenda.

Coincidentally, I was sitting next to Oren in the press center outside Gaza during the disengagement when he was editing the book and noticed he was using a well-known quotation by John Adams, the first American head of state to make a pro-Zionist declaration, “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation,” Adams wrote to Mordecai Manuel Noah in 1819 (after he had left office). I pointed out to Oren that this was misleading because, like others before him, he only cited part of the quotation and should read the rest. If he took my advice, he still chose to omit that...