Abstract
By narrating the seventy-year history of debates over relocating the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, this chapter analyzes how domestic politics influenced public discourse over U.S. foreign policy. What was originally a peripheral issue in U.S.-Israel and Middle East diplomacy developed, by the 1970s, into a frequently discussed and bi-partisan congressional cause. The embassy move took on significant domestic political symbolism even as U.S. administrations resisted the move. When President Donald Trump enacted the move in 2017, the U.S. embassy and its location had become a powerful grassroots symbol of American values. This chapter is thus a case study in how domestic politics has influenced the course of U.S. foreign policy.
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Notes
- 1.
Gil Hoffman, “JPost Poll: Skyrocketing Support for Trump Among Israelis,” Jerusalem Post, December 14, 2017, https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Skyrocketing-support-for-Trump-among-Israelis-518096.
- 2.
Colin Dwyer, “United Nations Votes Overwhelmingly to Condemn U.S. Decision on Jerusalem,” NPR, December 21, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/21/572565091/u-n-votes-overwhelmingly-to-condemn-trumps-jerusalem-decision; Farnaz Fassihi, “Fourteen of 15 Security Council Members Denounce U.S. Stance on Jerusalem,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/fourteen-of-15-security-council-members-denounce-u-s-stance-on-jerusalem-1512777971.
- 3.
This non-binding resolution vote was a reaffirmation of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act (see conclusion). See “A Resolution Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Reunification of Jerusalem,” Senate Resolution 176, 115th Congress, 2017, https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-resolution/176/text.
- 4.
Surveys on the peace process barely mention the embassy at all (though often document the status of Jerusalem issue thoroughly). See Dennis Ross, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Robert O. Freedman, ed. Israel and the United States: Six Decades of US-Israeli Relations (Avalon Publishing, 2012); Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Bantam Books, 2008); William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, Third Edition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005); Peter L. Hahn, Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Washington, D.C: Potomac Books, 2005); Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For an Obama-era assessment, see Dana H. Allin and Steven N. Simon, Our Separate Ways: The Struggle for the Future of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
- 5.
This mirrors broader public engagement with the U.S.-Israel relationship, which has a uniquely popular appeal in American politics. A variety of scholars and journalists have sought to make sense of the significance of Israel to American culture as the foundation of a “special relationship.” Here I examine the specific American Jewish and American evangelical subcultures. Studies of the “special relationship” include Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (New York: Knopf, 2022); Jonathan Rynhold, The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Stephens, U.S. Policy Towards Israel: The Role of Political Culture in Defining the “Special Relationship” (Brighton [England]: Sussex Academic Press, 2006); Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View the Jewish State as an Ally (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Eytan Gilboa, American Public Opinion Toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987); Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Schocken, 1984).
- 6.
On the development of elite Cold War liberal consensus, see Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, Second Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020); Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); and Robert Schulzinger, “Cementing and Dissolving Consensus: Presidential Rhetoric During the Cold War, 1947–1969,” in Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century, edited by Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010), 93–112.
- 7.
The structural role of lobbying, and the “Israel lobby” in particular, has received much scholarly attention. While lobbying extends to the early state period, it grows dramatically in the post-1967 period. On the early lobby period, which is receiving increasing scholarly attention, see Walter L. Hixson, Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Doug Rossinow, “‘The Edge of the Abyss’: The Origins of the Israel Lobby, 1949–1954,” Modern American History 1, no. 1 (March 2018): 23–43. On the lobby in the post-1967 period, see Keith Peter Kiely, U.S. Foreign Policy Discourse and the Israel Lobby: The Clinton Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); James F. Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (New York: Clarity Press, 2006); A. F. K Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Nimrod Novik, The United States and Israel: Domestic Determinants of a Changing U.S. Commitment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986).
- 8.
On surveys of U.S.-Middle East diplomacy, see Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, Third Edition. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and Peter Hahn, Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
- 9.
“Moving Embassy to Jerusalem Urged,” New York Times, December 17, 1949, 9.
- 10.
Shlomo Slonim, Jerusalem in America’s Foreign Policy, 1947–1997 (Boston: Kluwer Law International, 1998), 7–8.
- 11.
Ibid., 10.
- 12.
H. Eugene Bovis, The Jerusalem Question, 1917–1968 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1971), 60–61.
- 13.
Ibid., 62.
- 14.
Ibid., 82.
- 15.
Isaiah L. Kenen, Israel’s Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington (New York: Prometheus Books, 1981), 106.
- 16.
Slonim, Jerusalem in America’s Foreign Policy, 369.
- 17.
Quoted in Donald Neff, “Jerusalem in U.S. Policy,” Journal of Palestine Studies 23, no. 1 (1993): 28.
- 18.
Slonim, Jerusalem in America’s Foreign Policy, 180.
- 19.
For all major party platforms dating to 1840, see “The American Presidency Project” hosted by the University of California-Santa Barbara: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/elections-and-transitions/party-platforms.
- 20.
Arthur Hertzberg, “Israel and American Jewry,” Commentary (August 1967): 69.
- 21.
Dov Waxman, Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 36.
- 22.
Slonim, Jerusalem in America’s Foreign Policy, 199–200.
- 23.
See Noam Kochavi, “Joining the Conservative Brotherhood: Israel, President Nixon, and the Political Consolidation of the ‘Special Relationship,’ 1969–73,” Cold War History 8, no. 4 (November 2008): 449–80.
- 24.
James Naughton, “McGovern Seeks Jewish Votes with a Booklet on His Record,” New York Times, August 29, 1972, 21. McGovern claimed in a 34-page pamphlet to have been a consistent supporter of Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, as well as one of the supporters of a Congressional bill to sell jets to Israel in 1969–1972.
- 25.
McGovern quoted in Kenen, Israel’s Defense Line, 257.
- 26.
Quoted in Frank Lynn, “McGovern, in City, Says Humphrey Distorts Stand,” New York Times, June 10, 1972, 12.
- 27.
Nathan Glazer and Milton Himmelfarb, “McGovern and the Jews: A Debate,” Commentary (September 1972): 43–51.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid., 257–258.
- 30.
“McGovern Clarifies His Position on Israel, Jewish-Related Topics,” The Commentator 38, no. 2 (October 25, 1972), https://yucommentator.org/1972/10/mcgovern-clarifies-his-position-on-israel-jewish-related-topics-vol-38-issue-2/.
- 31.
“McGovern Urges Administration to Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 30, 1972, https://www.jta.org/archive/mcgovern-urges-administration-to-recognize-jerusalem-as-israels-capital.
- 32.
Revised Standard Version.
- 33.
On the classic study of prophecy belief in America, see Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992). See also Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- 34.
On the project of evangelical human rights, see Lauren Frances Turek, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).
- 35.
See Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002).
- 36.
“Evangelists Meet in the Holy Land,” New York Times, June 20, 1971, 10.
- 37.
See Caitlin Carenen, The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
- 38.
Quoted in Michael Thomas, American Policy Toward Israel: The Power and Limits of Beliefs (London: Routledge, 2007), 60.
- 39.
See L. Sandy Maisel and Ira Forman, Jews in American Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 153; Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 48.
- 40.
George Will, “Power, Politics, and the Embassy,” Newsweek, April 9, 1984, 112.
- 41.
Slonim, Jerusalem in America’s Foreign Policy, 252.
- 42.
Howell Raines, “Democrats Pledge Respect but Yield to Running Feud,” New York Times, April 2, 1984, A1.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
“1984 Democratic Platform,” https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1984-democratic-party-platform.
- 45.
Mike Evans, Jerusalem D.C. (Phoenix, AZ: Bedford Books, 1984).
- 46.
Falwell’s centrality to the Christian right is covered in Daniel Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 47.
Jerry Falwell prepared remarks on hearings for H.R. 4877, House Committee on Foreign Affairs (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C.: 1984), 85.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
“1996 Republican Platform,” https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1996.
- 51.
Quoted in Amir Tibon, “From Bill Clinton to Trump: The Never-ending Story of the Jerusalem Embassy Move,” Haaretz, February 5, 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-never-ending-story-of-the-jerusalem-embassy-move-1.5494231.
- 52.
Niels Lesniewski, “White House confirms Biden will keep embassy in Jerusalem,” Roll Call, February 9, 2021, https://rollcall.com/2021/02/09/white-house-confirms-biden-will-keep-embassy-in-jerusalem/.
- 53.
Quotes in Slonim, Jerusalem in America’s Foreign Policy, 326–329.
- 54.
Presidential Proclamation 9683 of December 6, 2017, Federal Register 82, no. 236, December 11, 2017, 58332, https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/DCPD-201700887.
- 55.
Quoted in “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, says Donald Trump,” BBC News, December 6, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42259443.
- 56.
Quoted in Barbara Plett Usher, “Jerusalem Embassy: Why Trump’s Move was Not About Peace,” BBC News, May 15, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44120428.
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Hummel, D.G. (2024). Slow March to Jerusalem: Domestic Politics and the History of the U.S. Embassy in Israel. In: Bessner, D., Brenes, M. (eds) Rethinking U.S. World Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49677-6_6
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