Book Review

Israel and the Western Powers, 1952-1960. By Zach Levey. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xiv, 203 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-8078-2368-6.)

"Well, isn't that special," Dana Carvey's church lady might well have observed had she taken time out from Saturday Night Live to review the history of Israeli-American relations. Indeed, many scholars agree that by the mid-1970s, common values and common enemies had propelled Washington and Tel Aviv toward an informal partnership in which top United States policy makers regarded Israel as a strategic asset in the Middle East. The two books under review demonstrate that the origins of this "special relationship" predate the birth of the Jewish state and that over the years, the relationship has been shaped as much by Palestinian Jews and Israeli leaders as by State Department and White House officials.	1
Michael Brown's The Israeli-American Connection traces the ambivalent relationship that developed between six prominent figures in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) and American Jews from 1914 to 1945. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, came to the United States during World War I, recruited fifteen hundred volunteers for a Jewish legion that fought on the western front, and then had a falling-out with mainstream American Zionists such as Louis Brandeis after the armistice. Chaim Bialik, the Yishuv's poet laureate and a central figure in the revival of the Hebrew language, toured the United States during the 1920s hoping to make friends and raise funds for the Zionist cause but returned home with little more than memories of a strange land where babbitry reigned supreme. Berl Katznelson, a labor organizer and founder of the Histadrut (the Yishuv's central trade union), was likewise disappointed by the stingy and domineering attitudes he encountered among many American Zionists during the 1930s.	2
Brown's account of the careers of Henrietta Szold and Golda Meir, two Zionist pioneers with deep ties to the United States, suggests that greater familiarity only bred greater frustration. The Baltimore-born Szold was the founding mother of Hadassah, a women's organization that raised funds to build hospitals in Palestine. Increasingly convinced that American Jews were far too out of touch with conditions in the Holy Land, however, Szold emigrated to Palestine after World War I and in short order became the Yishuv's informal secretary of health, education, and welfare. Golda Meir, born in Russia but raised in Milwaukee, shared Szold's doubts about the dependability of American Zionists and emigrated to Palestine in 1921. Nevertheless, Meir returned to the United States frequently during the following twenty years to raise funds and create a vibrant Zionist infrastructure among women's groups, labor organizations, and New Deal officials.	3
But it was David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the Mapai (labor) party and the most charismatic leader of the Yishuv, who did the most to shape the Israeli-American connection during the three decades before 1948. Using new material from the Israeli and American archives, Brown paints a portrait of Ben-Gurion as a master politician and fund-raiser who, like Jabotinsky and the others, remained deeply ambivalent about the United States, where far too many Jews were opting for assimilation. Ben-Gurion, however, quickly realized that American Zionists were probably less important for the dollars and emigrants that they provided to the Yishuv than for the political and diplomatic leverage they might wield with United States policy makers. Ben-Gurion agreed with Berl Katznelson, who remarked in early 1939 that American Zionists were not merely "a financial reservoir" but also "a political crutch" useful in persuading the United States government to prop open the door to Palestine that United Kingdom officials were ready to slam shut. Although Michael Brown occasionally gets bogged down in describing intra-Zionist squabbles, one puts down his book with a better understanding of the American connections that enabled Ben-Gurion and his comrades in the Yishuv to secure United States support during the Truman administration.	. . .