| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Biblical Interpretation and Middle East Policy: The Promised Land, America, and Israel, 1917–2002. By Irvine H. Anderson. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. x, 187 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8130-2798-5.)
Irvine H. Anderson's Biblical Interpretation and Middle East Policy raises a number of important questions regarding the support Protestant sects gave to Israel and Zionism. Moreover, the subject can provide greater understanding about the relationship between Israel and the United States as well as the impact of religious groups on the formulation of policy within the United States. This topic should be researched and studied in greater detail using such documents as the papers of the U.S. presidents from 1900 to the present as well as the papers of White House, State Department, and Defense Department associates, congressional debates and major newspapers, and journals and magazines.	1
There are certain questions that Anderson has raised that need further analysis. While the title indicates that his book was to be a study of America and Israel, he begins with such British individuals as Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Minister Lord Arthur Balfour. Claiming that both had a rather "strong biblical background" (p. 60), Anderson does not quite show how that background may have influenced them to be in favor of the Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. Nor does he tell us what impact their beliefs had on their desire to seek the friendship of the Arab nations. Why was Balfour's declaration so much less than what Dr. Chaim Weizmann had asked the British government to support? Why did Lloyd George and Balfour believe that Jews throughout the world would turn in their patriotism to their own countries in favor of the Allies in return for British support of the Jewish homeland idea? Was not that notion filled with the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century European racists?	. . .

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