Broken promised land: Truman's quick recognition of Israel was tragic, dysfunctional, and quintessential American.

• Author: Hurlburt, Heather
• Position: Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict - Book review

Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict

by John B. Judis

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 448 pp.

Like many American intellectuals, John B. Judis has experienced decades of dashed hopes about the American role in the Arab/Israeli conflict. Arguably the 370 pages in Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict are too few to hash through all of them: what the role of universalist ethics was, or should have been, in the birthing of Zionism writ large and American Zionism in particular; what role American politics, and the very personal politics of Harry S. Truman, played in the creation of the state of Israel; whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have been averted; and why the Obama administration's efforts at peacemaking have fallen so short.

The sheer breadth of material Judis covers, combined with his determination to call out Zionist and American leaders for moral failings, will bring this book in for plenty of criticism. Whatever your area of expertise, you will find some facet of this book that needs more depth or gets some nuance of policy ever so slightly wrong.

Regardless, Judis is a must-read for two bigger questions he raises: Could America, if it chose to, detach itself from the Zionist project? And can the American state do politics and policy coherently? The book is also necessary for two issues he does not explicitly raise: What should be the role of morality in government policy, Israeli or American? And what is the new center for American Jews who concern themselves with the fate of Israel, and find themselves ready to give up the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but not Zionism?

Judis shows, thoroughly, that the contours and success of Zionist ideology cannot be separated--love it, hate it, or try to ignore it--from Americans' core myths about ourselves. Who was one of the greatest purveyors of the idea that nineteenth-century Palestine was a desolate, barren place, populated only by a few benighted peasants? Mark Twain. Who wrote that "the situation reminds me of that in America, when the settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to protect themselves against the Indians"? Louis Brandeis. Who invested personally in plans that would have given political agency to both Jews and Arabs in Palestine, but gave them up again and again for domestic political exigencies? Harry Truman.

Many readers will know that Truman's prompt recognition of the state of Israel at its unilateral declaration in 1948 was the new state's first, and that he was later lionized for it. Fewer will be aware that this was the controversial result of intense domestic...