Walter Russell Mead

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People Walter Russell Mead

From the acclaimed author of God and Gold and Special Providence, a groundbreaking new work that overturns the conventional understanding of the Israeli-American relationship and explores the fate of the Jewish people. In this brilliant investigation, one of our premier scholars of American foreign policy contends that both pro- and anti-Zionists have unintentionally collaborated in a myth of monolithic American-Jewish support for Israel that exaggerates Jewish unity concerning Israel, overstates the influence of Jewish lobbyists, and underestimates the potential for change in the Israeli-American relationship. Mead unveils the little-known incidence of non-Jews such as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller lobbying for a Jewish homeland well before the foundation of the modernist Zionist movement. He makes clear how, in contrast, many Jewish Americans feel at odds with Israel's right-wing nationalists; and how developments under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama drove the most heated American debate over Israel since the 1940s. Throughout, Mead's singular intelligence and lively prose penetrate layers of opaque history and politics, illuminating a better way forward.