Life’s too short to read the new Walt/Mearsheimer book, but something struck me about their London Review of Books article that I didn’t remark on at the time, which is a pretty big hole they don’t seem to even see, and which none of their critics (that I noticed) said anything about. After going on about how they see Israel as geopolitically irrelevant and morally equivalent to the Arabs, they got to their main point:

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it? The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.

But wait a minute — these guys really don’t seem to understand America at all. And I don’t mean our affection for Israel a beacon of democracy, blah, blah — I’m talking about our visceral identification with the Jewish people specifically, something inherent in our national character. Sure, the pro-Israel lobby is powerful and effective, but most of the time it’s going with the flow of American attitudes rather than redirecting them. It’s not just those wacky Christian Zionists they identify as part of the elite Lobby, bending America to their will — our association with the Israelites of the Old Testament (and by implication, their modern heirs) is part of our foundational mythology and shapes our modern attitudes. When John Winthrop told his flock that “we shall be as a city upon a hill,” the allusion was to the City of David atop Mt. Zion. They and subsequent settlers explicitly saw themselves as making an exodus from the fleshpots of Europe to wander in the wilderness, which is why both Franklin and Jefferson proposed images of the Children of Israel leaving Egypt for the the Great Seal of the United States, and why Lincoln called us God’s “almost chosen people.” I’m sure there are whole books written about this, but my point is that I think secular, post-American urban elites often don’t understand the public’s connection to Israel, amorphous and even unconscious as it might be in many cases.