Zionism, Nationalism, and the American Jewish Congress

Pappé’s story begins in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Western evangelical Christians embraced the concept of the “return of the Jews” and turned it into a millennial injunction. They envisioned that a Jewish state in Palestine would, as Pappé writes, precipitate “the resurrection of the dead and the end of time.”

This theology later morphed into a political project for two reasons. First, it came to be understood that such a theology could serve the British interest in demolishing the Ottoman Empire. Second, it drew support from Jews and Christians among the British aristocracy who — especially after Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, published his 1896 pamphlet called The State of the Jews — sought a solution to the vicious antisemitism that had broken out on the continent. The surge in antisemitic acts spurred a modest wave of Jewish migration to Palestine beginning in the early 1880s, as well as to Britain, where the Jews were not greeted hospitably.

The period between 1905 and 1918 stands out in the history of lobbying for Zionism in both Britain and the United States. During this time, Zionist leaders not only impressed on the British that a Jewish stronghold in Palestine would serve Britain’s geopolitical interests, they turned it into a reality with the notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917, a pivotal policy statement that committed Britain to supporting “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Zionists managed to successfully overcome opposition from British politicians concerned about how Palestinians would receive the news and anti-Zionists within the Anglo-Jewish community who conceived of themselves as British and not as members of a distinct nationality.

Across the Atlantic, another important development unfolded in the wake of the Balfour Declaration. In 1918, when Zionism had limited support among American Jews, the newly established American Jewish Congress met at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. There, they formulated a more modern understanding of Judaism based on democracy, progress, and Zionism. According to Pappé, this marked “the first time Judaism came to be defined in terms of national identity.”

After Britain paved the way for the Zionists to obtain a grip on Palestine, the native Palestinian inhabitants resisted. Rebellions erupted in the 1920s and again in the ’30s, with the 1936 revolt met with particularly brutal repression by the British. These uprisings caused British policymakers to periodically propose limits to Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine.

However, the lobbying efforts of people such as Chaim Weizmann, combined with the economic and political cost of reversing course, neutralized these proposals. This cleared the way for what would become one of the most important periods in the Zionist lobby’s history, spanning from 1942 to 1954.

The Birth of AIPAC

It was during this period, in the context of growing awareness of Nazi atrocities, that Zionism took a hard-line turn and broke firmly with earlier diplomatic efforts to simply shape British policy. As Pappé explains, leaders at a 1942 Zionist conference held in New York “moved away from co-operating with British policy, demanded the whole of Palestine and sidelined Zionist diplomats such as Weizmann. Diplomacy was now obsolete — force was the order of the day.”

It was a crucial change that spelled immense trouble ahead for the native inhabitants of Palestine. And that was not all the conference accomplished. The meeting’s location in New York signaled the growing power of the lobby in the United States. With support increasing among American Jews for Zionism, the leadership at the meeting pronounced the United States as the new capital of what the American Jewish Congress called “Zionist political activities.”

In 1943, a new organization named the American Zionist Emergency Council was founded to win backing for Zionism among the entire US public. It targeted politicians and newspapers with letters and petitions and even mobilized college presidents to support a Jewish state in Palestine. On the eve of Israel’s founding, the council had evolved into what Pappé dubs “one of the strongest pressure groups that had ever existed in America until then, leaving barely any room for Jewish public life outside the realm of Zionism.”

The council would evolve in the 1950s into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but even before then, it demonstrated its power. By overcoming opposition in the US State Department, the lobby helped secure the passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine. This resolution recognized the Jewish state, while denying Palestinians their ambition for self-determination and a democratic state across historical Palestine.

The 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which saw the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians, was largely tolerated by both British and American leaders. However, the US State Department remained dubious about the Zionist project. In 1953, after Israel retaliated for a Palestinian guerrilla attack, which killed an Israeli woman and her children, by massacring sixty-nine villagers in Qibya, the United States played a role in drafting a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel. As historian Doug Rossinow has noted, Washington also announced a temporary suspension of economic aid to Israel.

In the Shadow of the Nakba

AIPAC’s first major effort was to influence the outcome of the 1954 midterm elections, employing tactics that remain central to its operations today, as seen in recent controversies involving Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.

The lobby maintained significant influence over political elites on both sides of the Atlantic. But in the years after 1967, when Israel launched its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, those lobbying for Zionism lost the support of increasingly large segments of US and British civil society as Israel — no longer understood as a kind of David against the Arab Goliath — now came off as the aggressive, stronger adversary. Pappé notes that in the wake of 1967, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) broadened its definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel.

Arguably, it didn’t really become acceptable to discuss the Nakba, the Arabic term for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, until the period after the mid-1970s. In 1976, Pappé notes, the BBC aired “the first ever exposé about the victims of the Nakba.” Edward Said famously discussed the catastrophe in the context of colonialism in his The Question of Palestine, published in 1979. Four years later, Noam Chomsky also raised the matter in Fateful Triangle. A search of Google’s Ngram Viewer reveals that mentions of the word “Nakba” in English shot up dramatically after the mid-1990s.

As civil society grew more aware of the Nakba, the lobby adjusted its strategy. While the BBC was reporting on the ethnic cleansing, the United States elected Jimmy Carter as president. Carter, who viewed the Palestinians, like African Americans, as a disfranchised people, raised the refugee issue, alienating the lobby despite his continued support for military aid to Israel. In response, the lobby added a new tactic to its arsenal: “fighting against any attempt to legitimize the Palestinian narrative,” as Pappé notes.

Although the lobby was able to capitalize on Carter’s impatience with the Palestinians to cause him to abandon their cause, it has struggled to control the narrative since the late 1980s and ’90s when faced, for example, by the rise of the New Historians of Israel, a group that included Pappé, who focused their studies on the Nakba.

Rewriting Criticism

Compounding the lobby’s trouble was the emergence of dissent within the US Jewish community, such as the founding in 1996 of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has placed the Nakba front and center in its activism. In 2005, the group put forth a resolution at a Caterpillar shareholder meeting, calling for an investigation into whether its bulldozers were being used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes. Four years later, Pappé notes, Barack Obama became the first US president to reference the 1948 catastrophe.

No development has done more to raise awareness about the Nakba than the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement established in 2005. More than 170 Palestinian organizations called on people of conscience to join the movement, modeled on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, to end the occupation and force Israel to obey international law.

Britain was one of the first countries to embrace BDS, Pappé notes, with many calling on their government to acknowledge historical responsibility for paving the way for the Palestinians’ oppression. The BDS movement spoke of settler colonialism and apartheid, forcing people to conclude that a resolution to the plight of the Palestinians could only come through decolonization, not through empty peace talks.

The lobby responded not only by attempting to control the narrative, but also by silencing dissent. In 2013, as Pappé explains, Israel “hijacked” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s effort to redefine antisemitism, reshaping it “to include anti-Zionism and even moderate anti-Israel stances.”

Two years later, the lobby began waging a successful campaign against the newly elected leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, accusing him of encouraging and directly aiding the spread of antisemitism. By 2019, the campaign succeeded in driving him from power. Pappé argues that the triumph “forged a seemingly ineradicable connection between anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism in the public consciousness.”

Cracks in the Zionist Foundation

Ultimately, Israel and its lobby remain locked in a struggle over the morality of the Zionist project. As Pappé puts it:

The foremost groups the lobby wants to win over are those among the Jews and the Zionists who find it difficult to be fully convinced that Judaism is not a religion but a national identity, and more importantly, that this redefinition of Jewish identity justifies the settler-colonial project of establishing Israel in historical Palestine.

This challenge has been made all the more daunting in the wake of the mass killings in Gaza that began in 2023. And yet even as victory in the battle for hearts and minds in civil society slips away, the lobby continues to exert monumental influence over the US political establishment, which continues to conceive of its relationship with Israel as ironclad — genocide notwithstanding. If nothing else, this is a remarkable testament to the lobby’s enduring power.

Pappé, however, believes that we are witnessing the start of a historical process that could lead to the collapse of the Zionist project. Despite the unimaginable horrors Palestinians may continue to endure in the short term, he points to fractures in Israeli society, economic instability, and the nation’s increasing status as a global pariah.

Whether Pappé is correct remains to be seen. But if there is one thing I do know as a historian, it’s that oppressions have a beginning, a middle, and, like it or not, an end.