We Are Not One

A History of America's Fight Over Israel is the product of many years of research and coverage of American political debates over Israel.His eighteen chapters are arranged chronologically, dedicated to events and developments that help to explain how Zionism and Israel came to play such an important role in United States politics and in American Jewish communal life, and how fights over Israel became so fierce and attained such high stakes.Alterman begins at the turn of the twentieth century, with the founding of the modern Zionist movement and various "schisms" among Jewish groups as they debated Jewish nationalism, visions of a Jewish state, and what role such a state might play in modern American Jewish life.Alterman admires the fact that "so many groups with competing agendas were able to reach agreement on anything at all and go on to assemble what may be the most impressive lobbying effort in the history of democratic politics" (32).The destruction and immense loss in the Holocaust, along with the refusal of Western nations to accept Jewish refugees, led to a "communal near consensus" that only emigration to Palestine (which became Israel with statehood in 1948) could save world Jewry (34).Alterman's snapshots of history encompass several overarching themes and address several significant questions.He acknowledges the intense violence against Palestinians that was the foundation to Jewish statehood in Israel.One of the key questions he seeks to answer, then, is why American Jews have historically failed to recognize this violence, endemic to Israel since its founding.Many Jews and others felt that the Holocaust necessitated the use of any possible means to achieve Jewish safety.Over the course of the last eighty years, Alterman notes, as rabbinic power faded and most American Jews became more secular, "the twin poles of the defense of Israel and the sacralization of the Holocaust[became] the near sum-total of Jewish identity" (271).Debate over the rights of Palestinians has largely been made absent-less a topic in the US than in Israel itself-because American Jewish leaders were intent on keeping Zionism essential to "ethnic solidarity" and pride (43).Historian Geoff Levin's forthcoming book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, analyzes this absence and this history.Israel came to represent

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