June 3, 2007
From Jamestown to Jerusalem Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 PM EST Yesterday I enjoyed reading this weekend’s homepage feature, a piece by Jon Grinspan about the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. Mr. Grinspan traces an interesting story of Americans abroad and makes an alluring case for visiting the hotel. The first sentence of the piece caught my eye: “Few people associate Jerusalem with American history.” For the last 60 years of the American-Israeli relationship, this has been becoming less and less true, as the focus of U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly turned toward the various struggles and peace processes in Israel. Yet Mr. Grinspan is undoubtedly right that most people do not think of Jerusalem, and indeed the Mideast more broadly, as a central part of American history—at least until around 1948. There’s one historian, though, who sees things rather differently. A fellow at Jerusalem’s Salem Center, and a former visiting professor at two Ivy League universities, Michael Oren recently published an expansive history of American involvement in Western Asia, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. Released this year to positive if slightly mixed reviews, Oren’s history traces the relationship between the United States and the Middle East back to long before the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine. Oren’s history features early American explorers, like John Ledyard, who reported with unease that “the Arab language has no word for ‘liberty.’” It includes New England missionaries attempting religious and civic education in the Middle East, and in the process founding the Syrian Protestant College, now the American University of Beirut. Christopher Hitchens explored some of the early actions of the American government in that region in his brief book on Thomas Jefferson. Oren’s work, approximately 700 pages long, is a far more thorough survey. In a recent post on this blog regarding the twentieth-century relationship between America and Israel, Joshua Zeitz wrote that the Six-Day War has been seriously misinterpreted as a spur for the rightward migration of American Jews. This episode, writes Mr. Zeitz, “laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.” For those who believe America’s present-day engagement in Middle Eastern affairs is largely a product of Jewish influence, and for those who are interested in the history of American foreign relations more generally, Oren’s scholarly work, including Power, Faith, and Fantasy, is a useful contribution.
|
