“AmericaIsrael:” On the Boundaries of Political and Religious Dissent

Theological, Pedagogical, and Ethical Approaches to Israel/Palestine Seminar (Program Unit: Isr/Pal seminar)

“AmericaIsrael:” On the Boundaries of Political and Religious Dissent

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University

Discussions of the religious and affective elements of U.S. support for Israel often invoke dispensationalist theology, Christian and Jewish Zionisms, and Jewish American support for a Jewish state. All are important. Yet U.S. support for Israel is more complex and conflicted, and also more slippery and ubiquitous, than can be captured by conventional explanations. This paper takes the U.S. border as a heuristic for exploring the boundaries of political and religious dissent involving U.S. support for Israel. I examine the curious affective politics of this support and its implications for the public policing of dissent.

To develop this argument, I introduce the construct of “AmericaIsrael.” In this figure, the idea of Israel and the idea of America act in concert as interwoven expressions of redemption. The border between the two states is simultaneously posited and suspended. For many Americans, Israel—both the State of Israel and the idea of U.S. support for Israel—represents a unique capacity for boundless collective self-realization. AmericaIsrael is a central figure in the US spiritual-political imagination. It draws on a powerful set of Christian and American norms and political theologies. Standing apart from what is commonly designated as ‘religion,’ in the words of sociologist Courtney Bender, it summons a sacred American nation without summoning ‘religion.’ The figure of AmericaIsrael has dominated US electoral, racial, and religious politics, and foreign policy, for 75 years.

If AmericaIsrael invokes an easy, heroic overcoming of borders, it also incorporates an inability and unwillingness to incorporate an inassimilable racial/religious other. It conjures an attempt to assimilate an unassimilable sacred-abject-Jew within a Christian nation. This too is part of the affective intensity of the U.S. commitment to Israel. And its danger. It is a story of racialization, abjection, philosemitism, and antisemitism combined, as scholars like Atalia Omer and Shaul Magid have shown. Today the intensifying fallout of, and frontal challenges to, AmericaIsrael are being aggravated by the onset of the latest phase of the war in Palestine in late 2023. This paper evaluates the policing of dissent facilitated by AmericaIsrael via legislative efforts to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) and U.S. government-sanctioned attempts to collapse the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.