Episode 71: Why the heck does America support Israel?
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.
Our current question: Why the heck does America support Israel?
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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On to the next question. |
| 0:06.0 | Why the heck does America support Israel? |
| 0:08.7 | I like the subtlety. |
| 0:11.9 | This is quite likely somebody in the United States who maybe is very frustrated with Israel, |
| 0:16.6 | maybe very angry at Israel, but also probably just wondering, genuinely. |
| 0:21.6 | Let's get into it. |
| 0:22.7 | The irony of the American relationship with Israel is that it's one of the few countries |
| 0:26.9 | that had a powerful and strong and fascinating and multi-layered relationship |
| 0:31.8 | before there was in Israel. |
| 0:34.1 | Because America's initial relationship with Israel is actually a relationship with Jews, frankly the Jews that America didn't want to take into America. In 1921, America |
| 0:44.4 | passes the Emergency Quota Act in Congress and the doors of America are closed to Jewish immigration. |
| 0:50.2 | What's fascinating is that very quickly, the following year in 1922 in September, the same Congress that closed the doors passed the Lodgefish resolution, which basically followed on the Balfour Declaration five years earlier by Britain and said that the United States supports the establishment of a Jewish national home of some kind in Palestine. And, you know, if you get |
| 1:12.8 | into the history, there's a tremendous amount of religious Christian, American, Protestant. We're |
| 1:17.3 | not talking about that. We're talking about the American Congress beginning to recommend, as a matter |
| 1:22.2 | of policy, American support for Zionism. Both those things are true. American support for Zionism |
| 1:28.7 | at the beginning has that religious overtone, that genuine support for the idea that Jews |
| 1:33.7 | belong in the land of Israel. And also a genuine desire not to have so many more Jews, millions of |
| 1:39.8 | Jews are fleeing Europe, come to America. Fast forward to the 1930s and 40s. The Jewish desperation |
| 1:46.5 | is growing. America still doesn't want to take in more than the two and a half million Jews it took |
| 1:51.0 | in between 1881 and 1921. And so America begins to more seriously support some kind of a Zionist |
| 1:57.8 | solution to the Jewish problem in Europe, if only because it doesn't see |
| 2:01.3 | any other solution. That puts America at odds with the British, with the British allies and |
... |
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