Review of “Our American Israel” by Amy Kaplan

This book is an objective, if potentially disturbing, history of America’s relationship with Israel. The author does a good job explaining a lot of what I witnessed during my life, but she ties all those disparate news stories into a coherent picture of the myriad special interests and fantasies comprising America’s global perspective. Kaplan is a professor of English, so the writing and punctuation are very good and mostly readable. However, I started finding cut-and-paste errors in the last third–better than most authors accomplish.

A lot of the public perception of the American-Israeli relationship is told through detailed descriptions of Israel as presented in movies and newspapers, including short quotes from cited sources listed in the appendix. This got a little excessive in my opinion. Nevertheless, it served as the cement that bound the news into an accurate depiction of this complex relationship.

The picture is presented in a balanced approach for every aspect of this alliance, leaving the reader to make up their own mind; however, I suspect that Kaplan is skeptical of the mainstream story as portrayed in the press and government statements. I applaud her discipline in not saying what I voice daily; but this book was published in 2018, and a lot has happened since then.

I definitely recommend this as background for anyone trying to understand what the hell is going on in the Middle East, and America’s role in this unstable part of the world. While I was reading this book, I stumbled on a YouTube video by Andrei Jikh about recent events in this region and their potential impact on the global economic system, which proposes an economic reason for America’s support for Israel–the root cause for instability in the region.

This book should be treated as a primer for understanding why U.S. presidents have reaffirmed America’s unwavering support for Israel, no matter how the rest of the world interprets its actions.