The American Exceptionalism Beneath Liberal Zionism

In the wake of its victory over the declining Spanish Empire in 1898, the United States of America was faced with a political and moral problem. Specifically, the territories it had acquired under the Treaty of Paris - the largest of which were Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico - were inhabited by over 10 million people, or the equivalent to 12% of the US population at the time. As Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States, the annexation of foreign territories and people was nothing new to the political project of the US. After all, the nation’s foreign policy over the 19th century was characterised by a westward expansion which naturally entailed fighting over and occupying land from numerous foreign powers, not to mention the indigenous population of said lands. This time, however, not only were Spain’s former colonies densely populated, but they were densely populated with non-whites.

The ensuing Congressional debates surrounding the question of what to do with these newly acquired territories, and more importantly their populations, offer a fascinating insight into how the US perceived its own national legacy. Opponents of annexing the territories, the anti-imperialists, warned their countrymen that absorbing these distant lands into the union would force the US to grant their peoples full citizenship rights under the republican values of universal freedom and political representation. The prospect of having to share one's citizenship with ‘foreign savages’ was enough to convince a sizable proportion of American politicians that establishing colonies was a mistake. 

Others, like Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, chose to bypass the colonial-republican dilemma entirely by refusing to acknowledge the rights of the peoples living in these territories. In defense of an American empire, Roosevelt decried those statesmen who “cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed’, in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men”. To round off this incredible display of intellectual clarity, Roosevelt criticised his opponents for holding so strongly onto the values of the American Declaration of Independence, namely the ‘self-evident’ truth that ‘all men are created equal’, by arguing that “their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States”.

Ultimately, the imperialist camp emerged victorious in the intellectual struggle over Empire, annexing several territories including the Philippines until 1946, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and later the U.S. Virgin islands among others. America gave up its legal protectorate over the island of Cuba in 1934. Barring Hawaii, not a single one of these territories ever became a formal part of the United States. Today, around 4 million people live in ‘unincorporated’ territories with no representation in Congress, no presidential voting rights, and without US citizenship enshrined in the constitution.

At the heart of this story lies an astounding contradiction. How could the United States so casually shed its purported founding principles of popular sovereignty and the inalienable rights of man for mere economic and geopolitical expediency? The straightforward first answer is, of course, white supremacy. White Americans could claim there was no contradiction between the US’s imperial ambitions and its republican values because the people it ruled over were of an inferior race. Thus, denying rights to a population of sub-humans did not contradict a belief in the inalienable rights of ‘man’, as late 19th and early 20th century American politicians understood the term. This explanation for the glaring contradiction at the heart of America’s historical legacy also applies to the extermination of Native Americans by white settlers, the centuries-long practice of slavery, and the system of institutionalised racism which followed under Jim Crow.

Running alongside this current of racism, however, is an even more fundamental belief in the exceptionalism of the American spirit and the American political project, an exceptionalism which supersedes even the status of other white nations around the world. American Exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is a unique nation, one that is superior to all others for its righteousness and pursuit of universal liberal-democratic values which all other states should seek to emulate as the ‘shining city on a hill’. Indeed, adherents to the view of American exceptionalism believe its values ‘transcend the nation’ (Ch 8), where the nation itself is the political project which will bring about the end of history under liberal democracy. Crucially, American Exceptionalism also transcends accusations of nationalism. In an article lamenting the rise of nationalism in Europe, a former senior Clinton official wrote that “Americans should not deny the fact that of all the nations in the history of the world, theirs is the most just, the most tolerant, the most willing to reassess itself, the best model for the future” (Ch 8). 

Despite its cultural influence, American Exceptionalism has not been universally adopted by all members of the American political establishment, nor has it been interpreted in the same manner over time. So-called foreign policy realists like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger argued that the United States was a country like any other, and its foreign policy should be guided by simple self-interest over quasi-messianical excursions in defence of universal freedom. The more self-reflective Obama sought to reformulate the exceptionalist proposition as a standard to measure America against, not an inherent fait accompli. He further undermined the belief in the United States’ historical singularity in 2009 when he said "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism". Obama’s attempts to curtail the more bombastic tone of American Exceptionalism, however, was met with an indignant Republican party who made the 2012 presidential election about whether the president loved America enough.

Beyond the white supremacy that must be an important consideration for any serious inquiry into the conduct of American foreign and domestic policy, American Exceptionalism provides a useful lens through which to understand the US’s history of hypocrisy. Most importantly, this comes with understanding that American exceptionalism does not leave room for hypocrisy as a factor in decisionmaking. The violation of international treaties and multilateral cooperation, the support of illiberal dictators across the world, and the suppression of free speech within its borders is the policy of the United States and is thus righteous in its contribution to America’s unique political project. As Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in response to criticisms over cruise missile attacks on Iraq in 1998, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We stand tall. We see farther into the future".

Today, American Exceptionalism’s most strident expression is to be found in the position of so-called Liberal Zionists. Indeed, the term itself is an oxymoron. Despite its repeated claims of being the only democracy in the Middle East, the Zionist political project is exclusionary and illiberal by nature (Chapter 5: Zionist Literature Marches in Lockstep with Politics). It was Theodore Herzl, one of the preeminent Zionist intellectuals who in 1895 wrote, “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country”. This point was well understood by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, who wrote in a letter to his son in 1937, “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. to guarantee our own right to settle in those places”. In the current era, the state of Israel continues to behave in a manner becoming of its intellectual forebears, treating Palestinians as second-class citizens and presiding over a system of apartheid in the dwindling communities that are yet to be dispossessed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. 

Thus, when American progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders advocate for Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’, or criticise only Benjamin Netanyahu for the country’s growing laundry list of war crimes, they are repeating a version of the American exceptionalist script of American politicians past. Admittedly, both Sanders and AOC have rejected aspects of the American exceptionalist creed in both domestic and foreign policy, although their stance on foreign policy issues leaves much to be desired. In the broader Democratic party, however, it is this outspoken progressivism and defense of American liberal values, combined with a support for a genocidal state, which is starkly similar to Woodrow Wilson pursuing segregation while declaring that “Liberty does not consist in mere general declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action”. Or, as I presented in the introduction to this article, it speaks to a broader cultural anxiety and ambivalence surrounding the beliefs and principles which were supposed to make America unique as a national project, but which have been markedly absent from the nation’s history.

After Mark Carney’s speech at Davos earlier this year, Donald Trump’s berating of NATO members, and his threat to ‘destroy a whole civilisation’ only a month after preaching his intention to liberate the Iranian people, the West’s perception of pax Americana is taking a turn for the worse. Amid this growing criticism of the US’s role as the world’s hegemon, liberal American politicians’ ability to proclaim themselves progressives without taking an honest stance on the atrocities they perpetuate around the world is diminishing fast. The longer it takes them to shed the skin of American exceptionalism and reckon with the consequences of their actions, the quicker they will lose international credibility, if they haven’t lost it all already.

Image: Flicker/Zeev Barkan

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