AIPAC would likewise wield much less influence inside the 21st-century beltway if the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts hadn’t thought of themselves as reenacting the exodus of the Hebrews from bondage in ancient Egypt. ~D.L. at Democracy in America

As the distilled essence of Mead’s argument about the reasons for pro-Israel attitudes in America, this captures quite nicely just how silly it is. It must be that South Africa’s Nationalist government was also interested in developing a close diplomatic relationship with Israel during the 1970s and 1980s because Calvinist Afrikaners also thought of themselves as a New Israel. When we put it that way, it’s clear how ridiculous it is. Can I just point out that Reformed Christians who identified themselves as a New Israel were making a statement that is necessarily not really compatible with enthusiastic support for Jewish self-determination? National and religious groups claiming to be a New Israel are not more likely to feel strong sympathy with Jewish political causes; they are more likely to be indifferent or antagonistic. If a national or religious group believes it is a New Israel, they are not saying that they are natural allies of the people of Israel. On the contrary, they are saying that they are a replacement or successor in God’s providential design. They are appropriating Israel’s claim to being the People of God. It is hardly shocking that Protestant colonial settlers in new, unfamiliar lands drew on the examples of the Israelites coming into Canaan for consolation and guidance. These were the examples that were most familiar to them and most relevant to their experience as settlers in a new country. So the “broader history of identification with Israel in the American imagination” didn’t and doesn’t necessarily translate into ready American support for Zionism, and it certainly doesn’t automatically cause unflinching support for a close military and political alliance with the modern State of Israel.

I would never say that the religious culture of a nation is irrelevant to its foreign policy, but it does not shape a state’s foreign policy in the way D.L. and Mead describe. Even when there is something in a nation’s culture to be exploited by a government, such as a shared ethnic or religious heritage with another country, it is the government that exploits and mobilizes it to build support for a policy that it already wants to pursue. Russian Pan-Slavism did not create Russian strategic goals of weakening the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and seizing Constantinople; Pan-Slavism emerged at a time when Russia was already pursuing those goals and the government was trying to rally support for Russian intervention in the Balkans. In Mead’s version, we have the exact reverse, which is a combination of crude cultural determinism with a strangely naive belief that foreign policy is a product of democratic consensus.