Summary
Historian, author of Israel in the Mind of America (1983), quoted and answered at several points in Perceptions of Palestine (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 159-167).
Details
- Grose is quoted on the U.S.–Israel bond: “Americans and Israelis are bonded together like no two other sovereign peoples”, and, as printed in the text, “As the Judaic heritage flowed through the minds of America’s early settlers and helped to shape the new American republic, so Israel restored adopted the vision and the values of the American dream. Each, the United States and Israel, grafted the heritage of the other onto itself” (lines 159-167 / printed p.3).
- Christison takes up Grose’s belief that many State Department officials who staffed the Division of Near Eastern Affairs in the 1920s-1940s and opposed Israel’s creation in 1948 were indelibly marked in youth by anti-Semitic children’s literature portraying Jews as “routinely ridiculous figures” — “Nothing they, or others like them, would learn or hear in their maturity” “could wholly erase its effects” — and answers that the policymakers who supported Zionism read the same literature, and that the derogatory writings on Palestine’s Arabs made at least as enduring an impression (lines 345-375).
- After citing Balfour’s 1919 memorandum, Grose is quoted frankly praising Balfour for being “willing to rise above” the principle of self-determination in Palestine (lines 435-445).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Balfour Declaration, Self-determination