Amy Kaplan’s 2018 book Our American Israel is a penetrating, and depressing, examination of the power of Zionism in the US since World War II. Kaplan explains that over the decades, and in a range of ways, Americans have seen Israel as a reflection of the US, which supposedly embodies core aspects of American identity.
From Leon Uris 1958 novel Exodus, which presented Israelis as bold anticolonial fighters against the British a la patriots in the American revolution; to 90s films like Schindler’s List which framed American support for Israel as a kind of continuation of US virtue in liberating the camps; to The Left Behind series which fuses the US and Israel into the protagonists of God’s apocalyptic end times plan; to post 9/11 propaganda linking America and Israel as embattled allies fighting against Islamic terrorism—America has seen Israel in different ways, but it has always seen it primarily as itself.—
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“We have projected images of American exceptionalism onto our visions of Israel, as exceptionally modern, humane, powerful, and threatened,” Kaplan writes. To be Zionist is to be American, to be American is to be Zionist—which is why American anti-Zionist protestors and speakers are treated as if they are traitors to America itself.
One of the core claims of Kaplan’s book is that the romance of Israel appeals to American exceptionalism—exceptional virtue, exceptional power, and exceptional vulnerability. As she writes.
The belief that America is an “exceptional” nation of moral force and military power underwrote and strengthened its special bond with Israel. The United States would protect and secure Israel, a moral community of both concentration camp survivors and heroic warriors. At the same time, Israel was seen as unique in its own right—a state that is both vulnerable and indomitable, an invincible victim. [emphasis mine]
The concept of “invincible victim” is one that Kaplan returns to often in the book. She identifies it as an ugly dynamic. But she doesn’t quite make the connection that struck me at once—the idea of an “invincible victim” is not unique to Israel. On the contrary, invincible victims are central to the definition of fascist thought.
America and Israel: invincible victims together
Kaplan argues that the idea of Israel as an invincible victim first took hold during the Six Day War in 1967. After its preemptive, devastating attack on Syria, Egypt ,and Jordan, Kaplan says. “Israel came to appear both vulnerable and invincible at the same time, at risk of destruction yet militarily indomitable.” The Arab states, in contrast, were viewed as an existential threat to Israel and yet as unable to contend with its high-tech military superiority.
Kaplan points out that the idea that Israel faced annihilation in the Six Day War was largely “retrospective.” During the build-up to the war, few commentators believed that the Arab nations could seriously threaten Israel’s existence; most analysts and reporting suggested instead that Israel’s superior military would in fact win in a conflict. It was only after Israel’s victory that outlets declared it had faced extermination and managed a miraculous victory.
The view that Israel was always under terrible threat became more and more entrenched in American Zionism over the years. Kaplan points out that only after Carter did American presidents regularly bring up the Holocaust as a reason to support Israel. That’s because it was only in the 80s and 90s that the US began to view the Holocaust as central to its own story of virtue and righteousness. As Holocaust memory became more important, the Holocaust became seen as the ever-present alternative to Israel—a transhistorical truth and the only possibility for Jewish people other than an ethnonationalist Jewish enclave. Or as Kaplan puts it, “Seeing Israel as the legacy of the Holocaust contributed to the sense of its vulnerability as a perpetual victim of Arab aggression.”
This appeal of Israel as invincible victim was heightened further after 2001, when 9/11 led to many comparisons between America’s supposedly besieged state of vulnerability to terror and Israel’s besieged state of vulnerability. Israel’s imagined extermination becomes the United States’ imagined extermination (not least in the millenarian fever dreams of the Christian right.) Israel’s indomitable and inevitably victorious fight against overwhelming odds becomes America’s indomitable and inevitably victorious fight against overwhelming odds.
The final, nightmarish upshot of this joint Israeli/US paranoid fantasy of vulnerability and vaunting fantasy of power is the Iran war. Trump and Netanyahu insisted that Iran’s nuclear program was likely to lead to the destruction of Israel, the US, and the world. They also insisted that US and Israeli power was unstoppable, and that, without allies or much explanation, they could immediately bring Iran to heal.
Of course, the Iranian threat was overstated, as were Israel and US power, and the result has been a pointless, protracted war which the US and Israel have lost even if they refuse to admit it.
Invincible victims of fascism
It’s not surprising that fantasizing about yourself as invincible victims, detached as it must be from reality, inevitably leads to poor outcomes on the international stage. Nor is it surprising that it leads to expansionist and endless foreign war—especially when you recognize that the trope of invincible victims is core to fascist ideology.
Umberto Eco provided the most famous description of the role of invincible victims in fascism. In his essay “Eternal Fascism” he explained:
The followers [of fascism] must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Scholar Robert O. Paxton doesn’t put it quite so succinctly, but he too emphasizes that fascism involves seemingly contradictory fantasies of weakness and power. He writes that fascism is, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” In other words, fascists imagine themselves as weak victims and then imagine themselves overcoming that victimhood through unity and power, leading to orgies of “redemptive violence” directed at both internal and external enemies.
The American vision of Israel as “invincible victim”, then, is a kind of surrogate, vicarious fantasy of fascism. By identifying with Israel, American Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) can see themselves as humiliated and in danger of existential extermination, which in turn justifies massive gouts of redemptive, apocalyptic violence. Israel functions as a screen much like the film Birth of a Nation, in which the rape of (weak, vulnerable) white women justifies and brings forth the cleansing, irresistible white wave of the Klan.
The fantasized Neo-Confederate temporal past is marshaled against different groups, and in different ways than the fantasized Israeli spatial other. One led to lynchings and anti-Black pogroms; the other motivates violent reprisals against pro Palestinian protestors, support for genocide in Gaza, and bombing school-children in Iran. One in the American context mainly activates domestic policy; the other foreign policy. And so forth. These differences are important.
But the similarities are important as well, not least in a political landscape where many people still believe that Zionism can be consistent with a liberal politics. The very fact that Zionists regularly demand that critics of Israel state that they support Israel’s existence—as if Israel is in imminent danger of disappearing—is itself part of the constructed identity of invincible victim, in which Israel’s eternal vulnerability justifies any excess of violent reprisal: by Israel against Palestinians, by American Zionists against Israel’s critics.
The Zionist obsession with invincible victims also creates familiar pathways of imagining and narrative in which fascist policies and stories are shorn up and normalized. It encourages us not to try to honestly assess our own weaknesses and strengths, but to instead use weakness and strength as rhetorical cudgels in the name of stigmatizing some and justifying others. It builds a rhetoric and a constituency for conspiratorial explanations and extreme violence.
Zionism is far from the only foothold of fascism in the United States. But it is one that has credence among audiences and constituencies which oppose other forms of bigotry and discrimination. As a result, it’s become a particularly corrosive force in our politics. If we want to defeat fascism, we need to understand there are no invincible victims—not in the US, and not in Israel either.
The invincible victim is a fascinating concept I had not encountered before. Now that I know of it (at lest superficially), I can see it’s imprint everywhere—from the way the police often portray themselves (think “blue lives matter”) to the conspiratorial paranoia slaveholders expressed in the antebellum South (believing that enslaved people would revolt as they had done in Haiti).
The invincible victim concept may contribute to conspiracy theorizing. For instance, a lot of MAGA folks perceive that they exist as victims of a world they can’t control or even understand and that dark forces (immigrants, black and brown people, feminists, trans folks, and everyone who ain’t them) are arrayed against them. Whackadoodle conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, both confirm their status as victim and empower them with mystical knowledge they can use to defeat their many enemies. Their struggle is existential, but their belief in their exceptional indomitableness sustains them. Hmmm.