Deconstructing the “Special Relationship”:: The Cultural Erosion of American Popular Support for Israel

Abstract

This article attempts to explain the growing criticism of Israel among young Americans, most recently on display in the widespread demonstrations across American university campuses in response to the Israel-Hamas war, through the unlikely engagement with American studies. Employing scholarship from multiple fields, it sheds light on the eroding cultural foundations of the so-called “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel by highlighting the evolving ways through which the once celebrated image of Israel has been deconstructed in American eyes and transformed into something far less sympathetic and more controversial. Rather than approach any specific facet or field the article casts a wider interdisciplinary net that connects the broad and diverse body of existing scholarship surveying the cultural representations of Israel across American film, television, literature, and popular culture in recent decades. By integrating various academic discourses, usually detached from one another, into a single cohesive narrative, the article reconceptualizes them as part of an overarching cultural process of deconstructing Israel’s romanticized image in the American public eye that has unfolded since the 1980s. In doing so, the article explains, at least to some extent, why many young Americans, especially those who came of age in recent decades, have become much more critical of Israel, at times hostile to it, than previous generations. The conclusion evaluates the potential impact the cultural deconstruction could have on the future of U.S.-Israel relations and considers ways in which it might inform foreign policymaking and possibly diminish American popular support for Israel.