Ambivalence and ambiguity: The Hoover administration and American Zionism.

详细信息   

• 作者：Wentling ; Sonja Patrizia Schoepf.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2002
• 导师：Heiss, Mary Ann
• 毕业院校：Kent State University
• 专业：History, Middle Eastern.;History, United States.;History, Modern.;Political Science, International Law and Relations.
• ISBN：9780496291939
• CBH：3081321
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：12395727
• Pages：342

文摘

The special relationship between the United States and Israel has been a political reality for over fifty years and a longstanding grievance of Arab leaders against what they see as a biased and unbalanced U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Yet prior to the state of Israel's creation in 1948, when Great Britain was in charge of the Palestine mandate, Zionism and its political objective of a Jewish state found little resonance among either the U.S. government or American Jews. The triangular relationship among the U.S. government, Zionism, and American Jews was plagued by ambivalence and ambiguity.;While an abundance of literature has been produced on the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, comparatively little has been written on the Hoover administration and its record on Zionism and American Jews. This dissertation attempts to fill this historiographical gap by disentangling the complex web of domestic and international factors that shaped the relationship between the Hoover administration and American Zionism and led to reluctant U.S. government support of the fledgling Jewish venture in Palestine.;The Hoover administration's response to Zionism was rooted in the contradictory statements and policies of Wilsonian statecraft, President Hoover's weltanschauung and personal relations with non-Zionist members of the American Jewish community, the ambiguous nature of American Zionism itself, and the desire to achieve Anglo-American rapprochement and naval disarmament. The ambiguity of the Wilson legacy reasserted itself under Hoover: Sympathy for Jewish suffering, economic development of Palestine, and the creation of a safe haven for persecuted Jews, but no concrete support for a Jewish state; admiration for the pioneering spirit of Jews and their accomplishments, but in the end the issues of Zionism and Palestine were always subordinated to larger foreign policy concerns. In a climate of Anglo-American rapprochement and naval disarmament, the Hoover administration refrained from criticizing its ally's policies in Palestine during and after the 1929 riots in the Holy Land. Zionism was still a minor matter, representing a wide gamut of ideological interpretations, and was not part of an overarching foreign policy goal.