 Good afternoon. I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America and it is my great pleasure on behalf of New America and the international security program to welcome Walter Russell Mead and our discussion of his new book, The Ark of a Covenant. Walter is one of New America's co-founders. We at New America think this is his greatest distinction, but he is also a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. He is the Ravenel B. Curry Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is a prolific author and columnist. He has written on a wide range of subjects and continues to inform people far and wide on current issues. In this latest book, which really does deserve the adjective magisterial, it's some 600 pages, but a very lively prose, he examines the roots of the U.S.-Israel relationship, debunking myths on the Zionist and anti-Zionist side. He traces the ways in which Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community. And he argues that Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state, tracing the relationship in through the rise of evangelical politics. The New York Times Book Review named The Ark of a Covenant to one of its 100 most notable books of 2022. And in the International Security Program, we are committed to supporting detailed discussions of current events in international security. Also, the intersection of international and domestic politics shaping those events and schools in international security and the longer histories that can make most sense of immediate events. And this book is absolutely a book that does a very careful history in ways that will challenge people's thinking on all sides of the issue and change the way you see many current events. So we are looking forward to this discussion. Walter, welcome back to New America. And I turn the microphone over to my colleague Peter Bergen. Thank you, Amory. So The Ark of a Covenant, United States Israel and the fate of the Jewish people. A brilliant title for the book, if I may say. Titles are important. And then I just wanted to, Amory referenced the amazing reviews, but Jonathan Tepperman, who's a former managing editor of foreign policy and also the top editor at Foreign Affairs, said, the pros is among the best I've encountered in 25 years of reviewing foreign policy books. He also uses words like masterful capacious brilliant. And then also in the Washington Post, there was another rave review in which the reviewer said that the book, it was timely necessary extraordinary etc. So, all the congratulations and all the great reviews and we're going to turn it over to you to kind of give us the big, the big themes of the books, important stories and then we'll have a Q&A between us and I'll monitor the questions coming in and we'll also pose those questions to you. All right, Peter. Listen, thank you for for making this possible it is great to do a new America events. As a founder and for something like a quarter century of board member new America is an organization I've, I've watched grow and develop and become a major force in America. It's funny to think we started out for young people and now, you know, the founders are are getting kind of long in the tooth, but the organization continues. And this book really started out, I hoped it would be a kind of a simple book, but it didn't work out that way. And it's because the kind of core theme I wanted to look at, which was my sense that, you know, whatever else we want to say, the driving force behind American foreign policy toward Israel is not now and never really has been Jewish power. The American Jewish communities influence in the country. The more I got into that theme the more I realized you couldn't really write this book without touching on a whole range of other issues. And I'll as I kind of go through the big themes I'll show you how, at least in my view it just all kind of all came out connected. And I ended up writing a much longer and more challenging book than I expected, but one which I hope will readers are going to find interesting. This notion that somehow the Jews or an Israel lobby which is a mix of Jews and evangelical Christians is the primary driving force behind American foreign policy. Israel is actually quite deeply embedded and it's pretty widespread, especially if you go outside the United States. You'll often hear even quite educated people when asked why does the US have the policies that we do toward Israel. They say, well, it's because of the Jews. And that I think is a profound misunderstanding of the American Jewish community, its role in American life, the way American politics work. And I wanted to really take that on. For one thing, it's if you if you're working hypothesis, it's somehow Jewish power is the is the driving force behind our policy in Israel. You can't actually build a coherent historical narrative on this on this basis. You know, you think in the 1920s, probably the single most important thing the United States ever did that promoted the rise of a Jewish state in Israel was to block migration, including migration from Jews from Europe in 1924. Without that decision, there would never have been the critical mass of Jews in Palestine to actually form a state. The era of major Jewish migration before that decision, Jews leaving Russia or Eastern Europe almost all came to the United States after that Palestine became a much more desirable location. The American Jewish community fought that decision tooth and nail. So if they had if they had won the battle, there would likely be no Israel today. In the 1930s, you have the rise of Hitler. Again, if the American Jewish community or Jews around the world were so powerful, surely they would have used their power to crush Hitler at the start, or in the United States they would have forced American politics with the with the Benjamin's, as some people say, with the money with the power with the influence to boycott Hitler, challenge Germany, do all these at least increase the immigration slots for desperate European Jews trying to escape the Nazis. They weren't able to achieve any of these things. In 1944, the Jewish leaders come to the White House that talked to Roosevelt and are asking the United States to just spare a few airplanes to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz to slow the Holocaust down. The answer to that is no. Trying to construct. However, at this time you had lots of people in the United States and abroad who believe that the Jews were the hidden power that rules the world. Even though in 1948 Harry Truman recognizes Israel and the and the people say, ah, well this is the Jews they they forced him they left him no choice they were so powerful he had to override the State Department he had to do all these things. But nobody ever explains how the Jews went from being unable to get a few planes to bomb Auschwitz in 1944 to be the dictators who force Harry Truman's hand on Israel policy. Then in 1953 when Eisenhower takes office, US policy actually switches we support Nasser rather than Israel. They're actually trying to get the Israelis to discord the Negev Desert more than half their territory. This and working with the British to do this is not a pro-Israel policy Suez. The United States actually sides again with Egypt against Britain, France and Israel. This is not a sign of the American Jew. So what happened to those dominant all powerful Jews of 1948? Did they all die of the plague? So there's no narrative here. There's no way to make sense of this and yet it's deeply ingrained in the thinking of a lot of people. Of course, that's how you recognize a prejudice. That's how you recognize racism and other things. Narratives that persist despite slim to know empirical foundation, historical foundation. Baseline, when Israel was small and weak and desperately needed an American alliance, the United States did nothing for it. Siding with Nasser instead. The US only becomes Israel's ally after Israel becomes a nuclear armed regional superpower. As I say in the book, Israel did not become great because it had an American alliance. It gained an American alliance because it had grown great. That sentence sums up a lot of what I'm trying to get at in the book. And one very important implication for policy, by the way, is that Israelis know this. Israeli governments know that they survived from 1948 into the 1970s. They survived and flourished without an American alliance. And if the small, poor, weak Israel surrounded at the time by really quite formidable enemies could maintain its independence without the United States, we need to understand that any threats that the United States, our influence over Israel is a lot less than many people in America believe it is. And the Israelis know it. Then the American Jewish community has always been divided over Israel policy. Ironically, the time when it was most united would be between about 1943 and 1975. This in general was the time when US foreign policy was the least pro-Israel. So that actually after 1975, after 1977, especially when you start seeing liquid governments, the American Jewish community slowly at first and then more broadly returns to some of its earlier doubts about Zionism or the nature of the Jewish state and so on. And Jewish support for Israel becomes more nuanced, more distance. And in many cases, American Jews become leading advocates of justice for Palestinians. But at the same time that American Jewish opinions on Israel are shifting away from Israel, American policy is shifting toward Israel. The two most important pro-Israel presidents in American history are Richard Nixon and Donald Trump in terms of policies that are sort of openly seen here and in Israel as very pro-Israel. Those are the two least popular modern presidents among American Jews. Barack Obama, by contrast, was fighting with BB Netanyahu almost every day he was in office. And Barack Obama is easily the most popular president, modern president among American Jews. Only African Americans, only black Americans voted for Barack Obama in a higher percentage than American Jews did in 2008. And by the way, this extends to money as well. American Jewish campaign contributions were heavily weighted against Donald Trump, against for Barack Obama. For that matter, against George W. Bush as well. The president seen as more pro-Israel in the 21st century, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, have been extremely unpopular with American Jews. And the presidents who seem to have a somewhat more distanced approach or nuanced approach, whatever you want to say, like Obama and Biden have been much more popular. And yet around the world and in many circles in the United States, it's still axiomatic that it's the Jews that are driving our Israel policy. So that's, you know, that I wanted to kind of hammer home. That was the original, this to me was the big fact about Israel policy that people didn't understand and needed to understand. And it's a historic reality as well as a modern one. The New York Times in the 19th century was a pro-Zionist newspaper while it was under Christian ownership. When a Jewish family bought the New York Times, it became strongly anti-Zionist and actually campaigned against the Balfour Declaration and against any American support for the Zionist cause. So the history, the view that we all think is grounded somehow really doesn't have any support. So having said that, I found, you know, I really need to go back and do it and say, okay, fine, if it isn't the Jews, what's going on? What is American foreign policy to Israel been? How has it actually been shaped? How does it relate to other foreign policies and what's the backing of it? And this forced me, you know, luckily for me in a way, I'm kind of an ignoramus about the Middle East, less so maybe now than when I started the book, but I'm a generalist. I'm not a regional specialist or Middle East specialist. So when I think about the Middle East, I generally think about first American foreign policy globally. And then I think, okay, where in that, how does the Middle East fit into that global policy? And then how does Israel fit given those issues? That's normally the way I come at any issue, not just Israel issues. And I said, let's try a thought experiment. Let's see what happens if we make the assumption that this is actually how American policy toward Israel has been shaped over the years. That changing American views of our global interests and our global foreign policy and our global strategy give the Middle East a changing role in American thinking. We want different things out of it or we worry about different things. And then our approach to Israel is driven by those considerations. And it turns out, and this is what I spend a fair amount of time in the book doing, it turns out that if you actually look at it that way, it makes sense that it explains our policy toward Israel much better than the Jewish lobby model explains it. And it, you know, American foreign policy is, you know, has gone through a lot of evolutions. We're looking at really 120 years, 100 years since the US adopted the Balfour Declaration, 115, 20 years longer, longer if you want to look at the deep history. So I had to kind of think a bit about what, okay, how did Americans in the 20s and 30s see American interests? And it really does turn out that their view of both what America would do for the Zionists and what it wouldn't do for the Zionists comported very well with their idea of supporting self determination for countries outside the United States, but not doing very much about it. And Israel policy, Zionist policy was actually quite consistent with policy toward other emerging nations at the time, toward other international questions at the time. Then you get the first, that's the interwar American consensus that falls apart with the stress of World War Two. And you soon find yourself in the Cold War consensus, the Truman consensus, so to speak, of containment NATO, all of this basically goes through the Vietnam War. Nixon kind of rebuilds that consensus with a, with sense of new, new interests and new concerns. And then with the end of the Cold War, you have American foreign policy seeking to build a liberal world order becomes the new sort of grand objective of American foreign policy. And again, through all of these stages, it's actually fairly easy to see how presidents would develop an Israel strategy based on their overall sense of where the world was going, how the Middle East fit into that, how the world fit into that policy. So, and I think this is this is valid, not just for Israel policy, by the way, I think this is a good way to look at American policy generally is think globally American strategy is global. And then begin to look how there's an interaction between a global view which is, you know, is often wrong. I'm not saying American presidents or public opinion is infallible or anything like that. But you can see why we do what we do, whether or not you think what we did was a smart thing or a stupid thing, at least see where it's coming from. As I was doing this, that whether people are pro Israel or anti Israel pro Zionist or anti Zionist in their thinking, there is a near uncontrollable desire to mythologize the relationship to kind of see it in some special unique way to see the relationship as central that somehow everybody, everybody, whether they, you know, are are pro Palestinian pro Zionist or whatever, they somehow want America to be have been responsible for the status quo in the Middle East, we did, if you like Israel or don't like Israel, you want to feel America did that, that some our support was crucial Harry Truman was was was Cyrus who enabled the Jewish state to exist. And you know, there's some superficial reasons for this I think one is, there's just a general sense among Americans that I guess you can call it the Teddy Roosevelt theory of history that Alice Longworth his daughter once said that Teddy Roosevelt wanted to be the the bride at every wedding, the child at every christening and the corpse at every funeral. And so when Americans and even American historians go back and look at at foreign policy world events. They're always looking for ways to put America at the center. There's a story of a famous former governor of New York back when the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union was taken to the Leningrad war memorial, and he whispered to an aid, who commanded the American troops here. Of course rather famously there were no American troops at the Siege of Leningrad but there. So there is this. And then I think too there's a sense, among some that that Israel can't possibly have become a great power in the normal way. That is, you know, by building an economy building a strong state building a strong army. They had to somehow use dark Jewish arts to do it manipulation finance. And again this idea that Israel is great because America made it great. If we can just get enough American college campuses to pass another enough BDS resolutions, then Israel will lose its American alliance and deprived of the American Alliance Israel will collapse like the House of Cards it's always been. I think there's a kind of a legend there that wants to make American supports more critical to Israel. In fact, if the US decided to break off its alliance with Israel there's a long list of countries that would line up to take our place as Israel's closest ally China, India, Russia would all be quite interested in that. But so what drives that hunger for connection. Since that's that was the third big theme of the book. Why do people want America to be so central in this story is a line in the book that says Israel is a spec on the map of the world, but it occupies a continent in the American mind. And one way to think about this a lot of this book is that it's sort of Lewis and Clark expedition to try to find out what's going on what that big continent is like. And there's a lot in here don't have time to really get into it all in this maybe we can do some more in the in the Q&A. But I would say there's a going back to colonial times even Americans shared this sense that not all Americans obviously and they're always there's always been descent. It was a lot easier for like white Protestant Americans to say yeah this is this is the way it's going meant for slaves or Native Americans and for others nevertheless. There was this idea that we're sort of a cutting edge of world history here in America. You know ancient world. You look there were the great people to the ancient world the Greeks the Hebrews the Romans. They were they were virtuous just read the literature they were virtuous they had they had democratic institutions, their lands were prosperous. Right. And then comes corruption and the dark ages. They lose their liberty they lose their learning. But you know things began to change. First there's the Renaissance we discover the ancient learning. Then there's the reformation which again for these Protestant Americans this is the recovery of the purity of true Christianity. Next in line the glorious revolution in Britain which the American Revolution American Revolutionary saw themselves as upholding and pursuing. You know you recover the principles of liberty. And these are going to transform the world. They're going to you know the Americans are like the ancient Hebrews, a people who have a mission that is bigger than they are. We're a providential nation. If you looked you know 1820 you look at the world you see America's growing quickly clearly going to be a decisive force. It's the place where these values are the most cogently adopted and clearly held you would say if you were to one of these Americans. And it's obvious that we're a providential nation destined for great things much like the ancient Hebrews. Now I'll just conclude by saying and one of the ways you would be able to tell this would be that these American principles would actually revive the ancient peoples. So when the Greeks rise up against the Ottoman Turks Americans actually go volunteer to fight in the Greek War of Independence. The Italian struggle for unification the overthrow of the papal kingdom in Rome and the establishment in 1848 of a republic under Mazzini electrified American opinions we actually sent the navy when the republic collapsed to take the refugees keep the refugees safe from the reactionaries. Garibaldi was offered a job as a general in the Union forces in the Civil War. And the Jews to that if the Jews would go back to the Holy Land and start farming and living under democratic principles. The Jewish people to spy scattered weak around the world would rock would recover their ancient glory. Instead of being despised they'd be respected instead of Jerusalem being a desolate village it would become a globally famous city. The Israeli economy would be terrific the land. Mark Twain said it's the only thing I've ever seen that's worse than Arizona when he went to Palestine. The land would bloom when these things happened or began to look like they were happening Americans felt tremendously vindicated. It's working. And this idea that Israeli success would be seen as an example of American success or is proof that America had it right. It's pretty deep roots in America. And by the way then for people who want to counter that narrative of America the great progressive empire the providential nation in a sense attacking Israel and describing what's wrong with Israel what happened to the Palestinians. You say this is so great so fabulous look at that. This becomes a way and I think it still occupies this space in American politics. It's a way you can communicate your feelings about America is the stands that you take in US Israel politics. In any case that's a quick and dirty overview of a long book. And I hope it's a hope it's helpful. Thank you Walter and if you if the audience have questions put it in the Slido. And I'll be monitoring the questions in the Slido box, which is at the bottom of your screen. So Walter, you know one of the, one of the things you say in the book is that Stalin was more responsible for the founding the state of Israel and Truman what did you mean by that. Well, a lot of things. Again there's there's the great sort of legend that very well known in the American, you know Jewish communities this spring of 1948. There's war in Palestine the fate of the Jews hangs in the balance. And Truman has refused to see any of the American Jewish leaders and even the great Kain Weitzman the great international Zionist leaders come to America to see Truman. Truman is refusing to see him. Well, fortunately, there's little Eddie Jacobson Truman's boyhood companion and business partner from Missouri who like Queen Esther in the Bible. He dares to go into the Oval Office and confronts the moody Gentile ruler and says help my people. And Truman says and this is actually true. Okay, you baldheaded son of a bitch you win I'll see him. Right. And you know this becomes and then he meets Weitzman and this in a lot of the American Jewish community became a kind of a foundation myth almost of describing the critical even the smallest Jew from the smallest city can save Israel, you know, and we're all connected. The only problem with this beautiful story is that actually American policy did not change after that meeting. After Truman met Weitzman and the US was still trying to persuade the Israelis not to declare independence right up until the moment that they did. Truman offered his personal plane to anybody who would be willing to fly around the Middle East and try to get this thing to stop. The last thing the Israeli the you should have as it was then known that the governing board of the Jews in Palestine, the last thing they did before declaring independence and proclaiming the Jewish state was to vote to reject the American request that they delay independence. So, you know Truman actually was not pushing for Israeli independence. The Stalin by you know the the other thing that that people don't really think about or know is that right after it was almost it was almost exactly 75 years ago late November that the UN General Assembly voted for the two state plan the partition of Israel between Palestine, British Palestine between Arabs and Jews, and the Israeli the Jews accepted the Arab rejected fighting breaks out. The United States State Department immediately puts an arms embargo on the whole area. Now as the Zionists at the time are quick to point out this favors the Arabs, because the Arabs are actually getting arms from Britain. The Arabs actually have armies. The they do an inventory the Zionists where they've got just a few thousand machine guns they really don't have enough for a big war. But Stalin then allows the Czech communists to sell weapons to the Jews for hard currency he's looking to make some money. And and by the way this is in total violation of American policy, because we're trying to sweet that the Czech coup is in February of 48 when the communists really take over. And this is seen as the really the real start of the Cold War that you know that's the the moment. And basically the Czech communists are able to use the money that the Jews pay them for these weapons to help stabilize their economy to make this transition work. Truman had offered them participation in the Marshall plan Stalin says this this is your Marshall plan. These weapons by the way been made for the Wehrmacht by Skoda the Czech arms dealer. Many of them still had the swastikas on them so it was actually Wehrmacht armies weapons, which Stalin sold to the Jews is how is what gave the Jews the ability to win the war of independence. You know, when you, you talk about FDR and the sort of decision not to bomb the tracks that took the trains to Auschwitz. But to what I mean was the establishment at the time was pretty anti Semitic is my general impression FDR himself may have been so how was that the factor here or was it ignorance or lack of willing. You know, misunderstanding what was really going on or why did they make this sort of decision not to impede the Holocaust as it was unfolding. I know. Well, I think it was primarily that that what they saw was you have to remember that that everybody had something they wanted the US to use the army for other than the pre designed military missions you know, save this save that take this take that. And for someone like Roosevelt the key thing would be I don't you know if we go start getting into that it'll never stop there'll be a million requests etc. And so you basically have to you have to say no at some point it's simplest to say no at the beginning. That's a sort of procedural argument. The more substantive one is this, at least in theory, all of the assets that you are using are being used for in the most efficient way to end the war, which is the fastest way to stop the Holocaust, among many other things. And so if you divert these planes. All right fine they bombed those rail lines but what about the targets they were going to hit that they didn't hit. Do you then end up extending the Holocaust in a sense, they'll fix the train lines. So, there was this sense of winning the war is the way to stop all of the terrible things that are going on. And to do that you've got to let the generals be the ones who make the decisions about how to use military assets. I really do think that was the driving force. Jonathan Friedland has this new book about the 18 year old, who was in Auschwitz who escaped and tried to tell the world what was really going on but he was basically tuned out. Why do you think that was the case because this seems related to FDR's decision. I mean for one thing I think FDR absolutely knew what was going on and the reports were out there. And you know people were talking about it at big speeches in Madison Square Garden I mean it was not in that sense a secret. I mean there's several things one is they didn't really so many terrible things are going on. You know you think modern Belarus something like 25% of its population was killed basically between June of 1941 and March of 1945 civilians. You know the atrocities are are so numerous so all consuming that it's only sort of afterwards that the Holocaust begins to assume such an iconic place in you know and today the Holocaust is almost the symbol for all of the suffering of World War two. It didn't closer it's like you know Mount Everest doesn't necessarily look so high when you're very close you have to get away and see it. I think that's part of it. And then there had been a lot of anti German atrocity propaganda in World War one, you know babies in Belgium being thrown on bayonets mass rapes of nuns. Most of this after the war was discredited by various commissions and so on. So there was an inbred skepticism, particularly I may say a British atrocity propaganda in America, we're sort of discounted as they're just trying to get us into the war. You said something very interesting about you know America's view of Israel really only became begin really changes with the Israel's acquirement of nuclear weapons which of course, you know, Israel was not has never really advertised in a public fashion right in this sense I mean there's. So what I mean what how did that happen and what was the process there. I mean, well you know, the first time an American president used the phrase special relationship to describe the US Israel relationship was when Jack Kennedy used it to persuade as part of his charm offensive to persuade the Israelis to trust an American guarantees and weapons shipments, rather than nuclear weapons. He was trying to say look you'll get whatever you need we love you, but you know been Yuri and well understood what Kennedy was trying to do. And Kennedy I think probably well understood what men urine was doing by the time Nixon and Kissinger come in and 69. So they reconvince that the Israelis have weapons, and they sort of come to it, and it was, you know, it was a bigger deal in the early 60s that it is not China only explodes its bomb and 64 I think. So, you know, if you think about the Kennedy administration, you've got America, Britain, France and Soviet Union are the only four countries that have bombs, all members of the Security Council, all sort of serious big economies big powers. So what's going to Israel if Israel gets on this tiny and at the time, very poor country, very small, they get one this is seen as okay that's the end, the Arabs will immediately get them everybody's going to get a bomb. And it's sort of the demonstration that you don't really have to be a big state to have one. So there was the full court press in America to try to stop Israel from getting the bomb. It didn't work, partly because Johnson got so distracted by Vietnam he sort of wasn't focused but in part because the Israelis were just going to do it, no matter what. So what date did they have when I mean what's the assessment of when they were saying that Nixon and Kissinger took office with the assumption that they had the bomb. I see. And the deal was and they sort of said, we'll stop agitating about it and you won't make a public announcement that you have it. And that was kind of that's been the basis that we've more or less operated on ever since that's really why they haven't. They don't talk publicly about it. We have some questions from the audience. I'm just going to. This is a little bit contemporary, but on people's minds which is is there any way for the Republican Party to regain Jewish voters after Donald Trump's dinner with two prominent anti sea mites. I would say a Republican Party that nominates Donald Trump would have a very hard time getting. But if if the Republic if if the narrative comes out that Trump's dinner with these anti semites is is a part of his decline and fall in the Republican Party, who knows. I think the you know that majority of Jews, American Jews are liberal and are democratic and I think we're you know that's that's unlikely to change fast. What about anti Semitism or anti Zionism perhaps might be on American campuses and you know what's driving this and right. I, I do try not to get into too much interpretation of people's motives I, I hate to admit this in public but I'm not a good mind reader. And so, and in general, by the way, I think in America today we have too much sort of ad hominem or add feminine arguments if you prefer that I don't like your argument. I just refute it by saying that you're a bad person and that only a bad person. I mean, that may in fact be true. But, but still, the way a civilized political society can deal with disagreement constructively is to refute the argument. I don't want to, I don't want to get into the categorizations, but and also when we are talking about 18 and 19 year olds and apologies to any 18 and 19 year olds that are that are listening. But we're often talking about people whose information base is relatively shallow, but whose emotional interpret investment is very high. What is, you know, many of the 810 I speak as someone who teaches college students, many college students a few years out of college look back on what they did and said at the time, and are sometimes, you know, sometimes only later do they see what they really meant. So let's not get too much in. Nevertheless, I do think we're now in a period when a lot of Americans on the left and the right for very different reasons find wonder if America works, can work, should work or ever has worked. Is America really just a racist project of white supremacy with Jews having been kind of recruited into it. If that's, if that's what you really believe, then, you know, the place of Jews in American societies contestable American support for Israel can be seen as, you know, just extending the racism. And the information base here is not very good. Most Israelis today are actually originally Middle Easterners rather than West European blonde Jews who've moved to Palestine. And in general, the blonde Jews in Israel are more liberal on the Palestinian issues than the Middle Eastern Jews. That's where the real hard core of the Israeli right mostly comes from. However, people have that narrative. And then on the right, there's this idea of only certain kinds of Americans can be real Americans. And the Jews, hey, great replacement, we heard that in, you know, Charlottesville, you know, you won't replace us stuff like that. So when people lose faith that the American project is valuable and works, anti Semitism tends to search. And that's not just now the depression was a time of very high anti Semitism. The 1880s and 1890s were a time of anti Semitism William Jennings, Brian's famous cross of gold speech is a kind of anti Semitic dog whistle. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. You crucifying bankers. Gee, I wonder how people would have interpreted that. So we are now I think in one of these periodic recurring eras of American self doubt transformation. I can't predict what's going to come out of it. I don't know. But I think we'll see that it will continue to be the case that when American society feels healthy and comfortable, not only anti Semitism but many other forms of hate, tend to move toward the margin tend to fade. And when, but when we, we start to doubt ourselves and our project more deeply question it, then a lot of these hatreds pop up. You know, you'll be very eloquent today, about kind of the misapprehensions of the influence of, let's say the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. So if it's not that what is it, you know what what what has actually been the driver. I mean, you know, because I'll give you. When I was reporting on, you know, in the Middle East in the, during the Clinton administration, we fairly common they would say all bright burger and Cohen are driving American foreign policy. Like, well, you know, Bill Clinton and Al Gore both Southern Baptist and it's like it's a little more. But so, and this relates also to an audience question which what what is what specifically about sort of evangelicals makes them sort of pro pro pro pro Israel. Those are very different questions and let me just begin by saying that the latest polls I see show that white evangelicals are about 12% of the population Jews about 2.4%. Even if they were all unanimously united behind, you know, rabid pro Israel support, which they are not. There's a lot of diversity in both groups. You're talking about 1415% of the population that tail is too small to wag this dog. And while pulling on Israel fluctuates it's generally 50% or more on average over time who tend to be describing themselves as sympathetic toward Israel. So these two groups only account for about a third of the sort of steady current of pro Israel sentiment that we see. But again, I would say the sentiment doesn't so much drive the policy is real politic that the Clinton people are interested were interested in the in establishing the peace process and the two state solution. Now, you know, you can never rule out the fact that nobody, you know, Clinton like his predecessors knew that there's one great way to get a Nobel Prize. And that's, that's be the one that gets the kind of, you know, the ultimate prize in diplomacy, but also at Middle East peace process worked really well for American foreign policy. For one thing, all the people around the world that care about this issue and there are a lot of them understood that the only real way to have an impact is through Washington. The Israelis are basically the only people will listen to are in Washington and we won't always listen to them. So that means the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs, everybody, the door to Palestine leads through Washington. That is a trim was a tremendous asset for the Clinton administration of the United States in all kinds of ways. Also as president United States. And you can see I think Biden doing this to while you get a lot of headaches because people are so emotionally invested in the issue. You can use your stand on Israel to speak to the American people about your foreign policy generally, which people pay people in general pay a lot more attention to Israel. They do to American foreign policy. And so if Biden makes a little step toward the Palestinians, he makes the whole left wing of the Democratic Party is going. Oh, yes, wonderful. You're such a statesman. But if on the other hand he feels a need to kind of boost himself with the centrist, he can take another step. So you make very small little rhetorical or policy steps, none of which necessarily have very much impact on the ground, and you get a big political boost for them. Trump did this the same way. I think classic example of an American president using this issue for ultimately domestic political ends, but not really classic Israel lobby ends. Trump, you know, Trump's whole stance in the world was, and I'm speaking in the past tense that may not be justified, but okay, was look, you know, the emperor has no clothes and I'm the brave boy that's willing to tell the truth when nobody else does. And so he took this issue of the US Embassy being in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem. And this is an issue, you know, matters actually in many ways more to some evangelicals than to a lot of people, but it was it's an irritant, you know, Israel says, Israel is the only country in the world where a lot of people don't recognize that the city that it says is its capital is its capital. That's a very anomalous situation. And so we pay, you know, Bill Clinton in 1992 attacked George, George HW Bush for not moving the embassy to Jerusalem, where's Clinton gets in the embassy doesn't move. And we pass a law, we're going to move where the law will be will move the embassy to Jerusalem I think 1995 but I have to look that up. And then, oh, every six months, the president signs a waiver and the embassy stays right there in Tel Aviv. So in 2000, George W. Bush runs against the Clinton Gores administration's failure to move the embassy out of catastrophe. Right. Why obey the law? All right. Then he comes in and amazingly the embassy stays in Tel Aviv. He doesn't move it. He signs the waivers. President Obama's running for office and he tells APAC in the summer of 2008, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Then he gets in office. Nothing really happens. Okay. So Trump's whole thing is look, they've been lying to you. They'll say anything to get elected, anything, but they have utter contempt for you. They laugh at you when you're not looking. And I will make the promise and then I do it. But even better for Trump as he's doing this, every Middle East expert in the country, every former secretary says, if you do this is the worst disaster ever. Oh my, it's unthinkable. You're a crazy man. You're an idiot. The Middle East will be in flames, will never recover. Do you remember this? It was a huge event. The embassy moves and nothing happens. All right. This was the perfect Donald Trump event. And it was a clear example of the dishonesty and the incompetence from his point of view of the entire professional diplomatic and political establishment. He wants his voters to think that this is how things work all the time. That was much more important to him than wherever the embassy was or even if we had an embassy in Israel. And as we can see, his emotional ties to the Jewish people and to the Jewish state do not appear to run very deep. Of course, Biden hasn't reversed that decision. No. Well, you know, same on protectionism, by the way, I mean, it's really, it's interesting how, you know, future historians, we'll spend a lot of time talking about how there was much more continuity between the administrations. But that's, you know, that's always the case that people fight, you know, look at Eisenhower got elected. We're going to stop this terrible policy of containment of Truman. We're going to do something new. Nope. Looking to the future of it, I mean, with the new Israeli government with seems to be, you know, very right wing, certainly compared to any other previous governments and what, what do you think the future of the US Israel relationship is with this new government and Right. Well, I think we're going to be unhappy and by the administration to be unhappy with the new government. I mean, we still don't know what their policies are going to, you know, actually be so I don't want to, you know, events do matter. But I think we will see some sort of rising tension here. But it's important to understand that America's ability to get any country in the Middle East to do things that we really want them to do that they really don't want to do is quite low. Egypt be them more democratic. Saudi Arabia stop, you know, marginalizing women and, you know, stop like oppressing journalists. You know, we have a long list with every Middle East country we have a long list of things that we want to do, which end with recognized gay marriage. And we're not able to get them. And so, nevertheless, we conduct our relations with these various countries on the basis of the national interest as we perceive it. And so my, my guess is, Israel will will follow the pattern with Israel. Final final question here. You know the Abraham Accords, you know, how do you as an historian how do you score them. I mean obviously Camp David Israel and Egypt had fought, you know, some pretty serious wars and now living a sort of cold piece. Is the Abraham Accords a big deal of medium deal small deal was going to happen anyway because of their mutual dislike of Iran or what, how do you score them. It was a big deal. And by the way, just as the Bagan Carter, I'm sure the Bagan Sadat deal was basically aimed at frustrating Jimmy Carter, who wanted a big Middle East conference actually tried to stop them from getting that deal. Right. And then had them on the White House because you might as well get some, you know, credit for it. And the Abraham Accords is fundamentally a vote of no confidence in the United States. It's the, you know, the Israel and the Arabs no longer have the belief that they can predict America, you elect a Bush, you elect an Obama, you elect a Trump, you elect a Biden. What are you going to elect next? Our lives depend on getting this right. And we cannot, we cannot base our security on anything any of you say, because we see what you do. Therefore, we share, we Israelis and Arabs share a strategic interest that we don't want any country to dominate the Middle East, because if they do, our independence will be lost. We're a group of countries too weak to dominate the Middle East on our own. But strong enough, we can hope that if we work together and use our combined diplomatic and other assets, we can navigate this terrain. So it's a sign of the ebbing of American power in the Middle East. And I think if we use it right, it can actually support us. It's a good thing. It's a good, it's terrific. You know, any American president, the Arabs and Israelis are getting along. This would have been the most wonderful news possible. So we should be grateful for it, but we should realize that it reflects in both on both sides, diminished confidence in the United States. We think we really want to thank you, Walter, for your presentation for the new book and virtual applause here from the audience. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Thank you.