On December 5, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 311 to 14 in favour of a Republican-sponsored resolution which, inter alia, declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. When Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky voted against the resolution and suggested that Congress was more interested in Zionism than American patriotism, the White House condemned him.
There is nothing surprising about the American establishment’s enduring sympathy for Zionism. If U.S. President Joe Biden unabashedly called himself a Zionist in Tel Aviv on October 18, the Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson flaunted his Zionism at a dinner hosted by the hard-right Zionist Organisation of America on December 3. Mr. Johnson’s closeness to Israel, reported Haaretz, reflects the American evangelist movement’s deep ties to the Israeli right.
The effects of the ideological propinquity between Jewish and Christian Zionism have long been felt on American foreign policy. In his widely-debated essay, ‘God’s Country?’, Walter Russell Mead wrote that conservative strains within American Protestantism have “changed US foreign policy in profound ways” to the extent that the “rising evangelical power has deepened US support for the Jewish state” in line with the Zionist belief that god blesses those who bless the nation of Israel (Genesis 12:3).
