Discussions of the relationship between the United States and Israel often invoke the influence of Jewish and Christian Zionisms. In broad strokes, the former refers to a form of Jewish nationalism that emerged in the late 19th century in Europe in which certain Jewish individuals and groups called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel and an end to diaspora. The latter, Christian Zionism, refers to a global movement in which certain Christians believe that support for the return of Jews to Israel aligns with biblical prophecy and is required for the second coming of the messiah. Most Christian Zionists see the existence of the state of Israel and the rebuilding of the Third Temple in Jerusalem as necessary steps for the return of Jesus to earth. Pete Hegseth, for example, belongs to an extreme-right denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which combines militant masculinism, support for Christian establishment at home, and a form of “post-millennialism,” in which believers are tasked with building the kingdom of God in the Middle East before Jesus’s return. In a speech at the Annual Gala of the National Council of Young Israel in 2019, Hegseth summed up his views on the matter: “Zionism and Americanism are the frontlines for Western civilization and freedom.”
This quote highlights a dynamic that differs from Zionism narrowly understood, as its primary object is not Jewish sovereignty or Israel’s place in Christian prophecy. Instead, it reimagines U.S.-Israel relations through a focus on American exceptionalization of the United States and Israel. This is not unrelated to Christian Zionisms but is also not reducible to them. This pooling of sovereignty between the U.S. and Israel in the American political imagination glorifies fantasies of military prowess, Holy Land fascination, and myths of civilizational triumph. It celebrates the frontier through rhetoric about the Promised Land and the Golden Land. It evokes a miracle in the desert reflecting, not only Zionist religious and political ideals, whether Jewish or Christian, but also a broader spectrum of (supra-) nationalist fantasies. A deep well of affection for the Holy Land merged with an American proclivity to reach and expand beyond its borders has allowed this sensibility to flourish among a broad swathe of the American public. The resulting political imaginary of U.S./Holy Land/Israeli borderlessness represents a particularly expansive expression of American exceptionalism. The history and power of this formation is the focus of this essay.
Holy Land Mania in a Borderless Empire
Even before its founding, the U.S. has refused to contain itself within the limits of the international state system. Instead, it has defined itself through aggressive bordering practices and a willingness to defy and redraw borders in the name of something greater than itself. The settlement of the American West in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” the Monroe Doctrine, the construction of the Panama Canal, and the aspiration to impose U.S. designs on the Middle East, including, preposterously, turning Gaza into a beach resort, are notable examples. The Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas and expansion into California, debates over annexing Cuba, and more recently, moves toward Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada are others. At such aggrandizing moments, the U.S. anoints itself as the indispensable nation among nations. It is the author of international rules, but not their subject. It fits into the confines of the nation-state while also exceeding them. It encompasses and shape shifts, mimicking the uncanny capacity of protestant Christianity in the United States to fit but also exceed the category of religion. Like the U.S. empire, Protestant Christianity functions not only as one representative of “religion” in a formally plural and egalitarian field but as the unmarked standard through which that field is organized and overseen.
Like the U.S. empire, Protestant Christianity functions not only as one representative of “religion” in a formally plural and egalitarian field but as the unmarked standard through which that field is organized and overseen.
This U.S. expansionist impulse has become closely intertwined with Americans’ longstanding historical, religious, eschatological, topographical, and commercial fascination with the Holy Land. America’s expansionist drive and its attachment to the Holy Land represent distinct, yet mutually supportive, commitments that cumulatively generate a powerful current of political and religious support for the state of Israel. Attachment to the Holy Land contributes to many Americans’ sense of personal and political connection to Israel. In her book on North American Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, Hillary Kaell shows that few of the pilgrims she studied distinguish between religious attachment to the Holy Land and political support for the state of Israel. The two come together as a package. The pilgrims with whom she traveled “frame[d] individual consumption of souvenirs, and the trip itself, as contributing to another moral national project: Americans’ responsibility to support Israel.” A sense of commingled religious histories and destinies makes the places and peoples of the Holy Land central to the national story many Americans tell of themselves.
The merging of these two American sensibilities—the expansionist impulse and a religious attachment to Israel—is also evident in the many Holy Land parks around the United States, discussed in my book Heaven Has a Wall. One example is the Holy Land Experience (HLE), a family theme park in Orlando that went bankrupt during the pandemic after two decades of serving as a “Christian Disneyland” combining Christianity, commerce, entertainment, pilgrimage, and politics. It was founded by Marvin Rosenthal, a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and became an ordained Baptist minister, describing himself as a “Christian Hebrew.” The theme park boasted a romanticized and commercialized replica of the “real thing” in the Middle East: a fifteen-acre historical simulation re-creating the ancient city of Jerusalem in first-century Judea. An actor playing Jesus wandered the grounds, while a manger with live animals doubled as a petting zoo. In 2007, Trinity Broadcasting Network, a major Christian television network, purchased the park and added a miniature golf course, “Trin-i-tee,” featuring Bible-story dioramas. One of my students visited and observed that HLE delivered “a clean, safe, conflict-free version of the biblical holy land which includes American comfort food and memorabilia for purchase.”
HLE’s Holy Land fantasy incorporated a form of collective reverence for the state of Israel that conflated Jewishness with Israel. Its online store had a section called “Judaica.” Among the items for sale was an Israeli flag described as “the perfect standard to display at your home or church to show your love and support for the land and its people.” Other product categories included “Olive Wood,” “Menorahs,” “Mezuzahs,” “Tallits,” and “Instruments.” At first glance, this commingling of Israeli flags and U.S. flags with Jewish ritual objects may seem unremarkable, like someone trying to make a buck. But the presentation of these objects in this context is not innocuous. It associates Jewishness primarily with Israel and the Holy Land, leaving less room for flourishing Jewish lives in the broader Middle East, North Africa, or anywhere else in the world. In short, and in line with most conventional renderings of Zionism, this move erases the Jewish diaspora. Judaism and the state of Israel are presented as largely coterminous, with Israeli flags appearing in the category of “Judaica.” HLE thereby translated longstanding American cultural investments in the Holy Land into commercial interest in Judaica and political support for Israel. In this framing, solidarity with Jewish people becomes difficult to distinguish from support for Zionism.
The convergence of Holy Land mania, narratives of chosenness, and U.S. imperial borderlessness has a long history.
Underlying this collective political imaginary is the U.S. aspiration to present itself as a chosen nation. Such narratives connect American attachment to the Holy Land with political support for Zionism. In their most explicit and dangerous form, they imagine the U.S. as a nation intended for Christians and Israel as a nation for Jews. Muslims, Indigenous people, and others are simply erased.
The convergence of Holy Land mania, narratives of chosenness, and U.S. imperial borderlessness has a long history. In Imagining the Holy Land, historian Burke Long describes American attempts to re-create Jerusalem in St. Louis at the World’s Fair of 1904. The sanctification of the Holy Land in St. Louis went together with the hierarchical representation of Indigenous peoples: the legendary opponent of American imperialism and Apache chieftain Gerónimo was exhibited in the “Apache Village” over the summer of 1904 as part of several exhibits representing supposedly “primitive” cultures. The Fair’s organizers sought to align the vision of America as a chosen Christian nation with the construction of a simulated Jerusalem in Missouri. Long writes that “the elaborate fantasy of Jerusalem as Holy Land […] lent moral and religious authority to the exclusions, celebrations, and paradoxical aspirations to universality that were embedded in a particular vision of America and her limitless future.” An editor from the St. Louis Mirror assured readers of the catalogue that the exhibit would “vitalize for everyone the story that has wrought the world into what it is to-day [and] recall to all the actuality of the history upon which Christianity has been builded [sic] to its present mighty influence.” The organizers encouraged fairgoers to visit the “Jews’ Wailing Place,” interpreted by Long as evidence of a persistent Christian theology of displacement rather than as an homage to Jewish spirituality. To quote the Prospectus of the Jerusalem Exhibit Company: “The sight of ‘pale, deformed, and sad Jews,’ would be ‘reproduced in all its picturesqueness.’” Muslims, on the other hand, were portrayed by the organizers as “ornamental” and “alive religiously only in Christian imagination.” The director of exhibits and displays, Madame Mountford, captured the “flavor of Holy Land infatuation and Christian, America-first mercantile nationalism” with a flamboyant pronouncement to fairgoers: “You cannot go to Jerusalem,” proclaimed Mountford, “so Jerusalem comes to you. To American energy all things are possible.”
Antisemitic Zionisms
The 1904 World’s Fair was a long time ago. But the anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Indigenous racism on display has not disappeared. It has assumed new forms in contemporary antisemitic pro-Zionism, which couples enthusiastic support for the state of Israel with the representation of Jews as ill-suited to life in the diaspora. Advocates of this position now occupy senior positions in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government. Their rhetoric revives older tropes in which Jews appear as a racial and religious other that invites attraction, repulsion, hierarchy, and dominance. An ostensibly “unassimilable” Jewishness is lodged uncomfortably within an America imagined as a righteous and white Christian nation.
But the anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Indigenous racism on display has not disappeared. It has assumed new forms in contemporary antisemitic pro-Zionism, which couples enthusiastic support for the state of Israel with the representation of Jews as ill-suited to life in the diaspora.
The combination of support for Israel and the othering of Jewish Americans was visible in President Trump’s 2019 address to the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Annual Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, in which he referred to Netanyahu as “your Prime Minister.” Trump’s remark suggested either that Israel was an extension of U.S. Jewish communities, or that Jewish Americans constituted a political satellite of Israel. Trump was broadly criticized for the statement, with Representative Jerry Nadler accusing him of wading “right into the anti-Semitic dual-loyalty lie.” In 2024, Trump again invoked this trope, suggesting that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal both to Jewish people and to the state of Israel: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. […]. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” In his first term, at a moment when white nationalist movements were on the rise, Trump issued an executive order on antisemitism which extended federal civil rights protections to a wider definition of the term. Critics warned that the order conflated Jewish identity with nationality and criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Historian Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel helps explain how antisemitism can coexist with and even fuel pro-Zionist arguments. She cites British Labour MP Richard Crossman’s 1947 Palestine Mission: A Personal Record, in which he suggests that the fact that Jews had no place to go other than Palestine was a symptom of, and not a solution to, the problem of European antisemitism. Crossman “castigated Americans as hypocrites for advocating that the gates of Palestine be opened to the same people who were barred at the gates of America.” As Kaplan reminds us, “advocacy for Zionism often had anti-Semitic overtones, a connection that has now been largely obscured by the mainstream story that in championing the Jewish state, Americans […] were rejecting anti-Semitism and trying to make amends for the Holocaust.” Some early American Zionists, according to Kaplan, believed that Jews raised in Palestine were stronger, blonder, bluer-eyed, more Western, and whiter than Jews raised in eastern Europe. Support for Zionism can and often has thus reproduced racialized and antisemitic depictions of Jews.
Americanism, Otherwise?
The British neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks once remarked that he wanted to “chronicle even what he couldn’t cure.” The task here is similarly diagnostic: to trace how Holy Land allegiance, shared chosen nationhood with Israel, and U.S. imperial borderlessness have shaped American support for Israel. Yet this political imaginary is increasingly unstable: today Americans of different backgrounds, including many Jewish Americans, are reconsidering or renouncing Zionism. Many no longer equate respect for Jews and Judaism with support for the state of Israel. They resist efforts to marginalize or criminalize forms of Judaism that challenge or refuse Zionism. They may own a mezuzah but decline to fly the Israeli flag.
This political imaginary is increasingly unstable: today Americans of different backgrounds, including many Jewish Americans, are reconsidering or renouncing Zionism.
These critics of U.S.-Israeli exceptionalism have reopened important questions about Jewish self-determination, Americanism, and the place of non-Jewish and non-Christian communities within both national projects. The violent attempt to capture the field of moral and political possibility expressed by Hegseth and brought to life (and death) on the ground in Gaza is not only fraying at the edges but rotting at its core.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd studies the cultural and religious foundations of contemporary international politics at Northwestern University, where she is Professor of International Relations and Religious Studies. Her most recent book is Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025) from which parts of this post draw on (and are reprinted with permission from).
Image made by Alberto Polimeni using “Church of All Nations at The Holy Land Experience,” by Zfigueroa licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
