Aaron and Cecile Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor Abraham Ben-Zvi yesterday offered a non-traditional perspective on the roots of United States-Israeli relations. At his lecture in Riggs Library on the origins of the American-Israeli alliance, he challenged what he referred to as the assumption that pressure groups, like pro-Jewish lobbies, in the U.S. were responsible for creating the alliance.
Instead, he argued, strategic foreign policy concerns dating to the mid-1950s caused the U.S. to perceive Israel as “the last bastion of the West” in the Middle East. Since then, he said, the U.S. has relied on Israel as a partner in stabilizing the region. He asserted that the alliance, once based around opposition to the Soviet Union, is still essential to U.S. interests in the area due to the threat of terrorism.
Every year since 1976, the Department of Government has hosted an Israeli professor to teach undergraduate courses and deliver an annual lecture.
Ben-Zvi was invited to be a visiting professor last December and teaches several undergraduate courses focusing on Israeli and Arab politics. He held the visiting Israeli professorship in 1995-1996 as well.
“Professor Ben-Zvi has done such a great job with his classes and in the department this year that we have asked him to stay on another year,” Government professor Robert Lieber said.
