Eric Alterman on We Are Not One

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from Isreal's nineteenth-century origins. Following it's 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the “nakba” or “catastrophe” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced at this time. According to Alterman, following the 1967 Six-Day War, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews’ collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel’s image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Join us when Alterman expounds on his researched, and reveals how consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, it is fracturing.