Hi.docx

Hi, I'm Sean acres, Dean of the helm School of Government. Like to welcome you for another video in our series on American foreign policy toward the State of Israel. Returning to the theme that ideas become policy, that ideas of the substance that policy is made of. It's very, very important to understand the relationship of Zionism. And we'll define that for purposes of this video. As is the support, an idea that, that the Jewish people have a historical homeland known as Israel and the Middle East. The understanding of this frame of thought in early America, in the early United States and its effect on US foreign policy thereafter. You see, we tend to think that this is a modern concept. But in fact, the idea that the Jewish people had a covenant relationship with God that played itself out in a claim in a covenantal right to property in the Middle East, to a historic homeland in the Middle East known as Israel, was an idea that came with some of the very first Puritans in the United States. Cotton matters father, a prominent figure in President of Harvard University, was one of the first to adopt this and to bring it about to show this line of thinking in the American people. Now, what I'd like for you to see though, is more than just one or two people in the United States.

What you have is a worldview that was shaped by a Judeo-Christian worldview that was shaped by a religious understanding of covenant. There were many people in the United States that saw the relationship of the Jewish people to the Middle East as a matter of covenant based strictly out of the bible, particularly where God told Abraham that I'll bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. And that, that first transaction taking place from Abraham purchased the caves of mock pay law and modern-day Hebron as a claim to right. Now what's interesting is that this idea became very important through religious figures. In other words, shaping the worldview of the body politic of the American people. And that idea found its way into American foreign policy. Especially as people like William Blackstone worked with Supreme Justice Louis Brandeis than others to show that the American people understood, believed, and accepted the fact that there should be a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. And this idea took such route first with the body politic, with the people, that it worked its way up into government and then became policy as the United States became the first nation after Israel declared its independence, to recognize Israel as an independent Jewish state.