David Gerlernter explains why Americans stand with Israel.

The United States and Israel are pick-up nations, created out of ideas.

American and Israeli settlers had to leave Europe; they felt the pressure at their backs. And once they arrived in their new lands, everywhere they looked they saw empty space, and so they naively assumed that there would be room for everybody.

If you want a homeland, you must create one. That's how America got its homeland, and that is why Israel belongs to the Israelis.

American settlers (the tragic fact is) committed gross crimes against American Indians. We don't lessen the significance of those crimes by noting that Indians committed crimes against the settlers too, and crimes against other Indians.

No analogy between Palestinians and American Indians will fly. The differences are too deep. But in other ways there are remarkable similarities between proto-Israeli and proto-American settlers, especially New Englanders.