Heather Johnston, founder of the U.S. Israel Education Association, sets out the case plainly in “America and Israel: A covenant, not a contract” (Fox News, July 1, 2026). The bond between the United States and the Jewish people, she argues, did not begin with the creation of the modern State of Israel and did not begin with the founding of the republic. It is older than both. It is covenantal.
The argument runs through the Puritans. John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” preached aboard the Arbella as the fleet bore toward Massachusetts, closed with the word of Moses to the Children of Israel entering the Promised Land: love the Lord, walk in His ways, keep His commandments, hold fast to the covenant. The Mayflower Compact was understood to be a covenant, not a contract, because a contract is transactional and a covenant is consensual—freely chosen, morally binding, and accountable to a higher authority than the parties themselves. Os Guinness, in America Agonistes, documents the American Revolution’s source not in the libraries of Greece or the common law of England but in the Hebrew idea of a people freely binding themselves to one another and to God. John Adams wished the Jews an independent nation in Judea. William E. Blackstone’s 1891 petition to President Benjamin Harrison, signed by J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Chief Justice, members of Congress, governors, mayors, and clergy, called for the restoration of Palestine to the Jewish people as their “inalienable possession” under God’s distribution of nations. Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant makes the case that the pro-Israel conviction in America was never primarily a Jewish conviction; it was a Protestant one, rooted in long-held habits and cultural predispositions formed by centuries of reading the Hebrew Scriptures as the republic’s own founding text.
The doctrine, taken at its strongest, is that the United States and Israel are bound by a covenant older than either nation’s founding documents, that this bond is the republic’s own self-understanding expressed in foreign policy, and that the alliance is therefore not a strategic arrangement to be evaluated by interest but a moral identity to be honored as obedience. The President’s October 2025 arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport, the joint exercises, the intelligence sharing, the innovation partnerships, the diplomatic shield at the United Nations—all of this is the covenant made operational. When America looks at Israel—its tenacity, its survival against empires, its insistence on being a democracy in a neighborhood that offers none—it sees its own worthwhile struggle mirrored. The two nations, Johnston writes, “sprouted from the pages of the Jewish Bible and share a common script that reflects our identity and impacts our view of the world.” To treat the alliance as merely contractual is to miss what it is. It is the covenant holding.
This is the covenant’s own case, pressed without apology. It is the theology of the American founding as the founders themselves read it, fused with the foreign-policy consensus that has armed, funded, and diplomatically protected the State of Israel for decades. The legal scaffolding—treaty obligations, strategic cooperation, congressional authorizations of military aid, the architecture of the alliance—stands on this covenantal ground. To break the alliance is to break the covenant. To question the alliance on transactional grounds is to misread the bond.
While the President’s party arrived at Ben Gurion and the bond was honored, a seven-year-old Palestinian girl in the Jabaliya district of northern Gaza tried to sleep. Three months earlier, Israeli airstrikes had hit the UNRWA school in Gaza City where her family was sheltering. The western wall of the classroom collapsed on her nine-year-old brother, Mahmoud, and four other children. Her father, a pharmacist, had been detained at an Israeli checkpoint three months before that; her mother had not heard from him since. The Israeli military had designated their current location, a lot that had been an olive grove, as a “humanitarian zone.” The zone had been struck twice. The tent they shared with eleven relatives lost its plastic sheeting in a January wind. The grandmother burned the wooden pallets they slept on to boil water that the Israeli siege had rendered unsafe.
The girl, Maryam, was two years old when the war began in October 2023. She turned four, then five, then six, then seven, while the Israeli siege tightened, while the United States Congress authorized the arms and the U.S. ambassador vetoed the ceasefire resolutions. By her seventh winter, her weight had fallen to less than eleven pounds below the threshold for severe acute malnutrition in children her age. Her mother had stopped lactating eighteen months earlier; she could not produce milk because she was not eating. Maryam’s hair had begun to fall out. She could not stand for more than a few minutes without resting. She had developed a productive cough that lasted six weeks; Israeli strikes had suspended the tuberculosis vaccination program in northern Gaza when they hit the clinics, and the medications to treat the secondary bacterial infection were unavailable. An Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital’s surgical wing had rendered the hospital non-functional. The Israeli military had severely damaged the Indonesian Hospital, the other referral center, which was now operating at a fraction of its capacity with no anesthesia and no functioning CT scanner. Israeli forces struck and destroyed the pediatric ward at Kamal Adwan.
In the early hours of a March morning, Maryam’s breathing became rapid and shallow. Her mother carried her to a makeshift clinic in a damaged storefront. The physician on duty, who had been working without pay for fourteen months, listened to her chest with a stethoscope he had been issued in 2021. He diagnosed pneumonia and severe malnutrition. He had no antibiotics because the Israeli siege had blocked their delivery. He had no oxygen because the Israeli strikes had destroyed the supply chains. He had no intravenous fluids. He told the mother to keep the child warm and to try to get her to drink. He told her that if she could get to a functioning hospital in the south, the child might survive. The mother had no fuel for the vehicle that did not exist; the Israeli military had restricted fuel imports. She held Maryam through the night. By morning the child was unresponsive. She died at 6:40 a.m. of pneumonia complicated by severe acute malnutrition, in a district where Israeli strikes had destroyed the medical infrastructure that would have saved her, under an Israeli siege that had denied her food.
The covenant is older than the republic. The bond is not strategic. America and Israel are bound by a shared founding, a shared text, a shared obedience to the God of Sinai who called a people out of Egypt and set them in the land. The Puritan settlers knew what they were doing when they read the Mayflower Compact as a covenant. The founders knew what they were doing when they invoked Hebrew law as the architecture of a free republic. The President’s party at Ben Gurion knew what it was honoring. The alliance is not a line item in a defense budget. It is the covenant holding across the centuries, the way God told Moses it would.
They are simply outside. They are not parties to the bond. They did not sign the Mayflower Compact. They were not at Sinai. They were not among the Protestant signers of Blackstone’s petition. They are not the children of the promise. The covenant runs between God and His people; the blessings of the covenant run to those within it; the order that holds the world in its place operates on those outside it according to their standing. The suffering of a seven-year-old girl in Jabaliya is the order operating as it has always operated. It is what falls outside the covenant looks like. The ledger balances. The wall stands. The covenant holds.