Begin with the obvious: the 180-degree disconnect between America’s and so much of Europe’s attitude toward Israel, as evidence, most recently, by Congress’s September 18 unanimous vote declaring Israel a “major strategic partner.”

But in Europe, were it not for lingering (but vanishing) embarrassment over that “Holocaust thing,” it would not surprise this writer to see a vote declaring Israel a pariah sail through at least some European parliaments.

As for America, like Europe, it is overwhelmingly Christian.  What, then, explains the affectionate bond between this Christian-majority country and the world’s only Jewish state?

Here are my suggestions:

1.  Both America and Israel were founded by people fleeing religious persecution.

Jews, of course, have been persecuted literally for millennia; anti-Semitism has truly earned its characterization as “the world’s oldest hatred.”

But the 16^th century saw the advent of a new phenomenon in Europe: the persecution of Christians by other Christians.

The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society…  In some areas Catholics persecuted Protestants, in others Protestants persecuted Catholics, and in still others Catholics and Protestants persecuted wayward coreligionists.

No wonder, then, given these Christians’ and Jews’ common historical experience, that the First Amendment to our Constitution prohibited the new government from infringing on the religious liberties of anyone.  But the point is, America is unique in having been founded by members of two religions fleeing persecution for their beliefs.

Then there is the Pilgrims’ likening of themselves and their flight from Europe to the New World to the Israelites’ flight from Egypt to the Promised Land.

And that was just the beginning, as proto-Americans continued to identify with the ancient Israelites throughout the Revolutionary War.  As historian Don Higgenbotham writes in The War of American Independence (emphasis mine):

In most of the colonies that had militia, a major part of each training day was a sermon, sometimes called an "artillery sermon," which "literally bristled with Old Testament injunctions in support of a just war."… Several generations of Americans saw themselves transformed into the Biblical David, while France (and later Britain) was Goliath incarnate."

No less a figure than Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, arguably the spark that ignited the American Revolution, cites the Jews as argument both against continued allegiance to a monarch and for independence.  He then ices the cake by further citing his perceived notion of “Jewish exceptionalism” to exhort his countrymen to embrace the concept of American exceptionalism (emphasis mine):

The hankering which the Jews had for the idolatrous customs of the Heathens, is something exceedingly unaccountable; but so it was, that… they came… to Samuel, saying, BEHOLD THOU ART OLD, AND THY SONS WALK NOT IN THY WAYS, NOW MAKE US A KING TO JUDGE US, LIKE ALL OTHER NATIONS.  And here we cannot but observe that their motives were bad, viz. that they might be LIKE unto other nations… whereas their true glory laid in being as much UNLIKE them as possible.

And need I mention that both and America and modern Israel had to wrest their independence not just from a European power, but from the same European power – Great Britain?

2. America and Israel share the same values. 

America is commonly, and correctly, characterized as a Judeo-Christian country.

And it is equally accurate to call modern Israel a “Christo-Jewish state.”

I am far from the first observer to note the Old Testament (read: Torah) tone to the Gettysburg Address – “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent…,”  not to mention Lincoln’s directly quoting Psalm 19:9, from the Hebrew Bible: “[T]he judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

But of course, the Second Inaugural contains another memorable passage – one suffused with Christianity:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

That’s Jesus speaking there, not Moses.  Or to put it another way, the citizens of Richmond and Atlanta would have gotten a much better deal from Lincoln, had he lived, than the citizens of Jericho got from Joshua.  And so, too, will the citizens or Ramallah and Gaza City if/when they make peace with the Jewish state.  Is there any question that Hamas’s most fervent wish is to destroy the Jewish state?  Is there any question that Israel seeks only the same peace she already enjoys with Egypt and Jordan?

But Lincoln’s words aside, what about Lincoln the man?  Lincoln was a Christian, of course.  And yet… (emphasis mine):

America made it by the skin of her teeth, by the grace of God.  We nearly dissolved in the Civil War, and no-one but a president with the character of a Hebrew prophet could have extricated us from disaster.

I have just given you two reasons why I believe America loves Israel and vice-versa.  But why do so many Europeans hate both us?  One reason, certainly, is the American and Jewish exceptionalism I cited earlier.  Europeans simply cannot countenance the high opinions that we Americans and our Israeli counterparts have of ourselves.  And it seems that the only thing Europe hates more than our and Israel’s belief in each people’s exceptional nature is our evident joy in proclaiming our exceptionalism openly.  Elite Europeans view such open bragging with undisguised distaste.

Problem is, to paraphrase baseball great Jay “Dizzy” Dean, it ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.

And America and Israel have shown, over and over, throughout history, that they can do it.

Worse, the people, in America and in Israel, who are “doing it” are people Europe did not want.  But America did, as immortalized in the words, by the American – and Jewish – poet Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…

To have been not just equaled, but surpassed by this “wretched refuse,” not to mention being totally dependent on them for defense, must be galling to many Europeans.

Knowing that the processor chip and anti-virus software in the computer on which one is typing that latest BDS screed was developed and/or manufactured in Israel must be no joy, either.

America is no slouch in technological development (often in partnership with Israeli firms), either.  But in Israel’s case especially, one suspects that nothing – nothing – raises Europeans’ blood pressures more than to see the people that Europe spat on literally for centuries transform themselves in the historical wink of any eye from this…

… to this:

That America – a country founded and built, as was modern Israel, by Europe’s “wretched refuse,” fleeing European religious bigotry – doesn’t have Europe’s problem with Israeli (read: Jewish) military prowess doesn’t surprise me.  That the House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution “condemning the rising tide of anti-Semitism abroad” surprises me even less.  “Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips.  And keep your Jew-haters, too.

And so, when Americans and Israelis look at each other, take pride in our respective achievements and – yes – our exceptional nature, each of us, American and Israeli, celebrates the praiseworthy qualities that we see in the other precisely because we see those same qualities in ourselves, can anyone be surprised when each asks the other the same question:

What’s not to love?

Follow Gene Schwimmer on Twitter.  Visit Gene at geneschwimmer.com.