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Truman's instant recognition of Israel was his way of securing the New York Jewish vote that he knew would be a large factor in winning the 1949 election. When we started giving them military aid, it locked us into support, and after Israel's several wars and conflicts with its neighbors, politicians saw it as a black and white issue.
In modern times, Mearsheimer is right that there are a large number of people who compose an "Israeli lobby" that seeks to equate anything but unconditional support of Israel with antisemitism. The media perpetuate this because it makes them money, and the result is that the debate in the US has shifted from a spectrum ranging from a Palestine-only solution to an Israel-only solution, and the extreme pro-Palestine position in the US is a two-state compromise.
Our idiotic foreign policy in the middle east over the past 60+ years has consistently turned the people, if not the leaders, of Arab countries against us, and in reaction the American people have been led to fear Arabs and Islam in a new Red Scare. The fanatical support for Israel in the US is not so much based on our support for them, but the fear of the alternative. We are collectively brainwashed into fearing and distrusting Arabs and seeing them as "America Haters" to use a Fox News term, and to suggest that we have antagonized them to the point that they distrust us is apostasy. The cold war mirror image of Monolithic Communism and Monolithic Americanism is gone, but the absolutism remains in our new cold war with the Arab and Muslim world. Sadly, the blind ideology that propagates this divide exists on both sides, and neither will back down. The moderates on both side will continue to be drowned out by the fanatics, and anything but unconditional support of Israel in the US will be seen as unpatriotic and a willingness to abandon democracy.
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