by Clifford D. May
Last week, a terrorist
drove his car into a crowd at a Jerusalem light rail station, killing a
3-month-old baby. Eight others were injured, including a 22-year-old
woman who died a few days later. The attacker fled the scene pursued by
police who shot and killed him.
Terrorists also have
struck in Ottawa and New York in recent days. So Israelis are not alone.
But many feel alone -- perceiving that an increasing number of
Europeans and Americans see them not as a tiny nation on the front
lines in a global conflict against jihad, but as bullies culpable
for the war being waged against them.
The first AP report on
the terrorist attack bolstered that impression. It carried the headline:
"Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem." A little later, that
was changed to "Car slams into east Jerusalem train station." Finally,
following protests on social media, the headline became: "Palestinian
kills baby at Jerusalem station."
There also was this:
The Fatah movement, led by "moderate" Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas, called the vehicular terrorist a "heroic martyr" who had
"executed the Jerusalem operation which led to the running over of
settlers in the occupied city of Jerusalem." If that evoked outrage in
any Western capitals, I missed it.
Joshua Muravchik, a
fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Studies, has
been studying the growth of anti-Israelism. He presents his analysis in
a cogent and valuable book: "Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel."
Start with the good
news if for no other reason than there's not much of it: Polls show a
clear majority of Americans continue to support Israel, continue to
believe the Jewish state has a right to exist and to defend itself.
But over the last few
decades, intellectuals of the Left, academics, the U.N., human rights
organizations, some mainstream Protestant churches and the media have
grown not just unsympathetic but, in many cases, hostile toward Israel
and Israelis. At the same time, they have been indulgent of Israel's
enemies, Islamist terrorists included.
An article over the
weekend in the International Herald Tribune noted that "Britain's
center-left Labour Party often sympathizes instinctively with the
Palestinian cause." Hamas -- which claimed responsibility for the
murders of the woman and child in Jerusalem last week -- defines the
Palestinian cause as the extermination of Israel and the murder of Jews.
(It's in the Hamas Charter. Look it up.)
If Britain's Labour
Party sympathizes with that, it is probably a learned, not instinctive,
response. Muravchik notes that as recently as the 1960s, Israel was
almost universally admired. Leon Uris' "Exodus" shaped the prevailing
narrative, one that saw "the founding of the Jewish state as a story of
heroism, sacrifice and redemption ... both just and necessary."
Muravchik recounts how,
in May 1967, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser sent his troops into
Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping (an act of war)
and vowed that Egypt, joined by other Arab armies, would "destroy
Israel. ... This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the
Arab nation."
Opinion in the West,
popular and elite alike, came down firmly in support of the Jewish
state. "As the crisis deepened," Muravchik writes, "a luminous group
of intellectuals," including thousands of academics, called upon the
U.S. government to help Israelis defend themselves.
When the fighting
concluded, Israel had prevailed, taking Gaza from Egypt and the West
Bank from Jordan, Sen. George McGovern, who would become the Democratic
Party's "peace candidate" in 1972, said he hoped Israel would "not
give up a foot of ground" until the Arabs made peace.
This summer, by stark
contrast, as Hamas fired thousands of missiles at Israel, anger was
directed at Israel. The media focused almost exclusively on Palestinian
victims -- even though the Israeli Defense Forces did more than any
army in history ever has to protect non-combatants, many of whom Hamas
used as human shields.
How did this change
come about? After the 1967 war, Israel's enemies and critics stopped
talking about an Arab-Israeli conflict. It became a Palestinian-Israeli
conflict instead.
The new David was
supported by the diplomatic, political and economic clout of 22 Arab
states, oil giants among them, as well as more than 50 nations that
self-identify as Islamic.
Another significant
factor has been what Muravchik calls "the transformation of the paradigm
of leftism from class struggle to ethnic struggle." More than half of
all Israeli Jews come from families who for centuries made their homes
in Muslim lands. In the 1940s and 1950s, most of them were forced to
flee. Nevertheless, the narrative shaped by the Left is of oppressed
Third World Palestinians rising against colonialist European usurpers.
Views prevalent on the
Left have a tendency to "seep, albeit in diluted form, into the
mainstream," Muravchik adds. And the "anti-Israel camp does not need to
win America fully to its side. Merely to neutralize it would radically
alter the balance of power and put Israel in great jeopardy."
Muravchik doesn't rule out the possibility that, should this process
continue, should "Israel's enemies succeed, the result could be a
second Holocaust."
I was looking forward
to Muravchik's thoughts on efforts to counter the rise of anti-Israelism
(and the anti-Semitism now inextricably attached to it), why such
efforts have fallen short, and what else might be considered by those
who are anti-anti-Israeli -- or even just anti-genocide. But he didn't
provide that. Perhaps he will tackle the subject in his next book. Or
maybe he is leaving the task to writers of a less scholarly and more
activist bent. Either way, he has made a persuasive case that such
thinking is urgently needed.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10373
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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