Making David into Goliath. Joshua Muravchik
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that the world’s current hostility to Israel is manifestly unreasonable, many Jews assume that its source must lie in that ancient hatred. So, why have I neglected it, except for incidental mentions, in this book?
The main reason is that I am aiming to explain change. No nation, except some that were transformed by political revolution, has ever experienced such a dramatic reversal in the way it is perceived and treated by the rest of the world. Israel was popular in 1967 in quarters where it seems to be detested now. For example, on the eve of the Six Day War, polls showed that French and British publics favored Israel over the Arabs by near-unanimous ratios (28 to 1). In recent years, in contrast, those same publics have registered intense hostility to Israel.
Surely the world was not devoid of anti-Semitism in 1967. Granted, the Holocaust may have “inoculated” certain populations against it, to borrow the term used by the essayist Jeffrey Goldberg,2 and this effect may have worn off, or be wearing off, as that unbearable episode fades further into the past. But would the inoculation have prevented people from feeling hatred of Jews or merely from expressing it aloud? Certainly the Holocaust had not touched the hearts of those Poles and other eastern Europeans who in its aftermath murdered returning Jewish survivors to prevent them from reclaiming stolen property, nor had it evoked much sympathy from British officials who in those years kept other Holocaust survivors penned up in Displaced Persons camps to prevent their resettling in Palestine. As for inhibiting public displays, even today there is, at least in the Western world and to some extent beyond, a considerable taboo against giving plain voice to anti-Semitism. Indeed those who argue that anti-Semitism lies behind animosity to Israel are suggesting that Israel is used as a foil for the real target—Jews—whom it is less acceptable to openly hate. Would not the same ploy have been possible in 1967?
Rather than anti-Semitism, Making David into Goliath focuses on three other explanations of the turn against Israel. First, the situation on the ground changed. The 1967 war left Israel occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip where a few million Palestinian Arabs lived, and by demolishing pan-Arabism, it paved the way for the crystallization of Palestinian nationalism. This transformed the image of the conflict from one pitting the vast Arab world against tiny Israel to one pitting mighty Israel against the pitiful Palestinians. Second, the Arabs, having failed dismally to translate their numerical advantage into military achievements, learned belatedly to use it politically, for example making the UN the world’s most bully pulpit for the vilification of Israel and the engine room of anti-Israel campaigns, such as the so-called BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Third, the world’s notions of “social justice” came to focus on the struggles of the darker-skinned people against colonialism and racism. In the Middle East, the Jews appear as the white Westerners (although many are neither, and no one has suffered more at the hands of white Westerners than the Jews) and the Arabs or Palestinians as the inherently virtuous “people of color.”
There was also a secondary reason why I did not focus on anti-Semitism. It is difficult to know another person’s motives, the more so to prove one’s interpretation. Where animus toward Jews is proclaimed in tandem with hostility to Israel—as is often the case in the Arab world or among neo-Nazis—there is no problem identifying anti-Semitism. The question at hand, however, is the more frequent phenomenon of anti-Israel sentiment expressed without any accompanying disparagement of the Jews. In such cases, I am reluctant to lay a charge of anti-Semitism.
Instead, in this book, I aim to show that most of the attacks on Israel are false, tendentious, or disproportionate. These are things that I can demonstrate. I can and do also indict various detractors for being biased against Israel—and often I can show that they are acting in bad faith; for example, officials of “human rights” organizations whose partisanship regarding the Middle East anteceded their interest in human rights and manifestly goes deeper. But, except for those who bare their Jew hatred, it is difficult to show that anti-Semitism lies behind attacks, even unfair ones. Mostly, this leads to a sterile debate. I say that someone’s jaundice toward Israel shows him to be an anti-Semite, and he denies being anything of the sort. I can repeat my accusation, and he his denial. I have witnessed such debates, and my sense is that the audience soon loses interest. In most cases, although not all, it seems to me more effective to prove that a given attack on Israel is insupportable or unfair and perhaps also that the attacker has a history of doing this, and to leave it there.
Moreover, with or without the fillip of anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel, or refusal to accept its existence, is in itself the most deadly thing facing Jews since Hitler. Israel has suffered roughly twenty-five thousand dead and a larger number wounded in its wars and terror attacks, all the carnage traceable ultimately to the feeling among many Arabs that any Jewish sovereignty in their midst is unbearable (or until 1948, that the prospect of one was so). This sentiment keeps peace perpetually beyond the horizon, ensuring that the casualties will continue to mount. (It is no solace, quite the contrary, that the Arabs have lost even more from their obduracy, with casualties roughly four times the number of Jews.)
In addition, hostility to Israel may prove extremely harmful even in the actions of those who would shrink from committing violence with their own hands. For example many of Israel’s detractors outside the Arab world today support the so-called BDS campaign. It cynically invokes the tradition of nonviolent protest made famous by Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence and the U.S. civil rights movement, but its goal is to destroy Israel. Its cofounder and leader, Omar Barghouti, has taken pains to make clear his decades-old opposition to the continued existence of Israel within any borders. “You cannot reconcile inalienable Palestinian rights with a two-state solution. . . . So . . . the two-state solution . . . has to go,” he says.3 In a like vein, some Western human rights organizations and jurists who participate in UN-sponsored kangaroo courts of Israeli “war crimes” seek to saddle Israel with constraints that no army has ever operated under and would make it difficult for Israel to defend itself against murderous foes.
Therefore, it seemed, alas, sufficient to deal with anti-Israelism without tackling the subject of anti-Semitism. At least that was how I felt at the time I completed Making David into Goliath in 2013. However, the anti-Jewish vitriol laced through the reactions to the war in Gaza in the summer of 2014 persuaded me of the need to revisit this issue. For one thing, it grew apparent that, whether or not anti-Semitism is the unspoken source of hostility to Israel, the converse is true: namely, that hatred of Israel has grown so febrile that it has unleashed unvarnished Jew hatred. In addition to the venomous and sometimes violent demonstrations I have mentioned, this progression was exemplified by so prominent a figure as Turkey’s Erdoğan who had in one period been characterized as President Obama’s favorite foreign leader. Having reversed, step-by-step, his country’s longstanding close ties to Israel, a process culminating in his 2014 accusation that Israel was worse than the Nazis, Erdoğan and his deputies began next to attribute opposition to his government to the “Jewish lobby”4 and to control of the New York Times by “Jewish capital.”5 Ultimately, I concluded that whichever comes first, the boundary between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism is growing fainter.
Yet, paradoxically, all of these coarse expressions of animosity to Jews do not mean that anti-Semitism is growing more widespread. The incidents I have mentioned played out in a period when polls suggest that prejudice against Jews is growing less common in the United States and Europe. In fact, in the United States, a Pew survey taken in 2014 suggested a degree of philo-Semitism that must be without precedent in the whole history of the diaspora. Respondents to a “thermometer poll” were asked to score their feelings on a scale of cold to warm toward each of eight different groups—Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, and atheists. The group receiving the warmest score was Jews.
No comparable poll has been taken in Europe, but a 2015 Pew survey of six major European countries asked respondents, among other things, about their feelings toward Jews. There were many more who said “favorable” than “unfavorable”—although the minority that professed itself “unfavorable” was not negligible, ranging from 7 percent in England and France to 28 percent in Poland. Whether these numbers in themselves should be taken as good news or bad, the relevant point is that the negatives were lower than in previous years. In other words, anti-Semitism is in some sense decreasing.