It was also true that Israel had developed formidable military strength. But, if Israel was a Goliath, it was a miniature one compared to some of the members of the Human Rights Council that had so often condemned Israel, and that had charged Goldstone with a mandate that presupposed Israel’s guilt. At the very moment that the Goldstone Commission was being called into existence, for example, the People’s Republic of China was busy suppressing protests in the captive nation of Tibet by means of mass arrests and executions. This evoked scarcely a whisper of international protest although Israeli abuses of Palestinians paled in comparison to the Chinese treatment of Tibet. Indeed, were China to grant the Tibetans what Israel had offered the Palestinians, the Dalai Lama would have danced for joy.
Nor was it only the United Nations that gave Beijing a free pass, despite a record of butchery and continued repression that had few rivals. Neither Swedish tabloids nor Norwegian supermarkets nor British labor unions nor mainline Protestant churches rose to condemn the Chinese abuses. On the contrary, the People’s Republic was viewed as a prime object for understanding and engagement—a member in good standing of the “world community” that self-righteously cast Israel as a renegade.
The contrast between the world’s treatment of China and of Israel suggested that the true reason for the anathemas heaped upon the Jewish state was not that Israel was so strong but that it was not strong enough. True, Israel had proven its military superiority over its neighbors. But, when the Arabs finally came to terms with this, they shifted the contest to other planes, learning to exploit the political and economic advantages inherent in the sheer weight of their numbers as well as their control of vital natural resources.
The League of Arab States has twenty-two members, and their combined population exceeds Israel’s by fifty-to-one. Moreover, for every Jew in the world, there are one hundred Muslims. Whereas Israel is the only Jewish state, fifty-seven states belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Once, such major Islamic states as Iran and Turkey had allied with Israel. But, carried along by the tide of radical Islam, the Muslim world had fallen into lockstep behind the Palestinian cause, making it the Islamic cause. Insofar as the Israeli–Palestinian or Arab–Israeli conflict is seen as pitting these two faiths against each other—as it is by most of the protagonists and perforce inevitably by those on the sidelines—the contest is hopelessly unbalanced. The Arabs had been unable to translate these advantages into military strength, but they made them pay off in political clout. They threatened those who crossed them with terrorism, oil cutoffs, and economic boycotts; and they rewarded those who appeased them with protection, economic favors, and the power of their diplomatic bloc, which largely controlled the United Nations through the Non-Aligned Movement.
Whereas people and countries quite often respond cravenly to such incentives, they seldom like to admit it even to themselves. Another factor, which may have been the most important of all in isolating Israel, made it easier to justify yielding to the power of numbers, the threats, and the diplomatic pressures; this was an ideological transformation that saw the rise of a new paradigm of progressive thought that Arab and Muslim advocates helped to develop. It involved multiculturalism or race-consciousness in which the struggle of the third world against the West, or of “people of color” against the white man, replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie as the central moral drama of world history. In this paradigm, the Arabs, notwithstanding their superiority in resources and numbers, nor their regressive social and political practices, nor their recent alignment with the fascist powers, now, in the guise of the Palestinians, assumed a place among the forces of virtue and progress while the Israelis were consigned to the ranks of the villains and reactionaries.
Tutored by the Algerians, who had waged one of the twentieth century’s most storied anticolonial struggles, the Palestinians executed a strategy that succeeded in yoking the support of almost the entire global Left. That support ran the spectrum from the diverse communist states and parties, with their cynical though formidable political apparatuses, to the idealistic “soft Left,” throbbing with guilt over memories of imperialism and the enduring reality of racism. Championed by the Left’s networks of organizations and intellectuals, a Palestinian state became a kind of Holy Grail to enlightened opinion, even while almost no one gave a fig for the aspirations of the Kurds or Tibetans or numerous other bereft peoples. Whether this state would rise alongside Israel or in place of it was of secondary concern.
These two forms of suasion—on the one hand, the raw power in Muslim numbers and Arab oil wealth, and, on the other hand, and the moral claims of the Palestinians and the latter-day ideology of the Left—were to some degree contradictory, but in practice they reinforced each other and created an enduring threat to Israel that might yet trump its formidable military machine. How Israel’s enemies developed and deployed each of these methods of influence, and to what effect, is the story told in this book.
When Israel Was Admired (Almost) All Around
“God Almighty,” she whispered. “What have I done?” All the months of fighting him, all the carefully built-up resistance, collapsed in that mad second that had sent her rushing to his side.
Thus did Kitty Fremont—tall, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, and the quintessential WASP—fall in love with Ari Ben Canaan despite herself. Having lost her husband in war and her daughter to polio, she was not ready to love again. And Ari was not easy to love. Kitty was still grieving and Ari was inured to human suffering, seemingly to all softer feelings. He was single-minded—obsessed with rescuing the remnant of European Jewry that survived the Holocaust and creating a state for the Jewish people. She had come to Palestine as a nurse, tending to refugees. Despite her personal tragedy, the direct experience of Israel’s birth pangs filled Kitty’s heart, and she gave it to Ari and taught him to love in return.
The two lovers are, of course, the main protagonists of Leon Uris’s 1958 blockbuster, Exodus, the best-selling novel in America since Gone with the Wind. It became a major motion picture, was translated into scores of languages, and reached best-seller lists in numerous other countries.
Kitty was the invention of a Jewish writer, nurturing a wish that the gentile world should see the founding of the Jewish state as a story of heroism, sacrifice, and redemption. In this purpose, Uris succeeded beyond all measure. A romantic epic of deadly serious intent, Exodus framed the story of Israel for millions of Americans and other Westerners, helping to create a climate of opinion in the 1960s that was warmer to Israel than ever before and more convinced that the country’s birth had been both just and necessary.
During the decades before the events portrayed in Exodus, Western publics had neither known nor cared much about the Zionist project, although wellsprings of sympathy could be found among devout Christians. The Jewish bible constitutes a part of Christian scripture, and the Jews hold an important place in Christian eschatology. Thus, for some, as Conor Cruise O’Brien put it, Zionism resonated with “a power” that activated “moral, spiritual and aesthetic forces, rather than calculations of material interest.”1
Nonetheless, most of the time, such ephemeral “forces” were outweighed by raisons d’etat. With near unanimity, Arab leaders had denounced vociferously the idea of a Jewish state in their midst. Arabs outnumbered Jews many times over and, as the twentieth century unfolded, the world grew ever more dependent on oil from Arab lands. These