Posted on 06/07/2002 5:50:47 AM PDT by SJackson
There is a concerted public relations campaign in the United States to shift domestic support from Israel to the Palestinian Authority. That effort is fueled by paid commercial advertisements, campus protests, petitions of aggrieved academics, and often one-sided news commentary and editorials. Yet Americans, by a 5-1 margin, continue to champion Israel's right to self-defense.
The Islamic Middle East has a population 50 times as large as Israel's. Its collective autocracies sit atop perhaps a third of the world's currently known petroleum reserves. Yet Americans, who import half their oil, still back the Jewish state. Terrorists from Saudi Arabia, based in Afghanistan, and guided by assorted Egyptians, Yemenis, and other Saudis, slaughtered 3,000 Americans and cagily professed that their murderous antagonism arose from the policy of the United States in the Middle East. Yet Americans have not wavered much in their sympathy for Israelis.
The old anti-Semitism is afire in the Middle East, igniting in Europe, and smoldering in the United States, assuring us that the cocky, conniving, and pesky Jews are too costly a liability. No matter the vast majority of our citizens remain adamantly pro-Israel. An array of our own ex-diplomats, retired generals, and international magnates remonstrates with us that we cannot afford to alienate so many millions of the Islamic world, in such a strategic location, at such a critical time, and with so many critical resources. Most of us sigh or yawn.
Why is this so? Bigots claim we are misled by the inordinate influence of the American Jewish community. Yet its electoral weight, like the once formidable Greek lobby, is shrinking, as American Jews become assimilated and the fast-growing American Muslim community is slated to outnumber them in the next decade or two. Besides, most of us here in rural America never see American Jews or hear their spokesmen.
The race industry alleges that we are prejudiced against the Arab people. But Americans consider Arab-Americans pleasant citizens, hard-working, and sympathetic refugees from tyrannical regimes abroad. Our elites complain to us that Protestant fundamentalists in our Midwest and South connect the survival of Israel with ill-founded Old and New Testament prophesy, and so in superstitious ignorance have unduly misdirected American public opinion away from our genuine geopolitical interests. Still, that can hardly be true when we all realize that earnest Protestants have less and less influence upon an American culture that is increasingly secular, often crass, and prone to demonizing Bible-thumpers.
A BETTER explanation for our sympathies lies with our shared affinities. Like the United States, Israel is a democracy. It has a free press, an independent judiciary, and is liberal in social and economic commerce in ways its enemies whether the theocrats in Iran, the lunatics in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, the dictators in Egypt and Pakistan, and the royalty in Jordan and the Gulf are not. No one here believes Yasser Arafat's single rigged election and rule by fiat constitutes real consensual government. Your Knesset debates are more like our Congressional discussions than are the stone-faced yes-men we see in "parliaments" in Cairo or Damascus. Israeli judges remind us of our own not those on the West Bank. Your elite critics and harping professors are more like what we see in the Ivy League than the censors who monitor discussions on the sly in classrooms in Saudi Arabia.
Such political and social similarities count for a great deal among Americans. Yet there is still something more about Israel that gives it precedence in the American psyche, above other tiny democratic societies, such as Holland, Belgium, or Costa Rica. Israel is still a confident and muscular state, one that has faith in its own values and the willingness to defend itself against great odds, both military and political.
Most Americans, as the descendants of immigrants with a similar pioneering heritage, appreciate that assurance. Israeli spokesmen over here do not filibuster or interrupt on the evening news like their adversaries; but they do not back down either. When attacked, they do not shriek and finger-point, but quietly prepare retaliation. In American parlance, they are "quiet but carry a big stick." The nation of Israel shows genuine thanks to America and appreciates our material and political aid, but its citizens are not lackies, and rightly sense Americans don't like obsequious clients or arrogant and ungrateful allies. Israel is neither. Collectively, Americans have given the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians tens of billions of dollars, and yet receive from them constant unappreciative lectures and warnings about our aiding Israel. In contrast, Israelis do not tell us what we can do with our own money. We are not worried that individual Israelis are armed or that they distrust United Nations auditors, since we recognize that such a free citizenry's collective judgment is to be trusted more than the ad hoc edicts of some of the frightening nations that now dictate the policy of the UN. In fact, most Americans perhaps alone now in the West worry not so much about the excesses of a democracy's military power as the insidious perils that arise out of its very success. We are more concerned that affluence, occasional license, and ample leisure can sometimes weaken the mettle of free peoples, here and abroad, tending to make them na ve about their deadly enemies and overly confident in international utopian bromides, rather than in the will power of their own citizenry.
In this regard, Israel should sense real friendship in the current American administration. Unlike former US president Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush has less faith in either the morality or the efficacy of the UN. European Union remonstrations are more likely to exasperate than to impress him. And unlike his father, he seems a world away from the New England patrician class, whose business, academic, and political careers were so often predicated on realpolitik that they were often unsympathetic to Israel.
Perhaps it is his southwestern upbringing despite his education and wealth that gave him greater ease with rural and middle-class Americans, who admire Israel precisely for its willingness to defend itself, articulate its values, and stand firm for the rule of law when other democratic nations will not. We in America realize that there is a debate raging today in Israel, as there is here, over the proper response to constant, savage, and demoralizing suicide-murdering of Israeli civilians. Americans, of course, wish equality and justice to reign in the region, and so like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and many Israelis support a separate Palestinian state (on condition that its creation is not antithetical to defensible borders and guarantees of a permanent armistice.)
We also realize, however, that there are innate biases affecting world opinion which have nothing to do with what Israel does, and a great deal to do with how it is caricatured. How else can we Americans explain the world's hypocritical and shrill condemnation of the events in Jenin, and its relative silence, until recently, about the carnage in Kashmir, a region where millions may now be on the brink of nuclear annihilation? Israelis should remember that their concrete defense of liberal values is at the very heart of American support. And so they must continue to project such a sense of moral purpose not apologizing for the strong, but both legal and appropriate, responses they must take for their very survival. A strange mixture of factors causes the more calculating and opportunistic in the West to be hypercritical of Israel: historic anti-Semitism; propaganda from the Palestinians, who have grafted their cause onto the agenda of purported victims in America; and the fact that Israel's enemies have oil, terrorists, and hundreds of millions of angry citizens.
Do not worry about such a minority of faint hearts and worse. You will never win their approbation. Instead, simply continue to do what you must to protect democratic society, with a sense of right, as the humane nation you are sees that right. That way, the vast majority of Americans who do not live in Washington or New York will always insist on supporting you on the principles of who you are, what you represent, and why you are fighting as you must.
The writer, a classicist and military historian, is author most recently of Carnage and Culture (Doubleday 2001).
That is a stretch. Although the article does not cite any source for the 8O% claim. The Gallop organization has data that shows support for the Israeli side has varied from 10% to 50% over the last 30 years. Today, a large majority of American's don't want us to take sides in the conflict.
One would never guess that, reading just what is posted here.
Obviously I can’t speak for the author. However recent polls I’ve seen seem to be in the area of 50% supporting Israel, 10%-12% the Palistinians, with a big chunk of undecided. My guess is he’s referring to 80% of those who expressed an opinion.
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