Learning to Hate Zion

Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel
By Joshua Muravchik
Encounter, 296 pages

The global backlash against Israel’s recent war in Gaza was far from unexpected. Yet the ferocity of the demonstrations, the strength of feeling against Israel, and the media’s total lack of sympathy for the Jewish state descended to startling depths. For while campaigns against Israel may have become familiar, the 70 percent of Israelis who were forced day and night to dash to bomb shelters as their country was dragged into a ghastly war of their enemy’s making must surely have wondered anew: How can the world not see the rightness of our cause?

Among observers with a reasonably long historical memory, there is a dim sense that things weren’t always this way. But as Joshua Muravchik outlines in his important and lucid book Making David into Goliath, the turnaround in world opinion has been far more dramatic than even they might remember.

At one time the world’s media rallied to Israel’s defense when she was threatened by enemies committed to her destruction. During the 1967 Six-Day War, Europeans did in fact demonstrate—only they didn’t come out to condemn Israeli aggression. They voiced support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense.

Israel’s critics have long delighted in claiming that this huge shift in popular opinion is due to Israel itself. They argue that the country has abandoned its founding ideals—secular, socialist, progressive—and become a brutal occupier of another people. But, tellingly, as the mood against Israel turns ever uglier, a new explanation has become fashionable: Israel and Zionism were diabolical from the moment of their inception. Israel can do nothing to help itself, in other words, except dissolution.

This, of course, has always been the line that the Arab world has taken on Israel. How has the West’s liberal elite come to echo it? As Muravchik, a long-time contributor to these pages, explains, the ideological war on Israel had to undergo some fundamental transitions before Western liberals would enlist.

Reading this book, one is reminded of just how remarkable the Palestinian public-relations victory has been. Remarkable not because of the merits or lack of merits of the Palestinians’ claims, but because it has been achieved even though the Palestinian cause has thoroughly aligned itself with ideologies and regimes that are identifiably malevolent. Long before Palestinian national identity was even fully formed, the Arab leadership in Britain’s Palestine Mandate had established a macabre alliance with Nazism. The most noteworthy embodiment of this pact was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent his war years in Berlin broadcasting pro-Nazi propaganda to the Arab world and organizing an Islamic division of the Waffen-SS in the Balkans to carry out atrocities against Jews.

Not long after the defeat of Nazism, Yasir Arafat and the PLO sought the sponsorship of the Soviet Union and Third World Communism. Moscow may have provided much of the capital for funding the war on Israel, but Havana and Hanoi provided far more in the way of inspiration for the tactics of terrorism and guerrilla warfare that became the trademark of the Palestinian movement. Following his visit to Red Beijing, Fatah leader Abu Iyad marveled, “The Prophet couldn’t have done better than Mao Zedong.” It was perhaps then only a logical next step to embrace the bloodthirsty violence of fundamentalist Islam and the nihilistic martyrdom of the suicide bomber.

Muravchik’s extensive account details many turns in the road that led to Israel’s Goliath status. But there were two crucial shifts. The first was the popular reframing of the Arab–Israeli conflict as the Israel–Palestinian conflict. The second shift, following from the first, was the left’s move away from the issue of class struggle in favor of anti-Western Third Worldism. 

These changes inverted the collective mental map of the Middle East. Where once people saw Israel as a splinter of land penned in by a vast host of aggressive Arab dictatorships, now they saw little Gaza and the tiny West Bank bordered by “big” Israel with its highly sophisticated military. The Arab call to dismantle the world’s only Jewish state and replace it with yet another Arab one had seemed barbarically unreasonable to Western publics. But with the creation of a separate Palestinian identity, the Arabs were able to appropriate the Zionist narrative for their own cause. The Palestinians became the stateless people cast into exile. They were the ones who had suffered catastrophe and longed for return to their ancestral homeland, Jerusalem.

Making David into Goliath is an indispensable history of the New Left’s embrace of the Palestinians as the prize exemplar of a revolutionary Third World people. The change swept through policy circles and universities alike. Muravchik, a writer of granular clarity, gives a lively account of how Bruno Kreisky, the Jewish chancellor of Austria, worked tirelessly to erode support for Zionism among Europe’s social democrats in the 1970s. And the author devotes an entire chapter to the work of the late Palestinian academic Edward Said, who turned academia into a hotbed of anti-Israel incitement.

Muravchik exposes Said as an intellectual charlatan and deconstructs the flawed foundations upon which his entire anti-Western theory (Orientalism) was built. “Said’s cynical modus operandi,” writes Muravchik, “was to stop short, where possible, of telling an outright lie while deliberately leaving a false impression.” But an academia in the grip of the postmodernist cultural revolution was all too willing to overlook the flaws in his scholarship. Said, after all, had provided an electrifying framework for demonstrating that Westerners were always and necessarily racist and exploitive in their dealings with other cultures. His book Orientalism became a key text for the New Left as it looked to justify its abandonment of class struggle and trade unionism for race politics and anti-colonialism—during an age when both institutionalized racism and empire were mostly receding into history.

The embrace of anti-Western causes explains the double standards and the selective compassion of campaigners who feel outrage at the accidental killing of Palestinian children while they perform moral gymnastics to justify the intentional killing of Israeli children. All around the world, humanitarian efforts assisting victims of famine, natural disaster, and civil war go underfunded and undermanned. Yet increasingly the Palestinian terror war—with civilians as its primary target—has roused the support and sympathies of left-wingers and student activists.

For Muravchik, the Goliathization of Israel has been a function of trends unfolding on the left. While he certainly is not shy about identifying where the incitement against Israel has aligned itself with outright anti-Semitism, Making David into Goliath is not an account of Jew-hatred. For that, one need only look at the violent demonstrations against Israel’s latest clash with Hamas. Protests in Europe have featured the most open displays of anti-Semitism there since the 1930s. Whatever anti-Semitism’s role in initially turning the world against Israel, the current activism is awash in Jew-hatred.

Whether the war on Israel’s legitimacy is being sustained by anti-Semitism itself or by the left’s political alliance with Palestinians, there is no question that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are—at best—mutually parasitic. In that sense, Muravchik’s excellent book tells the story of a leftism that has betrayed the Jewish people everywhere.