No Worse Friend: The West’s Treatment of Israel

Meanwhile the enemies who have sworn to wipe Israel off the map are courted and indulged.

By Bruce Thornton, FPM        6.4.23

The Romans said of 1^st century B.C. general Sulla that there was no better friend, and no worse enemy. Epitomized in this saying is the ancient ideas of what comprises the just treatment of the gods and other people, expressed by the phrase do ut des, “I give so that you give.” “Friends” are those, humans or gods, from whom you have received, and to whom you owe benefits. “Enemies” are those who seek to injure you, and whom you may justly injure in return. In antiquity this principle of reciprocity defined all relationships.

And it applied to foreign policy. What we would call national interests were served by being predictable and reliable. If you were named a “Friend of Rome,” you could rely on Rome’s backing you against your enemies––as long as you reciprocated by paying taxes, obeying the laws, and providing auxiliaries for the Roman legions. Betray the principle of reciprocity, and you could depend on Rome to ruthlessly punish you, for as Homer shows in the Iliad, there is no greater injury than betrayal by a “friend” whom you have benefited, and from whom you are owed benefits in turn.

We moderns, of course, find such an ethic primitive, if not savage. Our notions of interstate relations are steeped in idealism, particularly “moralizing internationalism,” as British historian Correlli Barnett called the post-Versailles foreign policy of democracy promotion, and the non-lethal adjudication of conflict through diplomacy, foreign aid, and multinational institutions.

Yet as the sorry history of those efforts over the last century shows, the old realist mentality reflects more accurately the truth of human nature, and the inevitable clashes of passions and interests arising in a world of diverse peoples with equally diverse beliefs and aims.

A good case study of this truth is found in the West’s treatment of Israel, especially by globalist progressives. The Biden administration has been typical. For all its specious complaints about Russian interference in our politics, it recently injected itself into Israel’s current debate over judicial reform, which for the present has been put on hold.

According to the Times of Israel, when asked about the reforms, “The president responded that he hoped [Prime Minister] Netanyahu would ‘walk away’ from his current judicial overhaul legislation, and that he was ‘very concerned’ about the health of Israeli democracy. ‘They cannot continue down this road. And I’ve sort of made that clear,’ Biden said. ‘Hopefully the prime minister will act… to work out some genuine compromise, but that remains to be seen.’” Biden also pointedly rejected inviting Netanyahu to the White House.

Biden’s unseemly behavior, as the Wall Street Journal writes, “makes us wonder if his real goal is to stir more trouble for Mr. Netanyahu so his coalition falls.” I remember when the Dems decried such intrusions as heinous “interference in our election.”

Biden’s team, of course, somewhat backed off the comments for political PR reasons. But that they were made in such a scolding, school-marmish manner in the first place is revealing. It typifies most Democrats’ condescending disdain for one of our most important allies. Moreover, such a tone seems reserved for Israel (and Russia after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016). The Dems certainly don’t talk that way to our brutal, autocratic sworn enemies like China and Iran.

In fact, the contrast with the president’s treatment of Iran points to the moral idiocy and cringing retreat that has marked this country’s policy toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions since Barack Obama’s administration, itself a reprise of Jimmy Carter’s feckless groveling during the hostage crisis in 1979. And don’t forget the Reagan administration’s failure to punish the Iran-sponsored 1983 murder of 241 of our military personnel in Beirut.

As a consequence of our decades-long appeasement, briefly suspended during the Trump administration, Iran is now mere months, at most, from building a nuclear weapon, and has joined with China and Russia in order to thwart the NATO nations’ support of Ukraine and weaken the West.

So our long-time, chronically beleaguered ally is serially disrespected, its domestic politics meddled with, its interests and security seemingly low on our country’s list of concerns, while the world’s worst state supporter of terrorist murder, the genocidal mullahs who have sworn to wipe Israel off the map, are courted and indulged even as it relentlessly moves ever closer to becoming a nuclear-armed power.

But it’s not just progressive and leftist Americans who assume they can libel and insult Israel with impunity. Most European governments and EU functionaries obviously dislike Israel, and resent the complications it creates with oil-rich Muslim states and Europe’s own sizable Muslim immigrant population. Indeed, many immigrants openly sympathize with terrorist gangs like Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

Typical is Scotland’s new head of government, First Minister Humza Yousaf, who has accused Israel of “killing innocent civilians” and “starvation of population of Gaza and continuing human-rights abuses.” Not a word about the Palestinian Authority’s torture and execution of its Arab political enemies, nor the incessant missile-attacks on Israel’s civilians.

So why? Why is the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, one surrounded by enemies who have waged three major offensive wars against it, a country that has to live under the constant threat of rocket and missile attacks and terrorist violence, treated this way? Why do the UN and EU and progressive Democrats scorn Israel as a pariah state to be boycotted, sanctioned, demonized, and condemned for defending its people?

Post-Holocaust anti-Semitism accounts for some of the animus against Israel. For decades many in our foreign policy establishment were opposed to Israel ––the “stripe-pants boys, the boys with the Ha-vud accents,” some of whom “were antisemitic, I’m sorry to say,” as President Truman characterized them when he ignored their advice not to recognize Israel in 1948.

Nor should we be surprised. These foreign policy mavens were drawn from the same cognitive, social, and educational elite that a few decades earlier had been champions of “scientific racism” and its practical application, eugenics and forced sterilization, in order to ward off “race suicide” brought on by careless immigration policies that allowed in too many “beaten men from beaten races,” as the president of MIT, Francis Amasa Walker, put it in 1896.

More significant for Western attacks on Israel has been the Leninist demonization of imperialism and colonialism, which helped to create the current clichéd view of both as original sins for which the West must continually atone. Now, as Robert Conquest wrote, these terms refer to “a malign force with no program but the subjugation and exploitation of innocent people.” These verbal “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers” continue to serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”

Nowhere has this insight been more true than in the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict.

Disguised as anti-Zionism, Jew-hatred was incorporated into the anti-colonial and anti-imperial narrative that after World War I has shaped Western foreign policy. The creation of a Jewish nation in its ancestral homeland, and legitimized by international law and treaties, was transformed by its enemies and “friends” into an imperialist weapon against the national self-determination of the supposed displaced and “occupied” population. Israel became a neocolonial “settler” outpost stifling the longing for “national self-determination” of the innocent original inhabitants.

One can see this specious historical analysis in the 1979 UN General Assembly resolution making an exception to the ban on hostage-taking, a tactic popular with terrorists, if the hostage-takers were fighting “against colonial occupation and alien occupation and against racist regimes in their exercise of their right of self-determination.” Here we see the malign nexus of alleged “racism” and evil “colonialism” and the post-Versailles idealization of “national self-determination” that have comprised the pretexts for attacking the state of Israel––but only when Westerners are listening. Otherwise, as Yasser Arafat put it, it is “jihad, jihad, jihad” from “the river to the sea.”

And the pretexts have worked: as Ronald Reagan’s UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick once said, “The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one.” Our collusion over the years in this assault on an ally, this mistreatment of a “friend,” has been a stain on the West, one particularly outrageous given our incessant preaching and preening about the “rules-based international order.”

Finally, the biggest lie in the anti-Israel catalogue of slanders was referenced in Kirkpatrick’s statement. Just recently, the Biden administration has publicly condemned an Israeli minister for saying that “there is no such thing as Palestine because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Of course that statement is historically true.

In fact, as Sha’i ben-Tekoa documents in his three-volume study Phantom Nation, the first UN resolution referencing “Palestinians” instead of  “Arabs” occurred three years after the Six Day War, marking the international recognition of a “Palestinian people” and nation as yet another Arab tactic in gaining support in the West by exploiting an idea––nationalism––alien to traditional Islam. Before then “Palestinian” was a geographical term, more typically applied to Jews. Numerous quotations from Arab leaders reveal not a single reference to a Palestinian people, but numerous ones identifying the inhabitants of the geographical territory Palestine as “Arabs.”

For example, in 1937, Arab Higher Committee Secretary Auni Abdel Hadi said, “There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a country the Zionists invented. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us.” The Christian Arab George Antonius, author of the influential The Arab Awakening, told David Ben-Gurion, “There was no natural barrier between Palestine and Syria and there was no difference between their inhabitants.” Later in his book he defined Syria as including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. In testimony to the UN in 1947, the Arab Higher Committee said, “Politically the Arabs of Palestine are not independent in the sense of forming a separate political identity.”

Thirty years later Farouk Kaddoumi, then head of the PLO Political Department, told Newsweek, “Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people.” A few years, after the Six-Day War a member of the Executive Council of the PLO, Zouhair Muhsin, had been even more explicit: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity . . . Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”

Clearly, the continuing statements about a Palestinian people as a distinct nation that deserves its own borders and sovereign territory have been a tactic for pursuing the eradication of Israel by casting the struggle in Western terms of “national self-determination” and the struggle against neo-imperialism.

That the West has endorsed and legitimized this lie for nearly 80 years is perhaps its worst mistreatment of Israel and its people. At a time when Israel is facing internal division, riots, terrorist attacks, an enemy on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, and one American political party that sympathizes with Palestinian Arabs more than with Israelis,  Biden’s meddling in Israel’s domestic policies, and harping on “settlers” living in their ancestral homeland, are despicable. And that’s no way for a great nation to treat a friend and ally.

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Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.

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