when david became goliath

8/10/2019 When David became Goliath

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THE JERUSALEM REPORT

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COME ON, Israel, go easy, buddy. Here you are, this mighty powerarmed to the teeth with the best armaments money can buy, squaringoff against those poor Palestinians with their slings and pebbles. Everyfew years a weird bloodlust comes over you and you lash out at them,murdering innocent men, women and children for no reason at all.Now tell me: What have the Palestinians ever done to you? Those

barrages of rockets from Gaza, you say? Theyre mere annoyances,childs play. Those suicide bombers from the West Bank, you whine?

Thats all in the past; stop dwelling on it. Those knings and deadlycar ramming attacks of late in Jerusalem, you splutter? Youve hadthem coming.

And so it goes. Ask people in the West, and many, if not most, willtell you that Israel is brutish Goliath to Palestines plucky David, andin the permanent tussle between the two, its always Israel that is

at fault. Thats because the Jewish state allegedly keeps fueling thecycle of violence by its disproportionate response to Palestinianattacks, which are, were assured, driven purely by desperation andrightful self-defense.

Israeli aggression is always assumed to be coldly calculated toexact the heaviest toll on Palestinians. By contrast, Palestinian vio-lence, however brutal, is viewed simply as the collective sigh of theoppressed and as such not only understandable but morally justiable.

So carry on butchering those Zionist occupiers, if you will,

Hamas and Fatah. And since both Palestinian groups consider allof Israel to be occupied Palestinian territory, presumably Israelishave no right to defend themselves any time anywhere. Just as in thebiblical story, Goliath has only one way to go: down. And down wemust help him go.

How has a tiny, beleaguered state, whose youth must give their

best years to the army so that the countrys citizens can sleep peace-fully at night, come to be widely regarded as an insufferable bully

who is in the wrong just by defending itself?In his rst-rate new book, Making David into Goliath, the

American author and political scientist Joshua Muravchik exploresthe dynamics that underline such thinking and the developmentsthat have shaped them.

The reason that Israel, the author reminds us, has long been sin-gled out for virulent scorn and censure, alone of the worlds nations,is not that it was so strong but that it was not strong enough. In

the face of the countrys unrelenting demonization by the League ofArab States, whose 22 members automatically gang up on the singleJewish state at international forums like the UN (to say nothing ofthe Organization of Islamic Cooperation with its 57 member states),Israel has been cornered from the get-go.

After they failed to eliminate the Jewish state militarily in 1948,1967 and 1973, Arab nations set about trying to do away with the

Zionist entity politically by seeking to isolate it through their col-lective economic and political might. They threatened those whocrossed them with terrorism, oil cutoffs, and economic boycotts; andthey rewarded those who appeased them with protection, economicfavors, and the power of their diplomatic bloc, Muravchik writes.

THE TACTICworked, not least because the Arabs found willing ac-

complices both among the countries of the former Soviet bloc, whichdespised Israel for being a staunch ally of the US, and among largesegments of the Wests educated multiculturalist elite who cameto regard Israel as a latter-day imperialist outpost that reminded

them of the sins of their own countries against people of color inthe former colonies.

In modern progressive thought, the putative liberation struggleof these former colonials in Asia and Africa from the yoke of theirerstwhile European masters, who allegedly continue to exert unduepolitical and economic inuence over them, has replaced the olderMarxist model of class struggle as the central moral drama of worldhistory, Muravchik notes.

Championed by the Lefts network of organizations and intellec-tuals, he explains, a [would-be] Palestinian state became a kind ofHoly Grail to enlightened opinion, even when almost no one gave

a g for the aspirations of the Kurds or Tibetans or numerous otherbereft peoples. Whether this state would rise alongside Israel or inplace of it was of secondary concern.

But that ideological development required two sleights of hand.

Malignantrole-reversalJoshua Muravchiks new book warns that the

relentless campaign to recast Israel as a malevolentGoliath places it in grave peril By Tibor Krausz

According to an EU poll, well over half of Dutch, Austrians, Finns, Britsand Germans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace; ananti-Israel demonstration in central London, July 19


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THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 12, 2015 43

LUKEMACGR

EGOR/REUTERS


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One was the creation of a new category ofArabs, the Palestinians, whose nationalidentity crystallized only after the war of1967 when Israel captured Gaza and theWest Bank. In short order, the Arabs livingin the occupied territories became proxiesfor collective Arab grievances against Isra-

el. The emergence of Palestinian national-ism following the Six Day War transformedIsraelis from pioneers into colonizers,Muravchik notes.

And by embracing their cause, Arab statesmanaged to rebrand, for the sake of Westernaudiences, their formerly religious and ideo-logical enmity to the Jewish state as support

for Palestinians national aspirations. Andas any public relations consultant will tellyou, branding is everything.

In succinct and apposite chapters, Mu-ravchik charts the history of Arab opposi-

tion to the very idea of a Jewish state in theMiddle East. We listen to them insist, in apt-ly selected quotes from the 1930s and 40s,that they will never accept such a state oneven one inch of Palestine. We hear themissue full-throated genocidal threats prior tothe war of 1967, crowing with anticipatedbloodlust that No Jews shall be left alive,

in the immortal words of the PLOs rstchairman, Ahmad Shukeiri.

We see them go on murderous rampagesof terrorism against Jews and Israelis world-wide in the 1970s and 80s, even while, ina form of economic gangsterism, oil-richArab states wield the threat of embargoes

against nations that dare cross them overIsrael.

Then rst comes one bloody intifada inthe 1980s, then another, even more bru-tal one, at the dawn of the new millenni-um, before a Hezbollah attack on Israel in2006 and years of rocket attacks by Hamasfrom Gaza. Meanwhile, the UN, domi-nated largely by the myriad Muslim states

and their political fellow travelers, pass one

stinging resolution after another against thediplomatically besieged Jewish state. [O]fall General Assembly resolutions that criti-cize a particular country, Muravchik pointsout, three-quarters apply to Israel.

DEPRESSING, YES. Commendably, how-ever, the author is prudent enough not toportray Israel as simply the victim of Arab

ill will. Some of the countrys plight hasbeen self-inicted, Muravchik rightfullyobserves. Hes uninching, as he should be,in highlighting awed and reckless policiesby successive governments, including Ari-el Sharons ill-fated invasion of Lebanonand the Likuds extensive settlement build-ing in the West Bank in the 1980s whose

malignant effects are still with us.Still, the fact remains that through the

years the Arab worlds loathing of Israel has

little abated. What has changed over time isthe alignment of Western views with thoseof the Arabs about Israel. Cowed by the dan-gers of Islamist terrorism and violent back-

lash from their own volatile Muslim immi-grant populations, successions of Europeangovernments have long adopted conciliatoryattitudes toward Arab states on the issue ofPalestine.

Meanwhile, over in academia, postmod-ernist claptrap has blowtorched its waythrough the humanities, creating whole new

generations of intellectuals, scholars andteachers who are instinctively wedded to a

hopelessly ahistorical, Manichean view ofthe conict.We can largely thank the late Arab-Amer-

ican literary critic Edward W. Said for that.Hardly a nuanced thinker, the ColumbiaUniversity professor of English was prone to

spurious ex cathedra pronouncements suchas this: Every European, in what he couldsay about the Orient, [has been] a racist, animperialist, and almost totally ethnocen-tric. Nor was Said above misrepresentingother scholars views, launching maliciousad hominem attacks on his critics and fal-sifying his biography to turn himself from

privileged Egyptian into Palestinian refu-

gee.Yet he became widely hailed as a su-

premely gifted intellectual, whose Orien-talism a muddled, pedantic, error-strewntreatise published in 1978 as a foundingtext of postcolonial studies has served upan oversize, distorted prism through which

many Westerners now view Israelis and Pal-estinians. By lending an intellectual veneerto Palestinian rejectionism and Islamic ob-

scurantism, Said did more than most to helplegitimize them.Which brings us to the second ideologi-

cal sleight of hand that has been coopted todelegitimize Israel: the repainting of Jews aswhite (or ethnically amorphous at best).Thats been done because as people of col-or themselves with their ancestral roots in

Palestine they would less obviously qualifyas axiomatic colonialist oppressors in theeyes of Western progressives.

And so a people who for centuries werescorned as hook-nosed Semitic aliens inwhite Europe now nd themselves demon-ized as white European intruders various-

ly identied as ethnic Russians or Poles orthe descendants of Khazar converts to Juda-ism in a hitherto ethnically harmoniousMiddle East.

For that too we have Edward Said tothank. The intellectual succeeded in por-traying Orientals as the epitome of thedark-skinned; Muslims as the representativeOrientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims;

and nally, Palestinians as the ultimate Ar-

Books

For all its might, Israel

remains a David,

struggling against

the odds to secure

its small foothold in

a violent and hostile

region


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THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 12, 2015 45

abs, Muravchik observes. Abracadabra,Israel, in conict with the Palestinians, wastransformed from a redemptive refuge fromtwo thousand years of prosecution to thevery embodiment of white supremacy.

In one fell swoop, Said and likemindedintellectuals helped reframe the conict asa Palestinian-Israeli one in lieu of what itactually has always been: an Arab-Israelione. The result: Israel is a jackbooted Go-liath lording it smugly over a helpless mi-nority, on whose stolen land this obnoxious

behemoth has been squatting.Point out, though, that the Jewish state oc-

cupies a fraction of one percent of Middle

Eastern territory with a little more than 6million Israeli Jews pitted against 370 mil-lion or so Arabs (and another 1.2 billionMuslims further aeld), and the logical con-clusion about who is David and who is Goli-

ath looks rather different.But accepting the implications of such a

role-reversal is anathema to the countrysenemies and detractors. And so they fallback on exaggerating Israels political and

economic might through the usual canardsof sinister Jewish inuence in world af-fairs. Playing second ddle to them is theArab-Muslim world, which is awash withinane conspiracy theories and perniciousblood libels about Jews and Zionists.

LIKEWISE, MANY Western media outletsand commentators xate almost obsessive-ly on Israels shortcomings, magnifyingthem mercilessly out of proportion throughboth sheer repetition and barefaced hyper-bole (Gaza is an open-air prison or con-centration camp, Israel is an apartheid

state, Palestinians are experiencing ethnic

cleansing or genocide etc.).All the old slanders about Jews have been

transferred wholesale to their state. Once,Jews were accused of ritually slaughteringChristian children for their blood; now, Is-raelis are accused of deliberately slaugh-tering Palestinian children in Gaza. Once,

Jews were accused of fomenting wars forprot; now, Israelis are accused of hinder-ing world peace by allegedly radicalizing

Muslims worldwide through their illegaloccupation of Palestine.

One of the worlds smallest countries and a thriving liberal democracy at that has come to be seen not only as a colossalnuisance but as a positive menace. Accord-ing to an EU poll, three-quarters of Dutch

people, two-thirds of Austrians, and wellover half of Finns, Brits and Germans re-gard Israel as the greatest threat to worldpeace. North Korea? Iran? Russia? China?Bah, theyre bastions of freedom, liberalismand common decency, compared to Israel.

Is there hope for change? Precious little.

And thats a worry. Faced by implacable en-emies, Israelis are forever treading a ne linebetween self-preservation and dangerouscompromise for the sake of peace. For allits might, Israel remains a David, strugglingagainst the odds to secure its small footholdin a violent and hostile region, Muravchikwarns. The relentless campaign to recast it

instead as a malevolent Goliath places it ingrave peril.

MOHAMEDAZAKIR/REUTERS

Arab-American literary critic Edward W. Saidlent an intellectual veneer to Palestinian

rejectionism and Islamic obscurantism

Making David into

Goliath: How the World

Turned Against Israel

By Joshua Muravchik

Encounter Books296 pages: $25.99

when david became goliath

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