How The World Turned Against Israel

Matt Vespa | Jul 08, 2014

Have you ever noticed that the political left doesn’t really have much zeal for Israel? I mean, our own Secretary of State said Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state” if there was a failure to reach a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. That’s a very poor choice of words. Secretary Kerry eventually apologized, but why has Israel become such a target for vitriol and hate?
While our own Katie Pavlich’s new book, which undercuts the Democrats’ disingenuous “war on women” narrative, hit the shelves today ( You should buy a copy right now!); you should probably pick up Joshua Muravchik’s Making David Into Goliath: How The World Turned Against Israel as well.
In 2003, a EU opinion poll showed that 60% of Europeans view Israel as the world’s most dangerous country.

Across the United States, there are calls to boycott Israel. Recently, there was a push to have an academic boycott, which was rejected by a multitude of American colleges and universities. Nevertheless, “Israel Apartheid Week” reared its ugly head again last February. Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection always has good coverage of the anti-Israel insanity permeating through American academia.
But, what are the highlights of Muravchik’s book? He shows:

• How the Non-Aligned Movement reshaped the United Nations to become anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel, and to create three special bodies, funded to the tune of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, devoted exclusively to denigrating Israel and promoting the Palestinian cause—while not a single such body exists for any other people, cause or country.
• How Edward Said, the godfather of modern scholarship on the “Third World,” and perhaps the mostly widely assigned author on American and European poisoned generations of Western academics and students against Israel through sheer intellectual charlatanism.
• How the Jewish socialist Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, who filled his cabinet with former Nazis to prove he was a “true Austrian,” became a leading figure in the hate-Israel movement by using his Jewish “authenticity” to persuade European socialists to disavow Israel and embrace Yasser Arafat.
• How after the Six Day War in 1967, opponents of Israel successfully redefined the conflict between Israel and the Arabs as a conflict between an occupier and stateless Palestinians. Until then, not only had there never been a Palestinian nation, but even PLO’s Palestinian National Covenant did not call for a Palestinian state: it sought merely to eject the Jews so that Palestinian Arabs could take their place in the larger “Arab nation.”
• How U.S. churches, most recently the Presbyterian Church, have been targeted with increasing success by anti-Israel activists to cut ties with and boycott the Jewish State. Now the same opponents of Israel are intent unraveling U.S. evangelical support.
• How Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, boasted openly that he had forced the moderate Arabs to bow to the radicals by creating a “climate of terror” and how European leaders were so cowed by Palestinian bombings and hijackings that they refused to keep a single perpetrator of Palestinian terrorism behind bars.
• How, rocked by the 1973 OPEC embargo, these same leaders openly proclaimed their need to switch to the Arab side to assure the flow of Mideast oil.
• How Israel’s home-grown “adversary culture” – revisionist historians, “post-Zionist intellectuals,” and the country’s leading newspaper – furnishes an unending supply of grist for the mills of Israel’s detractors and enemies.

With tensions mounting between Israel and Hamas, expect Israeli criticism in the coming days.