The National Review
February 4, 2002

Why Support Israel?
It would certainly be easier not to.
By Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson020402.shtml

The Muslim world is mystified why Americans support the existence of Israel.
Some critics in the Middle East excuse "the American people," while
castigating our government. In their eyes, our official policy could not
really reflect grassroots opinion. Others misinformed spin elaborate
conspiracy theories involving the power of joint Mossad-CIA plots, Old
Testament fundamentalists, international bankers, and Jewish control of
Hollywood, the media, and the U.S. Congress. But why does an overwhelming
majority of Americans (according to most polls, between 60 and 70% of the
electorate) support Israel - and more rather than less so after September
11?

The answer is found in values - not in brainwashing or because of innate
affinity for a particular race or creed. Israel is a democracy. Its
opponents are not. Much misinformation abounds on this issue. Libya, Syria,
and Iraq are dictatorships, far more brutal than even those in Egypt or
Pakistan. But even "parliaments" in Iran, Morocco, Jordan, and on the West
Bank are not truly and freely democratic. In all of them, candidates are
either screened, preselected, or under coercion. Daily television and
newspapers are subject to restrictions and censorship; "elected" leaders are
not open to public audit and censure. There is a reason, after all, why in
the last decade Americans have dealt with Mr. Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon -
and no one other than Mr. Arafat, the Husseins in Jordan, the Assads in
Syria, Mr. Mubarak, and who knows what in Lebanon, Algeria, and Afghanistan.
Death, not voters, brings changes of rule in the Arab world.

The Arab street pronounces that it is the responsibility of the United
States - who gives money to Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Afghanistan and
others, has troops stationed in the Gulf, and buys oil from the Muslim
world - to use its influence to instill democracies. They forget that sadly
these days we rarely have such power to engineer sweeping constitutional
reform; that true freedom requires the blood and courage of native
patriots - a Washington, Jefferson, or Thomas Paine - not outside nations;
and that democracy demands some prior traditions of cultural tolerance,
widespread literacy, and free markets. Moreover, we give Israel billions as
well - but have little control whether they wish to elect a Rabin or a
Sharon.

Israel is also secular. The ultra-Orthodox do not run the government unless
they can garner a majority of voters. Americans have always harbored
suspicion of anyone who nods violently when reading Holy Scripture - whether
in madrassas, near the Wailing Wall, or in the local Church of the Redeemer
down the street. In Israel, however, Americans detect that free speech and
liberality of custom and religion are more ubiquitous than, say, in Saudi
Arabia, Iran, or Palestine - and so surmise that the Jewish state is more
the creation of European émigrés than of indigenous Middle-Eastern
fundamentalists.

Pluralism exists in Israel, rarely so in the Arabic world. We see an Israeli
peace party, spirited debate between Left and Right, and both homegrown
damnation and advocacy for the settlers outside the 1967 borders. Judaism is
fissured by a variety of splinter orthodoxies without gunfights. There are
openly agnostic and atheistic Israeli Jews who enjoy influence in Israeli
culture and politics. In theory, such parallels exist in the Arab world, but
in actuality rarely so. We know that heretical mullahs are heretical more
often in London, Paris, or New York - not in Teheran or among the Taliban.
No Palestinian politician would go on CNN and call for Mr. Arafat's
resignation; his opposition rests among bombers, not in raucous televised
debates.

Israeli newspapers and television reflect a diversity of views, from rabid
Zionism to almost suicidal pacifism. There are Arab-Israeli legislators -
and plenty of Jewish intellectuals who openly write and broadcast in
opposition to the particular government of the day. Is that liberality ever
really true in Palestine? Could a Palestinian, Egyptian, or Syrian novelist
write something favorable about Golda Meir, hostile to Mr. Assad or Mubarak,
or craft a systematic satire about Islam? Past experience suggests such
iconoclasts and would-be critics might suffer stones and fatwas rather than
mere ripostes in the letters to the editor of the local newspapers.
Palestinian spokesmen are quite vocal and unbridled on American television,
but most of us - who ourselves instinctively welcome self-criticism and
reflection - sense that such garrulousness and freewheeling invective are is
reserved only for us, rarely for Mr. Arafat's authority.

Americans also see ingenuity from Israel, both technological and cultural -
achievement that is not reflective of genes, but rather of the culture of
freedom. There are thousands of brilliant and highly educated Palestinians.
But in the conditions of the Middle East, they have little opportunity for
free expression or to open a business without government bribe or tribal
payoff. The result is that even American farmers in strange places like
central California are always amazed by drip-irrigation products,
sophisticated water pumps, and ingenious agricultural appurtenances that are
created and produced in Israel. So far we have seen few trademarked in
Algeria, Afghanistan, or Qatar.

There is also an affinity between the Israeli and Western militaries that
transcends mere official exchanges and arms sales. We do not see
goose-stepping soldiers in Haifa as we do in Baghdad. Nor are there in
Tel-Aviv hooded troops with plastic bombs strapped to their sides on parade.
Nor do Israeli presidents wear plastic sunglasses, carry pistols to the
U.N., or have chests full of cheap and tawdry metals. Young rank-and-file
Israeli men and women enjoy a familiarity among one another, and their
officers are more akin to our own army than to the Republican Guard, Hamas,
or Islamic Jihad.

The Israelis also far better reflect the abject lethality of the Western way
of war. Here perhaps lies the greatest misunderstanding of military history
on the part of the Arab world. The so-called Islamic street believes that
sheer numbers and territory - a billion Muslims, a century of oil reserves,
and millions of square miles - should mysteriously result in lethal armies.
History teaches us that war is rarely that simple. Instead, the degree
militaries are westernized - technology that is a fruit of secular research,
group discipline arising from consensual societies, logistical efficiency
that derives from capitalism, and flexibility that is the dividend from
constant public audit and private individualism - determines victory,
despite disadvantages in numbers, natural resources, individual genius, or
logistics.

We hear a quite boring refrain from enraged Palestinians of "Apache
helicopters" and "F-16s". But in the Lebanese war of the early 1980s we saw
what happens in dogfights between advanced Israel and Syrian jets in the
same manner Saddam's sophisticated weapons were rendered junk in days by our
counterparts. So Israel's power is more the result of a system, not merely
of imported hardware. The Arab world does not have a creative arms industry;
Israel does - whether that be ingenious footpads to wear while detecting
mines or drone aircraft that fly at night over Mr. Arafat's house. If the
Palestinians truly wished military parity, then the Arab world should create
their own research programs immune to religious or political censure, and
ensure that students are mastering calculus rather than the Koran.

Nor are Americans ignorant of the recent past. The United States was not a
colonial power in the Middle East, but developed ties there as a reaction
to, not as a catalyst of, its complex history. Israel was instead both
created and abandoned by Europeans. The 20th century taught Americans that
some Europeans would annihilate millions of Jews - and others prove
unwilling or unable to stop such a holocaust. We sensed that the first three
wars in the Middle East were not fought to return the West Bank, but to
finish off what Hitler could not. And we suspect now that, while hundreds of
millions of Arabs would accept a permanent Israel inside its 1967 borders, a
few million would not - and those few would not necessarily be restrained by
those who did accept the Jewish state.

Somehow we in the American heartland sense that Israel - whether its GNP,
free society, or liberal press - is a wound to the psyche, not a threat to
the material condition, of the Arab world. Israel did not murder the Kurds
or Shiites. It does not butcher Islam's children in Algeria. Nor did it kill
over a million on the Iranian-Iraqi border - much less blow apart
Afghanistan, erase from the face of the earth entire villages and their
living inhabitants in Syria, or turn parts of Cairo into literal sewers. Yet
both the victims and the perpetrators of those crimes against Muslims answer
"Israel" to every problem. But Americans, more than any people in history,
live in the present and future, not the past, loath scapegoating and the
cult of victimization, and are tired of those, here and abroad, who
increasingly blame others for their own self-induced pathologies.

The Europeans are quite cynical about all this. Tel Aviv, much better than
Cairo or Damascus, reflects the liberal values of Paris or London. Yet the
Europeans rarely these days do anything that is not calibrated in terms of
gaining money or avoiding trouble - and in that sense for them Israel is
simply a very bad deal. All the sophisticated op-eds about the shuffling of
Mr. Jack Straw about Islamic liberalism cannot hide the fact that Europe's
policy in the Middle East is based on little more than naked self-interest.
If Israel were wiped out tomorrow, Europeans would ask for a brief minute of
silence, then sigh relief, and without a blink roll up their sleeves to get
down to trade and business.

Our seemingly idiosyncratic support for Israel, then, also says something
about ourselves rather than just our ally. In brutal Realpolitik, the
Europeans are right that there is nothing much to gain from aiding Israel.
Helping a few million costs us the friendship of nearly a billion. An
offended Israel will snub us; but some in an irate Muslim world engineered
slaughter in Manhattan. Despite our periodic tiffs, we don't fear that any
frenzied Israelis will hijack an American plane or murder Marines in their
sleep. No Jews are screaming at us on the evening news that we give billions
collectively to Mubarak, the Jordanians, and Mr. Arafat. And Israelis lack
the cash reserves of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and they do not go on buying
sprees in the U.S. or import whole industries from America. So the reason we
each support whom we do says something about both Europe and the United
States.

Instead of railing at America, Palestinians should instead see in our policy
toward Israel their future hope, rather than present despair - since it is
based on disinterested values that can evolve, rather than on race,
religion, or language that often cannot. If the Palestinians really wished
to even the score with the Israelis in American eyes, then regular
elections, a free press, an open and honest economy, and religious tolerance
alone would do what suicide bombers and a duplicitous terrorist leader could
not.

Victor Davis Hanson, is the author most recently of Carnage and Culture:
Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.

Excellent article! Thank you, Friz!

Eric The(Delighted)Hun[>]:)]

How does the old saying go?

"The measure of a man's intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with you."

[devil]

You are right, Jarhead_22, that's why I think both the author and the poster are geniuses!

Absolute geniuses!

Eric The(NoDoubtAboutIt)Hun[>]:)]

Why support Isreal? Because they give us such neat toys, the Tavor, the Galil, and the Desert Eagle!