Council Resolution 242, which affirmed Israel’s right to live in peace behind “secure and recognized boundaries”—a formula that implicitly endorsed alterations to the pre-war armistice lines to allow Israel more favorable borders. Efforts by the Arab states to rally support for their cause in the General Assembly, where London and Washington wielded no veto, were rebuffed, with a substantial number of states condoning Israel’s action.
But, by 2009, this sympathy seemed a distant memory in the United Kingdom and the rest of Western Europe, and the United Nations was arrayed overwhelmingly against Israel. Its Human Rights Council, which had created the Goldstone Commission, in the few years since its formation, had already adopted multiple resolutions condemning Israel for one thing or another, while rarely rebuking any other government even once. The Jewish state, once widely admired for its resolution “never again” to allow Jews to be targeted, now was denounced each time it raised its hand against murderous enemies.
In singling out Israel, the Human Rights Council was far from alone. Its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, had practiced the same one-sidedness, as had the UN General Assembly, which had lacerated Israel in countless resolutions, even going so far as to endorse terrorist attacks on Israel as legitimate “resistance.”
Although the United Nations constituted an especially fertile field for denunciations of Israel, many other national and international bodies, including many in the West, joined this chorus. British teacher unions proclaimed academic boycotts of Israel; mainline Protestant churches in the United States divested from companies doing business with Israel; Norwegian supermarkets boycotted Israeli goods; Sweden’s largest newspaper concocted sensational stories that Israel was slaughtering Palestinians to harvest and sell their organs; reputable international human rights organizations focused more on Israel than on the world’s most egregious tyrannies; and a former president of the United States issued a book accusing Israel of practicing “apartheid.”
In short, the “global community” had stamped Israel as an outcast. What had happened in the intervening decades to occasion such a dramatic turnaround?
On the surface, there were two explanations. First, the Arab cause, reactionary, overtly homicidal in its objectives, and expressed in bluster, had been replaced by the far more sympathetic and “progressive” Palestinian cause. Instead of proclaiming openly their determination to deny the Jews a state, Israel’s enemies now accused the Jews of denying that same right to another people, the Palestinians.
Second, Israel no longer seemed endangered. The Egyptian and Syrian rulers who had mobilized their armies on its frontiers in 1967 had trumpeted their intent to annihilate the Jewish state. Although Israel had defeated Arab opponents in 1948 and 1956, it remained surrounded and outnumbered, and in 1967, with memories of the Holocaust still fresh, nobody felt certain that the Jewish state would survive this more determined threat to its survival. But four decades and several wars later, Israel appeared invulnerable. In a complete reversal of fortune, David seemed to have become Goliath.
Although superficially plausible, neither of these explanations was sufficient to account for the vehemence with which world opinion turned against Israel. It was true that the Palestinians had suffered at Israel’s hands (as Israel had at theirs). And yet, no reasonable person could argue that Israel’s abuses equaled, much less exceeded, those of scores of regimes that practiced violence, repression, and racial and religious discrimination without being rebuked by UN bodies or castigated by others in the way Israel now routinely was. Nor, conversely, could it be said that the suffering of the Palestinians, or the justice of their aspirations, surpassed that of others for whom world opinion showed little sympathy. Another Middle Eastern people, the Kurds, yearned for a state of their own, and by every measure their claim was more compelling than that of the Palestinians: they were five times more numerous, they spoke a language of their own, and their distinct ethnicity traced back roughly a millennium. But, aside from the Kurds themselves, who spoke up for the Kurdish cause?
It was also true that Israel had developed formidable military strength. But, if Israel was a Goliath, it was a miniature one compared to some of the members of the Human Rights Council that had so often condemned Israel, and that had charged Goldstone with a mandate that presupposed Israel’s guilt. At the very moment that the Goldstone Commission was being called into existence, for example, the People’s Republic of China was busy suppressing protests in the captive nation of Tibet by means of mass arrests and executions. This evoked scarcely a whisper of international protest although Israeli abuses of Palestinians paled in comparison to the Chinese treatment of Tibet. Indeed, were China to grant the Tibetans what Israel had offered the Palestinians, the Dalai Lama would have danced for joy.
Nor was it only the United Nations that gave Beijing a free pass, despite a record of butchery and continued repression that had few rivals. Neither Swedish tabloids nor Norwegian supermarkets nor British labor unions nor mainline Protestant churches rose to condemn the Chinese abuses. On the contrary, the People’s Republic was viewed as a prime object for understanding and engagement—a member in good standing of the “world community” that self-righteously cast Israel as a renegade.
The contrast between the world’s treatment of China and of Israel suggested that the true reason for the anathemas heaped upon the Jewish state was not that Israel was so strong but that it was not strong enough. True, Israel had proven its military superiority over its neighbors. But, when the Arabs finally came to terms with this, they shifted the contest to other planes, learning to exploit the political and economic advantages inherent in the sheer weight of their numbers as well as their control of vital natural resources.
The League of Arab States has twenty-two members, and their combined population exceeds Israel’s by fifty-to-one. Moreover, for every Jew in the world, there are one hundred Muslims. Whereas Israel is the only Jewish state, fifty-seven states belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Once, such major Islamic states as Iran and Turkey had allied with Israel. But, carried along by the tide of radical Islam, the Muslim world had fallen into lockstep behind the Palestinian cause, making it the Islamic cause. Insofar as the Israeli–Palestinian or Arab–Israeli conflict is seen as pitting these two faiths against each other—as it is by most of the protagonists and perforce inevitably by those on the sidelines—the contest is hopelessly unbalanced. The Arabs had been unable to translate these advantages into military strength, but they made them pay off in political clout. They threatened those who crossed them with terrorism, oil cutoffs, and economic boycotts; and they rewarded those who appeased them with protection, economic favors, and the power of their diplomatic bloc, which largely controlled the United Nations through the Non-Aligned Movement.
Whereas people and countries quite often respond cravenly to such incentives, they seldom like to admit it even to themselves. Another factor, which may have been the most important of all in isolating Israel, made it easier to justify yielding to the power of numbers, the threats, and the diplomatic pressures; this was an ideological transformation that saw the rise of a new paradigm of progressive thought that Arab and Muslim advocates helped to develop. It involved multiculturalism or race-consciousness in which the struggle of the third world against the West, or of “people of color” against the white man, replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie as the central moral drama of world history. In this paradigm, the Arabs, notwithstanding their superiority in resources and numbers, nor their regressive social and political practices, nor their recent alignment with the fascist powers, now, in the guise of the Palestinians, assumed a place among the forces of virtue and progress while the Israelis were consigned to the ranks of the villains and reactionaries.
Tutored by the Algerians, who had waged one of the twentieth century’s most storied anticolonial struggles, the Palestinians executed a strategy that succeeded in yoking the support of almost the entire global Left. That support ran the spectrum from the diverse communist states and parties, with their cynical though formidable political apparatuses, to the idealistic “soft Left,” throbbing with guilt over memories of imperialism and the enduring reality of
