Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies and formerly a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has published more than three hundred articles on politics and international affairs, appearing in, among others, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times Magazine, Commentary, the New Republic, and the Weekly Standard. Muravchik, who received his Ph.D. in International Relations from Georgetown University, serves on the editorial boards of World Affairs, Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of International Security Affairs. He formerly served as a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, the Commission on Broadcasting to the People’s Republic of China, and the Maryland Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights.
The following exchange will focus on his recent book Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel (Encounter Books, 2014).
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Dear Professor Muravchik,
I don’t normally do this, but I’d like to start this exchange by asking about your book’s politically charged title, “Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel”.
The tale of David and Goliath is perhaps the ultimate underdog story. It is also one in which it is very clear who the reader needs to root for, a black and white affair in which a man chosen by God slays an evil giant.
The beginning of your book describes a time when “Israel was admired (almost) all around”. It then proceeds to describe a long, complex process in which “David” was “made into Goliath”. My question:
Did the world really see pre-1967 Israel as a vulnerable “David” fighting an evil “Goliath”? Should it have? How far should we take this biblical metaphor?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
Let’s start with the first question: Did the world really see pre-1967 Israel as a vulnerable “David” fighting anvil “goliath”?
For the Western world, the answer is clearly yes. A Gallup poll found that 55% of Americans favored Israel, and only 4% the Arabs. A newspaper ad by leading American academics read: “The issue can be stated with stark simplicity . . . whether to let Israel perish.”
And unlike today when America stands virtually alone in its support of Israel, in 1967 all of Western Europe was of a like mind. In the UK, the disparity in public opinion was even sharper than in the US, 55% to 2%, while in France it was 56% to 2%. Thousands of Britons and Frenchmen, many of them gentiles, volunteered to go to Israel to help in its defense. A public declaration of solidarity with Israel featured the names of France’s cultural icons – Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and more. In Holland, the Sunday of that week was designated a day of prayer for Israel in all of the country’s churches. Other countries witnessed other such outpourings of sympathy with the Jewish state.
Of course, the Communist world was on the other side – meaning the regimes, since the people had no voice. But even here there is evidence that the muffled opinions of the public were much more sympathetic to Israel. Opinion in the Third World was mixed. But Israel had enough non-Western support that when the Communist and Arab blocs worked to secure a resolution in the UN General Assembly to counterbalance Security Council resolution 242, they were unable to achieve the needed two-thirds majority. Resolution 242, introduced by the UK, was accurately seen as tilted toward Israel because it called for a return to “secure and recognized boundaries” rather than to the pre-war lines.
Now for the second question – Should it have?
The war’s outcome suggests that the military balance may have been misjudged, although Israel was indeed outnumbered and outgunned. Its military strategy depended on striking the first blow, which succeeded in all but wiping out the Arab air forces. Had the contest begun with a different opening move it would not have been so one-sided – as indeed was the case in the Yom Kippur war, six years later.
But if the “David’ was less vulnerable than many feared, the “Goliath” was not less evil. After mobilizing his army on Israel’s border and closing the Tiran Straits to choke off Israel’s sea lane to the east, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Arab camp, proclaimed: “the battle against Israel will be a general one. . . And our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. . . This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the Arab nation.” PLO chief Ahmed Shuquairy added this piquant touch: “We will wipe Israel off the face of the map,” and “no Jew will be left alive.”
Today, much is made of the fact that the Arabs felt the creation of Israel was unjust. So what? The greater part of Africa, Asia and the Middle East had been transformed in that era from conquered lands to independent states. Virtually nowhere did the new borders neatly encompass homogeneous nationalities. Scores of peoples felt they had not gotten a fair shake. None of it justified the attempt to annihilate another state, much less with genocidal intent.
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