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.
This exchange focuses on his recent book Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel (Encounter Books, 2014). Part one can be found right here.
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Dear Professor Muravchik,
In round one I asked you whether the charged biblical story of David and Goliath really applied to Israel’s pre-1967 situation. In your answer you said that while “the ’David’ was less vulnerable than many feared, the ‘Goliath’ was not less evil”. In support of this claim you mentioned PLO chief Shuquairy and Egyptian President Nasser’s clear genocidal intent and the concerted regional effort to destroy Israel in 1967.
But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and when Israel is represented as a “Goliath” it is not in in reference to the Arab world; it's in reference to the Palestinians, who have always been the weaker, poorer side in the “Middle East conflict” as it is known today.
Reading your book, though, one sometimes gets the sense that the Palestinian cause is presented as little more than a shrewd PR move made by “the Arabs” in their fight to annihilate Israel.
My question – why should anyone today think about the conflict as being between “Israel and the Arabs” rather than between “Israel and the Palestinians”? Do you really believe that the support the Palestinian cause receives from Arab leaders in places like (General Sisi’s) Egypt and Saudia Arabia is still mainly about destroying Israel?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
The Palestinians weren’t always a side in the Middle East conflict–weaker, poorer or otherwise. From, say, the 1920s until the 1970s, the force counterposed to the Jews was not the Palestinians but the Arabs. This changed in the course of the 1970s. The idea of pan-Arabism collapsed after the 1967 humiliation of Nasser who had been its principle exponent, and this collapse cleared the way for the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. Then, a campaign of global terrorism seared the Palestinian cause into the world’s consciousness, and the Camp David accords removed the largest Arab state from the equation. Thus, the Palestinians rather than the Arabs as a whole, came to be, or to be seen as, Israel’s primary antagonists.
But no sooner had the conflict narrowed in this sense than it expanded in another—and to a wider dimension than ever. The overthrow of the Shah and transformation of Iran into an “Islamic Republic” dramatically energized political Islam, making it a dynamic force throughout the Muslim world. Thus, powerful non-Arab states, first Iran and recently Israel’s other main one-time Muslim ally, Turkey, added themselves to the roster of Israel’s enemies. Seen from this perspective, Israel is at least as much a “David” as it has ever been.
Regarding your remark about how reading my book “one sometimes gets the sense that the Palestinian cause is presented as little more than a shrewd PR move made by “the Arabs” in their fight to annihilate Israel” – I don’t believe this is a fair characterization of what I have written. I describe in some detail the rise of Palestinian nationalism as a function primarily of two forces. The first was the collapse of pan-Arabism which allowed Palestinian nationalists, who had been quite marginal, to come to the fore. The second was the gathering defeat of America by the Vietnamese Communists, creating an inspiring model of revolutionary irregular warfare by which a weaker, less developed polity could defeat a more modern, Western adversary. Palestinian nationalists, led by Arafat, self-consciously emulated this model, positioning themselves to win the support of the global Left for the Palestinian cause.
In response to the two questions at the end:
The events in the Middle East over the past 3 years have illustrated how quickly things can change in the region, how deeply unstable it is. It may well be true that the rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia today view Islamist movements and Iran as direr enemies than Israel. Egypt, like Jordan, has a peace treaty with Israel. Perhaps the Saudi rulers would like to have one, too, but they dare not for fear of their publics, much as the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are forever balancing their own commitment to the treaties with the need to appease publics that are deeply hostile to Israel. Recall the post-2011 siege of the Israeli embassy in Cairo and the top-of-the-charts popularity in Egypt of the song “I Hate Israel.”
This grass-roots hatred of Israel seems ubiquitous in the Arab world, as exemplified by Secretary of State Kerry’s assertion that Arab leaders have told him, more or less unanimously, that resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict would ameliorate all other problems in the region. I doubt that in fact it would. Even the utter disappearance of Israel would not diminish the antipathies between Sunni and Shia or between the Islamist movements and those who resent and distrust them or between the Kurds and the Arabs, Persians and Turks who oppress them, etc. But the Arab leaders make this claim because the presence of Israel remains a bitter irritant to Arab publics—which they apparently see as the region’s most neuralgic issue.
Are the Arab publics merely incensed over the lack of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, rather than over Israel’s existence? It would be nice to believe their excitement is fueled by empathy for the Palestinians rather than animus toward Israel. But in numerous other contexts they have exhibited no such empathy—as Palestinians often angrily complain—and it is hard to think of examples in which compassion for anyone has been a ruling sentiment in Arab politics.
For their part, the Arab governments, whether out of conviction or fear of their own publics, have not taken steps available to them to bring the conflict closer to resolution. As long as that hatred festers, fanned more often than allayed by Arab governments, even by the likes of the Mubarak regime, notwithstanding its adherence to the peace treaty, Israel will remain in the crosshairs.
Perhaps neither President Sisi nor King Abdullah wishes Israel’s destruction. But many or most Palestinians do, and they have plenty of backing in the Arab world and beyond. Iran never tires of expounding its wish for Israel’s destruction, a sentiment shared by others at its command. Islamists of the Sunni world share this sentiment, including the most moderate of them, such as Turkey’s President Erdogan and Tunisia’s Ennahda Party. So perhaps Israel is not facing all of “the Arabs,” but its murderous enemies are plentiful.
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