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07/28/2003 Archived Entry: "Israel Without Apology"

ISRAEL WITHOUT APOLOGY: In addition to the fine article spotlighted earlier that is appearing in City Journal you can find "Israel Without Apology" by Sol Stern.

Three decades ago, I was a Berkeley New Leftist with a political and personal problem. I had been born in Israel, and, though I didn’t consider myself a Zionist, I certainly didn’t want to see the Jewish state disappear. Yet my comrades on the Left were starting on a long march whose ultimate objective was to demonize Israel and turn it into a pariah among the nations. At Bay Area meetings, I heard Israel denounced as an imperialist aggressor that had “ripped off” the land from the native population and had aligned itself with the most reactionary forces in the world. The Arabs, on the other hand, were the truly victimized, the wretched of the earth, right up there in the pantheon of our movement’s other heroes, the Cubans and the Vietnamese.

None of this made much sense to me. All you needed was a map to see that Israel was a little sliver of a country, surrounded by more than a dozen retrograde, tyrannical Arab regimes. In June 1967, Egypt’s dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had thrown the U.N. force out of Sinai, sent his army to Israel’s border, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and called on his brother Arabs to join in a war to exterminate the Jews. Israel had no international support after its only ally, France, abruptly switched sides. Even President Lyndon Johnson offered only the mildest protest to Egypt’s aggression. After standing alone and routing three Arab armies, Israel had immediately offered to trade “land for peace.” But the Arabs, gathered at a summit in Khartoum, emphatically announced three noes: “no recognition, no negotiations, no peace.”

In arguing these elemental points with my fellow leftists, I realized I didn’t know enough about the country that I now felt morally compelled to defend. So in the summer of 1970, I left for Israel—my first visit since immigrating to America as a three-year-old in 1939. In just three weeks, I saw almost the whole country, from the Lebanese border to the Negev desert in the south, from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River in the east.

Read on.

Find more articles from the Summer 2003 issue here.