[My personal recommendation. Buy this book. It’s excellent]

WEEKLY STANDARD
by Ronald Radosh
September 8, 2014

The downward trajectory of global prestige

When Joshua Muravchik wrote this book, he could not have known how timely it would turn out to be. He would not have been surprised, however, by the worldwide condemnation of Israel for its “disproportionality” and “lack of restraint” in response to recent Hamas rocket attacks. He writes that “Hamas’ unyielding avowal of intent to eradicate Israel, made real by a barrage of rocket fire over the border, prompted Israel to .  .  . launch recurrent strikes at terrorists and their facilities,” and, next, to launch Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), “an invasion of Gaza aimed at crippling Hamas’ offensive apparatus.” The response was a rebuke of Israel by such figures as Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Kofi Annan, as well as by the British press, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the worldwide left, and the infamous Goldstone Report (later repudiated by Judge Goldstone himself). In fighting back against Hamas, so the narrative went, Israel alone was guilty of “war crimes.”

The subject to which Muravchik devotes Making David into Goliath is why and how the world turned against the Jewish state. At its beginning in 1948, Israel had broad global support; in America, both Republicans and Democrats, including the entire liberal/left-wing community, supported it. Israel’s story became familiar to Americans when, a decade after the country’s birth, Leon Uris’s novel Exodus became a worldwide sensation and bestseller that outsold even Gone with the Wind and was subsequently adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman. Uris’s depiction of the heroic struggle of Palestine’s Jews to build a state out of the existing Yishuv in Palestine moved people all over the world, creating great sympathy for Israel, especially in the United States.

The question Muravchik raises is: Why did this positive feeling erode, both here and in Europe? After Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the narrative that was quickly adopted was not that of 1948, in which beleaguered Israel valiantly fought for its survival as a state against the Goliath of invading Arab powers. It was replaced by the opposite: Israel had been transformed into Goliath, using its superior power to defeat and destroy Palestinians who were fighting for their own people. Suddenly, the Arab powers had become David, standing against the Israeli behemoth……

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