Israel’s Existential Struggle Is Also the West’s

Anyone seeing the videos and hearing the experiences of Israelis last weekend had to be reminded of Nazi Einsatzgruppen (“action groups”) exterminating East European Jews after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. What’s been almost as disturbing is that so many Europeans and Americans, as well as Palestinians, have taken the Nazis’ side in this fight—not just because they hate Israel and the Jews, but because they hate the West. Their governments, and ours, must now recognize that what’s ultimately at stake is not just Israel’s existence, but the survival of the West itself.

Since its independence, support for Israel has always been a barometer of the West’s own self-confidence. The Six-Day War took place before the West’s intellectual institutions were swept up in the radical takeovers of 1968, and when the West’s mood—and America’s—was still optimistic and strong. Even my leftist parents unabashedly admired Israel’s sudden and decisive victory over its enemies. There was pride in Paris and elsewhere that French Mirage jets had contributed to that victory.

By the time of the Yom Kippur War six years later, the mood in America and Europe had darkened, with the global economic downturn triggered by the Arab oil embargo and OPEC’s price hike. Just a year after the U.S.’s humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam and after the Club of Rome report suggesting that the days of economic growth were over for the West, a pessimism had overtaken the left and Western elites that was reflected in their increasingly negative view of Israel as somehow the cause of all that was wrong in the Middle East. This “blame Israel” mood culminated in the United Nations resolution passed in 1975 branding Zionism a form of racism, a mood captured by the then-U.S. ambassador to the UN, and the resolution’s fiercest opponent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: