If you love America and want it to prosper – and most Americans do – it is necessary to understand that Israel is America’s most important ally. Period. Point.
In early October, Pew Research found that 56% of Americans supported Israel, a sharp increase from earlier this year. That earlier decline occurred during the closing stages of the Israeli military’s long offensive against Hamas in Gaza City — a brutal, prolonged fighting season mixed with massive influxes of Islamist propaganda about imaginary famines in Gaza to America, especially in the social media feeds of younger Americans. That “information war” had driven support for Israel among Americans to an all-time low. As mentioned, these numbers have recovered, but that they have fallen at all should alarm Americans who are realists about the world.
In the 25 months since Hamas’s invasion of Israel and the terrorist army’s devastating massacre from Gaza, the IDF’s uphill battle against the terrorists and fighting on six other fronts has caused American support for the Jewish state to slip. Historically, support for Israel among all Americans has been high: from 2000 to 2019, an average of 59% of Americans showed more sympathy for the Israelis, compared to 17% for the Palestinians.
NEW YORK TIMES HAD ‘FAR’ THE WORSE ISRAEL-HAMAS COVERAGE IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA, THE JERUSALEM POST EDITOR SAYS
By 2024, but before October 7, sympathy for Israel had fallen slightly to 56%, while sympathy for the Palestinians rose to 26%. Two years of war – and images of Gaza’s destruction as Hamas hid in its underground tunnel fortress and booby-trapped buildings – along with IDF artillery and bombs devastating the area left Americans inundated with online propaganda about the war. That brought support for Israel below 40%.
Support for Israel is now recovering, which is great news for both the US and Israel, and for the region and the world.
The reason is simple: free states must balance the power of the world’s evil regimes – lest the latter overcome the former.
Some Americans might say that they support Israel because they are Jewish and support the Jewish state. Some might say that they support Israel because they are Christians of a certain kind who view history through the prism of the Judeo-Christian understanding of history.
But every American, regardless of ethnicity or theology, should say they support Israel as a simple matter of American national security. Simply put, Israel is the country most important to America’s long-term strength and position in the world.
America leads ‘the West’ and has many allies within or adjacent to the West. “The West” is best understood as the collection of nations where governments are based on the consent of the governed and the rule of law in which every adult citizen is expected to participate, or at least respect.
As leader of the West, America protects, but depends on, its allies in the assembly of the world’s nations. Countries bordering the West lack some or most of America’s defining features—individual freedoms, including those of religion, speech, press, assembly, property, and due process of law—but have some of these features or aspire to them and/or are allies of America and the greater West, because in the growing global division between tyrannies and free or largely free states, that state more aligned with the West is favored than one more aligned with the People’s Republic China – the leading power of the alliance of tyrants, including Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
There are few countries that are not part of one bloc or the other. The “non-aligned” movement of nations that existed in the shadow of the first Cold War between the United States and its NATO allies, in opposition to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, has slowly but surely withered away since the People’s Republic of China, under General Secretary Xi Jinping, shed all its pretense of being bound by any form of rules-based international order. The ‘alliance of tyrants’ is open and quite powerful.
The rejection by Xi and his fellow tyrants of such rules defines the “anti-West.” So we should not be surprised that Russia invaded Ukraine twice and continues to wage a barbaric war there, or that Iran has devoted nearly fifty years to destroying Israel and building a theocratic arc of powers that, although now largely in ruins, remain fiercely anti-liberal and piracy, as evidenced this weekend by the hijacking of an oil tanker owned by the United Arab Emirates, a country that is very much part of the alliance of allies that have gathered around America.
Of all America’s allies – and there are many, despite frequent disagreements – Israel is the most important to the US because it is the strongest: a nuclear and intelligence superpower committed to the rule of law, with the will and ability to project power over vast distances, and working closely with the US.
The United Kingdom was America’s most important ally throughout the twentieth century, and the leader of the West for almost half a century, while the US expanded into that role. Now it is Israel, and it will probably remain Israel for decades to come.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS ADVICE
Britain has fallen on hard times and seems destined for a slow but not easily reversed decline due to the lack of dynamism that comes with the abandonment of free markets and the suffocating embrace of modern bureaucratic rule, as is the case with most of Europe. There are bright spots such as Poland. There are countries in the West that seem lost, such as Spain. But while the West still includes most of Europe, Europe needs America to defend it against Russia and behind Russia, China.
America’s allies in the Pacific—Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan, and more—are key in standing up decisively to the PRC’s hegemonic ambitions. But to keep the West going, we need Israel just as much as we need it in the Middle East. Israel is one of the West’s two R&D centers. If we and our allies ever want a “Golden Dome” to protect us from wave after wave of ballistic – and even hypersonic – missiles that we have seen Iran use against Israel and Russia against Ukraine, we will need Israel’s Iron Dome technology, as well as our own research and development efforts. We also need the intelligence capabilities of Israeli intelligence services, especially the Mossad, and the technical marvels emerging from Israel with the speed and remarkable usefulness of ours from Silicon Valley.
Much damage has been done by the propaganda wars against Israel. While it is ignorant to proclaim oneself “anti-Zionist” (you might as well call yourself anti-Republic of Ireland or anti-India, as Israel, like those countries, emerged in the decolonization movements of the 20th century), knowing that proclamations are ignorant does not make them any less effective. Students or activists who call themselves anti-Israel are just as stupid when it comes to the historical facts, and those who engage in or delve into anti-Semitism are simply submitting to evil.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
“In vain are we loyal citizens,” Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, declared of Jews around the world. Ultimately, Herzl and his early Zionist allies concluded that anti-Semitism is coming for all Jews. Even in the most cultured societies, in those societies where Jews feel they belong most, Herzl believed, that is where anti-Semitism will emerge in its fiercest form.
I learned of this fundamental pessimism about Herzl’s world from a conversation between Israeli journalist and public intellectual Haviv Rettig Gur and Israeli international law expert Dr. Tal Becker. It’s a disturbing piece of undeniable history. But Herzl may also have failed to take into account the success of his vision: that national self-interest drives nations, that the reborn state he envisioned could achieve such power and importance that it would help lead the West, and that it might become in America’s self-interest and in the interest of every state in the West, or countries allied to the West, to realize that Israel is just as inseparable from the future of America and that America is inseparable from the future of the West.
CLICK HERE TO BY HUGH HEWITT
