Interests
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The Muslim world is mystified as to why Americans support the existence of Israel. Some critics in the Middle East excuse "the American people," while castigating our government. In their eyes, our official policy could not really reflect grassroots opinion. Others misinformed spin elaborate conspiracy theories involving the power of joint Mossad-CIA plots, Old Testament fundamentalists, international bankers, and Jewish control of Hollywood, the media, and the U.S. Congress. But why does an overwhelming majority of Americans (according to most polls, between 60 and 70% of the electorate) support Israel -- and more rather than less so after September 11?
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The answer is found in values -- not in brainwashing or because of innate affinity for a particular race or creed. Israel is a democracy. Its opponents are not. Much misinformation abounds on this issue. Libya, Syria, and Iraq are dictatorships, far more brutal than even those in Egypt or Pakistan. But even "parliaments" in Iran, Morocco, Jordan, and on the West Bank are not truly and freely democratic. In all of them, candidates are either screened, preselected, or under coercion. Daily television and newspapers are subject to restrictions and censorship; "elected" leaders are not open to public audit and censure. There is a reason, after all, why in the last decade Americans have dealt with Mr. Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon -- and no one other than Mr. Arafat, the Husseins in Jordan, the Assads in Syria, Mr. Mubarak, and who knows what in Lebanon, Algeria, and Afghanistan. Death, not voters, brings changes of rule in the Arab world.
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The Arab street pronounces that it is the responsibility of the United States -- who gives money to Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Afghanistan and others, has troops stationed in the Gulf, and buys oil from the Muslim world -- to use its influence to instill democracies. They forget that sadly these days we rarely have such power to engineer sweeping constitutional reform; that true freedom requires the blood and courage of native patriots -- a Washington, Jefferson, or Thomas Paine -- not outside nations; and that democracy demands some prior traditions of cultural tolerance, widespread literacy, and free markets. Moreover, we give Israel billions as well -- but have little control whether they wish to elect a Rabin or a Sharon.
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Israel is also secular. The ultra-Orthodox do not run the government unless they can garner a majority of voters. Americans have always harbored suspicion of anyone who nods violently when reading Holy Scripture -- whether in madrassas, near the Wailing Wall, or in the local Church of the Redeemer down the street. In Israel, however, Americans detect that free speech and liberality of custom and religion are more ubiquitous than, say, in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Palestine -- and so surmise that the Jewish state is more the creation of European émigrés than of indigenous Middle-Eastern fundamentalists.
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Pluralism exists in Israel, rarely so in the Arabic world. We see an Israeli peace party, spirited debate between Left and Right, and both homegrown damnation and advocacy for the settlers outside the 1967 borders. Judaism is fissured by a variety of splinter orthodoxies without gunfights. There are openly agnostic and atheistic Israeli Jews who enjoy influence in Israeli culture and politics. In theory, such parallels exist in the Arab world, but in actuality rarely so. We know that heretical mullahs are heretical more often in London, Paris, or New York -- not in Teheran or among the Taliban. No Palestinian politician would go on CNN and call for Mr. Arafat's resignation; his opposition rests among bombers, not in raucous televised debates.
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Israeli newspapers and television reflect a diversity of views, from rabid Zionism to almost suicidal pacifism. There are Arab-Israeli legislators -- and plenty of Jewish intellectuals who openly write and broadcast in opposition to the particular government of the day. Is that liberality ever really true in Palestine? Could a Palestinian, Egyptian, or Syrian novelist write something favorable about Golda Meir, hostile to Mr. Assad or Mubarak, or craft a systematic satire about Islam? Past experience suggests such iconoclasts and would-be critics might suffer stones and fatwas rather than mere ripostes in the letters to the editor of the local newspapers. Palestinian spokesmen are quite vocal and unbridled on American television, but most of us -- who ourselves instinctively welcome self-criticism and reflection -- sense that such garrulousness and freewheeling invective are is reserved only for us, rarely for Mr. Arafat's authority.
MrBelaou023
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