While superficially plausible, neither of these explanations was sufficient to account for the vehemence with which world opinion turned against Israel. It was true that the Palestinians had suffered at Israel’s hands (as Israel had at theirs). And yet no reasonable person could argue that Israel’s abuses equaled, much less exceeded, those of scores of regimes that practiced violence, repression, and racial and religious discrimination without being rebuked by UN bodies or castigated by others in the way Israel now routinely was.
Nor, conversely, could it be said that the suffering of the Palestinians, or the justice of their aspirations, surpassed that of others for whom world opinion showed little sympathy. Another Middle Eastern people, the Kurds, yearned for a state of their own, and by every measure their claim was more compelling than that of the Palestinians: they were five times more numerous, they spoke a language of their own, and their distinct ethnicity traced back roughly a millennium. But aside from the Kurds themselves, who spoke up for the Kurdish cause?
It was also true that Israel had developed formidable military strength. But if Israel was a Goliath, it was a miniature one compared to some of the members of the Human Rights Council that had so often condemned Israel, and that had charged Goldstone with a mandate that presupposed Israel’s guilt. At the very moment the Goldstone Commission was being called into existence, for example, the People’s Republic of China was busy suppressing protests in the captive nation of Tibet by means of mass arrests and executions. This evoked scarcely a whisper of international protest although Israeli abuses of Palestinians paled in comparison to the Chinese treatment of Tibet.
Nor was it only the UN that gave Beijing a free pass, despite a record of butchery and continued repression that had few rivals. Neither Swedish tabloids nor Norwegian supermarkets nor British labor unions nor mainline Protestant churches rose to condemn Chinese abuses. On the contrary, the People’s Republic was viewed as a prime object for understanding and engagement, a member in good standing of the “world community” that self-righteously cast Israel as a renegade.
The contrast between the world’s treatment of China and of Israel suggested that the true reason for the anathemas heaped upon the Jewish state was not that Israel was so strong but that it was not strong enough. True, Israel had proven its military superiority over its neighbors. But when the Arabs finally came to terms with this, they shifted the contest to other planes, learning to exploit their numerical, political and economic advantages. These continued to grow thanks to their higher birth rate, the proliferation of Third World states following the liquidation of European colonialism, and a multifold increase in the price of oil.
For every Jew in the world, there are 100 Muslims. While Israel is the only Jewish state, 57 states belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.Once, such major Islamic states as Iran and Turkey had allied with Israel. But carried along by the tide of radical Islam, the Muslim world had fallen into lockstep behind the Palestinian cause, making it the Islamic cause.
The Arabs had been unable to translate these advantages into military strength, but they made them pay off in political clout. They threatened those who crossed them with terrorism, oil cutoffs, and economic boycotts; and they rewarded those who appeased them with protection, economic favors, and the power of their diplomatic bloc, which largely controlled the UN through the Non-Aligned Movement.
While people and countries quite often respond cravenly to such incentives, they seldom like to admit it even to themselves. What made it easier to justify yielding to the power of numbers, threats, and diplomatic pressures was still another factor that may have been the most important one of all in isolating Israel. This was an ideological transformation that saw the rise of a new paradigm of progressive thought that Arab and Muslim advocates helped to develop. It involved multiculturalism or race-consciousness in which the struggle of the Third World against the West, or of “people of color” against the white man, replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie as the central moral drama of world history.
