The Romans said of 1st century B.C. general Sulla that there was no better friend, and no worse enemy. Epitomized in this saying is the ancient ideas of what comprises the just treatment of the gods and other people, expressed by the phrase do ut des, “I give so that you give.” “Friends” are those, humans or gods, from whom you have received, and to whom you owe benefits. “Enemies” are those who seek to injure you, and whom you may justly injure in return. In antiquity this principle of reciprocity defined all relationships.
And it applied to foreign policy. What we would call national interests were served by being predictable and reliable. If you were named a “Friend of Rome,” you could rely on Rome’s backing you against your enemies––as long as you reciprocated by paying taxes, obeying the laws, and providing auxiliaries for the Roman legions. Betray the principle of reciprocity, and you could depend on Rome to ruthlessly punish you, for as Homer shows in the Iliad, there is no greater injury than betrayal by a “friend” whom you have benefited, and from whom you are owed benefits in turn.
We moderns, of course, find such an ethic primitive, if not savage. Our notions of interstate relations are steeped in idealism, particularly “moralizing internationalism,” as British historian Correlli Barnett called the post-Versailles foreign policy of democracy promotion, and the non-lethal adjudication of conflict through diplomacy, foreign aid, and multinational institutions.
Yet as the sorry history of those efforts over the last century shows, the old realist mentality reflects more accurately the truth of human nature, and the inevitable clashes of passions and interests arising in a world of diverse peoples with equally diverse beliefs and aims.
A good case study of this truth is found in the West’s treatment of Israel, especially by globalist progressives. The Biden administration has been typical. For all its specious complaints about Russian interference in our politics, it recently injected itself into Israel’s current debate over judicial reform, which for the present has been put on hold.
According to the Times of Israel, when asked about the reforms, “The president responded that he hoped [Prime Minister] Netanyahu would ‘walk away’ from his current judicial overhaul legislation, and that he was ‘very concerned’ about the health of Israeli democracy. ‘They cannot continue down this road. And I’ve sort of made that clear,’ Biden said. ‘Hopefully the prime minister will act… to work out some genuine compromise, but that remains to be seen.’” Biden also pointedly rejected inviting Netanyahu to the White House.
Biden’s unseemly behavior, as the Wall Street Journal writes, “makes us wonder if his real goal is to stir more trouble for Mr. Netanyahu so his coalition falls.” I remember when the Dems decried such intrusions as heinous “interference in our election.”
Biden’s team, of course, somewhat backed off the comments for political PR reasons. But that they were made in such a scolding, school-marmish manner in the first place is revealing. It typifies most Democrats’ condescending disdain for one of our most important allies. Moreover, such a tone seems reserved for Israel (and Russia after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016). The Dems certainly don’t talk that way to our brutal, autocratic sworn enemies like China and Iran.
In fact, the contrast with the president’s treatment of Iran points to the moral idiocy and cringing retreat that has marked this country’s policy toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions since Barack Obama’s administration, itself a reprise of Jimmy Carter’s feckless groveling during the hostage crisis in 1979. And don’t forget the Reagan administration’s failure to punish the Iran-sponsored 1983 murder of 241 of our military personnel in Beirut.
As a consequence of our decades-long appeasement, briefly suspended during the Trump administration, Iran is now mere months, at most, from building a nuclear weapon, and has joined with China and Russia in order to thwart the NATO nations’ support of Ukraine and weaken the West.
So our long-time, chronically beleaguered ally is serially disrespected, its domestic politics meddled with, its interests and security seemingly low on our country’s list of concerns, while the world’s worst state supporter of terrorist murder, the genocidal mullahs who have sworn to wipe Israel off the map, are courted and indulged even as it relentlessly moves ever closer to becoming a nuclear-armed power.
But it’s not just progressive and leftist Americans who assume they can libel and insult Israel with impunity. Most European governments and EU functionaries obviously dislike Israel, and resent the complications it creates with oil-rich Muslim states and Europe’s own sizable Muslim immigrant population. Indeed, many immigrants openly sympathize with terrorist gangs like Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel.
Typical is Scotland’s new head of government, First Minister Humza Yousaf, who has accused Israel of “killing innocent civilians” and “starvation of population of Gaza and continuing human-rights abuses.” Not a word about the Palestinian Authority’s torture and execution of its Arab political enemies, nor the incessant missile-attacks on Israel’s civilians.
So why? Why is the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, one surrounded by enemies who have waged three major offensive wars against it, a country that has to live under the constant threat of rocket and missile attacks and terrorist violence, treated this way? Why do the UN and EU and progressive Democrats scorn Israel as a pariah state to be boycotted, sanctioned, demonized, and condemned for defending its people?
Post-Holocaust anti-Semitism accounts for some of the animus against Israel. For decades many in our foreign policy establishment were opposed to Israel ––the “stripe-pants boys, the boys with the Ha-vud accents,” some of whom “were antisemitic, I’m sorry to say,” as President Truman characterized them when he ignored their advice not to recognize Israel in 1948.
Nor should we be surprised. These foreign policy mavens were drawn from the same cognitive, social, and educational elite that a few decades earlier had been champions of “scientific racism” and its practical application, eugenics and forced sterilization, in order to ward off “race suicide” brought on by careless immigration policies that allowed in too many “beaten men from beaten races,” as the president of MIT, Francis Amasa Walker, put it in 1896.
More significant for Western attacks on Israel has been the Leninist demonization of imperialism and colonialism, which helped to create the current clichéd view of both as original sins for which the West must continually atone. Now, as Robert Conquest wrote, these terms refer to “a malign force with no program but the subjugation and exploitation of innocent people.” These verbal “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers” continue to serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”
Nowhere has this insight been more true than in the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict.
Disguised as anti-Zionism, Jew-hatred was incorporated into the anti-colonial and anti-imperial narrative that after World War I has shaped Western foreign policy. The creation of a Jewish nation in its ancestral homeland, and legitimized by international law and treaties, was transformed by its enemies and “friends” into an imperialist weapon against the national self-determination of the supposed displaced and “occupied” population. Israel became a neocolonial “settler” outpost stifling the longing for “national self-determination” of the innocent original inhabitants.
One can see this specious historical analysis in the 1979 UN General Assembly resolution making an exception to the ban on hostage-taking, a tactic popular with terrorists, if the hostage-takers were fighting “against colonial occupation and alien occupation and against racist regimes in their exercise of their right of self-determination.” Here we see the malign nexus of alleged “racism” and evil “colonialism” and the post-Versailles idealization of “national self-determination” that have comprised the pretexts for attacking the state of Israel––but only when Westerners are listening. Otherwise, as Yasser Arafat put it, it is “jihad, jihad, jihad” from “the river to the sea.”
And the pretexts have worked: as Ronald Reagan’s UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick once said, “The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one.” Our collusion over the years in this assault on an ally, this mistreatment of a “friend,” has been a stain on the West, one particularly outrageous given our incessant preaching and preening about the “rules-based international order.”
Finally, the biggest lie in the anti-Israel catalogue of slanders was referenced in Kirkpatrick’s statement. Just recently, the Biden administration has publicly condemned an Israeli minister for saying that “there is no such thing as Palestine because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Of course that statement is historically true.
In fact, as Sha’i ben-Tekoa documents in his three-volume study Phantom Nation, the first UN resolution referencing “Palestinians” instead of “Arabs” occurred three years after the Six Day War, marking the international recognition of a “Palestinian people” and nation as yet another Arab tactic in gaining support in the West by exploiting an idea––nationalism––alien to traditional Islam. Before then “Palestinian” was a geographical term, more typically applied to Jews. Numerous quotations from Arab leaders reveal not a single reference to a Palestinian people, but numerous ones identifying the inhabitants of the geographical territory Palestine as “Arabs.”
For example, in 1937, Arab Higher Committee Secretary Auni Abdel Hadi said, “There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a country the Zionists invented. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us.” The Christian Arab George Antonius, author of the influential The Arab Awakening, told David Ben-Gurion, “There was no natural barrier between Palestine and Syria and there was no difference between their inhabitants.” Later in his book he defined Syria as including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. In testimony to the UN in 1947, the Arab Higher Committee said, “Politically the Arabs of Palestine are not independent in the sense of forming a separate political identity.”
Thirty years later Farouk Kaddoumi, then head of the PLO Political Department, told Newsweek, “Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people.” A few years, after the Six-Day War a member of the Executive Council of the PLO, Zouhair Muhsin, had been even more explicit: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity . . . Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”
Clearly, the continuing statements about a Palestinian people as a distinct nation that deserves its own borders and sovereign territory have been a tactic for pursuing the eradication of Israel by casting the struggle in Western terms of “national self-determination” and the struggle against neo-imperialism.
That the West has endorsed and legitimized this lie for nearly 80 years is perhaps its worst mistreatment of Israel and its people. At a time when Israel is facing internal division, riots, terrorist attacks, an enemy on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, and one American political party that sympathizes with Palestinian Arabs more than with Israelis, Biden’s meddling in Israel’s domestic policies, and harping on “settlers” living in their ancestral homeland, are despicable. And that’s no way for a great nation to treat a friend and ally.
First Class examination of the Historical Distortions inherent in Anti Israel Western Societies.
Begs the Question, – Why does Israel do so little to get the Truth into the Public Eye ? We have been steadily losing the Information War for the Last 50 Years!!! Organised and Imediate Rebutal of every single Anti Israel Article is required, and only Israels Government can Fund and direct this. Israels Political Inadequacy is sadly apparent.
Netanyahu worked hard at this and knows the value of winning the public debate. He wrote extensively about it in his autobiography. See Bibi: My Story, pp. 162-216.
The number of Nobel Prize winners from the small nation of Israel greatly exceeds those from any other modern nation. Where would the modern world be without Jewish ingenuity? And yet most of the world hates Israel. That’s gratitude for you.
The REAL reason Jews and israel are hated is because they are God’s chosen people and most of the world hates God and Jesus. Israel and Jew hatred is demonically inspired.
Yes, Israel has excelled in technology, medicine, the arts, and agriculture. They are not an idle people who sit around and feel sorry for themselves, and deserve respect and the right to exist and prosper. Satan does not want Israel to survive, but Satan’s days are numbered. The other nations have nothing to be recognized for in positive ways except causing chaos.
“A few decades earlier had been champions of “scientific racism” and its practical application, eugenics and forced sterilization”
Now the UN promotes trans, homosexuality, lesbianism, pedophilia, and abortion.
Different tactics same outcome, lower the population.
This banana republic called the biden administration is doing exactly what the muslims and communists want.
Exactly right. This all started with Wilson. The problem with moralizing is that we come across as hypocrites and prigs.The radical left are prigs.
“We moderns, of course, find such an ethic primitive, if not savage. Our notions of interstate relations are steeped in idealism…”
The principle of just reciprocity is a principle based on rational selfishness, or if you prefer rational self-interest. Two friends help each other to mutual benefit, neither is crushed or sacrificed.
“Idealism” is simply a euphemism for altruism and self-sacrifice. The good should sacrifice itself to the evil, the intelligent to the stupid, the successful to the failures, the civilized to the savage, the rich to the poor, Israel should sacrifice itself to the “Palestinians”, America should sacrifice itself to the whole wide world.
“Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East”
Sulla was fascinating. If Julius Caesar hadn’t come along, Sulla might be better known.
America has never been a friend of Israel… don’t be duped…
The Zionist cause was overwhelmingly supported by the American people even before official recognition of Israel by the gouvernement.
Arguably, culturally, America has always been a friend of Israel. At the diplomatic level, it is about an ally.
Well, so much for non-lethal adjudication of conflict through diplomacy. Lebanon just (8:30 AM 4/6/23) launched rockets into Israel. Not known exactly who yet, but it is Rama-lama-ding-dong month so that narrows the field. There are already Allah Akbar shouting marches going on.
Biden criminal regime of homos, trannys, moo slims, radical latins, and left wing nuts is seriously putting us at risk of destruction at the hand of God.
Of course that IS Satan’s plan anyway.
Where is our Von Stauffenberg? We need to get rid of Bozo Clown and his laughing ‘Ho before they get rid of us.
The use of Sui Generis ‘laws’ against Israel shows that it is nothing more than fascism in action. Israel is held to higher ‘standard’ than the entire world and the Islamofascist invaders are never held to any standard whatsoever.
The indigenous people of the area are Jews and the Islamofascists invaded from ARABIA
As much as Joe Biden hate’s Israel the truth is the God had given all this land that now composes the State of Israel, including all of the West Bank, to the Jewish people. This may be found in the Bible, as seen in, for example, Genesis 28:13-15. 35:10-12. Deuteronomy 32:48,49. Psalm 105:7-11. 135:4.
In other words the Jews have tall this land by Divine Right. Furthermore, the Jewish people should have this land by historic rights as shown in First Kings 4:20,21, 24,25. 8:55, 56.
Still, in all fairness, there is one way for Joe Biden to convince God to change His Mind about being so much for Israel and then cause Him to turn His back on Israel and then have that nation be no more.
That way is for Biden to meet with Mahmoud Abbas of the PA along with President Rasis of Iran and then they will change the laws of astrophysics, including those laws of astrophysics the control the sun, the moon and the stars. For God had declared in His Word, the Bible, in Jeremiah 31:35,36. “Thus saith the Lord, Who gives the sun for a light by day and the ordinances of the moon and stars for a light by night…The Lord of host is His name. If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever.”
Joe Biden is definitely no friend of Israel. For he has proven it by his treatment of the head officials of the State of Israel and his appeasement policy for that Vicious anti- Israel “mullah regime” of Iran.
Nevertheless Biden is greatly the all overruled by God The reason why this is so is because according to the Bible the Jews have all the land that now makes up the State of Israel ,including the West Bank by Divine Right. As found in Genesis 28:13-15. 35:10-12. Deuteronomy 32:48,49. Psalm 105: 7-11. 135: 4.
Furthermore, the Jews should have all this land by historic rights. As seen in First Kings 4; 20,21,24,25. 8:55, 56.
“No Worse Friend: The West’s Treatment of Israel
Meanwhile the enemies who have sworn to wipe Israel off the map are courted and indulged.”
While the Reality is very different.Following:
No Worse Friend: Apartheid Zionist Israel
Meanwhile, Palestinian Christians and non-Jews have suffered Occupation,Displacement,and Ethnic Cleansing at the hands of Apartheid Israel,suffering near genocidal consequences.
While the “Gold Standard” of Genocide would be the 1) Jewish holocaust , 2), the Christian Armenian Genocide, and 3), the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda, the definition of Genocide,for good or bad,has evolved. Just sayin’.
Part 1
“ While the Reality is very different.Following:”
And so another wannabe prophet of lies, genocide, and hatred spews their tripe. Thou art kin to Haman.
“ No Worse Friend: Apartheid Zionist Israel”
Israel is not an Apartheid state, as actual victims of Apartheid attested. Any who claim otherwise are ignorant, liars, or both.
“ Meanwhile, Palestinian Christians and non-Jews have suffered Occupation,Displacement,and Ethnic Cleansing at the hands of Apartheid Israel,suffering near genocidal consequences.”
Bull. How many of the “Palestinian Christians” have stood up to defend converts from Islam to Christianity? To condemn the cults of anti-Christs like Hitler, Amin Al-Husseini, and others propagated by the totalitarian regimes that rule them? To condemn terroristic murder of their fellow Christians, of Israelis, and of the children for Allah and Profit? To condemn the genocide of the Jews of East Jerusalem in 1947-49?
Had the Israelis had the slightest interest in genocide, they would have done so like what happened to Bronze Age Gaza. They have not because for all of their many problems they sincerely seek peace. Something that cannot be said for Hamas or Fatah.
Part 2
There is a profound, disgusting illness of the soul endemic in so-called Falestinian Society, at least as much as there was in Royal Judea during the time of the Baptist and the Son of Man. And notably Christ turned his ire first not to the pagan Romans, who were much more willful in colonization and genocide than modern Israel ever was. He turned against those that claimed to speak in God’s name – in His – while debasing themselves and their faith. And the Romans did not cause that, as the Book of Judges shows.
“ While the “Gold Standard” of Genocide would be the 1) Jewish holocaust , 2), the Christian Armenian Genocide, and 3), the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda, the definition of Genocide,for good or bad,has evolved. Just sayin’.”
It has evolved, just not in ways that you want to admit. Please ruminate why there are essentially no Christians in Bethlehem before you continue spewing genocidal propaganda.
I believe that, as a youth, he assisted the Nazi invaders in locating and confiscating the property of Jews in Hungary. His father adopted the name “Soros” as it is a palindrome.
America will celebrate when Biden, Harris, Blinken, Garland and Obama are swinging from a tree.
Wow Cowboy tone it down a notch.
p.s. Alvin “Fatburger” Bragg too (meeting up with a Cottonwood)
Don’t be deceived, the Globalist New World Order would like to get rid of Christians too, just like they did the Jews.
June 7 marks the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem. This was the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that saved the Jewish state from destruction and made God’s Eternal City whole again. Many people are unaware that there has NEVER been a sovereign Arab state anywhere in Palestine. They are equally unaware that the West Bank happens to be the heartland of the Jewish civilization, with many of the Bible’s familiar events playing out there.
The Balfour Declaration granted the Jewish people the right to establish a national home in Palestine. Jewish success has always provoked Arab jealousy, as Arab marauders began to attack Jewish settlements. The Arab’s relentless hostility to the Zionist enterprise has proven self-defeating, ruinous, and even tragic for many Palestine Arabs. The 1967 Six-Day war may have disabused Arab leaders of the notion that they could overwhelm Israel militarily. It has not—truth be told—opened many hearts to the prospect of genuine coexistence and comity. Remember, It is not in Ishmael’s nature to dwell peacefully with Isaac. GENESIS 16:11. In EZEKIEL 38:11 God is going to show Israel’s enemies who is in charge. The outcome will be Israel’s glorious redemption, not merely from her physical enemies, but also from the power of sin.
How can Israel expect the West to support it when it treats Christians so horribly? This article from last year by Phil Giraldi describes the hidden reality of Zionist settlers assaulting Christians and vandalizing Christian holy sites. https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/does-israel-permit-freedom-of-worship/
This more recent article describes continuing violence against Christians and Christian holy sites in Israel committed by Jews. https://www.lifesitenews.com/analysis/catholic-leaders-in-holy-land-decry-escalating-jewish-attacks-against-christians-shrines/
This pattern is making me doubt that Jews and Christians share the same moral values. If Jews want Christians to support Israel, they must put a stop to this violence and allow Christians to worship in peace. As it is, however, the Assad regime in Syria treats Christians better than Israel does.
Lies, Fake News, Lies, Fake News,
Lies, Fake News, Lies, Fake News
Lies, Fake News, Lies, Fake News
Antisemite