What They Are Saying

Support for Israel Represents the Clear and Evident Will of the American People

Historian Walter Russell Mead writes in the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.org) about the source of American support for the State of Israel:

"When presidents overrule their expert advisers and take a pro-Israel position, observers attribute the move to the 'Israel lobby' and credit (or blame) it for swaying the chief executive. But there is another factor to consider.

"As biographer David McCullough has written, [President Harry] Truman's support for the Jewish state was 'wildly popular' throughout the United States. A Gallup Poll in June 1948 showed that almost three times as many Americans 'sympathized with the Jews' as 'sympathized with the Arabs.' That support was no flash in the pan. Widespread gentile support for Israel is one of the most potent forces in U.S. foreign policy, and in the last 60 years, there has never been a Gallup Poll showing more Americans sympathizing with the Arabs or the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

"Over time, moreover, the pro-Israel sentiment in the United States has increased, especially among non-Jews. The years of the George W. Bush administration have seen support for Israel in U.S. public opinion reach the highest level ever, and it has remained there throughout Bush's two terms. The increase has occurred even as the demographic importance of Jews has diminished. In 1948, Jews constituted an estimated 3.8 percent of the U.S. population. Assuming that almost every American Jew favored a pro-Israel foreign policy that year, a little more than 10 percent of U.S. supporters of Israel were of Jewish origin. By 2007, Jews were only 1.8 percent of the population of the United States, accounting at most for 3 percent of Israel's supporters in the United States.

"These figures, dramatic as they are, also probably underestimate the true level of public support for Israel. When, in a poll in 2006, the Pew Research Center asked whether U.S. policy in the Middle East was fair, favored Israel or favored the Palestinians, 47 percent of the respondents said they thought the policy was fair, 6 percent said it favored the Palestinians and only 27 percent thought it favored the Israelis. The poll was conducted during Israel's attacks against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, when U.S. support for Israel was even more controversial than usual around the world. One must therefore conclude that many of those who tell pollsters that the United States' policies are fair to both sides actually favor policies that most non-U.S. observers would consider strongly and even irresponsibly pro-Israel. The American public has few foreign policy preferences that are this marked, this deep, this enduring -- and this much at odds with public opinion in other countries.

"In the United States, a pro-Israel foreign policy does not represent the triumph of a small lobby over the public will. It represents the power of public opinion to shape foreign policy in the face of concerns by foreign policy professionals. Support for Israel is a U.S. foreign policy that makes some experts and specialists uneasy but commands broad public support. The ultimate sources of the United States' Middle East policy lie outside the Beltway and outside the Jewish community.

"U.S. opinion on the Middle East is not monolithic, nor is it frozen in time. Since 1967, it has undergone significant shifts, with some groups becoming more favorable toward Israel and others less so. More changes may come.

"But if Israel should face any serious crisis, it seems more likely that opinion will swing the other way. Many of the Americans who today call for a more evenhanded policy toward the Palestinians do so because they believe that Israel is fundamentally secure. Should that assessment change, public opinion polls might well show even higher levels of U.S. support for Israel."

Anti-Semites Manipulate the Image of Anne Frank to Help Smear the Jews

Historian Alvin H. Rosenfeld writes in The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com) on June 23 about the most tasteless T-shirt ever:

"In January, a stenciled image of a smiling Anne Frank wearing a red and white kaffiyeh appeared on the walls of buildings in Amsterdam. Soon after, an enterprising Dutch business firm called Boomerang transferred this image to designer T-shirts and postcards. The cards were distributed free throughout the Netherlands, no doubt to boost sales for Boomerang's politically chic new line of shirts.

"The Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands expressed outrage. So did Dutch Jewish groups. But the response was not universal. Some were drawn to the newfangled Palestinian Anne and endorsed the artist's political point, which one blogger interpreted to be that 'the Zionists, in the name of Jewry, [were] doing to the Palestinians what was done to Jews in Europe.' This simplistic formula has become a staple in the rhetoric of contemporary anti-Zionism. The charge it makes is baseless, but it is rhetorically catchy and now routinely employed to tar Israel with the Nazi brush.

"What plays well in certain political circles may not play well in business, however. Sensing, perhaps, that their company's image was at risk, Boomerang executives quickly switched to damage control mode. Their aggressively revisionist T-shirt version of Anne Frank now was said to present 'an idyllic image of peace.'

"Yet contemporary political iconography has matched it with another image of Anne that is equally obscene: A drawing featured in a 2006 Holocaust cartoon contest sponsored by the Iranian paper Hamshahri shows a wasted-looking girl sinking under the bed sheets, while propped up next to her, a bare-chested, swastika-laden Hitler crows, 'Write this one in your diary, Anne!' Above Anne's head, a wordless bubble registers the grief of the devastated girl.

"The fact that this graphic is vile has not kept it from being widely distributed by, among others, the Arab European League, a Belgian-Dutch Islamic political organization headed by the popular leader Dyab Abou Jahjah. In the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, Jahjah was offering payback, declaring, 'Europe, too, has its sacred cows.'

"Indeed it does, but Europe's murdered Jews are not among them. Anne Frank, dead before she had turned 16, was no saint but rather one more addition to the mounds of anonymous corpses at Bergen-Belsen. One need not sacralize her memory in order to pay it a decent respect. Until recently, most people have found it proper to do so, but in an age of resurgent anti-Semitism, respect for even the Jewish dead has become a dwindling commodity.

"It gets worse. A few years ago, a writer quoted on the Web site aljazeerah.info, presented a scheme to copycat Anne Frank's story for partisan purposes.

"Actually, there are writers who have been trying all along, appropriating the memory of Anne Frank and turning Jews into Nazis and Palestinians into Jews. The equation is fraudulent -- one more instance of applying the symbols of Jewish suffering to anti-Jewish ends -- but repeated often enough, it begins to catch on. And so we now have a plethora of Anne Frank look-alikes.

"To bed Anne Frank with Hitler and drape her in Yasser Arafat's trademark head scarf is tantamount to mudering her again. And to substitute made-in-the-Middle-East counterfeits for her real diary is to lie against history itself."