Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel

Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel by Joshua Muravchik
Hardcover: 296 pages
Publisher: Encounter Books (July 8, 2014)

Making David into Goliath could not have been released at a better time as Israel is in the new for defending herself, once again, from Hamas.

Israel, one of the lone democracies in the Middle East and America's strongest ally, is also one of the most criticized and most despised nations in the international community because people such as Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former UN chief Kofi Annan take the time to lambaste Israel every time that they act to defend herself against terror.  During the recent campaign, Carter took the time to pen an op-ed saying that Hamas is a legitimate political government.  Yeah, right...and pigs can fly, too.

At a time when Iran is seen as a major threat with the capability to make nuclear weapons, Europeans are telling pollsters that they feel that Israel is a bigger threat.  At the same time, about a quarter of all votes in the United Nations are directed toward Israel while an increasing number of college campuses are adopting policies of BDS.

As hard as it is to believe with the current climate right now, it was only forty years ago that Israel was attracting admiration and widespread sympathy from people around the word.  Progressives and intellectuals were praising Israel.  They aren't doing that all that much these days and Muravchik goes into detail as to why.

Muravchik explores just how and why this transformation, as wrong as it is, has taken place.  He goes into detail on who is behind it, too, in detail.  A fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Muravchik is one of the nation's leading scholars when it comes to socialism and the Middle East.

He shows how the pressure of terrorism, oil, and demographics have led to Israel being treated as a pariah.  In the 1970s, the Arab League threatened to raise oil prices to those countries that voted in favor of Israel at the United Nations!  These were the same leadeers that bowed to Palestinian pressure to release those suspected by terrorism so as not to have another bombing or hijacking on their soil.

One of the chief culprits in the transformation was the rise of a intellectual paradigm that saw the replacement of workers against capitalists to the "people-of-color" struggling against the "white man."  This was the new moral drama for progressive thinking.  No matter what Israel did to defend her borders, she was attacked as being on the wrong side.

The UN, as things stand now, is one of the biggest anti-Israel groups out there.  This is mainly due to the Non-Aligned Movement reshaping the the UN to be one that is anti-American, anti-Western, and most of all, anti-Israel.  They created three special bodies that, no matter the name, were exclusive to denigrating Israel and serving as a pro-Palestinian body.  Not a single such body has ever existed for any other people, cause, or country!

Human Rights Watch cannot be described as humanitarian when they are anti-Israel to an infinite degree.

Edward Said, the godfather of modern scholarship on the "Third World" was one of the most widely assigned authors on campuses in America and Europe.  His anti-Israel bias has poisoned a countless number of generations in Western academics just through sheer intellectual charlatanism.

Bruno Kreisky, the self-hating Jewish socialist Chancellor of Austria, was the leading figure in the hate-Israel movement.  This was a guy who filled his cabinet with former Nazis even though a number of his family had died in the Shoah.  He was ashamed to be Jewish and used that to persuade socialists in Europe to embrace Yasser Arafat and disavow Israel.  This was at a time when the PLO believed in terrorism and strongly opposed to Israel's right to exist.

Before the Six Day War of 1967, not a single person in the world cared for the human rights of those living in Gaza or the West Bank.  After Israel gained land in a war that was started by her Arab neighbors nonetheless, all of a sudden people cared for their human rights.  It was this war that redefined the Israeli-Arab conflict as one between Israel and the Palestinians.  Before this point in time, there had never been a Palestinian nation.  The PLO's Palestinian National Covenant did not call for a Palestinian state.  Instead, it called for Jews to be ejected so that the Palestinian Arabs could be able to take their place in the "Arab nation."

Evangelical support, for now, remains strong when it comes to Israel.  However, a number of U.S. churchs, mainly the Presbyterian Church, have been targeted by anti-Israel activists to cut ties with and boycott Israel.  Notably, the anti-Israel group, Jewish Voice for Peace, has endorsed BDS.

The home-grown "adversary culture" in Israel does her no favors.  This includes Haaretz, revisionist historians, and "post-Zionist intellectuals."  In their behavior, they provide an never-ending supply of grist for the Israel haters.

The Middle East is more tumultuous now then ever before with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq being a threat in one way or another.  Groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda are violent and a threat to mankind.  Israel is and will continue to be on the front lines against the terror from radical Islam.

All in all, this is a book that shows how Western opinion, shaped by progressives, abandoned Israel and chose to embrace its enemies despite the fact that they were enemies of the West.