Making David into Goliath

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Joshua Muravchik. Making David into Goliath

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Praise for Making David into Goliath

“Part polemic, part intellectual history, this thoughtful and timely study. . . . provides a nuanced and illuminating guide to the ideological developments that have led many on the left to detest Israel.”

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This is most evident in the BDS campaign, which is notable for its flagrant double standards. Although this campaign usually claims Palestinian human rights as its purpose, it has never addressed the universal mistreatment of Palestinians in Arab countries. Jordan has the best record, granting Palestinians citizenship and allowing them to practice professions like law and medicine from which they are barred in Lebanon, but even Jordan severely restricts the number of Palestinians allowed seats in its legislature. No such professional or political constraints exist in Israel. More broadly, Israel’s record on human rights is by all measures light years better than that of all of the states that surround it and most other states. The annual survey of Freedom House, highly respected by scholars and democratic governments for its rigor and objectivity, rates Israel 1.5 on its scale of freedom, on which 1 is the best possible score and 7 the worst. The median of the Arab countries is 5.5 and of the whole world, 3.5. Yet, neither the BDS movement itself, nor any of the churches, unions, or student governments that have voted to boycott or sanction Israel has ever done the same to any other state. This prompted Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, to say that this campaign is “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”26

In respect not only to liberté but also the other two elements of the traditional principles of progressivism—égalité and fraternité—as well as such latter-day issues as environmentalism, Israel’s record ranks among the world’s best, while those of its enemies are among the worst. (I have documented this with careful details and statistics in Liberal Oasis: The Truth about Israel, the e-book companion to this volume.**) And yet in the dominant discourse of the contemporary left, all of this is trumped by the trope of the noble third world versus the malevolent West.

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