Don FederFrontPageMagazine.com September 7, 2004
I recently did a column exposing the Israel bashing in Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book, Where The Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency – the Michael Moore Book Club’s selection of the month.
Fortunately, only a small segment of the right has been infected with Buchanan’s neo-isolationism and anti-Zionism. Still, Pat’s fulminations spur the following reflections on why I support Israel as an American patriot.
First, a bit of personal history – not to boast, but to let you know that, for me, patriotism transcends election-year rhetoric.
I’ve been fighting for America my entire adult life. In the '60s, I was a campus conservative activist. While John Kerry was defaming Americans serving in Vietnam (we were "butchering a lot of innocent people," the future nominee told a Senate committee), I organized a rally on the Boston Common in support of our troops.
As a syndicated columnist, I spent nearly 20 years defending America against the lies of multiculturalists and historical revisionists. I devoted my pen to supporting Reagan’s foreign policy and opposing Soviet expansionism. (I once spent a week in Cuba, to better understand the tragedy of daily life under communism.)
Since the end of the Cold War, I’ve shifted my focus to militant Islam, and the peril it poses to our nation.
I’ve taken every opportunity to remind my countrymen of why America is the greatest force for good in the world, and worthy of our love and loyalty. I’ve warned of clear and present dangers to our national unity – including language fragmentation, the failure to control our borders, the inculcation of anti-Americanism through public school and college curricula, and an internationalist elite that controls the media, academia and Hollywood.
Other than wearing my country’s uniform (a privilege neither Pat nor I had), I’ve done everything in my power to protect the nation that gave my grandparents a home and gave the world a model of liberty, prosperity and republican government.
Thus, I address the matter of U.S. support for Israel as an unabashed patriot.
You might think that, as a Jew, my views on Israel were predetermined. But, Jewish leftists -- like Noam Chompsky, Howard Zinn and George Soros -- are among the most savage opponents of the Jewish state.
At the same time, Israel’s most eloquent champions today are Christians, among them William Bennett, Pat Robertson, Cal Thomas, George Will and House Speaker Tom DeLay. In 2004, support for Israel is far more philosophic than genetic.
I’m pro-Israel for the same reason I’m pro-Taiwan: The course of history often turns on the fate of little countries – Belgium in World War I, Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, and Taiwan and Israel today.
The same foreign-policy sophisticates who are blasé about the fate of Israel are equally nonchalant regarding Taiwan. Who made us their keepers? Why risk war for an insignificant dot on a map, half a world away? I mean, really – whose land is it, anyway?
It’s easy to rationalize the betrayal of little countries.
But when the great powers sell out the small democracies, they reap the appeasement whirlwind. Who thought the Czechs were worth fighting for at Munich (other than Churchill) or the Poles at Yalta? World War II and the Cold War proved the folly of such short-sighted pragmatism. After feeding little countries to the wolves, the Western powers barely avoided getting eaten themselves. Our honor was redeemed in blood.
Yet Israel has a special connection to America that neither Taiwan, Belgium nor the Czech Republic share. We are soul-mates. In the deepest sense, a betrayal of Israel would be a betrayal of ourselves.
America didn’t begin at Philadelphia in 1776 or 1787. Philosophically, it started at a mountain in the Sinai peninsula more than three millennia ago. America was founded on those values – liberty, justice, righteousness – first articulated in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The first settlers to these shores and the Founding Fathers both were inspired by a Jewish worldview. Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan divine, wanted to make Hebrew the language of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For the Great Seal of the United States, Benjamin Franklin proposed a depiction of Moses leading the Children of Israel through the Dead Sea.
As my friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin, of Toward Tradition, so eloquently explains, over the course of history, ancient Israel and the United States of America are the only two nations founded on ideals. For each, the vision – in once case, articulated in Mosaic Law and, in the other, in the Mayflower Compact -- actually preceded possession of the land.
Every president of the United States, from George Washington to George W. Bush, has taken the oath of office on a Book that includes the story of the Exodus, the encounter at Sinai and the possession of the Promised Land. The rights and duties set forth in the United States Constitution are echoes of that older covenant.
Throughout our nation’s capital, testaments to America’s heritage are chiseled in stone.
A representation of the Ten Commandments is engraved on each of the oak doors leading to the Supreme Court’s courtroom. A frieze of Moses adorns the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. In the National Archives Building, near the Declaration of Independence, the Roman numerals one through 10 are set in the floor. More than Rome or Athens, London or Paris, the light that guided our infant republic shone forth from Jerusalem.
Clearly there have never been two nations more intimately connected than the U.S. and Israel. Colonial America was only the beginning.
America offered shores of refuge to generations of Jewish immigrants. In the Second World War, the United States destroyed history’s greatest anti-Semite (though, admittedly, that wasn’t our reason for going to war) and liberated the death camps. At the end of the war, America provided crucial support for the rebirth of the Jewish state and has helped sustain it for the past half-century.
From Hayim Solomon (financier of the American Revolution) to the present, Jewish patriots have done their duty. A Jew named Einstein gave America the weapon to win the war in the Pacific and keep our freedom during the Cold War. And a Jew with the improbable name of Berlin gave us what’s called America’s second national anthem.
There is yet another reason why the patriot is called on to support Israel. In a global conflict, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, Americans and Israelis confront the same fanatical, hate-filled, anti-human foe.
The same medieval, totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion that killed 242 Americans in the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing in 1983, that slaughtered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and that’s responsible for the deaths of 860 of our servicemen in Iraq – also bombs buses, murders motorists and attacks Jewish communities, from Tel Aviv to Hebron.
Yasser Arafat is the mold from which Osama bin Laden was cast.
His followers are a division of an army bent on world conquest. Three years ago, when America was shrouded in tears, Palestinians did goalpost victory dances in the streets. Later, they named a square in Ramallah after the first suicide bomber who killed American soldiers in Iraq. Hamas contributes fighters to the Iraqi jihad.
Should Israel fall, the enemy would have another bastion to rival Taliban Afghanistan and Iran under the mullahs. Resources could be shifted to other fronts in the world war – Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, and on and on. If we do nothing when the jihad comes for Israel, comes for India, comes for Serbia, comes for Russia, comes for the Christians of the Third World – who will be there for us when it come for America?
Our history, heritage, faith and national interest all mandate American support for Israel -- the land where (in a spiritual sense) America began. A patriot who doesn’t understand this is no patriot at all.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
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