American policymakers “fail properly to recognize Israel’s virtue, its singular character as a free society amid a hellscape of dictatorships, theocracies and rampaging jihadists,” writes Ayn Rand Institute scholar Elan Journo in his new book. What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict provides a crystal-clear case for why right justifies might in supporting Israel’s developed democracy in its longstanding fight for survival against freedom’s foes.
Journo’s survey of Israel’s historic conflict with its Arab neighbors, including those now called Palestinians, and Israel’s Middle East surroundings, documents his decisive thesis that:
justice demands…a principled stand in support of Israel—along with everyone else in the region who seeks genuine freedom, including among the Palestinian population—and a stand against the Palestinian movement and its cause.
Journo comprehensively debunks the oft-propagated distortions that slander Israel’s Jewish state, truly a lone “light to the nations” in a depressingly dark Middle East, as a “shitty little country.” Indicative of the Middle East is “Third World…dead-end poverty, ignorance, stagnation,” he explains, while particularly noting the region’s various repressive Islamic societies. “Religious subjugation of the individual is a salient political norm in the Middle East,” and “not only of the region’s outright theocracies and medievalist monarchies, but also of the nominally secular regimes.”
“Whereas women in Saudi Arabia have long been forbidden from driving a car or leaving home unchaperoned, in Israel women pilot fighter jets,” Journo writes, in a stunning contrast of Israel with Middle Eastern illiberalism. “Throughout the region, only Israel exhibits a commitment to the principle of the rule of law,” as exemplified by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s corruption conviction. “Only in Israel can you breathe in fresh air” via a free media, and not the “region-wide smog of government thought control,” while against the Middle East’s “tumultuous political backdrop, people in Israel enjoy a decidedly First World standard of living.”
Symbolic of Israel’s religious freedom and treatment of non-Jewish minorities, Journo notes, is the fact that the “Baha’i temple in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, flanked by lavish gardens, is a tourist landmark.” He also reviews how the “characterization of Israel’s ‘Arab’ citizens as ‘second-class’ citizens is an overstatement.” To counter any public or private discrimination and neglect they face, “Israel’s political system, its rule-of-law institutions, its independent courts” offers the “best chance of having wrongs righted.”
Journo refutes common myths about Arab grievances throughout the history of Zionism and Israel. He notes that during the Palestine Mandate’s Zionist settlement, “incoming Jews acquired land by purchasing it,” often from Arab landlords eager to sell. To the extent that these landlords shortchanged their tenant farmers’ interests, Zionists are not the culprits.
Journo also exposes the fraudulent “right of return” demand regarding those Arabs who lost their homes in what became Israel during its 1948 independence war, largely through flight. The farcical definition of this “refugee” population encompasses not just those few still living from among some 600-700,000 Arabs who fled this war, but also their descendants, for a total population of over five million. Thus this “is a demand for the return of a population more than six times larger than the one that fled, seventy years ago,” and that is “replete with individuals deeply hostile to Israel’s continued existence. That cannot end well.”
Journo likewise refutes the ubiquitous tropes of a brutal Israeli “occupation” in the Palestine Mandate territories that Egypt and Jordan seized during 1948’s Arab state “scrimmage for conquest,” and that Israel later won during the 1967 Six Day War. Following 1967, the “residents of the occupied territories actually saw their standard of living rise” enormously under Israeli administration. “Israeli rule was objectively superior to what came before, under Egyptian or Jordanian authority—and superior to whatever degree of Palestinian self-rule was permitted to take hold later.”
Contrary to such falsifications by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that emerged in the 1960s to lead a Palestinian national movement, “[t]here is no genuine Palestinian grievance, no past or present wrong, that it has worked to right.” Either “aging PLO peddlers of Marxist-Leninism, Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism” or in more recent years jihadists such as Hamas have characterized an unsavory Palestinian leadership. These leaders have “indoctrinated their avid followers—along with innocent children and unwilling adults—in the nobility of slaughter and destruction and martyrdom,” now a “distinctive feature of Palestinian society.”
Such Palestinian pathologies made stillborn the 1990s Oslo Accords peace process and its precursor at the 1991 Madrid Conference, Journo says. Here the “premise animating George H.W. Bush’s administration was that the moral character of the adversaries was really beside the point; you could bargain with anyone.” Thus PLO leader Yasser “Arafat—a man with the blood of thousands on his hands, the leader of an officially designated terrorist organization—had his sins washed away. Instantly, he was anointed a partner for peace, a statesman.” “The price of this grotesque fiction, to which Israel and the United States were active parties, would be the lives of numerous individuals” due to subsequent Palestinian violence under a “phased strategy” of seeking Israel’s destruction.
This phony peace process helped demonstrate that Israel today is “tightly enmeshed in a wider clash between free societies and Islamic totalitarianism,” Journo notes. Yet repeatedly, “America has sold out the region’s only free society—Israel—along with freedom-seeking people across the Middle East and among the Palestinian community.” For example, President George W. Bush’s democracy agenda “sowed chaos across the Middle East by empowering Islamists” in places such as Iraq and Gaza’s “Hamas-stan.” “Essential to the democracy crusade was an evasion of the prevailing ideas in the Middle East, chiefly the embrace of Islamic totalitarian ideas,” Journo somberly evaluates.
Such ideas mean that the Oslo peace process “was, and remains, premature—by several generations,” Journo concludes, as “no genuine grievance…can be righted by the creation of a nationalist dictatorship or an Islamic theocracy.” “No one who understands the nature and aims of the Palestinian movement can take seriously the idea of rebooting the peace talks.” Any possible Palestinian state is “reasonable only in a future where the Palestinian community has re-oriented itself toward rational ideals.”
Accordingly, Journo endorses the “compelling case” for Daniel Pipes’s Israel Victory Project, for which this author has written. Journo closes with a quotation from his libertarian inspiration Ayn Rand denouncing “moral neutrality,” and thereby recalls her stark past statements on Israel’s defense against Arab neighbors. As Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) in an advertisement campaign quoted Rand: “in any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.”