In the Six Day War of 1967, polls showed that Americans favored Israel over the Arabs by overwhelming margins while in Europe support for Israel ran even higher. In the UN Security Council, a British resolution essentially gave Israel the terms of peace it sought; and when the Arabs and their Soviet backers tried to counteract this in the General Assembly they fell short of the necessary votes. Fast forward forty years and Israel had become perhaps the most reviled country in the world. True, Americans remained constant in their sympathy for the Jewish state, but America stood virtually alone while almost all the rest of the world treated Israel as a pariah. What had caused this remarkable turnabout? Joshua Muravchik traces the process by which material pressures and intellectual seductions reshaped world opinion. First, terrorist intimidation, oil blackmail, and the sheer weight of Arab and Muslim numbers gave the world powerful inducements to back the Arab cause. Then, a prevalent new paradigm of Leftist orthodoxy, in which class struggle was supplanted by the noble struggles of people of color, created a lexicon of rationales to take sides against Israel.Thus could nations behave cravenly while striking a high-minded pose in aligning themselves on the Middle East conflict.
