America’s Debt to Israel

Excerpt

Two years after Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, the U.S. should be grateful to Israel. The Jewish state has defanged a range of militant actors who despise the U.S. and have killed Americans. Yet the Gaza war, with its substantial civilian casualties, has turned much of the Democratic Party against Israel and fractured European-Israeli relations. Israel’s enemies on the left depict the Jewish state as an illegitimate pro-Trump “apartheid” state, and the war has also stirred anti-Israel sentiments in corners of the American right.

This hostility to Israel wasn’t inevitable; wars have sometimes transformed the Middle East for the better. Take the Six Day War. In the 1960s, the radical Arab republics led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser aligned with the Soviet Union. Nasser helped finish off the British in the Middle East, menaced the oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms, and harassed Israel. Arab nationalism—a crude amalgam of socialism, opposition to Western imperialism, violent cultural chauvinism, and sometimes not-so-latent Muslim pride—had gained sway in the region. Nasser and militant Arabism looked like the future.

Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations.