How I Became a Zionist: How I came around to support and understand Israel’s cause. By Dan McLaughlin
I was not always a Zionist.
That is perhaps not a surprising statement for an Irish Catholic born in the 1970s. Nor for conservatives in general above a certain age. But how I got there is a journey others have taken, and it bears lessons for those taking a fresh look at Israel after October 7.
Out of the Cold War
Israel was for many years a socialist country, and more socially liberal than the United States. Our government has, since 1948, consistently recognized Israel as a sovereign state and supported its right to exist, but that commitment in the past was far less certain than it is today. Early Israeli governments had, for a time, fairly warm relations with the Soviet Union, before the USSR decided that Israeli democracy was a greater liability than Israeli socialism was an asset. For the first three decades of Israel’s existence, America often had more of an arm’s-length relationship with Israel than an alliance.
The overriding imperative of American foreign policy between 1947 and 1990 was the Cold War. That was the foreign-policy framework I grew up with in the 1980s. Rose-colored retrospectives may paint the Reagan era as a time of pristine moral clarity, pitting the Free World against the Evil Empire. And so it was, in its essential character and in important aspects of the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and his administration. But there was continual agitation over the unsavory anti-communist allies (dictators, human-rights abusers) who made their home under the umbrella of “the Free World.”
This was practically necessary, but it also required us to steel ourselves to a foreign policy that was not always morally pure. Some de facto allies, such as apartheid-era South Africa or Mao’s China after 1972, were sufficiently odious that the United States didn’t quite acknowledge them as allies. Famous neoconservatives such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick argued for the necessity of alliances with authoritarians.
So, it was fashionable, or at least necessary, for Reagan-era Cold Warriors to make their peace with the fact that the choice of allies and enemies around the world was not always just about the fellowship of liberal democracies. It was, like our wartime alliance with Josef Stalin himself, sometimes simply a matter of the enemy of my enemy — in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous phrase, an SOB, but our SOB.
If you looked at things in the coldest light of realpolitik, it seemed strange that we would ally ourselves with Israel at the cost of alienating its many enemies. Israel was one small state, of little or no economic importance at the time, and with no oil. The Arab and Muslim states were numerous, populous, oil-rich, and covering many strategically important corners of the map. Even in spite of their obvious military inefficiency in comparison with the Israelis, it would seem that one would prefer them as allies in a global war if choosing between the two.
Oh, there were moral arguments for Israel. But there were moral arguments against it, too. That was the case in many of the world’s trouble spots, from El Salvador to Northern Ireland. So long as the U.S. was on the right side of the big questions, I was less interested in those days in working through all the ancient grievances elsewhere.
The turn in U.S.–Israel relations started with the Camp David accords in 1979 — ironically, given that Jimmy Carter, who oversaw them, never really understood there to be a moral case for alliance with Israel. Ronald Reagan worked hard to strengthen and deepen our alliance with Israel, yet with the Cold War as the central organizing principle of his administration’s foreign policy, he also devoted a lot of effort to trying to keep the Greater Middle East pacified so that it would not detract from that focus. That was the impetus behind sending Don Rumsfeld as special envoy to the region, which resulted, among other things, in the subsequently famous photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. It was also the motivation behind two of the worst foreign-policy decisions of Reagan’s term: sending American Marines into Lebanon and trading arms to Iran for hostages. Meanwhile, conflict with the Soviet Union required supporting the waging of jihad in Afghanistan, supplied through Pakistan.
Through it all, there were good reasons for Americans to see Israel’s problems as a distraction that could draw us away from the main goal. At least, that was how it often looked to me, as a high-school student.
The Thaw
The end of the Cold War didn’t just vindicate the view that the moral power of the liberal democracies was greater than we’d hoped; it also allowed a reappraisal of some of our more unseemly alliances. Ferdinand Marcos fell in the Philippines in 1986. The end of the Soviet-backed conflict in Angola after 1988 spelled the doom of apartheid, as the South African regime could no longer rely on its role as a bulwark against communism in southern Africa to justify even minimal Western tolerance of its repressions. Naturally, in that climate, the liberal democracy of Israel looked more appealing next to its Arab neighbors, none of them remotely liberal or democratic. More fundamentally, in the optimistic period between 1989 and 2001, it seemed more appropriate to orient our alliances more closely with our American values.
What began my own process of rethinking the value of Israel as an ally was, at first, a practical event: the Gulf War. With a large coalition full of Muslim and Arab partners, the U.S. didn’t need help from Israel; it needed restraint. The Israelis complied, even at the cost of Iraqi Scud missiles raining down on Israel. There was no Israeli retaliation — the U.S.-led coalition would take care of that.
That was the strategic side. But as the 1990s passed, I came to see more clearly the moral case for Israel. And in time, I came to feel that case.
One turning point was the Oslo peace process in the mid 1990s. With notorious and corrupt terrorist Yasser Arafat as their negotiating partner, the Israelis bent over backward to offer anything that could result in a sovereign, independent Palestinian state — anything but the one thing they couldn’t offer, which was the destruction of their own nation and people. Arafat, by then in his mid 60s and on his way to becoming a billionaire from his position, seemed tempted to take the deal, which would have normalized his position as a head of state. But he also knew what had happened to Anwar el-Sadat after making peace with Israel. He refused the deal.
That was enormously clarifying about the nature of the grievances behind the Intifada that began in the late 1980s. Everyone already knew that the tactics of the Palestinian insurgents were morally unequal to those of their Israeli enemies. And we had — as I learned, on reading more of the history during this period — copious evidence that the Arab states had chosen to create a perpetual conflict with Israel rather than try to build a better world that included it. But here was fresh evidence that, given the opportunity for peace — the same opportunity taken in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and across Central America — the Palestinians themselves would prefer war, poverty, and unending struggle to peace.
The 1990s saw a movement away from a clash of civilized powers toward what increasingly looked like a clash between civilization and its enemies. In 1996, I went to work in the World Trade Center, a building that itself had been bombed by Islamic extremists. Their ever-shifting litany of grievances over the course of that decade educated me in their pretextual nature, and the end of my time working in the Trade Center finished the process of clarification.
Then there was the Holocaust. Even growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in a world where the Second World War was living memory to my parents and their generation, it seemed a thing that had happened once quite a while ago, and in truth, the world was not in the business of making new nations to remedy old injustices. In truth, Zionists have always been a bit uncomfortable with the idea that the State of Israel is some sort of reparation for the Holocaust. That would imply that the Jewish people had no right to a homeland until the 1940s, and that the guilt of Europeans was paid for by others.
As I came to understand, the point of invoking the Holocaust in defense of Israel is not that a Jewish state is needed to make up for what happened, but that a Jewish state is needed in order to ensure that it never happens again. In the 1990s, it was happening again — not to Jews but to Tutsis and Bosnian Muslims. And the world stood by disapprovingly, but ineffectually. They were on their own in Rwanda and Srebrenica. It will ever be thus for those who cannot defend themselves.
The Break
If there was a single event that completed my conversion to the Israeli cause, it was a single killing that came not long before September 11: the murder of Shalhevet Pass. In March 2001, a 10-month-old Israeli girl was shot in her stroller by a Palestinian sniper. It was an act of the most gratuitous cruelty, having nothing to do with Palestinian statehood and everything to do with the raw, brute desire to inflict pain upon the Jewish people just for existing. And yes, the fact that I was the father of two small children at the time made it hit home that much harder.
The killing deranged the father of the victim, who was later convicted in an Israeli court of plotting a terrorist attack in revenge. Israelis may have sympathized with him, but he was treated as a criminal, not a hero.
By the eve of the September 11 attacks, I had come around to the moral case: Not only were the Israelis unambiguously the historical and ongoing good guys in the dispute, but they were an important bulwark against barbarism. Naturally, what followed over the next several years deepened that conviction and exposed ever further the moral rot of anti-Zionism, from its roots in Nazi and Soviet propaganda to its continuing recurrence wherever the enemies of Western civilization can be found, at home or abroad. By then, I knew I was a Zionist, and always would be.
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