On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

by Douglas Murray

Then in 1967, and even more so in 1973, something changed. If Israel had been David up until this moment, a number of its supporters now saw it as having transformed into Goliath. The fact that Israel was still a tiny country with a tiny population in comparison with its neighbors was not the point. It now came to be seen by many as the overdog. The change came about in part because Israel had won those two wars with relative ease. Also, they had taken ground from the places their enemy had attacked them from (principally Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights). At the same time the idea grew that the Arabs who lived in Israel were not to be referred to as Arabs, like their brothers and sisters in Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, but rather as “Palestinians” with a unique and long-recognized identity of their own. With the turning of the Arabs into Palestinians it was now the Palestinians who were the beleaguered minority and the Israelis who were seen as the oppressive majority. So the Palestinians became the new Jews, with the Jews becoming the imperialist, brutish overlords.