David Becomes Goliath
- Shoga Films
- 13 minutes ago
- 5 min read
On October 5, 1973, the State of Israel was still basking in the glow of virtue and success. To quote myself from a previous podcast: Israel seemed, once again, the center of an epic. The oppressed of the Old World had migrated to the Promised Land and had built for themselves a new life of justice and wealth.
The kibbutzniks did seem to be a finer, more idealistic breed. They were trying to live according to a communal idea; they had profited from the labor of their own hands; they had made the land produce as it had never done before and created a new institution out of the Ashkenazi shards blasted from Europe. Israel was the reincarnation of the Jewish state, the biblical history enacted in our time, and the promise at last fulfilled. “May my right hand lose its cunning if I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” The people had remained faithful until the land was again delivered into their hands. And Israel’s deserts bloomed.
And, by god, I had seen the deserts bloom! Watermelons and lettuce growing out of the sand! The new settlers had brought with them every ounce of Western culture and technology.The Jewish state was incomparably more advanced then its Arab neighbors. Through guts, skill, and imperiled valor, the tiny beleaguered nation had survived, triumphed, expanded. The Arabs had fled in terror before them, leaving their shoes in the desert as witness to their flight. The Sinai was embraced, Jerusalem reunited. Israeli paratroopers had battled their way through blood and fire to kiss the Wailing Wall with tears of thanksgiving in their eyes.
And then, the next day, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, everything changed. The neighboring states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had gotten their butts kicked in the wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967. The Six Day War had been a particularly shameful rout for the Arabs -- the destruction of their air force, the loss of much real estate now under Israeli control, another failed attempt to oust the Jewish state from its home in Palestine. The latest major conflict was only a little over five years in the past. Surely, the Arabs had learned their lesson!
But on October 6, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel with a coordinated attack again! And furthermore, the Arabs were more successful in this attack than they had ever been before. Israel was caught on its back foot. The first days of the war saw losses of matériel, life and land that the young nation had never experienced before. Furthermore, the reliable Western allies who had been such staunch supporters of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 weren't quite so reliable. England conditioned its support on a return of Israel to its 1967 borders (not gonna happen, bro!), and France, mindful of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil, adopted a policy of supposed neutrality, imposing an arms embargo on all the belligerents. The Soviet Union jumped in as an arms supplier to the Arab states, which pushed President Nixon to offer a full-scale airlift of military equipment on October 10. This U.S. assistance replenished Israeli forces, allowing Israel to launch a successful counter-offensive.
By the time a U.N.-brokered ceasefire took hold on October 25, Israel had recouped its military losses and had even advanced into Egyptian and Syrian territory. David, it seemed, had emerged victorious from its battle with Goliath yet again. But the war shattered Israel's complacency about its invincible military superiority, and the label of underdog which had served it so well in the first twenty-five years of its existence was shifting over to the Arabs. After 1973, the hot war of Middle Eastern conflict was between the Israelis and the Palestinians, not between sovereign states. As an occupied people, Palestinians were able to surpass Jews in the Victim Sweepstakes that conditioned international perception. In 1975, the U.N. passed a resolution determining that Zionism was a form of racism and promoted racial discrimination. (Israel didn't help its case here by allying itself with the Afrikaaner Republic of South Africa from the mid-70s to the late 80s.)
Israel's former Western champions, England, France, and the European Union, demanded a return to the 1967 borders and a solution to the problem of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived precariously and without political rights under Israeli rule. A flicker of hope flashed when the Oslo Accords of 1998 were signed recognizing (in theory) a two-state solution, but Israel's promise was a hollow one, gradually gutted by the country's rightward drift. The brutality of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, as evidenced by the two Intifadas of Palestinian uprising, fatally tarnished Israel's reputation. The Jews were now the bullies in the Middle East.
This was profoundly confusing to Jews in the diaspora who were used to thinking of themselves either as victims or as aspirants to full citizenship in countries with histories of antisemitism. We'd never had a state before where we could oppress other people! Ardent Zionists the world over refused (and still refuse) to acknowledge Israel's crimes and failures. And even ambivalent Jews have this secret thought. "It *could* happen here; if it does, I'm glad there's a refuge for me."
The Jewish response to Israel's fall from grace was mostly to double down (with honorable exceptions, of course). Did the growth of Orthodox Jews and political conservatives create a bloc that works tirelessly to ensure no loss of land through the creation of a Palestinian state? Did the Israeli electorate put Benjamin Netanyahu, the worst Jewish leader in modern history, into the top office time and again? Did the American Jewish community direct any of its clout and wealth to pressure Israel into genuinely working towards the two-state solution it had presumably endorsed but was flagrantly trashing through its support of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank?
O well! You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. We have a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card with the undeniable 2000-year history of antisemitism. And friends in high places! Do you know what the largest American pro-Israel lobbying group is? (No, it's not AIPAC.) Christians United for Israel, which has over seven million members!
God help us! If only He would leave the Holy Land for more peaceful climes! Like Greenland!
--Dr. Robert Philipson
Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Hating Nixon -- A Family Tradition
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