Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
Sruli Fruchter claimed in a recent column on the Forward news website that “Americans are abandoning Israel” because some Israeli and American Jewish leaders have not, in his view, been sufficiently vigorous in condemning the handful of young Jews who have clashed recently with Arabs in Judea and Samaria (November 18).
Fruchter is not giving average Americans enough credit. It’s wrong to assume that most Americans will look at the behavior of a tiny number of Jewish youth, blame the entire State of Israel for their actions, and then proceed to “abandon” the Jewish State unless American Jewish organizations issue more forceful press releases.
History shows that American public opinion toward Israel ebbs and flows, usually in conjunction with whether or not there is a war raging at the moment. It should be recalled that in August 1982 (even before the killings at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut), a Gallup poll for Newsweek found 60% of Americans believed Israel had “gone too far” in its action against PLO terrorists in Lebanon, and 43% favored cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel. Only 16% of those surveyed supported Israel’s actions.
But what choice did Israel have in 1982? What choice has it ever had? Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 primarily to end rocket and other terrorist attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) against communities in northern Israel. Another goal of “Operation Peace for Galilee” was to destroy the PLO’s military and political infrastructure in Lebanon so that Israelis in the north would not continue to be threatened by the PLO.
Labor-led governments could have refrained from striking first in 1956 and 1967; perhaps that would have boosted Israel in the polls-but Israel would have been left in mortal danger.
Likud-led governments could have refrained from striking the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, or the Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year, and perhaps that would have helped in the polls-but again, it would have left Israel in great danger.
At the end of the day, Israel’s leaders must do what is necessary for their nation’s security, regardless of the latest trends in American public opinion. And when the hostilities subside, as they inevitably will, most respondents to the pollsters will side with Israel over the totalitarian, terrorist-supporting Holocaust-deniers of the Palestinian Authority and the genocidal barbarians of Hamas.