Our American Israel 3 INVINCIBLE VICTIM

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CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
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3 INVINCIBLE VICTIM 

 

ON JUNE 8, 1967, three days into what Israel would later dub the Six-Day War, the New York Times published a feature on 

the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Yitzhak Rabin, with the headline “Hero of the Israelis.” Recounting Rabin’s rout of the 

Egyptian army from the Sinai Peninsula, the article identified him as the “prototype of a fictional hero,” the inspiration for Ari Ben 

Canaan in Leon Uris’s novel Exodus. Two weeks later, Life magazine repeated this claim in an article that included a photograph of Rabin 

in military uniform, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, gazing upward at the recently captured Western Wall in Jerusalem.¹ 

Rabin did not, in fact, serve as the model for Uris’s fictional hero, even though journalists may have thought the “blue-eyed, sandy- 

haired and rugged” commander looked the part.² Fiction, though, did provide journalists with a prototype for their heroic portrayal of 

the Israeli soldier in the 1967 war. The Exodus reference rendered the descriptor “hero of the Israelis” immediately legible as a deadly if 

reluctant warrior, equal parts muscle and morality. A popular and enduring narrative of the war followed the equally familiar plot of 

plucky David trouncing a lumbering Goliath, in the form of the Israel Defense Forces overcoming the threat of annihilation from sur- 

rounding Arab armies. 

The Six-Day War is commonly considered the turning point in the special relationship between the United States and Israel. The 

small nation’s lightning victory and righteous cause appealed to a nation embroiled in the Vietnam War, and Americans en masse fell in 

love with Israel. The enthusiastic media found “a measure of relief in the switch from Vietnam to the Mideast,” wrote Variety magazine. 

“Heroes and villains seemed easier to come by,” and “colorful characters” abounded, “right out of central casting.” Tapping into nos- 

talgia for the moral clarity and decisive outcome of World War II, the Arab-Israeli conflict fulfilled the dreams of those who “yearn wist- 

fully for wars that were,” and “Israel’s blitz tactics doubtless produced the desired catharsis.”³ 

The Israeli heroes of the June war may have leapt from the silver screen of Exodus to distract Americans from their own quagmire in 

Southeast Asia. But the war’s final outcome did not mesh with the view of Israel’s founding as an anticolonial act. On June 5, 1967, after 

a tense three-week standoff with Egypt, Israel launched an attack that obliterated the Egyptian air force and in a few hours essentially de- 

cided the course of the war. That day, even as Israel’s leaders announced that the country would not seek to expand its territory, its army 

hurtled forward on three fronts.⁴ Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem 

from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. One million Palestinians came under Israel’s military rule, as it quadrupled the extent of 

the territory under its control. 

The belief that Israel had narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat became the common-sense understanding not only of 

the war’s chronology but also of the nation’s existential state. Yet in the years immediately following the war, as Israel tightened its con- 

trol over the lands and people it had conquered, a global counternarrative emerged about Israeli colonialism, a narrative that framed the 

rise of Palestinian nationalism as a Third World revolutionary movement and linked Israel not with anticolonial struggles but with Amer- 

ican imperial power in Vietnam. Mainstream commentators across the political spectrum, not just on the radical left, expressed unease 

with Israel as an occupying power. Israel’s old-fashioned military triumph, which seemed so appealing at first, occurred at a moment in 

history when territorial expansion conflicted with the global trend toward decolonization. This, too, is one of the enduring legacies of 

the Six-Day War. 

After Palestinian resistance groups turned to violent acts of international terrorism in the 1970s, and the Cold War intensified the 

conflict between the United States and Third World nations, a new narrative gained currency that united Israel and America as leaders in 

a global war of civilization against barbarism. It came to displace the counternarratives of Israeli colonialism in the U.S. press and main- 

stream discourse. Ten years after the Six-Day War, “pro-Israel” narratives did not simply supplant critical ones; rather, the paradoxical— 

and heroic—image of Israel as an invincible victim became hegemonic in the United States—precisely when Israel came to offer Amer- 

icans a mirror in which to understand their post-Vietnam role in the world. 

 

Romancing the Israeli Soldier 

 

In the narrative that emerged from the Six-Day War, Israel came to appear both vulnerable and invincible at the same time, at risk of de- 

struction yet militarily indomitable. Its Arab enemies were portrayed as the inverse: formidable enough to obliterate an entire nation, yet 

incapable of matching Israel’s military forces on the battlefield. That story begins with Egypt, aligned with Syria, threatening Israel’s exis- 

tence by closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, ousting UN peacekeeping forces, moving troops to the border, and signing a de- 

fense pact with Jordan. After three weeks of impotent international diplomacy, during which no one comes to its aid, Israel launches a 

preemptive attack in self-defense, crushes the menacing armies, and seizes vast swaths of territory for its own protection. The story 

ends with Israel’s military forces miraculously achieving victory against all odds. 

Evidence of Israel’s military preeminence did not influence the impression of extreme vulnerability presented in this narrative. On 

May 24, 1967, New York Times correspondent James Reston reported that Egypt’s army could not match Israel’s armed forces in quality 

or preparedness. Two days before the war, he reported from Cairo that Egypt, under President Gamal Nasser, “does not want war and it 

is certainly not ready for war.” Reporting from Tel Aviv on the second day of the war, Reston noted the exhilaration over the initial defeat 

of Egypt, and he wrote that the Israelis “had to fight to save the existence of their country. This is clear on any objective analysis of 

Nasser’s political and military moves.”⁵ The perception of Israel’s existential peril grew even more amplified after its total triumph. A 

week after the war’s end, Life magazine editorialized that only the word “astonishing” could describe how “tiny Israel stood in the role of 

victor over the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to exterminate her.” The same editorial stated that “the tremendous discrep- 

ancy between the competence of Israeli and Arab armies is the most obvious fact from the start.” The “fact” of military imbalance did 

not make Israel’s victory any less “astonishing” in the American press.⁶ 

During the tense three weeks leading up to the war, however, apprehension about the possibility of Israel’s extermination did not ap- 

pear in most media reports. Editorials unanimously condemned Egyptian aggression, but they did not express concern that its troops 

might decimate the Israeli military, let alone the entire nation. Although journalists reported Nasser’s fervent speeches rallying the Egyp- 

tian masses to destroy the Jewish state, few believed that Egypt’s military capacity matched its saber rattling. Editorials urged the United 

States to lead a naval convoy to reopen the Straits of Tiran in order to uphold international law, not to rescue Israel from destruction.⁷ 

The Jewish American press did show concern for Israel’s safety. But most of its reports and commentaries expressed confidence that Is- 

rael’s steely determination and military capability would safeguard it. References to Nazi extermination appeared in some of these arti- 

cles, less as warning of a potential recurrence than as providing an object lesson that Israelis had learned to avert by becoming ace 

fighters.⁸ 

The press echoed the assessment shared by Israeli military leaders, U.S. government officials, and the intelligence agencies of both 

countries. In the buildup to war, newspapers ran articles with headlines like this one from the Los Angeles Times: “Odds in Battle Favor 

Israel, Experts Declare.” On June 4, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan assured the media that Israel would win the war without outside 

help. And when war broke out a day later, newspapers concurred that Israel would win an easy victory. They showed little worry about an 

Israeli defeat, let alone the country’s extermination, questioning only how many days it would take Israel to win and at what cost. When 

news of Israel’s early morning attack reached the White House, Walt Rostow, President Johnson’s special assistant on security, an- 

nounced the beginning of “the first day’s turkey shoot.”⁹ 

The narrative that Israel had narrowly averted an apocalypse in June 1967 was largely a retrospective one. It gained greater currency 

after Israel’s stunning triumph and has shaped popular memory of the war and Israel’s image as a nation. The story of a rapid and ex- 

treme reversal of fortune did make for dramatic reporting. Israel’s military feat appeared all the more astonishing and even “mirac- 

ulous”—an oft-used word—and it elicited wild enthusiasm from the American public. 

To call attention to this retrospective narrative is not to deny the genuine fear experienced by Israelis before the war. It arose from 

many sources. Murderous rhetoric broadcast on Egyptian radio was heightened by fears fanned by the Israeli government. Traumatic 

memories of the Holocaust had recently been evoked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1962. Even during the heady elation 

that followed the war, the experience of military dominance did not banish fears of defenselessness. Life reported that Israelis still lived 

with the nightmare that history could just as easily have cast them as victims instead of victors.¹⁰ This fear also affected American Jews, 

who, after the war, expressed as much dread of Israel’s vulnerability as pride in its army’s robust heroism. Amid victory celebrations, ac- 

cording to journalist J. J. Goldberg, “what the American Jewish community learned from the war” was that “Israel might be destroyed at 

any moment.” A newfound attachment to Israel brought forth guilty memories of the Holocaust for some American Jews, who, in an 

outpouring of emotion and frenzy of fundraising, demonstrated their determination to protect the Jewish state from what they believed 

could have been another genocide. Pride in Israel’s victory and identification with its vulnerability, in addition, helped revive a sense of 

Jewish identity that Jewish leaders feared was imperiled not by Arab armies, but by assimilation into mainstream American society. 

Whatever the psychological and sociological roots, the belief that Israel had been threatened by annihilation did not abate over time but 

became memorialized as history.¹¹ 

In the arena of international diplomacy, Israel raised the specter of annihilation to refute accusations that it had provoked the hostil- 

ities and to make its case for keeping the captured territories in the interest of national security. On June 19, Israeli foreign minister 

Abba Eban, “one of the television heroes of the United Nations,” stated to the UN General Assembly with signature eloquence that the 

“true origin” of the conflict was the Arab threat to Israel’s “very right to exist,” a threat that persisted after the war’s end. Refuting Soviet 

premier Alexei Kosygin’s charges of aggression, Eban proclaimed Israel’s deployment of arms to be a “righteous” cause: “As righteous 

as the defenders at Valley Forge, as just as the expulsion of Hitler’s bombers from British skies; as noble as the protection of Stalingrad 

from the Nazi hordes, so was the defense and security of Israel’s existence against those who sought our nation’s destruction.” Arab 

aggression, stated Eban, provoked Israel at the “lowest ebb of its fortunes,” and in response, its army reenacted the “uprising of our 

battered remnant in the Warsaw ghetto as a triumphant assertion of human freedom.” In this narrative, besieged Israelis did more than 

mount a defensive war against hostile neighbors: they refought World War II, this time smashing Nazi surrogates in the Middle East.¹² 

“Valley Forge” invoked the familiar American trope of Israel’s anticolonial origins at a time when the image of Israel as conqueror 

seemed too close to colonialism for some. On the day of Eban’s UN speech, a New York Times editorial implored the “lightning con- 

queror, to show magnanimity to her victims” and not to rush to annex Arab Jerusalem—or expel Arabs in another “human tragedy.” Ap- 

proximately two hundred thousand Palestinians crossed into Jordan during the war, many fleeing for the second time, as refugee camps 

that had been established in 1948 came under Israeli control in Gaza and the West Bank.¹³ A Washington Post editorial wrote of Israel’s 

“public relations woes,” which started when, at the end of the war, the army demolished scores of houses in East Jerusalem to create an 

open plaza by the Western Wall, expelling the residents and raising the “accusation of forced expulsion” of Palestinians to Jordan. Israel 

had an “image problem as a tough victor,” wrote the New York Times, for an “army of occupation cannot maintain the admiration show- 

ered on a victorious army” when “the pre-war David has become the post-war Goliath.”¹⁴ The postwar portrait of Israel as existentially 

vulnerable and forever subject to extinction by powerful enemies restored its role as David and countered the rival image of Israel as a 

heartless conqueror and colonial power. 

The paradoxical narrative of a militarily supreme nation that is under grave threat would have resonated with many Americans during 

the Cold War. In the build-up to the Six-Day War, editorials across the country expressed more concern for the safety of the United 

States than for Israel because of the political alignment of the Soviet Union with Egypt, and Syria and the United States with Israel. A 

war in the Middle East, it was feared, could provoke a superpower confrontation and result in a nuclear conflagration. “The threat of war 

between Israel and the Arab states,” warned the Los Angeles Times “has brought us closer to nuclear conflict than any post–World War II 

crisis—including the Cuban missiles incident.”¹⁵ Ever since the dropping of the atomic bomb, Americans had held a double-edged 

image of their nation as the triumphant leader of the free world—but one living under the shadow of nuclear holocaust.¹⁶ The “domino 

theory” justifying the war in Vietnam—the idea that the fall of one communist country as far away as Southeast Asia would trigger oth- 

ers to fall—added to the sense that there were omnipresent, but vague, forces menacing the United States. 

In 1967, Israel appeared under threat of the kind of annihilation that had stalked the United States for over two decades. Israel mag- 

nificently vanquished this threat in six days by crushing the same enemies—Soviet-backed forces—that the United States had not been 

able to defeat even after years of fighting in Vietnam. Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, “wasn’t playing dominos,” wrote Bill 

Mauldin in the New Republic. “His back was to the sea. On all other sides he was eyeball to eyeball with a vicious enemy who meant to 

exterminate the Israeli soldiers’ families, homes and country.”¹⁷ The dramatic action of Israeli soldiers averting apocalypse had a cathar- 

tic effect. In Israel’s swift victory over Soviet allies, Americans could vicariously experience both the dread of vulnerability and the thrill 

of invincibility, the irrefutable victory that was eluding them in Vietnam. 

American portraits of Israeli soldiers conveyed this paradox of invincibility and vulnerability on a human level, one that reinforced the 

image of them as reluctant conquerors rather than consorts of colonialism. The combined qualities of martial prowess and aversion to 

violence, brazen determination and youthful insouciance, toughness in battle and touching humanity together created his romantic ap- 

peal. Photographs of rugged, handsome Israeli soldiers filled Life magazine’s special edition, “Israel’s Swift Victory,” which was rushed 

to newsstands at the end of June. The Associated Press and United Press International soon followed with book-length compilations, 

Lightning out of Israel and Swift Sword, and CBS broadcast a special report, “How Israel Won the War.” As their titles indicate, these cele- 

bratory accounts portrayed the war from the standpoint of the victor. Together these media reviews consolidated an overarching narra- 

tive of the Six-Day War that interwove images of muscular strength matched by humane innocence as a hallmark of the Israel’s armed 

forces and its identity as a nation.¹⁸ 

“Israel’s Swift Victory” told the standard paired stories: one of an overwhelming military operation wreaking destruction; the other of 

a small endangered nation defended by its citizen-soldiers. The volume opened with a two-page photograph of a burning truck and a 

dead Egyptian soldier face down on the sand with a “fist-sized hole punched through his tunic.” The war started, according to Life, 

when “Israel launched its offensive” and “struck with devastating surprise at two dozen Arab airbases in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.” 

Black-and-white photographs showed rows of exploded fighter-bombers. Within hours, “Israel had sealed its victory” by destroying the 

entire air force of each nation.¹⁹ Bellicose language described the ground wars that followed. In Israel’s “savage attack on four fronts,” 

its tanks “thrust” into Egypt; “slashing into the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip” and “stabbing into the Sinai desert,” they “smashed ahead day 

and night.” Jordan suffered a “savage Israeli onslaught” as Israeli planes blasted positions with “napalm canisters which exploded with 

lurid flames.” In a thrust into the hills of Syria, Israeli troops “smashed through each successive line” and knocked out tanks in a “fury 

of phosphorous.”²⁰ 

Photojournalists were enchanted by the Sinai desert’s wide-open terrain. Israeli tanks dashed across it practically unimpeded to the 

Suez Canal, leaving a trail of burnt corpses and damaged materiel. On the cover of “Israel’s Swift Victory,” a black-and-white panorama 

of the sand-swept desert provides the background for a close-up color photo of an unshaven, dust-covered Israeli commander squint- 

ing in the sun, holding binoculars and dangling a cigarette. Looking relaxed and masterful, he surveys the quiet desert, recently a battle- 

field and now dotted with tiny figures carrying bundles on their heads, as through straggling through an earlier nomadic age. 

The desert landscape of the war in the Middle East contrasted starkly with images of the war in Vietnam. In articles comparing the 

two wars, journalists portrayed the blazingly bright background for Israel’s military achievement as matching the clarity of its cause, 

while the jungles of Vietnam symbolized the murkiness of America’s goals. American soldiers persistently complained about the invisi- 

bility of enemy combatants, who hid in tunnels and bunkers throughout the dark jungle. They came to view the Vietnamese landscape 

itself as the enemy, as Time reported: “U.S. forces are fighting not only Communist troops in Viet Nam but also the vegetation that con- 

ceals and feeds them.” Newsreels showed U.S. bombers flying in orderly formation dropping tons of bombs on heavily forested terrain 

that concealed the targets. In contrast, Israel’s rapid air war was shockingly well documented from above, with photographs showing ex- 

ploded fighter planes smoldering while still neatly lined up in their desert bases. Israel’s military power was illustrated by panoramas of 

destruction: mangled tanks strewn for miles throughout the desert, burnt corpses fallen in the sand, and masses of prisoners baking in 

the sun behind barbed wire.²¹ 

Humane portraits of Israeli soldiers tempered the ferocity of these images. Photographs of military preparation in “Israel’s Swift Vic- 

tory” show bare-chested soldiers cheerfully taking “an open air shower … after a day of waiting in the Negev desert near the Egyptian- 

held Gaza Strip.” Crowded together under the streaming water, buff young men scrub themselves vigorously, brawny torsos glistening 

in the sun. At the center a handsome youth with shampoo in his hair smiles directly at the camera, inviting, friendly, and confident. The 

men’s nakedness conveys tough virility along with a touch of vulnerability in their endearing boyish innocence. The title reads: “Israel’s 

cool readiness.”²² 

This image contrasts markedly with a photograph on a prior page of Egyptians clamoring for war, under the title “The buildup of fer- 

vor as Nasser casts the die.” A crowd of angry protesters in Cairo are chanting and pumping their fists in the air. At the center, a man 

hoisted on someone’s shoulders faces the camera directly with hands raised and mouth open, as though he is yelling at the viewer. An 

adjacent photograph shows uniformed soldiers carrying banners with Arabic writing and skulls and crossbones, calling for “the defeat 

of Israel and death of Jews.” In counterpoint, the next page shows the prime minister of Israel alongside text reproducing his words: 

“The Jewish people has had to fight unceasingly to keep itself alive.… We acted from an instinct to save the soul of a people.” The im- 

ages set up a disparity between men motivated by a just cause to fight for life, and maniacs motivated by extreme ideology in the pursuit 

of death.²³ 

Half-naked Israelis standing in water appear in two more striking photographs in this special edition. In the first, a well-built bearded 

man wearing only underpants, a hat, and glasses wades in the Gulf of Aqaba, holding a machine gun across his waist, demonstrating 

easy mastery in a cocky, casual pose.²⁴ The second reproduces a photo that appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s June 23, 1967, 

issue and became an icon of Israel’s victory. A tanned, lanky soldier stands in the Suez Canal with water up to his chest. His face grimy 

from battle and black curls tousled, he wears a wet shirt that shows off his muscular physique and hoists his rifle into the air. He looks 

skyward into the bright sun, white teeth shining, his eyes matching the deep blue water that fills the frame with no shore or horizon. It is 

a picture of military triumph and virile sexual appeal.²⁵ 

 

 

Cover of Life magazine, June 23, 1967. 

 

These water scenes convey an aura of purification and rebirth, in stark contrast to the parched desert landscape strewn with Arab 

corpses. In a caption under a picture of Israeli soldiers surveying dead Egyptians, Life noted that “besides those killed in combat, count- 

less Egyptians perished of thirst and starvation.”²⁶ A photo of Egyptian prisoners of war shows them in undershirts, stripped of their 

uniforms with hands tied behind their backs. If Israeli nakedness reveals the tough and tender human body beneath the uniform, the 

nakedness of these soldiers exposes their humiliation in defeat. 

Robust Israeli soldiers who mastered the desert terrain made a contrast not only with Egyptians, but also with American soldiers 

trapped in Vietnam. Mike Wallace hosted two CBS specials soon after the Six-Day War, one called “How Israel Won the War,” and the 

other, about a hilltop outpost near the demilitarized zone in South Vietnam, “The Ordeal of Con Thien.” In the first, Wallace interviews 

five young Israeli pilots who are lounging informally in their flight suits around the wing of their jet fighter. Bashful and boastful, they 

speak of “making something for history.” In contrast to the Israelis’ quiet invincibility, the American marines in Con Thien appear 

painfully vulnerable. Two bare-chested young men resting against sandbags talk of being “boxed in” and shot at like a “bull’s eye.” 

Against footage of wounded men in the background, another marine resignedly says, “There isn’t much you can do,” adding, “You can’t 

be saved you can only be lucky.”²⁷ Three months after the Six-Day War, Con Thien became a symbol of American impotence. The cover 

of Time on October 6 featured a photograph of a young American soldier curled up in a fetal position inside a trench, clutching his hel- 

met with his bare arms. The banner reads “Rising Doubt about the War.” 

The confident insouciance of Israeli soldiers delighted American reporters. They expressed surprise that even in uniform, the troops 

did not look like conventional forces. Wallace noted with a smile that the Israeli soldiers “look like a rag-tag group,” walking around 

“unkempt and unshaven” in the most “extraordinary group of uniforms or non-uniforms that I have ever seen.”²⁸ James Reston mar- 

veled that although “modern armies do not sing,” Israel’s was a “singing army, not polished but rumpled … young and middle-aged 

waving to the youngsters at the side of the road and smoking and singing like Hemingway’s heroes at the start of the Spanish Civil 

War.”²⁹ In Harper’s Magazine, Marshall Frady later observed that “for all its legendary deadly precision, the Israeli Army, from the youths 

at the front to its somewhat rumpled officers at headquarters, still seemed to have the informal quality of a guerrilla force, existing in an 

easy cohabitation with civilian society.”³⁰ This oft-noted disregard for military decorum made Israeli soldiers appear more like rebels 

than conquerors. 

The distinguished literary critic Alfred Kazin visited Israel during the summer of 1967 and wrote a long piece about his experience for 

Harper’s. Like many liberal Jewish intellectuals, his enthusiasm for Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War replaced his former skepticism 

about the Jewish state. He was especially taken by the combination of “militant self-confidence” and anti-authoritarianism of the young 

Israelis, who did not appear to conform to military standards. He described Israeli soldiers as looking like “young actors waiting to get 

into a TV Western.” His guide, the Israeli novelist Haim Gouri, responded with delight, “The Jordanian army looks like an army, but 

ours?” The lack of uniformity among Israeli soldiers underlined their resistance to military regimen and their natural toughness. On a 

Friday night in Jerusalem, Kazin relished the sight of “Greenwich Villagy looking soldiers, in hippie beards and camouflage pants … flirt- 

ing with girl soldiers who in their neat outfits looked delicious,” fusing the counterculture and militarism. For Kazin, these modern sol- 

diers marked the distance Jews had come from their long-suffering ancestors in the Diaspora. He was one of many Jewish intellectuals 

who took pride in Israel’s astounding military success, yet found reassurance that its street life appeared more like Greenwich Village 

with its peace symbols than the militarized society he criticized in America.³¹ 

The presence of women soldiers enhanced the modern appeal of the Israeli army. As the nation mobilized for war, Time reported, 

“girls in khaki miniskirts and pertly cocked overseas caps were on round-the-clock duty at sandbagged gun positions.”³² Journalists 

rarely described women soldiers without mentioning their miniskirts, finding their youthful sexuality channeled wholesomely into a 

“folksy army.” Girls of eighteen, noted Theodore White in Life’s special issue on the war, are “ushered forth by families as if to wedding 

or nunnery.” In the military, he added, boys and girls meet and marry, and the army provides the rabbi and wedding banquet. The armed 

forces ensured the survival of the nation by procreation as well as military defense.³³ 

The most celebrated Israeli hero of the Six-Day War was General Moshe Dayan, the charismatic defense minister. Pictures of his 

chiseled face crossed by a black eye patch adorned the covers of news magazines, and he appeared almost nightly on television news 

shows. Comedians and politicians joked about hiring Dayan to teach the Viet Cong a lesson.³⁴ Descriptions of his irresistible charm 

accompanied analyses of his military expertise. A New York Times portrait of the “hawk of Israel” equated his military daring with his 

earthy sexuality, and his identity as a modern, Israeli-born sabra was contrasted with the older, militarily cautious—and prudish— 

generation of leaders born in Europe. In a feature article in Look magazine, his novelist daughter, Yael Dayan, even commented on the 

large number of women who fell in love with her father.³⁵ Military and sexual power merged to create the masculine mystique of this 

cult-like figure. 

Dayan also represented the egalitarian and unifying qualities of Israel’s “people’s army,” which, enthused The Nation, had “no visible 

or material distinctions between officers and regulars.” In a photograph of Dayan in “Israel’s Swift Victory,” he sits cross-legged on the 

ground, holding an orange soda, as he listens to an animated group of officers in motley attire. This photo abuts a close-up of a beau- 

tiful young boy intently observing a machine gun being prepared by a reservist. Together these images conveyed a spirit of national 

unity in the “citizen army,” where everyone, from school-age youngsters to the highest-ranking generals, rallied together. In the New 

Republic, Bill Mauldin shunned the hero worship of generals to locate Israel’s military strength in the “farmers, homebuilders and mer- 

chants who have had a long and gaunt struggle for survival.” Mauldin was well known from World War II for his popular cartoon strip 

about ordinary GIs, published while he served as an infantryman. To him, Israelis reincarnated the American spirit of the citizen-soldier 

that had disappeared in Vietnam.³⁶ 

Israel’s total mobilization of civilians for war was presented in the American press as evidence not of a militaristic society but of its 

peace-loving values. The antimilitarism of the Israeli soldier went beyond his casual appearance to his inner moral fiber. Kazin quoted 

an officer saying that his men in the Sinai “fought without hatred” but with “terrible rage at the waste” of lives. He reported that his 

guide, Gouri, noted with great pride that there had not been a single instance of an Israeli soldier raping an Arab woman. As evidence of 

Israel’s peaceful intentions, Gouri took Kazin to visit a middle-class Palestinian couple in Ramallah in order to return their confiscated 

car and to expound on the need for cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. Kazin noticed that the hospitable but skeptical couple did 

not warm to the protestations of Israeli gallantry, and they quietly let their visitors know that they hailed from Jaffa before 1948.³⁷ 

 

 

Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan with a group of officers just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, from “Israel’s Swift Victory,” 

special edition of Life magazine, June 1967, p. 11. 

 

In an article in the Atlantic, famed military historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that “a recurrent mention in the post-war talk is of weep- 

ing.” An officer confessed to her, “I was fighting and crying, … because I was shooting and killing.” She did meet a soldier who was 

happy “killing as many Arabs as he could,” but she presented him as an exception to the rule that “these lions fought with tears.” With 

their reluctance to kill, Israelis were disinclined as a nation to adopt the role of conqueror, for in too short a time “the Jews have come 

from persecution to rule over others.” She quoted General Rabin as the first to recognize this burden in his victory speech: “The Jewish 

people are not accustomed to conquest, and we receive it with mixed feelings.”³⁸ 

The portrayal of conquest as inimical to Jewish identity peaked in accounts of the capture of East Jerusalem from Jordan. After three 

days of fierce fighting, wrote Life, the Israeli army’s entry into the Old City “seemed as much pilgrimage as conquest,” and the magazine 

quoted Dayan as saying, “We have returned to the holiest of our places never to depart from it again.”³⁹ Replicating the primal Zionist 

narrative, Dayan rendered the conquest of foreign land as the return to a biblical homeland. The capture of East Jerusalem yielded some 

of the most enduring emotional photographs of the Israeli soldier: fresh-faced and battle-tested, youthful soldiers gazed upward at the 

Western Wall in solemn awe and exultation.⁴⁰ Helmeted soldiers embraced the stones, weeping; while toting Uzis, they danced with 

bearded Hasidim in black coats and hats. One especially striking image from United Press International shows a soldier from behind, 

wearing a skull cap while praying at the wall, and in place of a prayer shawl his shoulders are draped with an ammunition belt.⁴¹ The 

capture of Jerusalem added a mystical aura to the image of the sharpshooting but innocent Israeli warrior restored to his ancient roots. 

The portrayal of Israeli soldiers as hesitant conquerors in 1967 drew on the anticolonial founding narrative as told in Exodus. The lib- 

eral press especially emphasized that the Israelis did not want to repeat the errors of Western imperialism. As Stanley Wolpert asserted 

in The Nation, “they express no wish to maintain martial rule over the more than one million Arabs living in borderland regions their 

armies have overrun.”⁴² Six months after the war, the New Republic acknowledged that Israeli attitudes were hardening about keeping 

the occupied territories and that Palestinians desired independence from both Israel and Jordan. Yet the same article found hope in 

Dayan’s assertion that “we are not colonialists,” and that “we don’t aim to impose a Pax Hebraica.”⁴³ 

 

 

Israeli soldier with bullets as prayer shawl praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, June 1967. 

 

Writers applauded this anticolonial attitude in ordinary soldiers. On a trip to Bethlehem and Hebron, for instance, a New Republic re- 

porter saw few signs of military occupation and instead more of a “county fair,” with Israeli soldiers and civilians buying ice cream and 

taking donkey rides. He followed a group of Orthodox soldiers to a “holy place where Abraham and other Elders of Zion are entombed.” 

After the soldiers knocked and requested entry, the door was shut in their faces. The soldiers made “no effort to press further for the 

entry denied them to a Jewish holy place by a vanquished Moslem guardian.” The reporter might not have realized that this holy place 

was also the hallowed Ibrahimi Mosque—vanquished or not—and he praised the soldiers’ polite refusal to take what was rightfully 

theirs: “Strange conquerors!”⁴⁴ 

This narrative of a reluctant conquest made the Six-Day War seem the opposite of America’s experience in Vietnam. The Israeli sol- 

dier appealed to hawks and doves alike, as a military model and a moral exemplar. The “lightning” victory shone brightly against the 

deepening quagmire facing the U.S. military. The Israeli air force accomplished in hours what Operation Rolling Thunder, the massive 

bombing campaign in North Vietnam, could not do in two years. Israel’s unified nation of citizen-soldiers was a reproach to a divided 

America of draft resisters and antiwar protestors. A “people’s army,” where generals and privates fought side by side, highlighted the 

gaps between the grunt’s experience on the ground in Vietnam and the official pronouncements of the generals in charge. Moreover, a 

nation threatened by annihilation could not have imperial aims, and an army fighting for survival made mockery of the domino theory 

and the idea of defending American honor in a distant land. 

 

Global Counternarratives 

 

“Israel is not Vietnam,” argued antiwar liberals Michael Walzer and Martin Peretz in an essay published in Ramparts, a leading organ of 

the New Left, a month after Israel’s 1967 victory. The essay was part of a special issue on the “Israeli-Arab Crisis.” Walzer and Peretz 

wrote that they had been in favor of the United States taking military action in response to the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran. 

Since then, they had faced criticism from both right and left: 

 

We have been asked: “How can you demand unilateral military action in the Middle East and oppose it in Vietnam?”; “Why should 

the ‘national liberation’ of the Arabs be resisted and that of the Vietnamese not resisted?” 

 

In other words, wasn’t it hypocritical to oppose one war and support the other? Not at all, they answered. To the right, they explained 

that Israel was not like South Vietnam, where the United States was illegally intervening in a civil war to prop up an artificial state of its 

own creation. To the left, they answered that Israel was not like America, which was fighting an imperialist war against a national liber- 

ation movement. Israel, they claimed, was neither a colonizer itself nor an outpost of imperial power; it was an imperiled democratic na- 

tion struggling for survival.⁴⁵ 

Walzer and Peretz’s argument for Israeli exceptionalism aimed to refute an emerging counternarrative that portrayed the Six-Day War 

as a war of colonial expansion. This narrative located Israel and Palestine on a global map where crosscurrents of U.S. imperialism, 

European colonialism, Third World revolutions, and black liberation movements in America and Africa intersected and collided. In this 

transnational context, Israel’s uniqueness took on a different meaning entirely: it could be viewed as a colonial power resisting the glob- 

al movement toward decolonization. Today we might assume that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only those on the radical left would 

identify Israel with colonialism. Yet in the mainstream media at the time, both liberal critics of the Vietnam War and staunch Cold War- 

riors expressed concern about Israel’s territorial expansion and its military rule over civilians, and they shared a lexicon of analogues 

with the radical left that linked Israel and Palestine to sites of colonial power struggles around the world. 

In their Ramparts essay, Walzer and Peretz rejected the argument that both Israel and the United States were “bastions of imperi- 

alism, on guard against the rise of the Third World.” To counter the characterization of Jewish settlers in Israel as European colonizers, 

they argued for the nation’s anticolonial pedigree, reviving the narrative of Zionism as a movement for emancipation. They contrasted 

Israel’s history with that of other colonial powers: “The Jewish colonization of Palestine,” they wrote, “differs from other colonizations 

in Africa and Asia in that the immigrant community”—that is, Zionist settlers—“was committed to do its own work” and did not “ex- 

ploit the Arab population.” This self-sufficiency prevented the development of the social hierarchies that existed between French settlers 

and Arabs in Algeria, or between whites and blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa. They found Israel more authentically socialist than 

many Third World regimes, like Nasser’s Egypt, pointing out that “the typical Jewish agricultural unit was not the plantation but the 

kibbutz.” Furthermore, they claimed that imperial powers were not responsible for establishing the Jewish state. Quoting from a 1948 

article by I. F. Stone, they contended that British and American diplomats and oilmen had sided with the Arabs and opposed the new 

state. Dissociating Israel from the taint of colonialism, they concluded that the source of the Middle East conflict was the refusal of 

Third World and communist governments to “recognize the threat posed by the present Arab rulers to the very survival of Israel.”⁴⁶ 

The same issue of Ramparts included an essay by I. F. Stone, “The Future of Israel,” that demonstrates how radically his political 

views had changed since 1948. The greatest threat to Israel’s survival, as he saw it, arose from its jingoism and chauvinism, which 

intensified the state of belligerence with its neighbors. Stone called on Israel to relinquish conquered territories and take responsibility 

for the Palestinian refugees, since its sovereignty over all of historical Palestine now forced the nation to confront a long-slumbering 

moral crisis. He insisted that Israelis must finally recognize what he too had ignored in the euphoria of 1948—“that a kindred people 

was made homeless in the task of finding new homes for the remnants of the Hitler holocaust.” The Palestinian refugees, he wrote, 

“lost their farms, their villages, their offices, their cities and their country.” Recalling his argument from the 1940s that Jews and Arabs 

should band together against British imperialism, Stone warned Israel not to “remain a Western outpost in an Afro-Asian world casting 

off Western domination.” In order to survive, it must “join the Third World.”⁴⁷ 

Stone was widely denounced when he elaborated these arguments in the New York Review of Books three months later in an essay, 

“Holy War,” that opened provocatively: “Stripped of propaganda and sentiment, the Palestine problem is, simply, the struggle of two 

different peoples for the same strip of land.” Stone viewed the conflict between Arabs and Jews as a tragic narrative that was, at its 

essence, “a struggle of right against right.” It was incumbent upon Israel from its position of strength, he believed, to do justice to the 

Palestinians. Arguing against Walzer—and indeed his own earlier position—he wrote that “the fact that the Jewish community in Pales- 

tine afterward fought the British is no more evidence of its not being a colonial implantation than similar wars of British colonists 

against the mother country, from the American Revolution to Rhodesia.”⁴⁸ 

In the same year, 1967, the Black Power movement also included the Middle East conflict in a global context that pointed to the Unit- 

ed States and Rhodesia as sites where colonialism and racism converged. In their influential book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, 

Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton chose as an epigraph a sentence from an essay by Stone that had been published a year ear- 

lier: “In an age of decolonization, it may be fruitful to regard the problem of the American Negro as a unique case of colonialism, an in- 

stance of internal imperialism, an underdeveloped people in our very midst.” The authors contended that “institutional racism has an- 

other name: colonialism.”⁴⁹ Advancing the Black Power movement meant seeing the struggle for liberation in the United States in rela- 

tion to anticolonial insurgencies around the world. In the United States, just as in Rhodesia and South Africa, they argued, colonialism 

inheres in the relationship between blacks and whites living next to each other, not in distant lands. 

When war broke out in the Middle East in June 1967, radicals in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the 

Black Panther Party were already finding links between resistance to American racism and a transnational anti-imperialist movement that 

was taking place throughout the Third World. They encountered the Middle East through the teachings of Malcolm X and the writings of 

Frantz Fanon on the Algerian Revolution, and through the travels of leaders like James Forman and Stokely Carmichael to Hanoi, Al- 

giers, and Havana.⁵⁰ 

In this spirit, the SNCC newsletter started a new series, “Third World Round Up.” The editors announced that since “we 

Afro-Americans are an integral part of The Third World,” it was important to “understand what our brothers are doing in their home- 

lands,” and they chose Palestine as the topic for the first article in the series.⁵¹ The article analyzed the history of Zionist settlement, 

starting with its inception as a colonial force that violently subjugated an indigenous people and seized Arab homes and land “through 

terror, force, and massacres.”⁵² Graphics accompanying the article provocatively portrayed both contemporary Israel and the United 

States as racist and imperialist. The article, however, made specious anti-Semitic claims about Jewish dominance of global finance, and 

it offended many by accusing Israel of committing massacres and comparing them to the mass murders at Dachau. The controversy 

that erupted was such that it reached the front page of the New York Times. Jewish organizations excoriated the article’s “hate-filled” 

rhetoric and “racism,” claiming that it took a pro-Arab and Soviet position that “smacks of anti-Semitism.” Well-known civil rights lead- 

ers joined in condemning anti-Semitism as detrimental to the goal of fighting against all forms of discrimination.⁵³ An editorial in The 

Movement, a small magazine affiliated with SNCC, rejected the label of anti-Semitism and, reasserting SNCC’s alliance with “revolu- 

tionary aspirations of the third world,” claimed that “Israel, as characterized by the actions of its statesmen and military men, is op- 

posed to these aspirations.” The editorial also raised the issue of hypocrisy that Walzer and Peretz had rejected, questioning the mo- 

tives of those liberals who “oppose American militarism and support Israeli militarism,” who denounce Lyndon Johnson but acclaim 

Moshe Dayan.⁵⁴ 

At the same time the Black Panther Party was developing a transnational analysis of the relationship between black freedom struggles 

and Palestinian resistance. These connections deepened over time through personal contacts in Algiers between Black Panthers and 

members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1968, the critique of American imperialism provided the fundamental tie be- 

tween Palestinians and black Americans. The Panthers condemned Israel as “an imperialist, expansionist power in Palestine” and posit- 

ed that blacks and Arabs both suffered from racial oppression, although it took different forms: “Zionism in Palestine and fascism here 

in America—but the cause is the same: it’s U.S. imperialism.” They drew special attention to the political imprisonment of Palestinian 

and black revolutionaries, framed as dangerous criminals or terrorists by Israel and the United States, both of which they characterized 

as police states. At a press conference in 1970, Huey Newton, head of the party, claimed that Israel was “created by Western imperi- 

alism and maintained by Western firepower.”⁵⁵ 

For the most part, established African American civil rights leaders rejected these radical positions toward both Israel and the United 

States; instead, they upheld the story of Israel as a liberal beacon of emancipation and an imperiled democracy. Members from the A. 

Philip Randolph Institute, a black labor organization, including Randolph and Bayard Rustin, formed a new organization, Black Amer- 

icans in Support of Israel Committee. In 1970, the committee sponsored a full-page ad in the New York Times, “An Appeal by Black 

Americans for United States Support for Israel,” signed by over two dozen influential figures. It called Israel “the most democratic coun- 

try in the Middle East” and implored the U.S. government to guarantee Israel’s security and “right to exist” through arms sales, so that 

the nation could freely implement its ideals of social justice.⁵⁶ 

A few months later, a counter ad appeared that addressed an issue first raised by the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and 

later embraced by many African American organizations in the anti-apartheid movement: Israel’s military and economic alliance with 

South Africa. The ad, “An Appeal by Black Americans against United States Support for the Zionist Government of Israel,” was signed 

by fifty-six black activists, artists, and intellectuals. It expressed Afro-American solidarity with Palestinians, both engaged in the same 

struggle “for self-determination and an end to racist oppression,” and it related both struggles to the anticolonial revolution “in places 

such as Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, Laos, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.” The appeal focused on Israel’s close relationship 

with apartheid South Africa, referring to the two nations as “privileged white settler-states” that exchanged arms and military training.⁵⁷ 

Israel’s American supporters grew concerned about its reputation among African Americans, and in 1969 the Israeli government in- 

vited a delegation of black journalists to tour the country. In a seven-part series in the New York Amsterdam News, correspondent Dick 

Edwards described his Israeli hosts’ emphasis on their humanitarian and anti-imperialist commitments both in the newly occupied 

territories and in Africa. Israeli officials, reported Edwards, described projects in the West Bank to improve the lives of Palestinians and 

rejected the possibility of annexation. Foreign Minister Abba Eban spoke to the group about Israel’s aid to black African nations, ex- 

plaining that the Israelis were uniquely suited to help other emergent states. When asked about the fraught subject of the white-ruled 

African states, Eban stated that Israel had severed relations with Rhodesia at great economic cost and rejected the South Africans’ offer 

to upgrade its diplomatic status in Pretoria. He cited the memory of “gas chambers in Auschwitz” as the reason why Israel chose justice 

over friendship with these states.⁵⁸ 

South Africa’s noted affinity for Israel, however, complicated Israel’s efforts to distance itself from that apartheid nation. The Los 

Angeles Times reported that the South African government regarded Israel as playing the same role as white South Africa: “defending an 

outpost of western, white civilization in a sea of uncivilized hordes.” In the New York Times, foreign correspondent C. L. Sulzberger 

wrote of the growing economic and political ties between the two countries and explained why, from the Afrikaner perspective, they were 

natural allies, with Israel sharing an “apartheid problem—how to handle its Arab inhabitants.” In one of several incensed letters to the 

editor responding to this article, Martin Peretz rejected any parallels between the control of a “huge landmass of a black majority by a 

wholly alien white minority” and a people’s return to a “small and ancient homeland.” Israel, in his view, was not South Africa, just as it 

was not Vietnam.⁵⁹ 

The euphoria that had initially seized the media during the Six-Day War, focused on images of Israel’s existential vulnerability and hu- 

mane military, vied with unsettling images of its domination over others. As soon as the war ended, the U.S. war in Vietnam began to be 

used as a cautionary tale and not just as a contrast with Israel’s heady triumph. “Military victory will be no solution in the Middle East,” 

warned the New York Times, “any more than the military victory the United States is seeking in Vietnam would be in South East Asia.” 

The Washington Post anticipated that as more stories of napalm injuries to civilians emerged from the Jordanian front, the conscience of 

Israelis would be touched, just as “this country has been touched by the photographic record of injury” to civilians in Vietnam. These 

parallels became more pronounced when reporters turned their attention to Israel’s efforts to quell Palestinian resistance in the newly 

occupied territories. Time reported that Israel was using American counterinsurgency tactics: building electronic barriers to deter infil- 

trators and retaliating against guerrilla raids by razing the fighters’ homes. The Vietnam experience became a warning that “a retaliation 

raid in massive force” only steels the will of the resistance and brings in new allies.⁶⁰ 

Commentators expressed concern about the damage that colonialism could do to Israel’s character. “Conquering peoples are never 

very attractive,” wrote columnist Joseph Kraft about his travels through the West Bank, and “the Jews, or perhaps I should say we Jews, 

are no exception.” Using an American analogy, he criticized the “abundant quotation of Scriptures as title deeds, asserting as a kind of 

manifest destiny, Israel’s right to the newly conquered lands.” A Washington Post editorial chastised the Israeli government for failing to 

recognize that “colonialism, however benevolent, doesn’t work.” Although syndicated columnist Flora Lewis blamed Arab aggression 

for Israel’s expansion, she saw no point in “denying that it was colonialism in the old fashion sense.” She predicted that Israel “did not 

seek this peculiar little empire, but it is likely to prove harder to give up than it was to acquire.”⁶¹ 

One of the most outspoken critics of Israel’s occupation in the mainstream press was also a great admirer of the country. Joseph 

Alsop, an influential syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, was a fervent anticommunist and an early 

advocate of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He believed that Israel was just like South Vietnam, a Cold War ally in need of U.S. support 

against Soviet client states. Alsop visited Israel in the fall of 1967 on his way to South Vietnam. At first, he savored the romance of the 

victory of a “magnificently brave people,” exemplified by his “generous-hearted” military guide, “a model officer, a burning patriot, a 

deeply moral man,” who made Alsop feel like he was traveling in a time machine back to the heroic revolutionary age of America’s 

founding fathers.⁶² 

Nonetheless, Alsop found it alarming that the majority of Israelis, from leaders to ordinary citizens—his guide included—were “pas- 

sionately determined never to give back the more important conquered territories, especially the Gaza Strip and above all the West Bank 

of the Jordan.” Throughout his travels—from an Arab-run restaurant in East Jerusalem to apparently pacified villages on the West 

Bank—he noted that the “basic problem of the occupied and occupiers” was “starkly posed.” Alsop venerated Moshe Dayan, whom he 

had cited as a military authority on Vietnam. But he doubted the viability of Dayan’s plan to contain Palestinian dissent by combining 

tough measures, such as demolishing houses and exiling leaders, with the benign formula of “occupation without administration.” 

Alsop repeatedly demanded of the Israelis he met, “Do you really believe this can go on forever? Do you really believe you can avoid 

using an iron fist to hold this land?”⁶³ 

The analogy Alsop used for Israel’s “iron fist” was not Vietnam but Rhodesia. In 1965, Rhodesia’s white-dominated government had 

declared independence from Great Britain and instituted rule over a vast majority-black population. “Holding down a huge Arab popu- 

lation,” warned Alsop, “with no rights except the right of local self-government will create in Israel—it must be squarely, brutally faced— 

something perilously like the relations between the races in Rhodesia.” Alsop referred to a study predicting that the population of Arabs 

would outnumber that of Jews in Israel in a decade, a shift that would place Jews in the role of white Rhodesians. 

Alsop’s analogy connected to his fears of racial uprisings at home. In the summer of 1967, black insurrections erupted in Detroit and 

Newark and were brutally suppressed by the police. Though Alsop derided all radical groups as Soviet stooges, his language reflected 

the Black Power movement’s comparison of domestic racial violence with Third World struggles. He warned of the grave risk of Amer- 

ica “declining into a continent-sized South Africa” and asked the same questions he would pose to Israelis about the dangers of occu- 

pation: “Is America’s white majority to find safety only by repression and by force? Are we to live forever with a deprived minority held 

down only at gun-point?”⁶⁴ In Alsop’s vision of the world, the situation in Rhodesia and South Africa provided a harbinger of the threat 

facing both the United States and Israel. Maintaining racial hierarchies and holding occupied territories would lead to mass insurrection 

and violent state repression, which would in turn destroy the claims of both nations to represent democracy, freedom, and progress in 

the struggle against communism. 

In a striking inversion of Israel’s image in the West as a paragon of modernity, Alsop decried what he called the “non-modernism” of 

Israel. He criticized Israeli leaders for their “antimodern” delusion that a “protectorate can be maintained without brutality and even 

with benefit to the protected population.” Though he sympathized with Israel’s desire for security, he worried that a prolonged occu- 

pation would turn it into an atavistic garrison state. Ultimately, Alsop wished to protect an ideal vision of Israel from the morally corro- 

sive impact of occupation, which “year after weary, angry year, will cause all Israel’s shining courage, noble self-denial and richly cre- 

ative intelligence to go for naught in the final verdict.” This romantic sentiment meshed with what Alsop believed was a realist Cold War 

imperative to prevent the emergence of Soviet proxies from resistance movements such as the Palestinians, and it echoed idealizations 

of American freedom as the opposite of communist oppression.⁶⁵ 

For a brief time following the Six-Day War, journalists were intrigued by the rise of Palestinian resistance, and they presented Pales- 

tinian guerrillas in a romantic revolutionary narrative, though it was one that offered little competition to the more intimate romance 

with the Israeli soldier. The PLO presented itself on the world stage as an anti-imperialist movement against the colonial occupation of 

Palestinian land, and it modeled its international image on the successful Algerian resistance against French colonialism and the Viet- 

namese struggle against the United States.⁶⁶ After the humiliating defeat of 1967, a younger generation of Palestinian leaders took their 

struggle into their own hands, abandoning the hope that Arab nations would liberate them. They organized new cadres of Palestinian 

fedayeen—Arabic for “men of sacrifice”—to conduct guerrilla raids into Israel, first from Jordan and then from Lebanon. Yasser Arafat 

led the largest organization, Fatah, and headed a coalition of militant groups under the umbrella of the PLO. Israel launched severe 

reprisals against fedayeen positions and their civilian supporters in towns and refugee camps on both sides of the Jordan River. In a sig- 

nificant battle in March 1968, Fatah inflicted heavy casualties on Israeli troops in the Jordanian village of Karameh. Although Israel de- 

clared victory, Fatah’s brazen resistance made it wildly popular throughout the Arab world. The battle took on mythical proportions in 

which a heroic defeat became a rallying cry and a founding narrative of national liberation. As Time explained in terms Americans would 

understand, “Karamah became the fedayeen Alamo.”⁶⁷ 

Curious about this new force in the region, journalists flocked to clandestine training outposts, refugee camps, and PLO head- 

quarters. In December 1968, Time featured Yasser Arafat on its cover in the style of a political poster. Wearing dark glasses, a black and 

white keffiyeh, and a denim shirt open at the neck, he looked handsome and confident. A line drawing above his head depicted a 

shrouded commando shooting a machine gun, under a banner reading “The Arab Commandos: Defiant New Force in the Middle East.” 

The cover article opened with a quote from a Voice of Fatah radio broadcast: “The revolution of Fatah exists! It exists here, there, and 

everywhere. It is a storm, a storm in every house and village.” To Israelis, the “raiders” were “terrorists and thugs,” but to Arabs, “they 

were freedom fighters in the best guerrilla tradition.” For members of the “Palestinian Diaspora” in refugee camps and Arab capitals, 

the fedayeen “awakened a sense of pride” by taking “the destiny of the Palestinians into their own hands.” In the process, Arabs “have 

come to idolize” Arafat.⁶⁸ 

The Palestinian movement appealed to the international revolutionary spirit of 1968. As youth around the world took to the streets to 

protest American imperialism in Vietnam, many discovered inspiration for radical social change in Third World leaders like Che Gue- 

vara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Young men toting guns and shouting revolutionary slogans, whether Cuban revolu- 

tionaries, Vietnamese guerrillas, or American Black Panthers, had an allure for the New Left and the counterculture. Journalists com- 

pared Amman, Jordan, to Hanoi and described refugee camps as a “protective jungle” that “any kind of resistance movement needs.”⁶⁹ 

They noted posters of Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Che on walls in refugee camps, and reported that the Black Panthers were receiving train- 

ing at a Fatah base in Algiers.⁷⁰ The fedayeen, reported Time, took their inspiration from the “apostle” of the Algerian revolution, Frantz 

Fanon, “the late Martinique-born Negro psychiatrist who preached in The Wretched of the Earth that for the oppressed and the colonized 

people of the world ‘violence is a cleansing force.’ ”⁷¹ After Fanon’s death in 1961, his book achieved a global reach that extended from 

Palestine to Third World liberation movements to black militants and student radicals in the United States. 

 

 

Yasser Arafat, cover of Time magazine, December 13, 1968. 

 

The revolutionary style of the fedayeen presented a masculine mystique that appealed to foreign correspondents, who wrote vividly 

about their dangerous treks to locate secret training camps or to interview a commander in the back alleys of Amman. Journalists who 

had reported from Vietnam, Cuba, Yemen, and other revolutionary hotspots encountered a familiar scene in Jordan: “armed men in 

khaki and basketball sneakers slowly climbing back to the base camp in tents in the rocks … the backslapping, the smiles of relief, fa- 

tigue, and pride of the kind one sees on the faces of returning astronauts.”⁷² This incongruous metaphor represented the fedayeen as 

modern heroes, triumphantly returning from feats comparable to mastering outer space. Images of youthful rebels, however, were often 

tempered by darker depictions of the refugee camps they came from, described by one journalist as “the spawning ground for the mili- 

tant Palestinian commandos,” where “everything tends to fester” and where commandos “infected” the inhabitants with discontent.⁷³ 

Despite this gloomy image of the camps, the modernity of the Palestinians became a recurrent theme among journalists. The world- 

liness of a young generation stood out against the nostalgia of their refugee parents and defeated Arab leaders. The press attributed the 

humiliating rout of Arab armies in 1967 to their feudal backwardness and their preference for rhetoric to action. In an interview with 

Arafat published in the New York Times, Dana Adams Schmidt contrasted the ineffective bombast of his elders with Arafat’s “restrained 

eloquence, sentimentality and humanism,” noting his “personal modesty and devotion to action.” The liberation of women from tradi- 

tional constraints offered further evidence of Palestinian modernity. Time described young women in refugee camps trained in first aid 

and weaponry, chanting “I have broken my chains. I am a daughter of Fatah!” In a visit to a group of “militia girls,” Marshall Frady inter- 

viewed young women who extolled the opportunity to abandon their conservative upbringing for a wider perspective.⁷⁴ Schmidt, report- 

ing on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), interviewed a spokesman who “wanted the world to know that the whole 

Palestinian community, women and children, as well as men, is imbued with revolutionary fervor.” The spokesman, wanting to “break 

the Hollywood stereotype of the stock-character Arab, the idea of the Bedouin with a knife in his teeth,” insisted that the Palestinians are 

“modern men, women, and children.”⁷⁵ 

Palestinian modernity was also reflected in the achievements of an educated cosmopolitan elite. In “The Palestinian Refugees: A New 

Breed: Smart, Skilled, Fanatical” in The New Republic, Georgie Anne Geyer debunked the image of impoverished, uneducated, “hang- 

dog” refugees “without land and without future.” In contrast, Palestinians were “the most advanced people in the Arab world” with “one 

of the highest percentages of university people of any national group in the world.” One was hard pressed to find a leader of the feday- 

een who was not a “doctor, lawyer or literary person.” She contrasted this future-oriented generation of “cosmopolites” with their nos- 

talgic parents stuck in refugee camps, mired in “memory, without hope, without work, without future” and “without the security of the 

timeless Moslem village hierarchy.” While their worldly sons and daughters shared no memory of life in Palestine, education and polit- 

ical ideology taught them that “a terrible injustice was done, and they yearn to correct it.”⁷⁶ 

This radical separation from their parents made Palestinians appear remarkably similar to early Zionists. The idea of Palestinians as 

“the Jews of the Arab world” was repeated among journalists. In their cerebral idealism, wrote Schmidt, Palestinians resembled their 

Jewish “cousins” as an “equally extraordinary people.”⁷⁷ Palestinians appeared as a “mirror image of American Jews” for their commit- 

ment to education and industriousness, and the way that assimilated Palestinians “now dominate many areas of Arab life.”⁷⁸ The 

combination of modern deracination with longing for a lost homeland uncannily echoed the Jewish experience and made Palestinians 

more recognizable to an American readership. Partisans of both Palestinians and Israelis drew parallels between their deployment of 

violence in a nationalist struggle. In a New York Times feature, “The Middle East Is Potentially More Dangerous than Vietnam,” Walter 

Laqueur, a renowned historian of Zionism, expressed doubt about Dayan’s contention that Palestinians find it “easy to live under occu- 

pation and difficult to undermine it.” No matter how many economic improvements Israelis brought to the occupied lands, opined 

Laqueur, “a young Arab patriot will support the guerrillas in the same way a young Jew in Mandatory Palestine joined the Haganah, the 

Jewish military organization during the British mandate.”⁷⁹ George Habash, leader of the PFLP, drew a similar analogy in an interview in 

the New York Times. He related his group’s attacks on civilians to the assaults he had observed as a schoolboy in Jerusalem in the last 

years of the British Mandate. He recalled the violent methods of “such Jewish groups as Stern and Irgun Zvai Leumi as they fought the 

British and early Arab nationalist organizations.” In 1948, Habash had arrived home from his medical studies in Beirut “to accompany 

an exodus of women, children and old men—through searing heat with a minimum of food and water—to the Jordanian lines at Ramal- 

lah. Some died on the way.” Habash objected to the Western press labeling the PFLP as a terrorist group, claiming that “terrorism … is 

what made of us refugees—what drove our people to the camps.”⁸⁰ 

In a dichotomy reminiscent of the depiction of Jews in Palestine after World War II, the media often fell back on a dualistic image of 

Palestinians as either refugees or terrorists. In an unusual departure from this pattern, Peter Jennings presented a television news spe- 

cial, “Palestine—a New State of Mind,” that focused on educated, middle-class Palestinians in Beirut, where Jennings was bureau chief 

for WABC. Filmed in discussions around the dinner table and on a university campus, bankers and engineers, housewives and shop- 

keepers, professors and students articulated their desire to return to their homeland and described their plans for building a modern 

secular state. They asserted their sense of national solidarity with refugees in camps and their pride in the fedayeen. As they argued over 

political strategies, they laughed at the accusation that they were planning to push Jews into the sea and expressed puzzlement about 

the lack of understanding they encountered in trips to America.⁸¹ 

Jennings’s perspective was rare at the time on American television. He described the Israel-Palestine conflict as a “fundamental 

tragedy” between “two cultures, Arab and Jewish,” who both “have proper claims to this small but special strip” of land. Similarly, a 

1970 Time article, “Palestine: A Case of Right v. Right,” which took its title from I. F. Stone’s controversial 1967 essay, quoted an Israeli 

labor leader stating a minority view that “the first thing we have to do is recognize that the Palestinian Arabs exist as an infant nation.”⁸² 

This narrative of two competing nationalisms would not gain currency in the United States again until the Palestinian intifada of the late 

1980s. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the outlines of Palestinian nationalism were slowly and faintly becoming visible through global 

analogies with contemporary liberation struggles, and through comparisons of the aspirations of a new generation of Arabs with those 

of the New Jews who founded Israel. This emergent narrative, however, remained a fragile construct that would disappear from main- 

stream American culture for many reasons, including the ongoing romance with the Israeli soldier, the staying power of Western stereo- 

types of Arabs’ Cold War alignments, the Palestinian turn to international acts of terrorism, and the easy access of the media to Israeli 

perspectives. 

Another factor that worked against the image of Palestinians in America was the overt effort by Israeli spokesmen and sympathetic 

journalists to undermine the revolutionary appeal of Palestinian resistance. Abba Eban protested that the guerrillas were not “fighting 

for freedom” but were in fact “fighters against freedom.” He explained that “the image that world opinion should have of them is not 

the image of Maquis, or resistance fighters, but the image of the S.S., the image of the guards at Auschwitz and at Bergen Belsen.”⁸³ 

When the prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, was asked about the significance of the new Palestinian fighting forces in the region, she 

responded dismissively that “there were no such thing as Palestinians” and that historically, “It was not as though there was a 

Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away 

from them. They did not exist.”⁸⁴ Meir acknowledged that the fedayeen were a new factor, but did not consider them important diplo- 

matically as part of a representative body of the Palestinian people. Between Eban and Meir, the Palestinian resistance was represented 

as both Nazi-like in its violent capacity and negligible in its political importance. 

Israeli government spokesmen used Vietnam analogies to belittle the competence of the fedayeen. Time quoted an Israeli officer dis- 

missing Palestinians as amateurs, even though he grudgingly conceded that Arafat had eluded capture several times. “We cannot dig- 

nify them with the name guerrilla or commando,” he claimed, for “the Arabs who cross over show no daring. In that respect they are 

nowhere near Viet Cong standards.”⁸⁵ Even Palestinian terrorism had paltry effects compared with attacks by the Viet Cong, as it took 

over a year for Palestinians to perpetrate the same number of attacks in Israel that Saigon had experienced in a few days. 

In an inverted mirror image of invincible yet vulnerable Israelis, Palestinian guerrillas appeared as both threatening and impotent. Al- 

though they had Nazi-like power to endanger Israel’s existence, they acted too ineffectually to breach Israel’s defenses or dampen its 

fortitude. “Anti-Israeli Guerrillas Are Mostly a Nuisance,” declared the headline of a story by Alfred Friendly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for 

his articles on the Six-Day War in the Washington Post. He cited an Israeli intelligence report that Palestinians broke down under interro- 

gation faster than members of any other resistance movement in history. Palestinians, in his view, did not present a modern alternative 

to the defeated Arab states. Instead, the fedayeen operated with the same degree of impotence and “opium dream” delusions, abetted 

by the “purple prose of the Western press.” Indeed, he deemed that Arabs from Baghdad to Algiers were gullible enough to believe that 

the fedayeen were “making Israeli soldiers bite the dust like Indians in a cowboy movie.”⁸⁶ What better way to highlight this delusion for 

American readers than to reverse the frontier roles of cowboys and Indians. 

“Israel is not Vietnam” meant to some American antiwar liberals that Palestinians were not struggling for self-determination as the 

Vietnamese were. Nothing annoyed Israelis more, wrote Philip Ben in the New Republic, than the “vague suggestion by foreigners” that 

Israel’s conquered territories were “akin to Vietnam, where bombs and ambushes are daily routine, and where the Israeli hold is shaky.” 

Israel succeeded in pacifying resistance, where Americans had failed. In contrast to Americans, who did not belong in Vietnam, Israelis 

believed that “if they wanted to stay alive in Tel Aviv, Haifa and West Jerusalem they had to conquer East Jerusalem, Jenin and Hebron. 

Now they have no alternative but to stay there.”⁸⁷ Rejecting analogies to Vietnam had the effect of recasting Israeli conquests as a strug- 

gle for survival. This narrative of the invincible victim prevailed over global counternarratives about colonial expansion, as did the 

wholesome image of the Israeli soldier fighting expertly—and with moral angst—for the survival of a tiny beleaguered nation. 

 

Barbarism versus Civilization 

 

The inverted mirror images contrasting Israeli heroism with Palestinian treachery became even more diametrically opposed when Pales- 

tinian terrorists began hijacking passenger jets. “Skyjacking” seized media headlines and shifted the geographical terrain of the Middle 

East conflict to a new global arena. The narrative of Palestinians as freedom fighters struggling against Israel’s anachronistic colonial 

occupation was soon eclipsed by a new narrative, one that evoked earlier images of Israel as a modernizing force in a backward region. 

The media recast the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis as an epic conflict between barbarism and civilization. As the 1970s pro- 

gressed, Palestinian nationalism became inseparable from international terrorism in the media, which represented the Palestinian ter- 

rorist, driven by murderous ideology, as the dark other of the idealized Israeli soldier, motivated by the will to survive. Israel was por- 

trayed as both the ultimate victim and the vanguard of defense against the forces of barbarism. Together with the United States, it safe- 

guarded Western values from a hostile world composed of Third World and communist nations. 

The PFLP shifted its armed struggle from local ground raids to the global arena of air travel in 1968, when it launched several attacks 

against flights operated by El Al, the Israeli national airline. Leaders of the group believed that these spectacular feats would draw the 

world’s attention to the cause of the Palestinians and would demonstrate their modernity by disrupting technologically advanced trans- 

portation and communication networks. As long as they attacked only the Israeli airline and released passengers alive, the American 

reaction was somewhat muted, for airline hijackings occurred frequently throughout the 1960s in the name of a variety of political and 

personal causes. This changed dramatically with the targeting of the first American jet plane. 

On September 6, 1970, members of the PFLP commandeered a TWA flight en route from Frankfurt to New York—forcing it to land 

with three other aircraft on an abandoned airfield in Jordan. The media was riveted on the desert scene. After six days, the hijackers 

evacuated the passengers and, in the words of Time magazine, “blew up $25 million worth of aircraft, in many ways the symbols of 

wealth and advanced technology.” The headline of the cover story in Time reveals the symbolism of this shocking episode: “The U.S. 

and the Skyjackers: Where Power Is Vulnerable.” The story emphasizes the impotence of advanced nations against a handful of lightly 

armed fanatics. Called “pirates of the sky,” they appear as though from an older era to force civilization into a “retrograde time ma- 

chine.” What made the desert scene so threatening was the “oddly terrifying juxtaposition of technology and barbarism,” and it gener- 

ated nostalgia for the time when civilization could retaliate against barbarous acts with impunity. In an interconnected nuclear world, 

wrote Time, President Nixon could no longer follow the lead of Thomas Jefferson, who once dispatched freighters “to clean out the Bar- 

bary pirates who menaced American trade in the Mediterranean.” Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, wanted the United States 

to return to an imaginary time of omnipotent power, when “an American could simply pin a little American flag on him and be safe even 

in the midst of a revolution in some other country, because the world knew that this country would go any place in the world to get back 

any citizen of ours.”⁸⁸ 

Skyjacking also ominously linked foreign terrorists to militants at home. The international revolutionary connections that inspired 

young radicals became bogeymen for law-and-order politicians. “The Palestinians’ tactics,” opined Time, “are analogous to the methods 

of radical bombers in the U.S. in the sense that both abandon law for what they regard as the higher authority of their revolution.” Both 

groups, “acting out of a sense of despair and powerlessness,” were willing to “wreck ‘the system’ ” in any way, even if it meant 

sacrificing the lives of bystanders. Time quoted an editorial from the Berkeley Tribe, an underground newspaper of the counterculture: 

“We are all the new barbarians. We are closer to the Palestinians than some like to admit. We are the people without the power in the 

world. Maybe soon, planes carrying very prominent international pigs like him [Reagan] will be hijacked from the U.S. to parts unknown. 

By, say, freaks.”⁸⁹ 

The image of barbarians confronting the civilized world burst onto prime-time TV during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, 

West Germany. On June 5, five Palestinian guerrillas from the Black September Organization invaded the dormitory housing Israeli ath- 

letes and coaches, killing two and taking nine others hostage. With dozens of sportscasters and journalists on the scene for the games, 

the nerve-wracking events were broadcast to millions of viewers as they unfolded in real time. Again and again, viewers watched a Pales- 

tinian terrorist peer over the apartment balcony with a ski mask covering his head and dark holes cut out for his eyes, like a death mask. 

His silent appearance punctuated wrenching human interest stories about the lives and families of each Israeli hostage. A day of tense 

negotiations culminated in an airport shootout after a botched rescue attempt. The guerrillas executed the remaining hostages by shoot- 

ing some and throwing a grenade under a helicopter holding others, and the German police killed five of the guerrillas. 

The Munich Massacre, as it became known, took on great symbolic power. This was the first time the Olympic Games had been held 

in Germany since Hitler hosted them in 1936. To overcome this dark history, the organizers had emphasized harmonious international 

cooperation over political conflict. They also aspired to efface the memory of the political controversy that had arisen during the 1968 

Olympics in Mexico City, when African American athletes had raised their fists in a Black Power salute during the medal ceremony as 

the U.S. national anthem played. The terrorist attack undermined the universal message of civilized competition among nations, and the 

German location evoked the particular history of Jewish extermination. 

Newspaper editorials denounced the killing of the Israelis as an attack on civilization itself. The murder at the Olympics plumbed 

“new depths of criminality,” wrote the New York Times: “Arab terrorists made it plain that their real target was civilized conduct among 

nations, not merely Israel.” The border between civilization and barbarism remained ambiguous for certain other American commen- 

tators, however, who drew parallels between the carnage at the Olympics and violence being perpetrated in Vietnam. For some, the hor- 

ror in full view in Munich was a reminder of the suffering that was hidden from view in Southeast Asia. “To condemn the obvious face 

of terror in Munich,” wrote Stephen Rosenfeld in the Washington Post, is to “blur the less conspicuous face of terror in Vietnam.” He 

found “scant moral difference between throwing a hand grenade into a helicopter carrying athletes and dropping a 30-ton load of bomb 

on a half mile-long swath of Vietnamese soil where peasants happen to live.” Only by halting its own terror in Vietnam, he opined, could 

America redeem its moral authority “to use its great but now-hobbled influence to limit terror elsewhere.” Another columnist called on 

Americans who felt “the horror the Israeli athletes must have felt” to “identify themselves with those on whom the American bombs are 

falling.”⁹⁰ 

This counternarrative connecting American imperialism to violence in the Middle East did not gain much purchase. More compelling 

for most Americans was the narrative of the existential threat to the Jewish people and the State of Israel, as exemplified by the murder 

of innocent athletes on German soil. Expressing the paradox of vulnerability and invincibility on a global scale, Prime Minister Golda 

Meir proclaimed Israel’s resolve to fight on a “farflung, dangerous and vital front-line” beyond its own borders, “to carry the war of ter- 

rorism back to the Arabs—guerrillas and host countries alike—and to strike at times and places of Israel’s own choosing.”⁹¹ The fierce- 

ness of Israeli reprisals briefly threatened again to blur the boundary between civilization and barbarism. In “Israel’s New War,” Time 

wrote that the Israeli air force extracted “savage revenge” for Munich, in raids on suspected guerrilla hideouts in which at least two hun- 

dred civilians were killed.⁹² In the United Nations, the Security Council voted to condemn Israel’s military actions, without mentioning 

Palestinian terrorism. But the United States vetoed the resolution, exercising its second veto in UN history, the first of many to follow 

on behalf of Israel. At stake, according to Ambassador to the UN George H. W. Bush, was something “much broader than that of the 

question of Israel and the Jews. What is involved is the problem of terrorism, a matter that goes right to the heart of our civilized life.”⁹³ 

The U.S. veto once again reinforced the contested boundary, with America leading the civilized world by defending Israel against the 

barbarism that was manifested not only by terrorism but also by the votes condemning Israel in the United Nations. 

In the aftermath of 1972, the interwoven image of Israel as both indomitable and vulnerable began to fray—once again and not for 

the last time. Israel’s aura of invincibility suffered a tremendous blow during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, when Egypt and 

Syria successfully coordinated surprise attacks on the territories Israel had conquered in 1967. Israel succeeded in beating back the 

offensive, but not without a massive airlift of fighter jets and weapons from the United States. The cost of victory to Israel was a high 

number of casualties and a disillusioned public with low morale. The aftermath of the war brought Israel and the United States closer 

together in policy and perception, as President Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger committed the United States to main- 

taining Israel’s military edge in the region and dramatically increased the level of military, financial, and diplomatic support. At the same 

time, Israel faced growing international isolation, especially among Third World nations at the United Nations, which invited Yasser 

Arafat, leader of the PLO, to address the General Assembly in 1974. 

During the same period, Americans were undergoing their own crisis of confidence as the divisive war in Vietnam staggered to an 

ignominious end, and the Watergate scandal forced out a president and revealed deep layers of government corruption. Both events 

challenged a core belief in American authority as a force for moral good at home and abroad. Some Americans resented the loss of this 

certitude and blamed it on the upheavals of the protest movements and the counterculture. Others pointed to the creed of American 

exceptionalism as the cause behind the devastation wreaked on millions of people in Southeast Asia. The image that best symbolized 

the mood of national humiliation was a chaotic helicopter evacuation from a rooftop in Saigon on April 28, 1975, while victorious North 

Vietnamese tanks rolled through the gates of the U.S. embassy. 

Conservative American intellectuals blamed the resulting spirit of defeatism not on the prosecution of an unjust and unwinnable war, 

but on cowardly acquiescence to criticism—criticism by the New Left at home, and by Third World nations in the United Nations. 

Pledging to resist the Third World in the international body, President Ford appointed as UN ambassador an outspoken Democrat and 

one of the original voices of neoconservatism: the pugnacious Daniel Patrick Moynihan.⁹⁴ 

On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly adopted a highly controversial resolution that declared Zionism to be “a form of 

racism and racial discrimination” and linked Israel with the pariah states of Rhodesia and South Africa for their “common imperialist 

origin” and “racist structure.” The vote split around Cold War and postcolonial lines, with 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstaining. 

Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to the resolution, and editorials across the nation unanimously condemned it as an anti- 

Semitic attack on the Jewish state. The resolution was also decried as an attack on the United States by Third World nations and their 

communist supporters. 

Ambassador Moynihan rose to the defense of Israel and simultaneously fortified the American values that appeared to be under fire. 

In a fiery speech to the General Assembly, Moynihan proclaimed that “this day will live in infamy,” quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s icon- 

ic phrase about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Such references to World War II served to tie America and Israel together as morally inno- 

cent victims besieged by evil forces. Moynihan called the resolution an “abomination of anti-Semitism” and declared that its intent was 

to grant “symbolic amnesty—and more—to the murderers of six million European Jews.” His fundamental argument was that Jews do 

not constitute a race, and the Jewish state includes non-Jewish citizens; therefore the Zionist movement that founded this state could 

not be racist. Moynihan’s speech restored the anticolonial narrative of Zionism as part of the modern “upsurge of national conscious- 

ness and aspiration” from nineteenth-century eastern Europe to contemporary Africa and Asia. Zionism “was to those persons of the 

Jewish religion a Jewish form of what today is called a national liberation movement.” Of all national movements, Zionism was “unique” 

and “singular,” claimed Moynihan, because it “defined its members not in terms of birth but of belief.” He concluded that only racists 

who consider Jews to be a race could consider Zionism to be racist.⁹⁵ 

To Moynihan the UN resolution represented nothing less than the decline of civilization. No “civilized person” could accept the 

equation of Zionism with racism, he declared, so “to think that it is an idea now endorsed by the United Nations is to reflect on what 

civilization has come to.” In opposition to this barbarism, his impassioned defense of Israel stood up for “civilized values that are or 

should be precious to all mankind.”⁹⁶ Moynihan not only revived the image of Israel as the invincible victim; he also advocated that 

America start seeing itself in the same light. In response to blatant anti-Semitic remarks by Idi Amin, president of Uganda, he impugned 

all African states with the charge of racism. He claimed that they had attacked Zionism only as a cover for their hatred for democratic 

states, of which Israel was one of a dwindling minority in the world. Moynihan similarly decried self-hating liberals at home, who “be- 

lieve that our assailants are motivated by what is wrong about us.” On the contrary, Americans, just like Israelis, “are assailed because 

of what is right about us. We are assailed because we are [a] democracy.”⁹⁷ 

While campaigning for the U.S. Senate a year later, Moynihan pointed to Israel as “a metaphor for the condition of democracy in the 

world today.” Israel’s vulnerability to annihilation exemplified the existential danger to all democracies “under siege” worldwide. Like the 

proverbial canary in the coal mine, Israel had long recognized this peril, which other democracies were only beginning to realize. Thus, 

he concluded that “to defend Israel is to defend liberty and democracy and therefore also to defend the United States.” He implied, in 

addition, that the United States should follow Israel’s lead in making itself militarily indomitable.⁹⁸ 

Moynihan’s UN speech was widely lauded for reviving American self-confidence. One television commentator explained that “the 

country is simply tired of feeling self-disgust,” accounting for the “joyous response to Moynihan’s passion and candor at the UN.” Ac- 

cording to another, Moynihan proved that America would “no longer accept ‘moral lectures from moral inferiors.’ ” People magazine de- 

scribed his appeal as that of a quintessentially American type, a “fighting Irishman” who talks tough.⁹⁹ Moynihan tried to buoy Amer- 

ica’s battered self-image with his strong defense of Israel. He exhorted Americans to see themselves in Israel’s image, as a bulwark of 

civilization that was perpetually imperiled by and victorious over the forces of barbarism—an amalgam of Third World bullies, terror- 

ists, totalitarians, and self-doubting leftists at home. 

Eight months after the speech, Israel dramatically enacted the role that Moynihan had praised it for with its astonishing foray to res- 

cue hostages from Entebbe, Uganda. Enthusiastic media coverage revitalized the portrait of Israel as an indomitable and righteous mili- 

tary power, defending beleaguered innocents and striking a blow for civilization. Americans basked in Israel’s glory, which struck some 

as a gift, coming as it did during lackluster bicentennial celebrations on July 4, 1976. 

On June 27, four hijackers, including members of West German and Palestinian radical groups, commandeered an Air France jet en 

route from Tel Aviv to Paris and forced it to fly to Uganda, where they were welcomed by dictator Idi Amin and joined by more guerrillas. 

The hijackers separated out the Israeli and Jewish passengers and held them in the airport terminal as hostages, releasing the others. 

After a week of frustrating negotiations, Israeli commandos surreptitiously flew three cargo planes to the Entebbe airport. Landing under 

cover of darkness, they stormed the terminal and shepherded over one hundred Israeli hostages onto the planes. In less than two 

hours, captives and commandos were on their way home, having lost only three hostages and one Israeli soldier, Jonathan Netanyahu, 

the young strike force commander who was the brother of future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israelis left in their wake 

seven slain terrorists, forty-five dead Ugandan soldiers, and eleven exploded Russian MiGs, a quarter of Amin’s air force. 

 

 

“An Israeli Superman Saves His People in Entebbe,” 1976. Cartoon by Tony Auth, Philadelphia Inquirer. 

 

The “spectacular rescue mission,” dubbed Operation Thunderbolt, electrified the American media. Journalists called it “extraor- 

dinarily daring,” a “courageous lightning raid,” and a “brilliant and heart-lifting victory over terrorism” that became an instant legend. 

News specials reconstructed blow-by-blow accounts that took on mythic dimensions and became etched in American popular culture. 

Bantam published William Stevenson’s 90 Minutes at Entebbe in record time, and half a dozen more books followed within a year. With- 

in weeks the press was abuzz with the “Entebbe Derby,” the rush to create films and TV specials. In addition to two American movies, 

an Israeli film was released in the United States by the director who would later make The Delta Force (1986), which featured a rescue 

scene based on Entebbe.¹⁰⁰ 

Accounts of Operation Thunderbolt reprised the glory of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, telling a similar story with the same 

vocabulary, such as “lightning strike” and “miracle.” In both cases, action trumped diplomacy. Going it alone with a surprise strike once 

again proved the impotence of international negotiations. Virile and sensitive Israeli soldiers were said to have sung haunting songs and 

read poetry in the belly of the cargo jet transporting them to Africa. The book 90 Minutes at Entebbe painted a picture of Israel’s people’s 

army: “soldiers with civilian jobs, pilots who were also university students; politicians with a taste for philosophy or archaeology.” And 

the enemy was presented in as contradictory a manner as in 1967. The German-led hijackers raised the specter of extermination by sepa- 

rating Jewish passengers from the others, yet along with the Ugandan armed forces, they appeared risibly incompetent. The depiction of 

young Jonathan Netanyahu as a martyr, sacrificing his life for others, and the loss of so few hostages demonstrated the exceptional 

value Israelis placed on human life.¹⁰¹ 

In 1967, after the Six-Day War, the conservative columnist William F. Buckley had applauded Israel for rescuing America from the 

antiwar movement, turning “our doviest doves into tiger sharks.” In 1976, commentators discovered in Operation Thunderbolt an anti- 

dote to the post-Vietnam malaise that clouded America’s bicentennial celebrations. Governor Ronald Reagan exclaimed that the Israelis 

“were acting like America used to act.” Editorials seized on the fact that the raid had occurred on the Fourth of July to reignite pride in 

the revolutionary heritage Israel shared with America—the plot of Exodus. Now terrorism took the place of the British Empire as the 

tyrant, and the Israelis showed the world “both why and how one must resist it.” In this spirit, an editorial in the New York Times called 

the raid an “effective declaration of independence from international blackmail, to which the ordinary rules of international law simply 

cannot apply.”¹⁰² 

“The Israeli Commando Force: Faceless, Swift, Deadly,” read a Washington Post headline. Israeli commandos had furtively crossed 

international borders to turn the tactics of terrorists against them in a spectacular act of salvation on a global stage. In flouting interna- 

tional law in the name of a higher cause and violating airspace beyond their borders, Israeli soldiers might have looked much like the 

very terrorists they were fighting. But they played the guerrilla in a redemptive register, validating the necessity, as the Post article put it, 

for “the afflicted [to] take the law into their own hands.” The drama of the stealthy sharpshooting Israeli commando appropriated the 

glamour that had for a short time been associated with defiant Palestinian fedayeen and Third World revolutionaries.¹⁰³ 

By 1976, the regional conflict of June 1967 had become globalized. Many Americans saw Israel’s mission in Africa as symbolizing the 

defeat, in the name of Western civilization, of a nightmare coalition of threats against America. Student radicals, Third World revolu- 

tionaries, terrorists, African dictators, all armed by the Soviets, represented the barbaric forces that threatened America as well as Israel, 

both at home and abroad. The introduction to 90 Minutes at Entebbe barely mentions Palestinians or Arabs. The book begins: “During 

the first hour of Sunday, July 4, 1976, a raiding party escaped from the heart of Africa with more than a hundred hostages held by a black 

dictator.” In most accounts, Amin becomes inseparable from the terrorists and is described as a “petty tyrant,” a “half-thug, half- 

buffoon,” standing in the way of freedom. Israeli soldiers did not simply rescue their own from Palestinian terrorists and European radi- 

cals. They saved white civilians, citizens of the civilized world, from the African heart of darkness.¹⁰⁴ 

The spectacle of victory over the Third World—of Israelis blowing up Soviet jet fighters before soaring out of Africa with freed cap- 

tives—con-trast- dramatically with the images of Americans fleeing in helicopters from the rooftops of Saigon. The efficiency and right- 

eousness of the raid epitomized a just alternative to America’s bumbling and brutal violence in Vietnam. Israeli commandos did more 

than free hostages held captive by terrorists in Uganda. Operation Thunderbolt also rescued America’s romance with the Israel Defense Forces. 

3

INVINCIBLE VICTIM

ON JUNE 8, 1967, three days into what Israel would later dub the Six-Day War, the New York Times published a feature on the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Yitzhak Rabin, with the headline Hero of the Israelis. Recounting Rabin’s rout of the Egyptian army from the Sinai Peninsula, the article identified him as the prototype of a fictional hero, the inspiration for Ari Ben Canaan in Leon Uris’s novel Exodus. Two weeks later, Life magazine repeated this claim in an article that included a photograph of Rabin in military uniform, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, gazing upward at the recently captured Western Wall in Jerusalem.¹

Rabin did not, in fact, serve as the model for Uris’s fictional hero, even though journalists may have thought the blue-eyed, sandy-haired and rugged commander looked the part.² Fiction, though, did provide journalists with a prototype for their heroic portrayal of the Israeli soldier in the 1967 war. The Exodus reference rendered the descriptor hero of the Israelis immediately legible as a deadly if reluctant warrior, equal parts muscle and morality. A popular and enduring narrative of the war followed the equally familiar plot of plucky David trouncing a lumbering Goliath, in the form of the Israel Defense Forces overcoming the threat of annihilation from surrounding Arab armies.

The Six-Day War is commonly considered the turning point in the special relationship between the United States and Israel. The small nation’s lightning victory and righteous cause appealed to a nation embroiled in the Vietnam War, and Americans en masse fell in love with Israel. The enthusiastic media found a measure of relief in the switch from Vietnam to the Mideast, wrote Variety magazine. Heroes and villains seemed easier to come by, and colorful characters abounded, right out of central casting. Tapping into nostalgia for the moral clarity and decisive outcome of World War II, the Arab-Israeli conflict fulfilled the dreams of those who yearn wistfully for wars that were, and Israel’s blitz tactics doubtless produced the desired catharsis.³

The Israeli heroes of the June war may have leapt from the silver screen of Exodus to distract Americans from their own quagmire in Southeast Asia. But the war’s final outcome did not mesh with the view of Israel’s founding as an anticolonial act. On June 5, 1967, after a tense three-week standoff with Egypt, Israel launched an attack that obliterated the Egyptian air force and in a few hours essentially decided the course of the war. That day, even as Israel’s leaders announced that the country would not seek to expand its territory, its army hurtled forward on three fronts.⁴ Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. One million Palestinians came under Israel’s military rule, as it quadrupled the extent of the territory under its control.

The belief that Israel had narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat became the common-sense understanding not only of the war’s chronology but also of the nation’s existential state. Yet in the years immediately following the war, as Israel tightened its control over the lands and people it had conquered, a global counternarrative emerged about Israeli colonialism, a narrative that framed the rise of Palestinian nationalism as a Third World revolutionary movement and linked Israel not with anticolonial struggles but with American imperial power in Vietnam. Mainstream commentators across the political spectrum, not just on the radical left, expressed unease with Israel as an occupying power. Israel’s old-fashioned military triumph, which seemed so appealing at first, occurred at a moment in history when territorial expansion conflicted with the global trend toward decolonization. This, too, is one of the enduring legacies of the Six-Day War.

After Palestinian resistance groups turned to violent acts of international terrorism in the 1970s, and the Cold War intensified the conflict between the United States and Third World nations, a new narrative gained currency that united Israel and America as leaders in a global war of civilization against barbarism. It came to displace the counternarratives of Israeli colonialism in the U.S. press and mainstream discourse. Ten years after the Six-Day War, pro-Israel narratives did not simply supplant critical ones; rather, the paradoxical—and heroic—image of Israel as an invincible victim became hegemonic in the United States—precisely when Israel came to offer Americans a mirror in which to understand their post-Vietnam role in the world.

Romancing the Israeli Soldier

In the narrative that emerged from the Six-Day War, Israel came to appear both vulnerable and invincible at the same time, at risk of destruction yet militarily indomitable. Its Arab enemies were portrayed as the inverse: formidable enough to obliterate an entire nation, yet incapable of matching Israel’s military forces on the battlefield. That story begins with Egypt, aligned with Syria, threatening Israel’s existence by closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, ousting UN peacekeeping forces, moving troops to the border, and signing a defense pact with Jordan. After three weeks of impotent international diplomacy, during which no one comes to its aid, Israel launches a preemptive attack in self-defense, crushes the menacing armies, and seizes vast swaths of territory for its own protection. The story ends with Israel’s military forces miraculously achieving victory against all odds.

Evidence of Israel’s military preeminence did not influence the impression of extreme vulnerability presented in this narrative. On May 24, 1967, New York Times correspondent James Reston reported that Egypt’s army could not match Israel’s armed forces in quality or preparedness. Two days before the war, he reported from Cairo that Egypt, under President Gamal Nasser, does not want war and it is certainly not ready for war. Reporting from Tel Aviv on the second day of the war, Reston noted the exhilaration over the initial defeat of Egypt, and he wrote that the Israelis had to fight to save the existence of their country. This is clear on any objective analysis of Nasser’s political and military moves.⁵ The perception of Israel’s existential peril grew even more amplified after its total triumph. A week after the war’s end, Life magazine editorialized that only the word astonishing could describe how tiny Israel stood in the role of victor over the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to exterminate her. The same editorial stated that the tremendous discrepancy between the competence of Israeli and Arab armies is the most obvious fact from the start. The fact of military imbalance did not make Israel’s victory any less astonishing in the American press.⁶

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