Should this come as any sort of surprise? Israel is the epitome of just about everything the left hates. It is one of the few, if not the last, remaining westernized nations that has continued to preserve its identity as a nation founded on religious faith, with a particular cultural identity, and the willingness to use overwhelming deadly force to protect their way of life. They have convictions and principles. The left has been busy tearing down western civilization in Europe and the United States, but thus far their campaign against Israel has been rather ineffectual.
Worse still, the rightness of the western way of life in Israel stands in stark contrast to the disaster that is, with exception of perhaps Jordan, the rest of the middle east. It shows, on the national scale, what they deny on the individual scale; that there is a definite right and wrong. There are moral truths and moral absolutes. The left hates this fact, because they don't want there to be right and wrong. They want choices and carte blanche to do anything they desire free from the judgment of others, regardless of the cost to society. Israel has walled itself off from the corrupting influence of other societies and ways of life in order to preserve its own.
Of course, that is not vilify the left entirely. Their ideology comes from a place of kindness and, chiefly, a desire to get along with everyone. They are idealists and dreamers that never grew up or still have yet to grow up. The younger generations have an excuse; it is their natural inclination to be idealistic. They have not the life experience necessary to make informed decisions about such things, but the older members should know better. But, there is a reason that they don't know better, because they cannot measure the value of culture due to the simple fact that they have none. They espouse a multicultural society largely because they live in them already in the cities and suburbs, and a multicultural society is, in effect, no culture. When the values of a specific culture go unenforced within your own community, they cease to be values, and values are inherent to culture. The only value that I can discern from multicultural populations is: self-interest.
It is one thing, give them credit for it, that Muslims across the world are aware of. Thus, from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the ethnic sections of Bradford, England, they resist mixing with other cultures in order to preserve their own. It is also why their culture and civilization will probably outlast ours.
The GOP love affair with Israel is, in part, an extension of its support for the Christian Right, who support Israel for religious reasons of their own, and because the Arab side of the issue has lost credibility in America since 9/11.
The issue is not cut and dried. On the one hand, Israel was created because of the Jewish demand for a piece of the World's turf, and one that, to boot, they had a historic claim to. And their demand gained even greater legitimacy after WWII, because during that time, the US and Western Europe shut themselves and Palestine off to Jewish immigration, allowing millions of Jews to be murdered by the Nazis. None of this is debatable, no matter what the lunatic Holocaust Deniers say.
On the other hand, within its present borders (it's 1948 territory plus the Golan Heights, all of Jerusalem, and the West Bank Occupied Territories, and the Gaza Strip), Israel will, in this century, have an Arab majority, even if every Jew in the US and Russia emigrated to Israel (and assuming that Israel could absorb such a wave). This would mean, ultimately that either (A) Israel would ultimately be governed by Arabs, or (B) Israel would have to resort to imposing some form of "second-class citizenship" on its Arab peoples. The first alternative is not really acceptable to Israel and to World Jewry, while the second would not be acceptable to the whole of the International community (no matter how hypocritical in some circles), and it would be impossible for the United States to support.
The wild card in this is Benjamin Netanyahu, who I have utter contempt for; he has attempted to interfere in our politics directly in a way that no foreign leader that I can think of has attempted. "Bibi" is the fly in the ointment and the reason relations with Israel have become increasingly tense; the only mitigating factor for Bibi is that American politicians are part of his interference as well, as they hate Obama enough to side with a foreign leader against their own President, which is more shameful than anything Bibi has done.
Israel's continuing construction of settlements in the West Bank is as counterproductive as can be. That's the territory they are going to have to give back someday, but Bibi keeps building there for domestic political reasons. It's not "anti-Israel" to suggest that the West Bank settlements are, long-term, untenable, and not in the interest of a JEWISH state (which Israel is, was meant to be, and should be). I do hope that Bibi's time is not long, and that a more honest, reasonable PM can carry on more constructively with America, and with the world.
