What about Israel?

I can never really make up my mind about Israel.

There is not the least reason of objective national interest for the US to uphold the cause of Israel in any degree, at all.

In fact, reasons of that kind all militate in favor of the US abandoning Israel to its own devices.

The cards have fallen out that way since 1948, for cryin’ out loud.

Any fool can see it.

There is this matter of oil, and the Israelis have none of it but their Arab enemies have lots.

And then there is the moral argument.

The opponents of Israel point out with perfect justice that “the Zionist entity” is a late-blooming and last vestige of 19th Century European colonialism.

With almost equal justice – well, some, anyway – they tell us Western support for Israel is a re-run of Western support for the crusader-state, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in the Middle Ages, going awry only so far as no Christian power in those days would have lifted a finger to uphold a state whose job was to provide a safe place for the Jews, and so far as the modern attempt has proved somewhat quixotic.

Should not the mid-20th Century political morality of decolonization that drove much of US policy in the post WWII period have led us, and lead us now, to oppose rather than support Israel?

The claim based on Jewish ancestors having their own kingdom in Palestine 2,000 years ago obviously cut no ice against the claim of the Muslim Arabs living there up to 1948.

The claim based on German guilt for the Holocaust was hardly relevant, since Palestine was not German territory, was not administered by any German ally, and was not Germany’s to give.

The claim of the Jews based on Lord Balfour’s declaration of 1917 – he more or less representing the British Empire, the colonial power then in control of Palestine – was and is surely no better than the claim of the pied-noirs to rightfully hold Algeria as their own country because France, the colonial power controlling that area since 1831, said they did.

The claim of the Jews based on the failure of the Occident as a whole to stop Germany’s horrifically successful attempt to make Europe Judenrein supposes there was a moral duty to do that by whatever means necessary.

There was clearly no legal duty.

And few will accept there was a moral duty beyond those who, today, suppose a like duty making it incumbent upon America to rescue any people, anywhere, not only from genocide in particular but from any horror at the hands of their rulers or any others.

But even our progressive, post-WWII, post-colonialist political morality accepts that countries founded and dominated by settler populations in which not too many indigenous people live on at all or in significant political subjection have as good a right to exist as any other, even if (as was not always the case) the country at the outset was in some measure created by crime against a native population.

Or anyway I would rather it did, given we have to pay attention to such nonsense as morality at all.

So let it pass that despite the claims of those who hate it Israel has as much and as good a right to exist as any other modern state.

That still leaves open the question why America ought to spend a penny or risk the bones of a single Connecticut grenadier to support or protect the Jewish State, though arguments of national interest powerfully urge us not to.

To spite the Muslims does not seem a good enough reason.

Nor that if we don’t they will gloat they shouted in our faces and we backed down.

At least I don’t think so.

Least of all if the grenadier is my own grandchild, say.

I was not, after all, much impressed with the like arguments when conservatives made them in support of the Vietnam War.

And I am not in retrospect.

Though it was a dismal thing to see, all those helicopters carrying people from the US embassy rooftop in Saigon to aircraft carriers not far off shore, fleeing the successful Communists.

Those pictures of sailors pushing empty choppers that would not be able to make a return trip off the decks and into the sea to make room for more choppers, full of refugees, to land were heart-breaking.

All the same, I opposed that war until it ended, demonstrating, writing to newspapers and politicians, and so on.

All the same.

(And though I was cheered when the Vietnamese Communists invaded Cambodia to put an end to the mad reign of Pol Pot and save the Cambodian people, despite the opposition of Henry Kissinger, always a man to meddle stupidly and at great cost to people other than himself in Asia.)