The countries of the West have tended to take the side of Israel against that of its Arab neighbors from 1948 onwards. This is particularly true of the United States, and, to a lesser extent, this is also somewhat more true of the English-speaking countries than of some of the other Western nations.
It might be felt that this requires an explanation. After all, Israel only came into existence in 1948, and there were people living in that part of the world already. Isn't this just a case of aggression and territorial conquest, pure and simple?
Of course, the first part of an explanation consists of pointing out the "elephant in the room", as the saying goes.
1948, the year in which the State of Israel was founded, is just three years after 1945 - the year in which the Second World War ended.
The world paid a terrible price to bring Nazi aggression, as well as Imperial Japanese aggression and Italian Fascist aggression, to an end. It would be an understatement to say that feelings towards Germany and its Nazi regime were quite strong at the time.
The world had been aware, from Hitler's speeches, and his infamous book Mein Kampf, as well as some of the actions of the Nazi regime, such as the Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938, and the Nuremberg Laws, that hatred of Jews was a prominent feature of Nazism. But this still had not prepared the world for the shock of uncovering the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps in the closing days of the war.
One of the first concentration camps to be liberated by Allied forces was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; this took place on April 15, 1945. Starting with the initial news coverage of this event, the awareness of the nature of the Holocaust had a significant effect on the entire Western world.
Prior to World War II, racial bigotry, even if deplored by a few, was generally taken for granted as an inevitable part of the human condition, and was accepted or acquiesced in by nearly everyone in the dominant group at least to some extent.
It was the combined effect of the shocking and horrific nature of the Holocaust, and the fact that no one felt any reason to make excuses for Germany at the time, that led to a great many people at least beginning to ask themselves if, just maybe, racism was a problem people should do something about.
One dramatic illustration of this from more recent history is the failed Presidential bid of Reverend Jesse Jackson. When a prominent black religious leader, Louis Farrakhan, was cited in news reports as having made bigoted remarks about Jews, such as calling Judaism a "gutter religion", while Jackson did condemn those remarks, because his reaction had not been an immediate, categorical, and absolute utter repudiation and denunciation of Farrakhan, his prospects of winning the Democratic Presidential nomination essentially evaporated overnight.
Of course, even in 1984, there were plenty of white Americans who would never have considered voting for a black man as their President. But there were others who did not feel this way, which was the reason the Rev. Jessie Jackson had genuine prospects of a successful Presidential bid. But because the Holocaust was, to a large extent, the reason that this was the case, by and large they were far more sensitive to any form of anti-Semitism than to racism directed against black people. This is why even a slight perception of being "soft" on anti-Semitism would immediately destroy a black politician's base of support among white people.
However, this is not the only factor at work. Sympathy for the sufferings of the Jewish people is a strong force, but it still can only get you so far. By itself, it isn't going to lead to the conclusion that we ought to take somebody else's land away from them in order to give it to Jewish refugees, whatever their plight.
Thus, we have to look more closely at the history of the region, to see why Western public opinion concluded that the Israeli narrative of these events basically coincided with the actual facts.
To start with, no one was proposing that the Arab population of Palestine be expelled in order to create room for an influx of Jewish refugees. Yes, Jews would be settled in Palestine, but if they wanted land for housing or to farm, they would have to buy it like anyone else.
There are two other factors that ought to be considered, though, before we conclude that there was nothing to be objected to.
For one thing, newcomers to a country, and their descendants, become voting citizens in time. If enough people, belonging to a different culture, a different faith, come to a country, then its laws will change, and likely become less suited to the culture and customs of the land's original inhabitants. I mean, this is one of the basic reason why people in a number of Western countries are currently making a fuss about the immigration policies of mainstream parties, and are starting to turn to extremist right-wing parties in increasing numbers.
For another, there was an issue regarding land tenure in Palestine. Before it became a British Mandate, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Before the Turkish conquest, the Palestinian Arabs farmed land that belonged to them. But afterwards, while they continued to farm, they paid rent to Turkish landlords for the land they farmed. When Zionist settlers bought land to establish settlements, naturally they bought that land from its legal owners; the consequence of this was that the Arab farmers who fed themselves from that land were now displaced. One can, I suppose, think of this as analogous to that modern plague of the "condo conversion".
Be that as it may, because the response to Jewish settlement in Palestine in its earliest stages involved deadly violence against Jewish settlers, long before it posed any genuine threat to the existing population, Western support fell squarely behind the Jewish settlers.
Given that in several Muslim-majority countries, including Egypt and Pakistan, members of non-Muslim minorities living there do not enjoy the equal protection of the laws, and this has led to young women from these communities being kidnapped by men who then claim these women have voluntarily converted to Islam and married them, naturally this has led to the conclusion that life under Muslim majority rule would be a nightmare for anyone else, one which the Western world refuses to impose on the Jewish people of Israel.
And immediately after the United Nations, in response to violence against Jewish settlers in Palestine, proclaimed the partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel, the armies of the surrounding states descended on the new nation of Israel in what appeared to be a war of extermination, one which the Israelis miraculously managed to survive.
Israel's early political leaders, such as Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir, made it abundantly clear that Israel was an enlightened democracy which did not discriminate against Israeli residents of Arab descent, giving them full equal rights as citizens.
A famous advertisement that appeared on the sides of buses in many American cities showed how the extent of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land increased over time. While the intent of this map was to garner sympathy for the Palestinian cause, each increase in Jewish territory shown on that map followed attacks on the Jewish people of Israel; the attacks on Jewish settlers in Palestine that led to the partition of Palestine, the war that followed the creation of Israel, the Six-Day War, which resulted from an Egyptian arms buildup which raised the distinct possibility of Egypt being able to carry out another war of extermination against Israel; and then the intifada that took place more recently.
Of course, though, various causes, such as a corruption scandal, and fatigue from the constant attacks Israel suffered, led to Israel electing Menachem Begin as Prime Minister. Relations between Western countries and Israel began to cool off under Likud, particularly after Israel authorized settlements in the West Bank which were in violation of the historic Camp David peace accords.
But the U.S. commitment to the survival of Israel and its right to exist remained unshaken despite this.
And then, of course, came the event that solidified Western public opinion concerning the conflict in the Middle East and similar issues.
I am, of course, speaking of the deadly terrorist attack which took place on September 11, 2001 on the soil of the United States itself.
Of course, this was the act of a single terrorist group; the entire Arab world, let alone the entire Muslim world, was hardly responsible for it.
And then, from the 20th to the 23rd of November, 2002, primarily in the Kaduna state of Nigeria, Muslim mobs stirred up by agitators murderously attacked non-Muslims because they were offended by a slighting reference in a newspaper to the objections of conservative Muslim clerics to the Miss World pageant planned to have been held in Nigeria.
This meant, which, strange to relate, many Westerners actually found surprising, that the attacks of September 11, 2001 did not result in every Muslim in the world having enaged in deep soul-searching to root out any inclination or temptation to commit terrorist acts. The rioters in Nigeria were even ordinary people, not trained members of terrorist organizations.
This had a further strongly negative impact on how the West viewed the Muslim world. People asked "How could this happen?", and, rather than recognizing (and remembering from many past events that had appeared in news reports in the West) how distressingly common what India euphemistically calls "communal violence" was in Third World countries, carried out by people belonging to many different faiths, including Hindus in India, many of them came to the conclusion that the Muslim faith itself must turn at least some of its adherents into murderous monsters - which, of course, hardly boded well for any balanced consideration of the situation of the Palestinian people.
And the simple reason why the Western reaction to this event tended to take this form... is because the typical Westerner does not live in the Third World and is therefore not naturally familiar with how things are there.
Another factor is that in most Western countries, until very recently, immigrants from majority-Muslim countries and their descendents were a vanishingly small and nearly invisible minority.
On the other hand, dating as far back as the Middle Ages, people of Jewish origin and faith had been a significant minority in most Western countries, and, over the centuries, they had made incalculable contributions to the arts and sciences in those countries.
To even begin to make a list of those who had done so seems like an absurd task, as I will illustrate with a tiny list of a very few of the names of some examples:
Natalie Portman, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Barbra Streisand, Felix Mendelsohn, Georg Cantor, Albert Einstein, W. F. Friedman.
Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Jascha Heifetz, Itzahk Perlman, Sigmund Freud, David Geffen, Jonas Salk, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Johnny Wayne, Frank Shuster, Carl Sagan, Franz Kafka, Tom Stoppard, Marc Chagall, Herb Alpert, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Lewis, Julio Iglesias, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, William Shatner, Paul Newman, Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig, Paula Abdul.
John von Neumann, Leonhard Euler, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, Mikhail Botvinnik, Garry Kasparov, Paul Ehrlich, Norbert Wiener, Emile Berliner, Leo Szilard, Max Born, Edwin Land, Betty Friedan, Hedy Lamarr, Hyman Rickover, Dennis Gabor, Emmy Noether, Seymour Papert, Adi Shamir, Leonard M. Adleman, Eugene Wigner.
None the less, the Western media still reported on the excesses of Israel's response to the terrorist attack of October 7, 2025.
And then, on December 14, 2025 a mass shooting took place in Australia's Bondi Beach which was inspired by the fanatical terrorist organization known as Islamic State, ISIS, or Daesh.
The last time most of the Western world had heard of Bondi Beach was when it was learned that the color of the first iMac, from August 15, 1998, was called "Bondi Blue" because it was inspired by the color of the waters of that beach.
At this point, once again because this time it was our ox that was gored, public sympathy and concern for the civilians of the Gaza Strip began to evaporate or be muted. Of course, this is not just, but it is none the less to be expected.