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June 13, 2002, 8:45 a.m. They Were Victims Once When the American Left turned on Israel. By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

he Six Day War between Israel and its Arab enemies ended on June 10, 1967, with a massive Jewish victory that included the extension of Israeli control over the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, along with the Sinai peninsula. It was just a week, but what a tremendous week it was. In a massive sweep through territories illegally occupied by Jordan for the preceding 19 years, the Jewish army returned to Judea and Samaria — the biblical heartland; Jerusalem, capital of the previous two Jewish commonwealths, was once again in Jewish hands; Jews returned to Hebron, where their 3,000-year presence had been extinguished by murderous Arab mobs in 1929; Gamla, on the Golan Heights, which fell to the Romans in 67 A.D., returned to Jewish sovereignty exactly 1900 years later.

Most commentators prior to that week expected that Israel would be swept away when faced with the combined forces of the Soviet-backed Arab states. Instead, every Arab state that used territories under its control for aggression against Israel lost that territory, and Israeli tank divisions were a precious few kilometers from both Damascus and Cairo. The world community was stunned. Jews around the world, including behind the Iron Curtain, breathed a sigh of relief and raised their heads a little higher.

June 1967 was also the month that the self-described "progressive" left in America began abandoning Israel and that the American conservatives embraced her.

Simcha Dinitz, a former parliamentarian from the Labor party and one-time CEO of the World Zionist Organization, was sent to run Israeli public relations in America following the 1967 Six Day War. According to Dinitz, who was interviewed on Israeli television last week, the liberals in the United States preferred an Israel that was weak and needy — a perpetual, objectified victim. On the other hand, Dinitz said, the conservatives saw Israel defeat Soviet-backed Arab states on three separate fronts and reached the conclusion that the Jewish state was an ally to be counted on. Political alliances switched almost overnight, throwing American Jews for a loop.

To illustrate the problem Israel faced at that moment, Dinitz told the story of a speech he gave in 1967 to a group of American liberals who had traditionally supported Israel in the past. He was forced to explain to them that Israel's impressive victory had not transformed it from a David into a Goliath. Rather, he told the assembled liberals, we are David after he beat Goliath. Had David lost, Dinitz said, he would only have merited two lines in the Bible; he is David the King precisely because he defeated Goliath. After the speech, an activist with the Democratic party approached him and said, "That's all very well and good, but how can we support you when you are so close with the Republicans and Nixon?"

The new alliances have remained steadfast until today. Last week it was announced that former executive director of the conservative Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, is taking part in a Stand For Israel campaign to strategically mobilize leadership and grassroots support in the Christian community for the State of Israel. And, for the most part, it ain't fans of Rush Limbaugh taking part in the "Justice for Palestine" hate-fests on college campuses across the United States.

Of course, this history should not in any way surprise traditional conservatives. Liberals like victims. They need them. And this cult of victimhood has not passed over American foreign relations. For American liberals, Israel came to represent, in the international arena, what Dinesh D'Souza, Justice Clarence Thomas, or Alan Keyes represent in the domestic arena: minorities who refuse the mantle of victimhood. What kind of a self-respecting victim has his own television show, or sits on the Supreme Court, or launches cutting edge spy satellites into space (as Israel recently did)? Without victims, liberals lose their raison d'etre — not to mention their voter base. Jews, or the Jewish state, refusing to act the part of the victim are unwelcome among leftist intellectuals, who obscenely treat any act of Israeli self-defense as "internalized oppression" that Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

That may explain why liberals are so anxious to see Israel returned to what the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, called the "Auschwitz borders" of pre-1967. That may also explain knee-jerk liberal support for the Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, who appear by all standards to be victims — even if it is mostly due to their own leadership, their own hatred and their fellow Arabs.

— Nissan Ratzlav-Katz is opinion editor at www.IsraelNationalNews.com