Update: I should add something else to this analysis of Ayn Rand’s support of Israel, which is a major point held against her by both the left and some of the right.
I’ve always seen this supoort as a personal blind-spot, understandable in the context of her life and times. But there is a conspiracy theory that paints her in a darker light, claiming she was part of a Soviet counter-intelligence outfit called The Trust, set up to penetrate Western societies and subvert them ideologically.
“Israel looms large in the ARI mind. A recent Google search for “Israel” on their website listed 178 pages. [1] Israel was not so important to Ayn Rand: there is only one mention of Israel in all her written work. It occurs in “The Lessons of Vietnam,” The Ayn Rand Letter, dated August 26, 1974 but – the Letter being behind schedule – written in May 1975. The essay is reprinted in The Voice of Reason, published after her death.
At the time she wrote this essay the U.S. had just abandoned South Vietnam, which immediately fell to the North Vietnamese, who were backed by communist China. We will examine her mention of Israel in a moment, but since she will use the slippery term “isolationism” we first quote an earlier paragraph to make her reference clear:
“Observe the double-standard switch of the anti-concept of ‘isolationism.’ The same intellectual groups … who coined that anti-concept in World War II – and used it to denounce any patriotic opponent of America’s self-immolation – the same groups who screamed that it was our duty to save the world (when the enemy was Germany or Italy or fascism) are now rabid isolationists who denounce any U.S. concern with countries fighting for freedom, when the enemy is communism and Soviet Russia.”Thus the Leftists, for such were all these “intellectual groups,” are inconsistent. They denounce the patriotic isolationists of WW II (Ayn Rand was one) and yet praise the new isolationists of the Cold War. In her next paragraph she castigates these new isolationists, and maintains that, contrary to them, the U.S. may properly aid another country if (to add a condition she makes elsewhere in the essay) such aid really is in the interests of America.
The next paragraph laments that this new isolationism plays on the American public’s legitimate anger over Vietnam, thus making the U.S. government afraid to get involved in foreign wars “not agreeable to Soviet Russia.” Now comes the part concerning Israel:
“The first intended victim of the new isolationism will probably be Israel—if the ‘antiwar’ efforts of the new isolationists succeed. (Israel and Taiwan are the two countries that need and deserve U.S. help—not in the name of international altruism, but by reason of actual U.S. national interests in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.)” The time she wrote the above, 1975, is important, because the context of her knowledge is important. And it turns out that that knowledge was incomplete and inaccurate. The above quote, as we shall show, is not Ayn Rand’s philosophy, it is an innocent misapplication of it.”
……….Evidently – for we believe Ayn Rand was consistent – in 1975 she thought that foreign aid to Israel was in the interest of the U.S., that it was not an act of national self-sacrifice.
Specifically, judging from her answers to questions at talks she gave around this time, she supported Israel for two reasons. She believed that without U.S. support, Russia – which was supporting the Arabs – would control the Mediterranean and its oil. And she saw the fight between Israel and the Arabs as a fight between civilized men and savages.”
…… When Ayn Rand spoke at the Ford Hall Forum she frequently got asked about Israel – whose supporters are anything if not vociferous – during the question and answer periods, which were open to any question. Her reply would go along the following lines: I support Israel; though Israel is a socialist country, in that region of the world Israel is the vanguard of civilization.
In other words, the gray of Israel is white compared to the surrounding near-black of Arabia. There is something to be said for that kind of argument, but of course it fails when the gray gets dark enough. Did Ayn Rand know how dark Israel really was? The year she wrote her essay, 1975, was long before Israeli torture came to light in the 1993 New York Times exposé, over ten years after her death. 1975 was long before Israel’s massacre of Beirut in 1982, the year of her death. [3]
Ayn Rand thought that Israel was America’s ally. Did she know how treacherous Israel really was? 1975 was long before the exposure of the Pollard Affair in 1985, three years after her death. Not to mention the USS Liberty attack (though it occurred in 1967 it was not made public until 1980), and many other acts by Israel against America. [4] And long before the publication of such exposés as Victor Ostrovsky’s By Way of Deception (1990) and Ari Ben-Menashe’s Profits of War (1992).
It is far more probable that Ayn Rand was ignorant of Israel’s brutality and deceit than that she thought Israel’s brutality and deceit were comparatively unimportant..“