The implications behind burning the US flag at anti-Israel protests - opinion

There is one bet you can make with 100 percent certainty in the strange landscape of American public life since October 7. If you attend a pro-Israel rally, you will see people flying American flags. If you attend an anti-Israel rally, you won’t. In fact, you might see them being torn down or burned. 

What is missing from the current discourse regarding Israel and American interests goes beyond the geopolitical realm to the civilizational importance of the Jewish state. 

Jerusalem, and all it represents, serves as the wellspring for Western civilization and a bulwark against encroaching Islamism, Russian and Chinese expansionism, and myriad other powers aligned against the fundamental values of the West. 

While this fact about the flag may seem small, it testifies to the broader ideological clash undergirding the present moment. Israel is, and forever will be, an emblem of Western civilization, and those who seek to destroy it do so out of broader-sweeping ambitions aimed against the very foundations of Western civilization, often gilded in artifacts from Palestinian American Edward Said’s post-colonial thesis. 

The core axiom at play here lies in a firm belief that any imprint the West leaves on the world is for ill. This central conviction tethers together the strange bedfellows of the global Marxist Left and the global jihad, leading to sites like gay men in crop tops sporting keffiyehs in Washington, DC.  

But, perhaps the most important and so far overlooked aspect of this phenomenon lies in the very identity of the Near East – and Israel’s vital role therein. No one understood what this region meant to Western civilization better than the Lebanese diplomat and principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Charles Malik. 

In his words, “If a circle is drawn on the map with Beirut or Damascus or Jerusalem as its center and with a radius of about 900 miles, this circle will pretty nearly comprise the whole of the Near East... Western civilization is an offshoot, in diverse modes of relevance, of what was revealed, apprehended, loved, suffered, and enacted in these 10 cities or in their hinterlands...”  

What is happening to Western civilization?

In other words, without this region and the revelations there unfurled, there is no Western civilization. What is Rome without Jerusalem? 

For many decades, the West has had the privilege of forgetting the well from which it springs and taking for granted the intellectual and cultural skeleton upon which it rests. But what happens when enemies, foreign and domestic, and a cohort of useful idiots take a sledgehammer to that foundation?

While you can ignore it when it’s sturdy, you notice it once it is gone. 

The fact that hundreds of people congregated in New York City in blatant allegiance to Hamas, vandalizing US monuments with phrases such as “Hamas is comin’” and with the infamous upside-down triangle denoting a target for al-Qassam shows the depth and breadth of the problem. 

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who exploit the liberties and prosperity of a free society to dismantle them from the inside. They have come to believe that the system they grew up benefiting from is evil and oppressive, making common cause with the supreme leader of Iran and his myriad terror tentacles from the Houthis to Hezbollah. 

The current conflict in Israel and the response from large swaths of America have underscored an endemic issue: America has forgotten how to tell its own story – the story rooted in what Malik called the “Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian” cumulative tradition – or articulate what is so special about this set of values and what sets it apart from its rivals. 

The ideas inherent to this great story, the one that starts in Athens and Jerusalem and takes shape in Rome and Paris, and all the other great cities of the West, deserve to be defended. 

The commitment to human dignity and the sanctity of the individual human person; faith in what is higher than man – God, beauty, good; belief in objective truth and the constant search to find it; respect for reason as a means of doing just that; recognition of human limitations, the primacy of love, and the possibility of redemption; and the rule of law as an essential means to protecting life and liberty – these core convictions have propelled the West, despite its many foibles and failures, toward the freest and most prosperous societies to ever exist.

While several political leaders across the spectrum have articulated the national security and geopolitical interests at stake in defending our ally Israel, no one has compellingly told the story on the civilizational level.

The people who hate Israel, domestically and abroad, hate the United States more vigorously because they know what we have forgotten: The ancient land of Israel, the improbable survival of the Jewish people, and the values and stories they transmitted through generations are essential to the West’s identity. 

Israel is our greatest ally, not just because it provides vital intelligence information, a counterbalance to Iran, or a safe haven to religious minorities fleeing radical Islamism, but because its enemies are our enemies, and the story of the West owes everything to the story of Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, and Galilee.

The writer is director of the Charles Malik Institute at the Philos Project. She researches terrorism and political violence, at the University of St. Andrews, and regularly publishes on issues related to culture, religion, and foreign policy.