Ayn Rand on Israel
Israel looms large in the ARI mind. A recent Google search for “Israel” on their website listed 214 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.
Many times Ayn Rand praised isolationism in its old-fashioned, America First, sense. For example, in her essay “The Chickens Homecoming” (reprinted by her in The New Left) she attacked
“the premises that we owe a duty to the rest of the world, that we are responsible for the welfare of any nation anywhere on earth, that isolationism is selfish, immoral and impractical in a ‘shrinking’ modern world, etc.”
Her attack is applicable not only to Europe and Vietnam but to any country.
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.
Ayn Rand must have plagiarized Francis Bacon, too !!! OMG! 
