If we’re honest, we do sometimes apply a double standard. It’s true, for example, as anti-Israel campaigners like to point out, that we are agitated about Iran acquiring nuclear technology while making no fuss about Israel doing so. But there is a pretty obvious reason for such inconsistency: we can’t imagine that Israel would ever aim its missiles at us.
When we look at Israel, we see a free-market, law-based, individualist democracy which has retained many Anglosphere characteristics – parliamentary rule, the common law and, at least when it comes to intellectual and commercial life, the English language. These things are bound to create, in the literal sense, sympathy: fellow-feeling rooted in common experience.
