Of course, Maoz's reason rehabilitating Nixon is clear: he labors under the delusion that anyone who does something nice for Israel is a philo-Semite, and Nixon, Maoz wants us to know, did loads of stuff that was "good for the Jews," the main example being his delivery of weapons to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
But as David Greenberg argues, Nixon's support for Israel was equivocal and contingent, writing:
It should be obvious that supporting Israel doesn't mean someone is not anti-Semitic. Many fundamentalist ministers who believe Jews are destined for hell support the existence of a Jewish state for reasons stemming from their millennialist theology. But even if Mideast policy did accurately measure attitudes toward Jews, the notion that Nixon aided Israel out of philo-Semitism is absurd. When Egypt and Syria launched their attack in 1973, Kissinger and Nixon deliberately waited for Israel to suffer losses—despite pleading from Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz—before delivering aid. They hoped to equalize the region's balance of power and to make Israel a more compliant party in regional peace negotiations. Only after a week, when the situation became truly dire, did the United States step in, knowing they could not let a pro-U.S. democracy be overrun by Soviet allies. Even then Nixon leveraged the assistance to keep American Jewish groups from lobbying on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jews. Nixon's intervention clearly resulted not from any belief in pro-Jewish feeling but from cold Realpolitik calculations. Resting on transient geopolitical considerations, such support was inherently fickle. Different global circumstances could easily have dictated a different course of action. Nixon himself even conceded—as he said on a tape that was released in 1999—"Accepted, I'm not pro-Israel; I'm not going to let Israel's tail wag the dog."These sort of people -people like Nixon, and the glibbly pro-Israel preachers - aren't friends of the Jews; suggesting otherwise is an insult to our real friends.
