Israeli history can be split into two eras: before and after 1967. Before the Six-Day War, Israeli policy was not noble but at least gave the rhetorical impression of (sometimes) opposing repression. In 1963, Foreign Minister Golda Meir told the United Nations General Assembly that Israel “naturally opposes policies of apartheid, colonialism and racial or religious discrimination wherever they exist” because Jews understood what it meant to be victims. Israel bonded with newly independent African states, enjoying their postcolonial freedoms, and African nations backed Israel at the UN. Many Israelis then and now viewed their country as a liberation struggle akin to being freed from colonial bondage. They had no time for the view that Zionism was tinged with colonialism. (…) Journalist Sash Polakow-Suransky recounts in his book on Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa, The Unspoken Alliance, that 1967 saw a watershed in Israel’s defense posture. Assisted by Soviet and Arab propaganda, “Israel’s image as a state of Holocaust survivors in need of protection gradually deteriorat[ed] into that of an imperialist stooge of the West.” Thereafter, many Third World nations turned away from Israel and the “Israeli government abandoned the last vestiges of moral foreign policy in favour of hard-nosed realpolitik.” Partnering with the world’s most brutal tyrants followed. Israel’s relationship with Iran under the Shah was an early example.

— Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein (13%)