Back in 1976, the battle over Abzug's record on Israel could not help being informed by the fact that, instead of Moynihan at the U.N., America now had William Scranton, former governor of Pennsylvania. For Podhoretz, as for many Jewish voters, the defense of the Jewish state and the defense of America were twinned. It was a personal matter, but it was also a matter of principle: both Israel and the United States were democracies threatened by the left-wing totalitarianism of the Soviets or their clients in the Arab world. It was particularly worrisome, therefore, that Scranton seemed gulled by the Arab diplomats who asserted that Zionists had tricked America into World War I, that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery, or that the Holocaust was a myth. Scranton's gullibility only went along with the tenor of administration policy since the Yom Kippur War: Ford and Kissinger had pressured Israel to evacuate the occupied territories while asking the Arabs to do precisely nothing in return. The hope, apparently, was both to guarantee access to the Arabs' oil and to avoid confrontation with their superpower ally, the Soviet Union.

Did this mean, as the title of Podhoretz's July 1976 essay put it, “The Abandonment of Israel”? For nearly thirty years, with the Holocaust vivid in people's memory, anti-Zionist passions had been restrained.