The Tikkun Olam Pyramid
Aaron David Miller, envoy of democratic administrations to the Middle East, published an article in the Washington Post in which he calls on the Biden administration to take a militant approach against the new right-wing government in Israel.
In particular, the following paragraph caught my eye:
The Biden administration needs to inform the Abraham Accord countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — that their evident lack of interest in the plight of the Palestinians will undermine their relationship with Israel and damage their credibility in advancing other regional objectives with the United States.
The irony struck me. A Jew warns a non-Jewish American president that he must make sure that Arabs show a modicum of care for other Arabs who are in conflict with Jews. This is really a level-of-abstraction pyramid.
A learned American Jew is at the top of the pyramid of the ability to abstract, and his concerns extend far beyond his relatives according to DNA similarity. This is what is known in progressive Jewish circles as "Tikkun Olam". The non-Jewish American president also cares for the whole world, but less so. So he needs to be reminded to care.
Arab countries are of course terribly selfish, but in the past they at least pretended that the plight of other Arabs bothered them. Whereas the Palestinians, at the bottom of the pyramid of concern for "Tikkun Olam", have never been interested in anyone other than themselves. Not long ago, Mahmoud Abbas, who constantly complains about occupation, gave a warm hug to President Putin, the occupier of Ukraine, at some meeting at an international convention. In 1991, the PLO supported Saddam Hussein's invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Something that made even the late far left Israeli politician Yossi Sherid say at the time: "Let them look for me."