A Facebook friend, with the ever-so-wry "just sayin'", just posted a quote attributed to a certain Father John Sheehan, S.J.:
“Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can’t help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East.”
As a pure statement of history, this is of course False. The U.S. has had its share of pre-1948 enemies in the Middle East (the Barbary Pirates, the Ottoman Empire in WWI, various Arab factions which sided with the Nazis in WWII, etc.).
But pushing beyond that, I think this statement needs to be unpacked a bit even if we took it at face value. The argument being made by our friendly Jesuit priest is that prior to Israel's establishment,
we were all buddy-buddy with the dominant powers in the Middle East, but that all went to hell once the Jews had the temerity to establish their own state. Damn Jews.
[........]
After doing all this work,
I got interested in the Provenance of the Quote itself and who this "Father John Sheehan" is. And that is a surprisingly difficult proposition.
The quote shows up a lot on Google, but it is almost invariably Unsourced except to say "John Sheehan, S.J." The closest thing I've found to a source is a citation to Volume 21, No. 2, p. 34 (2002) of the Journal of Historical Review.
The problem being that the Journal of Historical Review is the house journal of Holocaust-deniers -- it's a Conspiracy website with footnotes.
Meanwhile "John Sheehan" might as well be "John Doe" if you're thinking of generic name for a Jesuit Priest -- while that could just explain why it's so hard to find the particular "John Sheehan" who said it,
it also might explain why there seemingly is no information of the :"John Sheehan" who supposedly said it.
The bottom line is that I think the quote is a hoax -- it flies around various anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic circles, but I don't think it's real.
This story does come with a happy ending though: I posted all of this (
including my sense that the quote was Fake) on my friend's Facebook wall, and you know what she said?
She thanked me for my sleuthing, admitted she had probably taken in, and resolved to be more careful next time (and affirmed that the quote did not express her views on the American/Israeli alliance, which she says should be preserved).