Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon frames Israel not just as an ally but as a mirror Americans are invited to recognize themselves in. The opening image - “scratch a desert and produce a garden” - is pioneer mythology in a single sentence: the frontier made literal, scarcity conquered by grit. It’s a metaphor that launders geopolitics into a feel-good civic parable, turning a complex state project into the kind of bootstrap narrative Americans are trained to applaud.

The list that follows (“guts, patriotism, idealism…”) is a carefully curated bundle of American self-flattery. Nixon isn’t describing Israelis so much as describing the America he wants voters to believe in: brave, morally certain, freedom-driven. The subtext is transactional. If Israel embodies these virtues, then supporting Israel becomes a way for Americans to affirm their own identity - and to cast opponents of that support as skeptics of “freedom” itself.

Then comes the clincher: “I have seen it. I know. I believe that.” Nixon leans on eyewitness authority and personal conviction, a three-step escalation from observation to certainty to faith. It’s political rhetoric doing what it does best: moving from claim to testimonial to near-creed, bypassing messy details.

Context matters. Nixon is speaking from the Cold War era, when Israel’s strategic value to the U.S. was rising and public sympathy surged after Israel’s early wars. The quote works because it fuses strategy with sentiment, turning alliance maintenance into moral admiration - and moral admiration into a domestic political asset.