In Myanmar’s capital city Yangon, some 200 people, including the city’s chief minister and representatives of five local religious communities, attended a Hanukkah party this past December. Only about twenty Jews live in the city, but they enjoy tolerance, negligible anti-Semitism, and good relations with the local Muslim minority—who are spared the murderous persecution to which their coreligionists of the Rohingya ethnicity have been subjected. Charles Dunst writes:

The Jewish community here grew rapidly from the mid-1800s through 1942. At its peak, 3,000 Jews called Myanmar home, when it was still known as Burma and remained part of the British empire. Some rose to local power, like David Sofaer, who in the 1930s served as the mayor of Yangon, then known as Rangoon.

Jewish restaurants, pharmacies, and schools once marked the city’s streets. While these businesses have faded away, stars of David still adorn some buildings in Yangon: a school nearly 40 minutes from downtown; a skincare shop in the heart of downtown; a paint store across the street from the synagogue. . . .

Most of the Jews fled when Japan invaded the country in World War II, as the Axis power distrusted them for their perceived political alignment with the British. The majority of those who remained left in the mid-1960s, when the new regime nationalized businesses as part of a socialist agenda that would soon run the country into the ground. . . .

In the 1920s, the famed British author George Orwell, then a colonial police officer in Burma, recognized the Jewish presence there [when he] condemned British operations in the country for being “a device for giving trade monopolies to the English—or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.” . . . . Today, the [still-functioning] 19th-century Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in Yangon sits solitary in this land of golden pagodas and remains wholly unguarded in the city’s main Muslim neighborhood.

Although Nikki Haley had never been to Israel when she took the position of American ambassador to the UN, and had no prior foreign-policy experience, she distinguished herself as one of the most capable and vigorous defenders of the Jewish state ever to hold the position. Jon Lerner, who served as Haley’s deputy during her ambassadorship, sees the key to her success—regarding both Israel and many other matters—in her refusal to abide by the polite fictions that the institution holds sacred:

Myths are sometimes assets in international relations. The fiction that Taiwan is not an independent country, for example, allows [the U.S.] to sustain [its] relationship with China. In other cases, however, myths can create serious problems. On Israel–Palestinian issues, the Trump administration was determined to test some mythical propositions that many had come to take for granted, and, in some cases, to refute them. Haley’s prominence at the UN arose in large part from a conscious choice to reject myths that had pervaded diplomacy on Israel–Palestinian issues for decades. . . .

[For instance], U.S. presidents were intimidated by the argument that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would trigger violent explosions throughout the Muslim world. President Trump and key colleagues doubted this, and they turned out to be right. Violent reaction in the Palestinian territories was limited, and there was virtually none elsewhere in Arab and Islamic countries. . . .

It turns out that the United States can support Israel strongly and still work closely with Arab states to promote common interests like opposing Iranian threats. The Arab street is not narrowly Israel-minded and is not as volatile as long believed. The sky won’t fall if the U.S. stops funding UN sacred cows like the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). Even if future U.S. administrations revert to the policies of the past, these old assumptions will remain disproved. That is a valuable accomplishment that will last long after Nikki Haley’s UN tenure.