The book relies heavily on statistics but remains easy reading, and, in addition to proving its claim, provides an excellent introduction to Israeli society in general. What is especially impressive, moreover, is how Muravchik justifies Israel's few apparent shortcomings or uses them to demonstrate the opposite of what they appear to indicate. For example, although inordinately freer than its Arab neighbours, Muravchik reports that Israel is only in the "second tier" of Freedom House's scale of "freedom", along with the likes of Italy and Japan. But he does not leave it at that. Observing how many liberal democracies impose infringements in wartime (think of Franklin Roosevelt interning Japanese Americans or Winston Churchill interning refugees from Nazi Germany), he tells how Israel has been fighting an existential war since (even before) its inception, and therefore its comparatively high freedom score should be cause not for criticism but for celebration.

Meanwhile, though Israel has struggled in recent years with a deluge of non-Jewish African migrants, and has sought — through legal means — to deter, detain and remove them, the very fact that they risk their lives travelling through perilously hostile countries to reach Israel illustrates how "they heard rightly that they would face little threat to their persons in Israel, and stand a chance of making a life there, whereas in nearer countries, mostly populated by their co-religionists and people of cognate ethnic stock, they were likely to be mistreated or killed."

There is also a nod to neoconservative democracy promotion: Muravchik notes that some sceptics of that doctrine argue that it is unrealistic to expect democracy to grow where there is no democratic culture or tradition. While disputing the veracity of this argument, he argues that if it is generally true then democracy in Israel is even more astounding, since most of Israel's immigrants have been from undemocratic places, be they Arab and other Muslim countries or, in the case of most of Israel's founders, Central and Eastern Europe.

Muravchik does gloss over some areas where Israel does not satisfy liberal ideals (such as divorce law), but this is understandable. All countries do so in some way or another, and there is enough literature out there focused on Israel's real or supposed failures to make a book that does not do so a refreshing variation. Moreover, liberal ideals are not the only ones, and Israel's deviations are usually ascribable to equally valid conservative impulses, which any genuine democracy should exhibit as well.

Whereas Liberal Oasis makes the case that Israel is a liberal haven in a totalitarian desert, Making David Into Goliath tries to explain why Western leftists do not recognise it as such. Just as David, the Israelite youth, faced the giant Philistine warrior, Goliath, so Israel was, in its early years, perceived by those Western leftists as a young country confronting the formidable forces of the Arab world bent on its destruction. Eventually, though, Israel came to be seen as the Goliath — erroneously, in Muravchik's view.