The Israel Test
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In this book, George Gilder asserts that widespread antagonism toward the current state of Israel springs from, like anti-Semitism everywhere, envy of superior accomplishment. Israel’s sudden rise as a world capitalist and technological power, he argues, stems in part from the Jewish «culture of mind» and in part from Judaism itself, which, “perhaps more than any other religion, favors capitalist activity and provides a rigorous moral framework for it.” Critics of Israel—in the U.S., in the surrounding countries of the Middle East and in Western European nations that are facing socialist decline—have failed the “Israel Test” because they seek to tear down this country’s success rather than emulate it. America’s ability and desire to defend Israel will define our future survival as a nation: “If Israel is destroyed,” he says, “capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy.”
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Table of Contents
Title Page
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This is the most portentous form of the Israel test. Inescapably, it poses the questions of life and wealth that lie behind nearly all the holocausts and massacres of recent world history, from the genocidal attacks on European Jews and the pogroms of Russian Kulaks and Jews to Maoist China’s murderous “cultural revolution,” from the eviction of white settlers and Indian entrepreneurs from Africa to the massacres of overseas Chinese businessmen in Indonesia. The pattern recurs in the pillage and murders of “privileged”Kikuyu shopkeepers and “wealthy” Rift Valley long-distance runners after the 2007 Kenyan elections.
Everywhere, as I wrote in Wealth & Poverty thirty years ago, “the horrors and the bodies pile up, in the world’s perennial struggle to rid itself of the menace of riches” – of the shopkeepers, the bankers, the merchants, the middlemen, the traders, the landowning farmers, the entrepreneurs – “at the same time that the toll also mounts in victims of unnecessary famine and poverty.” Everywhere nations claim a resolve to develop; but everywhere their first goal is to expropriate, banish, or kill the very people doing the developing. At the United Nations, these contradictions reach a polyglot climax, with alternating zeal against the blight of want and against the Americans and Zionists, the creators of wealth.
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