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ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
The Central Issue
The central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two fractious armies, is the tiny state of Israel.
This central issue is not a global war of civilizations between the West and Islam or a split between Arabs and Jews. These conflicts are real and salient, but they obscure the deeper moral and ideological war. The real issue is between the rule of law and the rule of the leveler, between creative excellence and “fairness,” between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it.
Israel defines a line of demarcation. On one side, marshaled at the United Nations and in universities around the globe, are those who see capitalism as a zero-sum game in which success comes at the expense of the poor and the environment: every gain for one party comes at the cost of another. On the other side are those who see the genius and the good fortune of some as a source of wealth and opportunity for all.
The test distills into a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who surpass you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to equal their excellence, or does it make you seethe? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down? Caroline Glick, the dauntless deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, sums it up: “Some people admire success; some people envy it. The enviers hate Israel.”
The Israel test is a moral challenge. The world has learned to see moral challenges as issues of charity and compassion toward victims, especially the poor, whose poverty is seen as proof of their victimization. But the moral challenge of this century is not charity toward the poor but treatment of the productive elites who create the wealth that supports us all. A victim only of resentment, Israel epitomizes the plight of the productive elites under siege around the globe.
In countries where Jews are free to invent and create, they pile up conspicuous wealth and arouse envy and suspicion. In this age of information, when the achievements of mind have widely outpaced the power of masses and material force, Jews have forged much of the science and wealth of the era. Their pioneering contributions to quantum theory enabled the digital age. Their breakthroughs in nuclear science and computer science propelled the West to victory in World War II and the cold war. Their bioengineering inventions have enhanced the health, and their microchip designs are fueling the growth, of nations everywhere. Their genius has lifted the culture and economy of the world.
Israel today concentrates the genius of the Jews. Obscured by the prevalent media narrative of the “war-torn” Middle East, Israel’s rarely-celebrated feats of commercial, scientific, and technological creativity climax the Jews’ twentieth-century saga of triumph over tragedy. Today tiny Israel, with its population of 7.23 million, five and one-half million Jewish, is second only the United States in technological contributions. In per capita innovation, Israel dwarfs all nations. The forces of civilization in the world continue to feed upon the intellectual wealth epitomized by Israel.
Today in the Middle East, Israeli wealth looms palpably and portentously over the middens of Arab poverty. But dwarfing Israel’s own wealth is Israel’s contribution to the world economy, stemming from Israeli creativity and entrepreneurial innovation. Israel’s technical and scientific gifts to global progress loom with similar majesty over all others’ contributions with the sole exception of the United States.
Long before the founding of Israel in 1948, Jewish pioneers in Palestine had reclaimed the land from malarial marshes, gullied hillsides, and sand dunes, and enabled it – for the first time in a millennium – to sustain a population of millions of Jews and Arabs alike. Now, over the last two decades, Israel has unleashed a miracle of creative capitalism and technology and exported its contributions around the globe. During the 1990s and early 2000s Israel removed the manacles of its confiscatory taxes, oppressive regulations, government ownership, and socialist nostalgia and established itself as a driving force of global technological leadership.
Contemplating this Israeli achievement, the minds of parochial intellects around the globe, from Jerusalem to Los Angeles, are clouded with envy and suspicion. Everywhere, from the cagey diplomats of the United Nations to the cerebral leftists at the Harvard Faculty Club, critics of Israel assert that Israelis are somehow responsible for Palestinian Arab poverty. Violence against Israel is seen as blowback from previous crimes of the Israelis. With little or no extenuation for the difficulties of a targeted defense against guerrilla attacks, suicide bombers, rockets and missiles, the world condemns the Israelis’ efforts to preserve their country against those who would destroy it. Denying to Israel the moral fruits and affirmations that Jews have so richly earned by their paramount contributions to our civilization, the critics of Israel lash out at the foundations of civilization itself – at the golden rule of capitalism, that the good fortune of others is also one’s own.
In simplest terms, amid the festering indigence and seething violence of the Middle East, the state of Israel presents a test. Efflorescent in the desert, militarily powerful, industrially preeminent, culturally cornucopian, technologically paramount, it has become a vanguard of human achievement. Believing that this position was somehow maliciously captured, rather than heroically created, many in the West still manifest a dangerous misunderstanding of both economics and life.
Assuming that wealth is distributed from above, chiefly by government, rather than generated by invention and ingenuity, Israel’s critics see the world as a finite sum of resources. They regard economic life as a potentially violent struggle of each against all for one’s “fair share.” Believing that Israel, like the United States, has seized too much of the world’s resources, they advocate vast programs of international retribution and redistribution. They imagine that the plight of the Palestinians reflects not their own Marxist angst, anti-Semitic obsessions, and recidivist violence but the actions of Israel. In their view, Israel’s wealth stems not from Jewish creativity and genius but from cadging aid from the United States or seizing valuable land and other resources from Arabs.
In the blinkered vision of economists and politicians in international organizations and elite universities, this tiny bustling country, confined in a space smaller than New Jersey, is a continuation of the history of Western colonialism and imperialism. It is as if an embattled span of a few miracle miles in the desert echoes in some way a map of the world bathed in British pink or Soviet gray. In an elaborately mounted argument, full of pedantic references to Algeria and other colonial wars, Rafael Reuveny, a former Israeli army officer, now an Indiana University professor, declares that Israel is “The Last Colonialist.” From the fruited plains of America, he actually finds it possible to write of Israel’s “vast lands.”
The irony is that Israel is an imperial influence. Its hegemony stems not from its desperate efforts to contrive a defensible country amid compulsively predatory neighbors but from the global sway of its ideas and technologies.
To mistake the globally-enriching gifts of spirit and intellect for the brutal exercise of force is the central lie of Marxist economics. Although Marx sometimes affirmed the role of the bourgeoisie in creating wealth, he believed that the entrepreneurial contribution was transitory. The crude Marxian deceit was to declare that all value ultimately derives from labor and materials. Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen.
As one of the world’s most profitable economies built on one of the world’s most barren territories, Israel challenges all these materialist superstitions of zero-sum economics, based on the “distribution” of natural resources and the exploitation of land and labor.
This crippling error of zero-sum economics manifests itself around the globe. It is still the chief cause of poverty. It can destroy any national economy. Perhaps some readers share it. You may believe that capitalist achievement comes at the expense of others or of the environment. You may believe that “behind every great fortune is a great crime.” You advocate the redistribution of wealth. You think we all benefit when the government “spreads the wealth around.” You imagine that free international trade is a mixed blessing, with many victims. You want to give much of Israel’s wealth to its neighbors. You think that Israel’s neighbors – and the world – would benefit more from redistribution than from Israel’s continuing prosperity and freedom. You believe that Israel is somehow too large rather than too small. You believe, fantastically, that poverty is caused by enterprise and the ownership of private property – that poverty is, ineluctably, a grievous side effect of wealth.
Anti-Semites throughout history have been obsessed with the “gaps” everywhere discernible between different groups: gaps of income, power, achievement, and status. Against the background of Arab poverty, anti-capitalists and anti-Semites alike see Israel as primarily a creator not of wealth but of gaps. With a gross domestic product of around $217 billion (2010), per capita income of some $30,000, and close to a trillion dollars of market capitalization for its companies, Israel these days is rich, they say. But look at the gap between its luxuries and Palestinian privation. Look at the gap between Jews in Israel and Arabs in Israel – sure evidence of “discrimination” and “exploitation.” Jews similarly lead all other American groups in per capita income, signifying another gap, presumably rectifiable by the United Nations.
Shaping the clichés of the gapologists is a profound misunderstanding. What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience. As a system of accumulated knowledge, capitalism assigns to the entrepreneurs who have already proven their prowess as investors – who have moved down the learning curve in the investment process – the right to shape the future pattern of investments. The lessons of one generation of successful investments inform the next generation. The lessons of failure are learned rather than submerged in subsidies and gilded with claims of higher virtue and purpose. Information is accumulated rather than lost. Under capitalism, knowledge grows apace with wealth.
Disguising this edifying process in the United States are the handi-capitalists in nominally “private” institutions – from Wall Street money-shufflers and government-guaranteed mortgage hustlers to corn-state ethanol farmers and Silicon Valley solar shills – that are dependent on public handouts and mandates for their success. As explained in definitive works by the economist Daniel Doron in Israel and by the writer Jonah Goldberg in the United States, a perpetual temptation of democratic politics in Israel, the U.S., and around the globe is the use of government to reward political supporters, creating government-corporate alliances that are fascist rather than capitalist in character. In successful economies these alliances remain marginal, rather than central as they are in explicitly socialist regimes.
If governments were superior investors, the Soviet bloc would have been an economic triumph rather than an economic and environmental catastrophe. China would have thrived under Mao rather than under the current regime that claims, “To get rich is glorious.” Whether in the United States or in Israel, at Harvard or at the United Nations, an obsessive concern with gaps between rich and poor is the signature of a deep and persistent Marxism that is intrinsically hostile to the wealth-producing work of Jews in the world. At the heart of the UN’s case against Israel is the UN’s focus on gaps.
Misunderstanding the nature of capitalism, the critics turn to challenge Israeli democracy. They charge that Israel’s Jewish identity creates serious problems for its democratic values. Like former president Jimmy Carter in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in an article in Foreign Affairs, the flamboyant Frenchman Bernard-Henri Lévy in articles and a book, Left in Dark Times, and Thomas L. Friedman in a series of books and in his New York Times columns, many people raise the chimera of a Jewish “apartheid” regime that will mar the purity of Israel as a homeland for Jews.
The apartheid claim is based on the possibility that at some future date Arab Palestinians will comprise a majority of the population under Israeli control. But Jews in Israel are already a minority in the region and will always be a minority. Once the Arab nations learn to tolerate the existence of the Jewish state, some federal system involving Jordan would be the next step for any Palestinian nationalism that transcends a mere desire to destroy Israel. Equating democracy not with the rule of law but with the claims of racist self-determination, even nominally pro-Israel writers imply that 5.5 million Jews are morally obliged to entrust their fate to some 100 million Arabs pledged to their total annihilation.
This bizarre conclusion is the perfectly logical result of the fondest dream of the twentieth-century Left, to reconcile democracy and socialism. Democracy without capitalism has no content, since no power-centers outside the state can form and sustain themselves. As a form of politics, dealing with relative power, democracy by itself is a zero-sum game, in which the winnings of one group come at the cost of others. There are only a limited number of seats in a legislature or executive positions in a government, only a limited span of territory to rule. By contrast, capitalism is a positive-sum game, based on an upward spiral of gains, with no limits to the creation of wealth. Under capitalism the achievements of one group provide markets and opportunities for others. Without an expanding capitalist economy, democracy becomes dominated by its zero-sum elements – by mobs and demagogues.
Throughout history, in any nation with a significant Jewish presence, such mobs and demagogues have turned against the Jews. Today they have turned against Israel. And Jimmy Carter, Thomas Friedman, and all the rest who advocate the claims of Arab “democracy” over Israeli accomplishment unintentionally side with the mobs and demagogues. Their equation of democracy with ethnic self-determination transforms democracy from a defensible polity into a figment of tribal polling. It puts Israel into a queue of petitioners with such entities as Tibet, Kosovo or Bosnia as if these “nations” were comparable to Israel.
Non-capitalist self-determination, though, is entirely self-defeating. Sleek new automobiles across the United States – Volvos and Priuses galore – bear bumper stickers declaring, “War is Not the Answer” or urging a “Free Tibet,” as if Tibet could be freed with hortatory vehicular adornments. Without capitalism and free trade, self-determination is a pretext for constant civil wars, as each ever-smaller shard of nationality seeks its own exclusive domain, presumably to be defended by the United States or the United Nations.
The critical test of democracy is its ability to free human energies and intellect on the frontiers of human accomplishment. More than any other country in the world, Israel resplendently passes this test. It is the test of zerizus, Hebrew for “alacrity,” or, as Rabbi Zelig Pliskin describes it on the Jewish World Review Web page, “the blessed willpower and aspiration that leads to exceptional achievement.” Passing this test, Israel is precious. All the carping and criticisms of Israel reflect a blind proceduralism and empty egalitarianism. The test of virtue is not mere procedure; it is content and accomplishment. If a system cannot pass this test – democratic or not, concerned with electoral politics or not – it is just another form of barbarism.
José Ortega y Gasset in his masterpiece, The Revolt of the Masses described the essential barbarian mentality as a failure or refusal to recognize our dependency on the exceptional men and women who created the civilization in which we live and on which we subsist. Like monkeys in the jungle reaching for low-hanging fruit without any clue of its source or science, the barbarian politicians leading the ranks of modern anti-Semitism promiscuously pick the fruits of modern capitalism and the pockets of capitalists without a clue as to the provenance of their own largely parasitical lives and luxuries.
More sharply and categorically than any other conflict, the Israel-Palestine dispute raises these issues of capitalism and democracy, civilization and barbarism. To many observers – in the army of the Left – it is obvious that Israeli wealth causes Palestinian misery. How could it be otherwise? Jews have long been paragons of capitalist wealth. Capitalist wealth, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put it in regard to “property,” is “theft.” Karl Marx was said to have shaped his opposition to property rights and his Jewish self-hatred by reading the even more virulently anti-Semitic Proudhon. In an 1883 diary entry, Proudhon declared, “The Jew is the enemy of mankind. One must send this race back to Asia or be exterminated.”
History, however, favors the view that poverty springs chiefly from envy and hatred of excellence – from class-war Marxism, anti-Semitism, and kleptocratic madness. It stems from the belief that wealth inheres in things and material resources that can be seized and redistributed, rather than in human minds and creations that thrive only in peace and freedom. In particular, the immiseration of the Middle East stems from the covetous and crippling idea among Arabs that Israel’s wealth is not only the source of their humiliation but also the cause of their poverty and thus an appropriate target of their vengeance.
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.
With wealth seen as stolen from the exploited poor, the poor are, in turn, granted a license to dispossess and kill their “oppressors” and to disrupt capitalist economies. This is the message of Frantz Fanon, Hamas, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and the academic coteries of Chomsky, Zinn, and a thousand Marxist myrmidons across the campuses of the world. But no capitalist system can sustain prosperity amid constant violence, spurred by the idea that suicide bombing is an understandable and forgivable response to alleged gaps and grievances. It is the violence that makes necessary the police measures that render economic progress impossible, particularly for the groups associated with the attacks. By justifying violent assaults on a civilized democracy – and then condemning the necessary retaliatory defense – leftists would allow no solution but tyranny, with Jewish minorities widely under attack and the one Jewish state in jeopardy.
Most of the world’s experts – advocates and critics of Israel alike – are blind to the Israel test. G. K. Chesterton got it right. “The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.”
From the virtuoso tracts of Alan Dershowitz to the demented screeds of Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein, from the casuistic pirouettes of Michael Lerner and Tikkun magazine to the pro-Israel celebrations of the Religious Right, from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic to Bernard-Henri Lévy, the literature of Israeli condemnation and support – however coherent on its own terms – seems mostly irrelevant to the real test and trial of Israel.
Beyond the wholehearted endorsements of the Religious Right, which are unlikely to convince anyone else, the general position of the experts is that Israel is deeply flawed but commands a colorable case for continued existence. Coloring the case entails much knowledge of the intricacies of international law and the history of UN resolutions. Israel’s historical record is said to be full of excessive violence, but it is extenuated by the violence inflicted on the Jews in the Holocaust. Israel may not be good, but it has rights that should be respected, provided that it improves its behavior.
By clinging to liberal policy and democratic processes, Israel, in this view, may justify its claim to continued American aid. Under these conditions, says even our Third Worldly President Barack Obama, the United States should continue to affirm and guarantee the country’s defense. Because of Israel’s legal rights and democratic processes, the United States should ignore the country’s dire unpopularity with nearly all U.S. allies, international organizations, and trading partners that condemn its allegedly lawless and aggressive foreign policy.
At their best, these defenders of Israel pile up impressive mountains of evidence that Israel is “not guilty” of charges only a madman, a delusional academic, or a UN human rights expert could have brought in the first place. Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished law professor at Harvard, has contributed two popular books, The Case for Israel and The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, that offer over thirty chapters of evidence against the standard propaganda. He is among the best and most tenacious defenders Israel has, outside of the incandescent pages of Commentary , and he has millions more readers than that remarkable publication.
Not for nothing is Dershowitz one of the world’s leading defense attorneys. But the very act of responding to the claims of diabolical maniacs puts this great advocate of Israel in an inappropriately defensive posture, as if a country that requires so resourceful, agile, and punctilious a defense – like Dershowitz’s most notable former client, Claus von Bülow – must have something to hide, a skeleton in its Knesset, a metastasized horror in its history.
The central error of Israel’s defenders is to accept the framing of the debate by its enemies, whose idea is that peace depends on some marginal but perpetually elusive improvement in Israel’s behavior. Prefacing the usual defense are concessions that Israel is “far from perfect” and “has made mistakes” in “overreacting to terrorism and other threats.” As Lawrence Summers put it, “There is much . . . in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can and should be vigorously challenged.” Such statements from Israel’s nominal defenders slip readily from meaningless negatives: “Israel is not perfect” – to crippling concessions: “Israel overreacts to terror.”
Locked in a debate over Israel’s alleged vices, they miss the salient truth running through the long history of anti-Semitism: Israel is hated above all for its virtues.
No Israeli failure to comply with the dictates of the rulings handed down by the UN-run International Court of Justice in The Hague defending the free movement of suicide bombers, no Jewish falling short of the standards devised by UN human rights committees dominated by demented tyrants, can even begin to explain, let alone excuse, the celebrated kidnappings, beheadings, and bombings, and the frothy prophecies of extinction and calls to pogroms that reverberate daily through the streets and mosques of the Middle East with the regularity of the muezzin call to prayer.
From the PLO’s 1964 announcement, long before Israel had control of the West Bank or Gaza, of the PLO’s resolve to extinguish the state of Israel by “armed struggle,” to the daily calls by the venerable president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser for “Israel’s destruction” in the 1967 war; from the prime minister of Syria, Haffez al-Assad, invoking “a battle of annihilation,” to two recent presidents of Iran pledging to “wipe Israel off the map”; from the endless proclamations by Palestinian terrorist politicians seeking “liberation from the Jordan River to the sea,” to the various men of Allah declaring that Jews are “filthy bacteria” that must be “butchered and killed . . . wherever you meet them”; from the sponsorship and celebration of suicide bombers by various imams and exalted rulers, to polls of the Palestinian people affirming the same murderous worldview; these statements are no frenzied war cries uttered only during actual combat and regretted in peacetime. Representing the essence of the Palestinian movement, rabid anti-Semitism continues a commitment that began with Palestinian complicity in the Holocaust.
Everyone knows that the word “Nazi” is used promiscuously in today’s world. But the word does have a real meaning. It means the National Socialist Movement dedicated to murderous anti-Semitism. Socialism everywhere expresses envy of excellence by treating the works and wealth of the successful as the wages of sin. Nazism simply specifies the sin as the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
By this definition, the PLO has always been, at its essence, a Nazi organization. The first move toward pushing the Jews into the sea came during World War II from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. “Germany,” as the Mufti put it, “is the only country in the world that has not merely fought the Jews at home but has declared war on the entirety of world Jewry; in this war against world Jewry the Arabs feel profoundly connected to Germany.”
Fresh from aiding the massacre of Jews in Romania and Bosnia and recruiting Bosnian Muslims into the Nazi forces, the Mufti was a fanatical participant in the European Holocaust. His most passionate goal was to extend it to the Middle East. After visiting Auschwitz with Himmler, this founder-hero of the Palestinian movement urged the Nazis to accelerate and intensify the killings and then join him in extending the carnage to Palestine by massacring the half-million Jews living there. In this pursuit, he conspired with the Nazis under Walther Rauff, engineer of Auschwitz, to create a special force in Greece ready to make the attack. Only General Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel at El Alamein prevented the Mufti and his friends from pursuing their plan. Still unsated in his killing frenzies in late 1944, the Grand Mufti launched an attack of parachutists on the Tel Aviv water supply with ten containers of toxin. Failing in the attempt, he devoted the rest of his life to the cause of destroying Israel.
Cited as a war criminal, Husseini gained asylum with the similarly rabid Holocaust celebrants among the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. For his barbarities, the Mufti remains a revered historical figure among the Palestinians. Beginning in the 1930s, his Nazi animus originated long before any of the alleged Israeli offenses that are now cited to justify Palestinian violence and hatred against the Jews in Israel.
When Husseini died in 1974, his anti-Semitic cause was taken up by his distant relative Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader and eventual Nobel “Peace” laureate. Arafat characteristically bought Hitler’s Mein Kampf in bulk and distributed it to his followers in Arab translation under the title My Jihad, as Israeli soldiers discovered on capturing his abandoned camp in southern Lebanon in 1982. Arafat was a master of the duplicitous art of recanting in splenetic Arabic to his followers any public professions of peace he may have expressed in English at international meetings and “summits.”
Arafat’s successor as head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is supposedly a “moderate.” This seems to be the term for anti-Semites who are ambivalent about whether to celebrate the Holocaust or to deny that it occurred. Devoted to the destruction of Israel, Abbas was a Holocaust denier from the time of his doctoral thesis – in his own words, a study of “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed.” Contesting Abbas for power and winning Palestinian elections in 2006 was Hamas, an organization whose founding charter proclaims its devotion to the killing of Jews. After Hamas joined Fatah in a unity government in May 2011, Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, declared on Al-Aqsa TV:
All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews. In just a few years, all the Zionists and the settlers will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil.
Perhaps the most menacing force for Palestinian “liberation” is Hamas’ ally, Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared in 2002 that if all the Jews gather in Israel, “they’ll make our job easier, and will keep us from having to go hunt them down all over the world.”
When experts in the United States urge the creation of a Palestinian state, they are effectively endorsing a Nazi national movement with roots in Europe. Pointless and fantastical are claims to favor a Palestinian national movement that renounces the murder of Jews. Murdering Jews is the essence of the only Palestinian national movement the world has ever known.
The creation of a peaceful and productive Palestinian state would require support from neither Harvard nor Hezbollah, nor any force outside Palestine itself. The Palestinian Arabs could be a nation tomorrow and a state the day after, if their leaders could let go of the notion that the Jews must die before Palestine can live. By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world’s most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy. Civilized people with the good fortune to live near brilliant entrepreneurs or thinkers go to work for them and attempt to learn their skills and master their fields of knowledge. Then they may start similar ventures on their own. It is the only way to succeed. In the past, Palestinian Arabs often excelled as entrepreneurs, and some do around the world today. But nowhere are the Palestinians less likely to prosper than under the current Palestinian regimes. Palestinian leaders tell their people to disdain the peaceful and collaborative demands of democratic capitalism. Palestinians are taught to say they find it “humiliating” to work for Jews. They are taught that the creation of Israel was their “naqba,” a catastrophe comparable to the Holocaust rather than the source of their own nationhood and property. So, like the other self-defeating democrats everywhere in the region, they elect jihadists to drive out the Jews.
In no way do the usual defenders of Israel so clearly concede the National Socialist framing of the debate as on the question of “settlements”: the fate of the several hundred thousand Jews living on West Bank territory, land that some Israeli government might concede to a Palestinian state. Dershowitz and scores of other defenders of Israel, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Goldberg, join the chorus of critics regarding as a “serious” or even a “catastrophic error” settlements that plant productive people on mostly undeveloped areas of Judea and Samaria that once chiefly sprouted missiles and mortars overlooking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Once again, nominal defenders of Israel give up the key point without even seeing it. For the dispute over the settlements is an argument over whether Jews may reasonably expect to be permitted to live among Arabs anywhere.
After the Arabs refused all offers of land for peace in the wake of the 1967 war, the Israelis were necessarily responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s government under Levi Eshkol initially barred settlements on the grounds that under a peace agreement the land would one day be relinquished to the capacious and underpopulated existing Palestinian state named Jordan. When the Jordanians joined the rest of the Arab states in adamantly refusing any negotiations, Israel inherited the land. Refuting every claim of Arab “displacement” by Jews, the Israelis spurred development and welcomed Arabs thronging in to participate in it. Between the 1967 war and the first intifada in 1987, Arab settlers, moving in from Jordan and other Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza, came to outnumber Israeli settlers eight to one.
Since Israel’s creation, while it was accommodating massive immigration from Arab nations, essentially every Arab state expelled its own Jews, many resident for generations. Evicted were more than 800,000 people. Confiscated was some $2.5 billion in land and wealth. Rivaling every Nazi dream of ethnic purity are these domains ruled by Arab sharia law, anti-Semitism and state socialism.
Every proposal for a Palestinian state, even from Israel’s usual supporters, takes this massive crime as a given and proposes that Israel preemptively carry out exactly such an act of “ethnic cleansing” by itself uprooting the Jewish inhabitants from the West Bank. Although Israel accepts both Christians and Muslims as citizens, and indeed includes elected Arab members in its national legislature, both Israel’s enemies and its defenders assume that any future Palestinian state will exclude any remaining Jews from the homes and neighborhoods, communities, shops, and schools they themselves have built. Too bizarre to be contemplated, apparently, is the possibility that the Jews, if they so chose, could be allowed to live in a Palestinian state, or be safe if they did. One of the essential duties of a democratic government is the safeguarding of the rights of its minorities.
At home in the United States, if some locally dominant ethnic group violently protested against Jews being allowed to live on property amounting to 2 percent of “the neighborhood,” all these supposed defenders of Israel would know exactly whom they were dealing with and how to respond. But in the case of the Palestinians, we are to accept as their natural right their claims to be squeamish about living anywhere near Jews.
But without the presence of the Jews, there is no evidence that the Palestinians would particularly want these territories for a nation. When they were held under Jordanian and Egyptian rule between 1948 and 1967, after all, there was no significant move to create a Palestinian state, but there was a continuing migration toward the peace and prosperity that the Jews were creating. Hostility toward Jews stems not from any alleged legal violations or untoward violence, but from their exceptional virtues. This is the essence of anti-Semitism.
The Israel test forces a remorseless realism. It disallows all the bumper-sticker contradictions of pacifistic bellicosity. Either the world, principally the United States, supports Israel, or Israel, one way or another, will be destroyed. There are no other realistic choices. And if Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the protected home of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy.
Winston Churchill proclaimed the essential situation in a speech in Parliament in 1939 responding to efforts to withdraw British support for a Jewish state. Describing “the magnificent work which the Jewish colonists have done,” he said: “They have made the desert bloom . . . started a score of thriving industries . . . founded a great city on the barren shore . . . harnessed the Jordan and spread its electricity throughout the land . . . So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit – and this is what rankles most with me – to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”
That says it all, for the ages. Eighty years later nothing much has changed.
