The Israel Test

an article in Foreign Affairs, the flamboyant Frenchman Bernard-Henri Levy 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.

Jose 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 Levy, 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