The Israel Test

Elections — counting heads rather than breaking them — are a prime tool of democracy, but hardly its essence. Far from the arbitrary dictate of the latest election, democracy denotes the enduring self-rule of a people assumed to be equal under the Lord and the law. Elections every day would not make a democracy of a society in which the decisive political forces are teenaged gangs with guns and terrorist courtiers doling out foreign aid to an intimidated populace.

No tenable theory of democracy allows the majority to destroy or expropriate the minority. Without a functioning and legally protected capitalist system, democracies swiftly sink into ochlocracies, ruled by the mob. Without the independent private sources of power imparted by free businesses, unbiased courts, and other institutions of economic order, any democracy becomes a despotism ruled by any tribe of thug politicians that manages to gain control. If it has oil or foreign aid, the regime may stay in power for decades, if not centuries. The failure of Israeli intellectuals and politicians (and their U.S. counterparts) to comprehend this reality is far more lethal than any predicted demographic trend.

Americans, above all should understand this matter since it echoes the central trial of American history. As Lewis Lehrman wrote in Lincoln at Peoria, his book on the 1854 speech that launched Lincoln’s career as the nemesis of slavery, the decisive issue between the future president and his rival Stephen Douglas was the limits of popular sovereignty. Do majority rights extend to the right to enslave minorities?

This is the very issue that currently convulses the Middle East and animates the Israel test. By claiming the right to banish or kill 5.5 million Jews, Arab leaders assert the supremacy of majorities to the point of enabling them to dispossess and displace and, indeed, to annihilate minorities. By supporting the expulsion of Jews from the West Bank and Gaza, American critics of Israel such as Jeffrey Goldberg and Thomas L. Friedman in principle accept this “democratic” imperative. Such a “democracy” of “one man, one vote, one time” can establish communism, Nazism, or any other kind of human enslavement.

Even including the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is a tiny country. This “empire,” this domineering colonialist, constitutes one-sixth of one percent of the Middle Eastern land mass. The Jewish one-tenth of the West Bank population lives on about two percent of that area with perhaps another four percent reserved for roads and security. Minus the settled territories, Israel is nine miles wide at its narrowest point between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea. That’s fourteen and a half kilometers, a distance that can be crossed by a runner, or a modern tank, in less than an hour.

An expulsion of Israelis from the West Bank would merely repeat the suicidal harvest of the previous Israeli flight from southern Lebanon and Gaza. Both capitulations led to the triumph of bristling deadly tyrannies, Hezbollah and Hamas, financed by Iran and institutional foreign aid. The surrender of the West Bank would be even more deadly, since its mountainous spine would provide Israel’s enemies with an elevated staging area for a sudden invasion that could destroy the country.

Making a fetish of Israel’s pre-1967 borders, both President Obama and former President Jimmy Carter pompously proclaim them unimpeachably “legal,” embodied in the notorious UN resolution 242 in 1967 and UN resolution 338 in 1973, and accepted at Camp David in 1978 and in Oslo in 1993 by both Arabs and Israelis. Carter’s entire work is one perplexed and disgruntled screed against the Israelis for failing to observe their legal confinement. But Israel’s agreement to accept most of the pre-1967 borders has always been contingent and must always be contingent on verifiable guarantees of its defense. Legal or not, those borders — so constricted that they have been termed “Auschwitz borders” — left Israel as an indefensible shard.

The pre-1967 borders have been fully tested. Whether an attractive nuisance or an irresistible temptation, their vulnerability resulted in concerted attacks from three neighboring Arab states in 1967. Regardless of agreements or legalities, all the documents affirming the pre-1967 borders have been perforated and rescinded by the Arabs and their bullets, mortars, grenades, and bombs in four wars and innumerable raids and missile attacks.

A country surrounded by friendly neighbors could tolerate a nine-mile-wide waist guaranteed by the sort of “solemn pledges” that impress people like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. But less than worthless are solemn pledges from Arab regimes that have trained their people for most of a century, from madrasahs to military drills to maniacal media screeds, that Israel is a diabolical expression of a verminous bacterial subhuman population.

Under these conditions, with a relentlessly indoctrinated electorate, jihadist democracy is the enemy. This intrinsically anti-democratic die was cast long ago by rabid anti-Semitic venom injected daily in Arabic for decades. Israel must command a defensible territory. That means expanded settlements and police constabulary on the mountainous spine of the West Bank and the Golan Heights that afford strategic access to Israel. It means police presence in the Gaza Strip, a frequent source of attacks on Israel.

Thomas Friedman, Shlomo Ben-Ami, and others believe the strategic situation changed radically with the emergence of missile technology, such as the Scuds that were successfully aimed at Israel to wild Palestinian applause during the first Iraq war in 1991. With Israel, like the United States and all other modern nations, reachable from afar, these writers contend that the country no longer needs to hold a buffer of settlements to protect itself from nearby enemies. With Palestinians living among Israelis, the threat is no longer from outside but from within.

Benjamin Netanyahu rebuts this view in his book, A Durable Peace: “The lesson for a small country like Israel is this: In the age of missiles territory counts more, not less. Long-range missiles increase the need for mobilization time, and short-range missiles can destroy strategic targets within their reach. For both reasons, the control of a contiguous buffer area becomes more, not less, important.” He quotes the Left- oriented Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies: “Territory is especially vital when it permits our forces to ‘buy’ time: in case of a surprise attack, this enables us to mobilize our reserves and bring them to the front lines before the aggressor succeeds in taking any part of our vital area.”

Even if Netanyahu’s argument gave way to some new technology or strategy, the moral and democratic case is clear. Both the history of invasion and the present commitment of the Arabs to the annihilation of Israel vindicate Israel’s absolute and unilateral right to decide what land it must keep and what it may cede to the Palestinians, and under what conditions. Israel has no prior obligation to cede a single square inch of land except to advance its own security. If the right answer for Israel is to rule for a thousand years the territories on which reside enemies committed to its destruction, then no true principle of democracy compels them to do otherwise.

This confusion about the true nature and requirements of democracy enervates most of Israel’s would-be advocates even as it emboldens its enemies. Perhaps the most influential writer on these issues is Thomas Friedman, who has distilled all his illusions into a grand mythology. From his New York Times columns to his earlier book From Beirut to Jerusalem, which provided perhaps the most compulsively readable and courageously researched guidebook to this conflict, he insists that the obstacle to peace is not Arab violence but Israeli bellicosity.

In his book, he tells the story of his arrival in Beirut in 1982 as a committed Zionist since childhood and the tale of his eventual disillusionment. Beirut before his eyes became a snake pit of contending factions. When Yasser Arafat led the Palestinians into southern Lebanon as a vantage to attack Israel, it upset the balance between Maronite Christians and Muslims who had shared power. Muslims became a decisive majority. Because the Muslims as a majority had no tradition or intention of granting rights to minorities, the new situation was intolerable to the Maronites. Attacks came from all sides. While he was away, Friedman’s apartment building was blown up with his driver’s wife and children inside. Suicide bombs from the Iranian-financed terrorists of Hezbollah destroyed both the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marine headquarters.

The climax came in 1983 after the assassination by the PLO of the mildly pro-Israel Lebanese prime minister, Bashir Gemayel. Friedman reported a retaliatory massacre of some 400 or more Palestinians at the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, near Beirut, committed by Maronite Christian Phalangists. Israeli soldiers still surrounding the area failed to stop the killings. Challenging the Israelis’ claims that they had no foreknowledge of these crimes, his articles seethed with implications of unforgivable complicity. Friedman’s series of investigations in The New York Times won him the Pulitzer Prize and durably sullied the reputation of the Israel Defense Forces. In a fabulous feat of moral equivalence, many writers compared Israel’s behavior in Lebanon with the behavior of the Nazis in Europe.

Probing this scar tissue anew was the Academy Award-nominated Israeli animated documentary, the 2008 Waltz with Bashir, directed by Ari Folman, which occasioned many such suggestions by Israeli intellectuals that the most revealing and portentous event of the 1982 Lebanon War was this massacre, supposedly condoned by Israel.