America is a profoundly Judeo — Christian nation, and without the Jewish role, it might well not have prevailed or even survived in its present form. Israel is a national expression of the Jewish genius and achievement that has long been manifest in American life and commerce. We need Israel today as much as Israel needs us, as much as we needed Jewish physicists and chemists, such as Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, to bring to fruition the Manhattan Project that won World War II, as much as we needed Jewish entrepreneurs and inventors to consummate the technologies of Silicon Valley, and as much as we needed Jewish engineers to maintain our national defenses throughout the Cold War and thereafter.
The lesson of the ascendancy of Jews in America is the same as the lesson of Israel today. It is not primarily a tale of sentimental tolerance in which WASP Americans sheltered the needy Jews, but a tale in which America, including American WASPs, incomparably benefited by passing an often brutal and exacting moral test, and accepted, if sometimes grudgingly, the superior performance of another, in some ways, alien people. The point of Lazarus’ great poem is not to celebrate America as a vast homeless shelter but as a nation whose genius has been to know that the huddled masses — in their very yearning to breathe free — would surpass all the storied posh and pomp of Europe.
As with America, so with Israel. Israel is not a dispensable Jewish “best friend,” a noble but doomed democracy, or even a charitable dependent we can no longer afford. It is an indispensable strategic ally, and in the past twenty years it has evolved into perhaps our most valuable partner.
Yet, for most Americans, ultimately our loyalty to Israel arises not from a cold calculus of survival, but from a sense of the holy. What Americans must fathom with both heart and mind is that this instinct is true — and vital to our survival — that if we would live, we must defend this Holy Land.
INDEX
Abbas, Mahmoud
Abdullah, King of Jordan
abstract thought
accomplishment/superiority.
anti-Semitism and
envy/resentment of
global dependence on
Israeli test regarding
key indicator predicting
threat of
U.S. benefit from,
Adelson, Sheldon
Adiri, Jonathan
Adorno, Theodor
Agassi, Shai
agriculture
innovation in
land reclamation projects
Palestine in antiquity
production growth
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud
Alami, Musa
algorithmic faith
algorithms
Alinsky, Saul
Alsop, Reese Fell
Amimon
Amin
Anobit
anti-capitalism
Hitler’s anti-Semitism as
Obama’s
anti-Semitism
accomplishment/superiority and
author’s recollection
capitalism and
economic element of
essence of
locations of
Marx, Karl
origin of
present day, globally
reasons for
solutions to
uniqueness of
universality of
zero-sum nature of
apartheid regime, basis for claims of
Apple
Arab Awakening (1936 — 37)
Arab League
Arabs
economic success, globally
Israeli, life expectancy
Arafat, Yasser
Areikat, Maen
arms race
ending the
quantitative vs. qualitative,
ASOCS
al-Assad, Haffez
Assaf, Israel
Assyrian Christians
Al-Astal, Yunis
atomic bomb
Aumann, Robert
Austria
automobile industry
Avishai, Bernard
Avon Products
