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 Levy, 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
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.
CHAPTER TWO
The Israel test begins with anti-Semitism, which remains a global plague as persistent and metastatic and multifarious, and as baffling in its etiology, as cancer.
The most compelling book on anti-Semitism that I have encountered is
Prager and Telushkin emphasize that anti-Semitism is “unique:” it cannot be comprehended as a form of racism, neurosis, anti-nationalism, envy, ethnic hostility, religious bigotry, or resentment of success. They contend that “modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social, and political factors and universalize it into merely another instance of bigotry are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism…”
Prager and Telushkin recount many chilling and telling tales of anti-Semitic horror reaching far back into history, long before the modern forms of Jew-hatred emerged from current economic and political conditions. They also demonstrate that anti-Semitism has reached into the most refined centers of culture and the most learned redoubts of academic intellect — pantheons such as Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations, both old haunts of mine — where any other form of racism would be socially leprous and outre. The authors tout the universality of anti-Semitism, its persistence, its protean irrepressibility, its grisly shapes, its ghastly violence, its frequent respectability, its secular animus, and its religious fanaticism as evidence for its monstrous and inexorable uniqueness.
“Anti-Semites have not hated Jews,” they write, “because Jews are affluent — poor Jews have always been as hated; or strong — weak Jews have simply invited anti-Semitic bullies; or because Jews may have unpleasant personalities — genocide is not personality generated; or because ruling classes focus worker discontent onto Jews — precapitalist and noncapitalist societies, such as the former Soviet Union, other Communist states, and various third world countries, have been considerably more anti-Semitic than capitalist societies… ”
They conclude: “Anti-Semites have hated Jews because Jews are Jewish…” — essentially for the Jewish belief in their chosenness, in their own national identity, and in the universal reach of their monotheistic God and the moral law associated with the God of the Old Testament. Moreover, to salt the wound of anti-Semitic humiliation, practicing Jews enjoy the best revenge. They live well, leading “demonstrably higher-quality lives” than others who do not adhere to Jewish moral and religious tenets. According Prager and Telushkin, it is these specific characteristics of religious Jews that cause anti-Semitism, rather than the widespread human sins of racism, envy, nationalism, and ethnic hostility that inhere in all other examples of bigotry.
Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager- Telushkin view: “It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world…. The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.”
Jewish ethical monotheism is a basic gift and goad alike to gentiles and Jews who have accepted a relativist morality and philosophy that condones sexual immorality, abortion, and other convenient forms of hedonism. Ethical
