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
