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 Lévy, 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 American aid. Under these conditions, says even our Third Worldly President Barack Obama, the United States should continue to affirm and guarantee the country’s defense. Because of Israel’s legal rights and democratic processes, the United States should ignore the country’s dire unpopularity with nearly all U.S. allies, international organizations, and trading partners that condemn its allegedly lawless and aggressive foreign policy.
At their best, these defenders of Israel pile up impressive mountains of evidence that Israel is “not guilty” of charges only a madman, a delusional academic, or a UN human rights expert could have brought in the first place. Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished law professor at Harvard, has contributed two popular books, The Case for Israel and The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, that offer over thirty chapters of evidence against the standard propaganda. He is among the best and most tenacious defenders Israel has, outside of the incandescent pages of Commentary , and he has millions more readers than that remarkable publication.
Not for nothing is Dershowitz one of the world’s leading defense attorneys. But the very act of responding to the claims of diabolical maniacs puts this great advocate of Israel in an inappropriately defensive posture, as if a country that requires so resourceful, agile, and punctilious a defense – like Dershowitz’s most notable former client, Claus von Bülow – must have something to hide, a skeleton in its Knesset, a metastasized horror in its history.
The central error of Israel’s defenders is to accept the framing of the debate by its enemies, whose idea is that peace depends on some marginal but perpetually elusive improvement in Israel’s behavior. Prefacing the usual defense are concessions that Israel is “far from perfect” and “has made mistakes” in “overreacting to terrorism and other threats.” As Lawrence Summers put it, “There is much . . . in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can and should be vigorously challenged.” Such statements from Israel’s nominal defenders slip readily from meaningless negatives: “Israel is not perfect” – to crippling concessions: “Israel overreacts to terror.”
Locked in a debate over Israel’s alleged vices, they miss the salient truth running through the long history of anti-Semitism: Israel is hated above all for its virtues.
No Israeli failure to comply with the dictates of the rulings handed down by the UN-run International Court of Justice in The Hague defending the free movement of suicide bombers, no Jewish falling short of the standards devised by UN human rights committees dominated by demented tyrants, can even begin to explain, let alone excuse, the celebrated kidnappings, beheadings, and bombings, and the frothy prophecies of extinction and calls to pogroms that reverberate daily through the streets and mosques of the Middle East with the regularity of the muezzin call to prayer.
From the PLO’s 1964 announcement, long before Israel had control of the West Bank or Gaza, of the PLO’s resolve to extinguish the state of Israel by “armed struggle,” to the daily calls by the venerable president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser for “Israel’s destruction” in the 1967 war; from the prime minister of Syria, Haffez al-Assad, invoking “a battle of annihilation,” to two recent presidents of Iran pledging to “wipe Israel off the map”; from the endless proclamations by Palestinian terrorist politicians seeking “liberation from the Jordan River to the sea,” to the various men of Allah declaring that Jews are “filthy bacteria” that must be “butchered and killed . . . wherever you meet them”; from the sponsorship and celebration of suicide bombers by various imams and exalted rulers, to polls of the Palestinian people affirming the same murderous worldview; these statements are no frenzied war cries uttered only during actual combat and regretted in peacetime. Representing
