unique virtues and genius of its victims. It was an irretrievable loss and catastrophe for all humanity, depleting the entire species of intellectual resources that will be critical to survival on an ever-threatened planet. Imagine the wealth and culture that might have blessed the world from a population of 200 million Jews, the number that would live today if Jews retained their share of global population held at the time of the Roman Empire.
As irremediable and tragic the loss to the Jewish people and all Jewish families directly affected bv the Holocaust, one could argue that the rest of the world has suffered even more in absolute terms by the loss of the vast potential of the six million Jewish victims whose only sin was being Jewish on the European continent in the twentieth century.
The incontestable facts of Jewish excellence constitute a universal test not only for anti-Semitism but also for liberty and the justice of the civil order. The success or failure of any minority in a given country is the best index of its freedoms. In any free society, Jews will tend to be represented disproportionately in the highest ranks of both its culture and its commerce. Americans should not conceal the triumphs of Jews on our shores but celebrate them as evidence of the superior freedoms of the U.S. economy and culture.
The real case for Israel is incomparably more potent and important than the sentimental and self-serving mush usually mustered on its behalf. It has little or nothing to do with Israel’s murky politics, its frequently malfunctioning democracy, its extraordinary restraint in the face of constant provocations from its seething circle of demented neighbors, its treatment of gays or Palestinians or women or ethnic minorities, or its maddening indulgence of the Socialist sophistries of its critics and casuistically captious friends at Harvard, the Atlantic, and the New Republic.
The prevailing muddle of sentimentality and pettifoggery only obscures the actual eminently practical case for supporting Israel, for as long as it may take, without apology or deceit or waffles, without deception or obsequious self-denial. It is the case for Israel as the leader of human civilization, technological progress, and scientific advance. It is the case for Israel as a military spearhead of the culture of freedom and faith – the bastion of American progress and prosperity, and beyond America, for the progress and prosperity of all the people of the planet. The reason America should continue to “prop up” Israel is that Israel itself is a crucial prop of American wealth, freedom, and power.
In a dangerous world, faced with an array of perils, the Israel test asks whether the world can suppress envy and recognize its dependence on the outstanding performance of relatively few men and women. The world does not subsist on zero-sum legal niceties. It subsists on hard and possibly reversible accomplishments in medicine, technology, pharmacology, science, engineering, and enterprise. It thrives not on forcibly reallocating land and resources but on encouraging and giving freedom to human creativity in a way that exploits land and resources most productively. The survival of the human race depends on recognizing excellence wherever it appears and nurturing it until it prevails. It relies on a vanguard of visionary creators on the frontiers of knowledge and accomplishment. It depends on passing the Israel test.
Critics will call this a culpably Judeo-centric argument, missing lots of subtleties and complexities that shrewd, tough-loving critics of Israel cherish in their long catalog of its flaws. Former Prime Minister Olmert had the best answer, barking to writer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that he did not care about the flaws. Regardless of flaws – and Israel has fewer flaws than perhaps any other nation – Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial. Are you for civilization or barbarism, life or death, wealth or envy? Are you an exponent of excellence and accomplishment or of a leveling creed of troglodytic frenzy and hatred?
CHAPTER THREE
The Economics of Settlement
A prime cause of Mideast tensions and turmoil, according to the international media, are Israeli “settlers.” According to the prevailing “narrative”, they are strange extremists who reside illegitimately in the “occupied territories” of the West Bank. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Levy deem the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies.
As is his wont, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute adds to these political concerns a coming environmental catastrophe, also presumably aggravated by the Israeli settlers and their hydrophilic irrigation projects. He sees the Middle East as direly threatened by the growth of population and the exhaustion of water resources. The Institute explains: “Since one ton of grain represents 1,000 tons of water, [importing grain] becomes the most efficient way to import water. Last year, Iran imported 7 million tons of wheat, eclipsing Japan to become the world’s leading wheat importer. This year, Egypt is also projected to move ahead of Japan. The water required to produce the grain and other foodstuffs imported into [the region] last year was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River.”
Although these two concerns might seem unrelated, they converge in the history of Israel, a modern nation-state created by several generations of settlers and constrained at every point by the dearth of water in a predominantly desert land. In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of that century’s cohort of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia and Ukraine, Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine – now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today’s conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to the more Earth-friendly and sustainable demographics of Chad, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.
Chronicling the origins of this Jewish feat in 1939, nine years before the creation of the modern state of Israel, was one of the little-known heroes of the twentieth century, Walter Clay Lowdermilk. An American expert on land usage, he formulated and popularized the most successful techniques of soil reclamation and watershed management around the globe. Today the Department of Agricultural Engineering of Technion University in Israel bears the lapidary name of this Christian from the US, and the world-leading feats of Israeli water conservation attest in part to the lasting power of his influential books.
A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who went on to earn his doctorate in forestry and geology at Berkeley, Lowdermilk focused on “reading the land” for its tales of human civilization. He gauged cultures by their successes and failures in expanding the land’s capacity to sustain human life. A slim U.S. Department of Agriculture volume with a grand title, Conquest of the Land through 7000 Years, summarized many of his findings in 1953. It sold millions of copies and shaped the views of several generations of soil conservationists.
Married to a Christian missionary, Lowdermilk joined the faculty at Nanking University in northern China early in his career to find remedies for the great famine there in 1920 and 1921. Rejecting the prevailing theory of climate change as the cause of the tragedy, Lowdermilk and his Chinese colleagues identified the real culprit to be the enormous load of silt borne down the Yellow River every year. Deposited in the lowlands of the river, it caused floods on the plains and depleted the up-country of soils. “In the presence of such tragic scenes,” he wrote, “I resolved to devote my lifetime to study of ways to conserve the lands on which mankind depends.”
Becoming Assistant Chief in charge of research for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (now part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) in 1938 he embarked on a global mission to determine how the experience of older civilizations could guide the U.S. in surmounting its own agricultural crises of the dust bowl and the gullied soil erosion in the South. This 25,000-mile peregrination ended in the British Mandate of Palestine, where he confronted the question of how the “land flowing with milk and honey” described in the Bible had become a wasteland.
In
