Regarding Israel, I have–like most people, I think–very mixed opinions.
After Auschwitz, I think it became very clear to all people of Jewish origin that however civilized the nation you lived in might appear to be, being a minority put you into a secondary category, one that could turn genocidal very quickly. (For which reason, incidentally, I do not casually dismiss dire white nationalist predictions of what may happen to white populations in America and Europe when whites become a minority. Recent South African developments speak volumes. Mistreatment of minorities, sometimes unto extermination, is the historical rule; like gravity, we strive to rise above it, but to pretend that the pull is not forever there is to be fatally irresponsible.)
I digress, though. European Jewry came very close to being exterminated, and so the survivors naturally wanted a homeland where they would be the ruling majority, and naturally wanted to make it secure and capable of meting out a high price to anyone threatening its citizens. This is neither unexpected nor unreasonable. Unfortunately they located it in a place where others were present, and where those others were of an ethnicity, history, economic status, opinions and religious persuasion unlike theirs. Should we be surprised at the inevitable result?
The problem is that, once a nation is there, and is there for seventy years (not to say in various degrees for several thousand), and is economically viable, self-sustaining, and armed to the teeth, it isn’t going to go away, protests, sanctions, and UN resolutions be damned. We may condemn Israeli overreaction to recent protests, but Israeli forces don’t see it as overreaction. They see themselves surrounded by a hundred million Arabs who would be overwhelmingly gratified if Israel left the earth tomorrow with Himmleresque flourishes, and the only thing stopping them from making it so is Israeli force of arms and a frequently demonstrated readiness to use it. Unsurprisingly, Israeli troops demonstrate that readiness without much hesitation.
And this is why my feelings are mixed. I would like to see Israel survive, and I would like to see it survive as a Jewish state devoted to protecting the Jewish people. However, given the circumstances, that simply is not going to happen if they give themselves up to liberal pieties like democracy, equality before the law, one-man-one-vote, and so on. The demographics are such that democracy means Jews will inevitably lose future elections, and Arab Muslims will win. Will the winning Muslim majority be nice? Or will they take Israel’s 400+ nukes and world-class armaments and be not so nice? Since the recent record of Muslim nations is one of zero democracy and much bloody upheaval, asking Israel to take that chance with their peoples’ live is rather too much to risk.
So, faced with a choice between Israel as it is–for all its frequently illiberal bursts of cruelty–and liberal democracy leading to Maidenek:The Sequel, I opt for Israel. Jews ‘R Us: a long-enduring strand of Western Civilization that has benefited Western and world culture in innumerable ways, and they are worth preserving even at a high and even tragic cost. And this is what history is: tragic. You don’t free the slaves without throwing away 750,000 Northern and Southern lives, and you don’t keep Israel intact without putting bullets through Palestinian protesters now and again. That’s just how these things go. I don’t despise the Israel troops who do that, or the Palestinian protesters whose understandable anger and dispossession make it inevitable. Both are right. But it is a zero-sum game where one side wins and the other side loses. And if I have to pick one over the other, there’s no question: I want the Israeli side to win. Not least because, unlike the other side, I don’t see Israel ever going overboard. The West Bank is not Dachau, and Israel harbors no desire to make North Africa Muslimfrei. Their cruelty is moderate, and, for a modern state, that is saying a very great deal.
What is interesting, strange, and maybe portentous about all this is not the above oppressive calculus, however, but the decaying relation between Israel and the left. Once upon a time, to be Jewish and to be socialist was very nearly one and the same, and Bolshevism seemed about to become a Reform category all its own. But increasingly the left has become so anti-Israeli that Jews on the left have become–I won’t quite say anti-semitic–but neo-semitic: a new flavor all its own. A secular neoliberal New York-Washington sort of Jewish wing has become a kind of opposing pole to the Orthodox socialist Tel Aviv-Jerusalem wing. The first is ostensibly committed to Israel’s survival, but increasingly that commitment is tenuous, a matter of lip service, groping for some other solution as yet unposed.
The problem, I think, is that the reality of power and the ideology of power eventually have to fall into a kind of sync. If the only way Israel can preserve itself as a Jewish state is to favor one ethnicity and culture and religion over another, and maintain it by force and by limiting democracy rather than universal democratic consent, then you can’t come out with the usual twaddle about universal equality, diversity, multiculturalism, open borders, and so on. In New York, you’re all but obligated to mouth all that, as you let illegals pick potatoes and swab toilets for a dollar an hour, and then you go home to your gated suburban community, leaving the rabble to fester in their inner-city reservations till being herded to the voting booths to vote for the currently preferred mask worn by neoliberalism: Democrat. Not in Israel: there, open borders is a death sentence. Not for nothing do white nationalists like Richard Spencer call themselves white Zionists: Israel is a model ethnostate, and covering that up is a weariness; it’s more honest, and more true, to take it for what it is and think out the real implications.
This really goes back to Marshall McLuhan’s bon mot, “Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.” We live in an era of growing identitarianism because the Niagara of multiple cultures spilling from the media and the internet give us no easy default. We have no cultures anymore, only an ever-shifting digital collage of multiple perspectives, and you need a culture to find a place in it–a stable context in which to define your identity. Multiculturalism corrodes identity, and so each of us in different ways are more and more desperately groping for it. Israel too is moving with this trend: it’s presenting itself increasingly not as a Jewish Homeland but as a matter of Jewish identity: the Netanyahu wing would like to force the claim that to be Jewish is not to be pro-Israel but to be Israeli, pure and simple–that nationalism trumps the loose association that has been the case throughout the Diaspora.
That is a historic, almost geologic, shift that goes to the core of being Jewish and so deeply discomfits American, European and all non-Israeli Jews; it leaves some so uncomfortable that they go full leftist, ready to throw Israel to the Islamic wolves. I daresay it heralds a split; maybe several. And that’s tragic too: in the end all wars are internalized. We have met the enemy and he is us.