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 n his splendid (translation
of the word "splendid": full of things to argue and write
web columns about) new book The
Death of the West, Pat Buchanan relates a story about his
days working with President Nixon — who was, as Pat quotes
Golda Meir saying, one of the best friends Israel ever had. In the
story, Nixon had just hung up after receiving a phone call from
Yitzhak Rabin. Pat's wife Shelley asked the president what he thought
of Israel's prospects.
"The long
run?" Nixon responded. He extended his right fist, thumb up,
in the manner of a Roman emperor passing sentence on a gladiator,
and slowly turned his thumb over and down.
In this opinion,
as in many others, the 37th president was ahead of his time. The
question of Israel's long-term survival is now on many minds. Pat's
book gives the dismal demographic news: 25 million Palestinian Arabs
living alongside 7 million Palestinian Jews by mid-century. Many
of us are starting to wonder if Israel has a future.
Back in October,
Norman Podhoretz published a piece in the magazine Commentary
putting as brave a face on things as can be put. After pooh-poohing
the Oslo "peace
process," comparing Shimon Peres with Neville Chamberlain,
and acknowledging that the current leadership of the Palestinian
Arabs has no real wish to make peace with Israel, Podhoretz looks
to the future. There is, he says, "no glimmer of light at the
end of this dark and gloomy tunnel." He counsels Israeli Jews
to hunker down and wait for the day when "the Arab world will
make its own peace with the existence of a Jewish state."
That article
naturally generated a lot of mail to Commentary. Amongst
it was a letter from Ron Unz, the west-coast entrepreneur and policy
intellectual who campaigned successfully against bilingual education
in California. Unz (who, like Podhoretz, is Jewish) puts the pessimistic
case with great force:
I expect
Israel's trajectory to follow that of the temporary Crusader kingdoms,
surviving for seventy or eighty years following its 1948 establishment,
then collapsing under continual Muslim pressure and flagging ideological
commitment.
So who's right?
The Podhoretz party, which believes Israel just has to hold on until
the Arabs see sense? Or the Unzes, who believe that Israel is one
of those grafts that just won't "take" — like white
Rhodesia or the Crusader kingdoms?
The answer
probably lies with the Jews of Israel, with whether or not they
have the will and nerve to sit things out until the Arab world enters
the modern age, assuming it ever does. Here the signs are not good.
In a recent poll of Israeli Jews aged 25-34, a third want to leave
the country. With suicide bombings now almost a daily occurrence,
it's hard to blame them. Jews live free, comfortable, secure lives
all over the Western world. So who needs Israel?
A Zionist might
point out, quite truthfully, that 100 years ago you could have asked
the same question. Anywhere in Europe west of Russia (of which at
that time, Poland was a part), Jews were confident that they had
gained, or were close to gaining, acceptance, and that the horrors
of the Middle Ages were all behind them. Zionists were regarded
by most European Jews as crackpots. Theodor Herzl, the prime mover
of modern Zionism, himself felt that way until 1894. Then, as a
newspaper reporter, he witnessed the dishonoring of the Jewish army
officer Alfred Dreyfus on the parade ground of the École
Militaire in Paris, Dreyfus shouting out his innocence while beyond
the wall a mob bayed: "Death to the Jews!" We shall
never be secure until we have a nation of our own, was the entirely
natural conclusion Herzl came to, and set about building the modern
Zionist movement.
It took the
rise of Hitler to make any large number of Jews agree with him,
though. The arc of European-Jewish feeling about Zionism can be
traced by imagining the reaction of an "average" west
European Jew to the statement that there could be no security for
the Jews without a national home.
In 1892: "Nonsense. We are perfectly secure. It's people like
you who make trouble for us."
In
1952: "Of course! Anyone can see that!"
In
2002: "Do you think so? I feel a lot more secure in Paris than
I do in Tel Aviv!"
In the U.S.A.
the matter is more complicated. There have been very few full-blown
anti-Semitic pogroms in this country: The one in New York City in
August 1991 is the only one I know of. Because of the peculiar circumstances
in that case — it occurred in just about the only neighborhood
anywhere in the U.S.A. that Jews share with blacks — most American
Jews were not much bothered by it. They feel quite secure; and I
think, with some
slight qualifications, they are right to feel that way. At the
same time, the Jews of America include many thousands of Holocaust
survivors, who are naturally wary of slipping back into the complacency
of their own parents 70 years ago. It has often been said that black
Americans and white Americans will never be at ease with each other
until the generation that remembers Jim Crow has died out. It may
similarly be true that Jews will never feel truly secure, even in
the U.S.A., until the Holocaust generation has passed on. But when
that happens — and the very youngest Holocaust survivors are
now in their sixties — the question will be asked with even
more force: Who needs Israel?
I had better
step out front and center here and admit that I am a pessimist,
of the Unz party. I think Israel will go down. The reason I think
this is that I am British, and have been watching all my life, occasionally
at very close quarters, the long struggle between the two constitutional
nations of the British Isles and the terrorists of Sin Féin/IRA.
I do not see how anyone who has followed that conflict can come
to any conclusion other than the one I have come to, which is, that
democracy is no match for terrorism.
This may be
a universal truth, I don't know. At any rate, it is certainly true
of the modern Anglo-Saxon style democracies (among which I would
include the Republic of Ireland). Dedicated irredentist terrorists
with a single clear goal — Unite Ireland! Destroy Israel! —
will get what they want in the end. They have too many things going
for them that their opponents, the modern constitutional democracies,
do not have. They have stamina — the iron determination
to press on for decades, for generations, brushing aside
all reverses, weathering all storms, expelling all doubters, holding
steadfast to the golden vision. They have the luxury of perfect
ruthlessness as regards method. I have been told many times by supporters
of Irish terrorism — I was told it once in the "letters"
column of the Wall Street Journal — that anything, anything
at all, is justified in the name of "the cause." While
their enemies debate the morality of this weapon or that, and the
best way to avoid "collateral" casualties, and whether
their terrorist prisoners should have air conditioning, the terrorists
themselves are planting bombs in busy shopping streets, shooting
up 12-year-old girls at a bat mitzvah, or leading away the single
mother of ten children to be executed for the "crime"
of comforting a dying enemy soldier.
And the terrorists
have the moral condition of the modern democracies working for them,
too. We are open societies, in which all voices can be heard. The
terrorists can make their case in public; and of course they have
a case. Sinn Féin has a case; the PLO has a case; as George
Orwell pointed out in the middle of WWII, even Hitler had a case
— one to which, until he started invading other people's countries,
the world was much more receptive than we now care to remember.
The intellectual, litigational, over-educated elites who run modern
democracies are much more interested in hearing a case argued than
in organizing the grueling, deadly, morally ambiguous work of counterterrorism.
And the loathing that so many of our elites nurse in their innermost
hearts for the culture into which they were born, naturally helps
the enemies of that culture
Indeed, if
you pursue the Irish parallel, the prospects are even more depressing
than Ron Unz tells us. Taken to its full length, that parallel would
suggest that even if democracy comes to the Palestinians,
and even if they get a viable state, and even if the
great majority of the Palestinian people are content with that state
and give up, or postpone indefinitely, the old dream of driving
the Jews into the sea: even if all that, there would still
be tiny groups of fanatics who would reject the whole deal and continue
their war "by all means necessary"... and that the people
whose duty it was to fight those fanatics would eventually tire
of the task, and give in to everything the terrorists were demanding.
Even more than they were demanding, perhaps: The IRA now has offices
in the House of Commons!
So my answer
to the title question is a glum: "No, probably not." Sick
of terror, longing for a normal bourgeois life, those who can —
those who have education, talents, marketable skills — will
slip away. The dumbed-down remainder, outnumbered and outwitted,
will sink into a defeatist lassitude punctuated by crude, insensate
acts of rearguard violence. The only great nation at all inclined
to act as protector will tire of doing so, making all sorts of excuses
as she backs away from her obligations: "Oh, you know, they're
not exactly model constitutionalists are they? Look how they treat
their minorities! Because of them, all our foreign policy is bent
out of shape! Bombs are going off in our own cities! And the expense!
" I'm sorry, but I've seen it all, in another place. The result
is too predictable. This is how civilization yields ground to barbarism.
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