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 ack
in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs actually did the killing;
but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was responsible,
at some theoretical level, for keeping the peace in the zone that
included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the
brunt of the world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these
events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in
disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"
I've been getting
the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The fundamental reason
America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people
want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only
reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because
of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A
few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly
than that. Put it this way: While I have not yet encountered the
word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse"
enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should
say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds.
At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans
by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American
politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer
blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim
kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside
the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish
(as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins),
and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive e-mails, I am
going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be
blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians.
The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern
affairs: The root phenomenon is hesperophobia.
This word was
coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are
the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and phobos,
which means "fear," but which when used as an English
suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia
is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff,
by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting
by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint
dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear
us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to
have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]
Here is the
news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban"
mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and
Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries, European civilization
— the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a
lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if
you spend much time on college campuses.
I can't see
any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were
to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia
would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would
decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji,
from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because
we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed
up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly
humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared
in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the
19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off,
Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm
of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating
in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or
in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred,
the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them,
like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less
modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still
struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs
nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain rational,
constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic
condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly
recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The
Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first
encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient,
equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at
the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And
here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble,
led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were
also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering
in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by
their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final
body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The
superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly
demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end
of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial
Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad
about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the
Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not
have forgotten the Gulf War.
If you haven't
spent some time in its company, the depth, and bitterness of hesperophobia
in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points
out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers
do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious settlements. They
go for shopping malls or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews,
but they hate the West as much, or more.
Israel is not
a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture
is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited
by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly
as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of the Jews has been
built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There
is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were
contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This
is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated like swine.
For a true account, read Joan Peters's From
Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East
Crisis</a>. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western
state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation,
a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful
nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing.
Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft
that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of
what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid,
hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison
with another.
So, so, so,
is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in
the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must
speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in
any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and
I am not Jewish. (Following my
Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at
least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an
anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West
must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists
simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.
What, after
all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through?
We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our
aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against
the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms
manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently
not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what
so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by
American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we
should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots
of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who
will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example
— are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like
Iran, and pocketing the profits?
And the end
of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it
will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs
so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will
be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape
of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs,
with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's the
Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools,
and I want no part of it.
Israel's culture
is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered
a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won
a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support
Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional
lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests."
You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and
cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the
U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think
straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization
and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons
and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon
and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand
times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you
have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections
for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week
was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism,
or anti-Semitism. It was in part all those things: but more than
anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia.
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