George Gilder is a phenomenon. With a restless and questing mind, he has written books on feminism, capitalism, technology, and other topics. These books are absorbing, provocative, and somewhat original. Do you know how hard it is to be even somewhat original? There is nothing new under the sun. But Gilder notices things under the sun that escape most people’s attention. He seems to have three thoughts a second. He comes at you with a fire hose of thoughts. Most of them are true-ringing, and all of them merit consideration.

Now he has written a book about Israel, that critical issue of our time. But he has not dropped prior concerns: This is a book about capitalism and technology too. Really, it is a book about civilization and barbarism, life and death. Israel occasions the biggest thoughts.

The book is called The Israel Test, and you will want to know what that test is. I will let Gilder tell you — he has some questions: “What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishment? Do you aspire to their excellence, or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?”

Gilder’s idea is that people who have a problem with Israel have a problem with human efflorescence, freedom, genius, and difference. He reminds me of Paul Johnson, who says that those who hate America in fact hate humanity itself: because people from all over the world gather in America to live as fully, freely, and happily as possible.

Early in his book (as later), Gilder discusses the astounding success of Jews. “In countries where Jews are free to invent and create, they pile up conspicuous wealth” — and in so doing “arouse envy and suspicion.” The author quotes Gorky, who said, “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more capable of work than they are.”

The debate over anti-Semitism — its origins — is long, complicated, and, to me, ultimately unsatisfying. Take Japan: Anti-Semitism is very big there; and scarcely a Jew has ever set foot on those islands. What gives? Gilder chalks up anti-Semitism to envy, a green-eyed monster that, at its most ferocious, kills, even genocidally. And he says that “the hatred of Jews epitomizes a general resentment of excellence and creativity.”

As I said, to me, nothing is ultimately satisfying, where an explanation of anti-Semitism is concerned. The disease is as baffling as it is persistent. But Gilder makes his case with his usual verve and power.

It is clear that the world hath need of Jews. Gilder writes, “Their genius has leavened the culture and economy of the world.” Whenever non-Jews have killed or exiled the Jews, they have hurt themselves, as well as the Jews (although we need not spend much time feeling sorry for the persecutors). I remember reading, at Yad Vashem, a striking fact: Before 1933, Germans were awarded 37 Nobel prizes; and 11 of them went to Jewish Germans.

In Gilder’s pages, we relearn the “golden rule of capitalism”: “The good fortune of others is also one’s own.” This is hard for a great many people — probably most people — to accept. The leveling temptation is very strong. “Anti-capitalists, like anti-Semites throughout history,” writes Gilder, “have always been obsessed with the ‘gaps’ everywhere discernible between different groups: gaps of income, power, achievement, and status.” And efforts to eliminate or even reduce gaps bring stagnation, misery, and even murder. Appeals to “social justice” ought to make our blood run cold; equality of opportunity is what is just and desirable.

The Palestinians are among the most wretched of the earth, but they need not be. At a dinner in Jordan earlier this year, I sat next to an Arab-American professor who had grown up in Gaza. He spoke of the many Arab scientists, engineers, and so on working in Israel (where over 20 percent of the population is Arab). (Contrast this with the hospitality of Arab countries to Jews.) In Israel, said the professor, the talents of Arabs are appreciated and used. How nice if such people could work so fruitfully in Arab countries!

Gilder writes that, “by merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world’s most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy.” He also says that “the Palestinian Arabs could be a nation tomorrow and a state the day after, if their leaders could let go of the notion that the Jews must die before Palestine can live.”

I suspect that, if sane but stubborn Palestinians such as Saeb Erekat and Hanan Ashrawi read The Israel Test in the dark of night, with a single bulb near the pillow, they would agree with almost all of it — and never breathe a word about this agreement.

Israel, born (or reborn) in true-believing, cramping socialism, has recently opened and boomed. Gilder tells many stories of Israeli innovation, enterprise, and wealth-creation. It is all world-leading. But Gilder is not a believer in Homo economicus. What I mean is, there is a spiritual component to his work and thought. He attacks the claim that “matter must rule over mind.” And he says that “the reign of the algorithm vindicates the monotheist — and capitalist — intuition that the world in the first instance is a manifestation of thought.” Is this not metaphysics?

Getting into the nitty-gritty of politics and geopolitics, he says that “the central error of Israel’s defenders is to accept the framing of the debate by its enemies.” The error is in thinking that “peace depends on some marginal but perpetually elusive improvement in Israel’s behavior”: maybe a freeze on settlements. This is both delusional and dangerous, says Gilder. “Land for peace” has proven a chimera. “The Palestinian regime has as little interest in land as it has in peace.”

Gilder is often thought a dreamer and idealist, and in many ways he is, but he is also a realist and a nearly giddy thrower of cold water.

He is bracing on the topic of Jewish self-criticism, and also of Jewish self-hatred. Many Jews have, in a word, “internalized” (unjust) criticisms of themselves. Funny how apologetic they can be about money-making. And this line of Gilder’s almost made me spit out what I was drinking: “Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism.”

Toward the end of his book, Gilder has a chapter on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he contrasts with the new American president. Obama, he says, is a “fervent” proponent of “the economics of envy,” a “compelling spokesman for third world causes and Muslim grievances,” and so on. Netanyahu is — not. He is “the obverse of Obama in nearly every way.” Gilder details what Netanyahu, like Israel, has been through, in war and peace. And I thought of what Obama recently said about Israeli leaders: that they need to engage in “serious self-reflection.” Was that not one of the most clueless and embarrassing presidential utterances in memory?

Gilder explains why Israel and America are linked, sharing a destiny: If America lets Israel go, America itself will not be far behind. I was reminded of Norman Podhoretz, at the end of his well-known 1982 essay “J’Accuse”:

. . . anti-Semitic attacks on Israel . . . are also a cover. They are a cover for a loss of American nerve. They are a cover for the acquiescence in terrorism. They are a cover for the appeasement of totalitarianism. And I accuse all those who have joined in these attacks not merely of anti-Semitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the interests of the United States and indeed to the values of Western civilization as a whole.

Gilder’s Israel Test is an unconventional book, by an unconventional man. He hop-scotches around, following his restless mind, fire-hosing those thoughts at you — yet he is able to tie his thoughts together, in a brilliant synthesis. Along the way, he drops sentences that appear as aphorisms, lines to be written down or memorized: “Everywhere nations claim a resolve to develop; but everywhere their first goal is to expropriate, banish, or kill the existing developers.”

As he writes, you think of Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Natan Sharansky, Podhoretz, and others. And, in fact, Gilder cites these people. The beaux esprits are gathering in this volume. And Gilder is rightly unsparing when it comes to other esprits — e.g., Thomas L. Friedman, the three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Seldom has he been so zestily and neatly fileted. Gilder ends his book with a touch of autobiography, telling of some youthful anti-Semitism, of which he was quickly ashamed. “I had blamed the people who had outperformed me.” Gilder has surely passed every Israel test since.

Before sitting down with this book, I did not think I could read anything new, or newish, about Israel and the Middle East, but I soon found that I could. This book has an infectious enthusiasm. It is at times downright exciting, or thrilling. It will surely go into future editions — and some further proofreading is in order. Just some tidying. Also, there is at least one factual matter: Gilder makes a list of Jewish pianists. Plenty to choose from — but he must strike two non-Jews (Cliburn and, yes, Gould).

You know the waggish old line “Philo-Semitism is the higher anti-Semitism”? It does not always apply. George Gilder is a philo-Semite, and fine thinker, who has performed a noble and useful act. He has told essential truths. Incidentally, he dedicates this book to Midge Decter, an “American sage,” as he says. What an honor to be the dedicatee of such a book — one that will affect minds and live long.