Category Archives: Israel

When I Am The Stronger, I Take Away Your Freedom, Because That Is My Principle

Democracy, Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Law, The West

Nineteenth-century French writer Louis Veuillot produced this magnificent insight, illustrating the proclivities of certain peoples and cultures:

“When I am weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”

This saying came to mind as I read about the plans of some Arab-Israelis to use that country’s independent, liberal judiciary to prevail against it:

“Israeli Arab political party Balad, recently banned from the upcoming general elections by Israel’s central elections committee, warned on Wednesday that if the court upholds the committee’s decision, the party will call for a boycott of the elections and establish an alternative Arab parliament.”

“Balad, like the northern chapter of Islamic Movement, have been seeking elections for the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee in Israel for some time now, thus essentially establishing an independent parliament.”

“The Central Elections Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the motions to ban the Arab parties on Monday, accusing the Arab parties of incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

Update XI: Paleos Must Defend the West, And That Means Israel Too

Christianity, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Old Right, Palestinian Authority, Political Philosophy, South-Africa, The West

The thread in response to my VDARE.com column, “Paleos Must Defend the West, And That Means Israel Too,” grew so long, that I am carrying it over in this new blog post.

The original, heated discussion began here. We are now on Update VII (Jan 16):

So did I really say what Richard Spencer of Taki’s Magazine alleges I said? Why, the excerpt Mr. Spencer provides from my VDARE.com to back his contention contradicts it.

Contra Mr. Spencer, a philosophical defense of Israel can include a support for Israel’s incursion into Gaza, but, it doesn’t have to.

Richard Spencer’s colleague, Razib Khan (why can’t Americans spell “ILANA”?), objects to the term “The Judeo-Christian West.” I’ve heard this objection before from paleos put in far more sinister terms, the aim being to disinherit Judaism. Or deny the continuity between it and Christianity. An absurdity, of course.

So polite disagreement is a nice change.

Once again, Mr. Khan’s claim that between 500 and 1800 Jews were not major players in Western Civilization is not nearly enough to render hollow the term Judeo-Christian. Ditto the fact that most Israelis are descended from the Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497. (From their exile in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East, they fled to Israel as refugees after 1948.)

Consider: Under the Afrikaner National Party, South Africa’s institutions were eminently western, although Europeans formed a minority in that country. Should any paleo visit Israel, rather than just theorize platonically about the place, he will see the relevance of the SA example.

I am no theologian, nor am I remotely religious. I am, however, as Jewish as … Jesus was.

Yeah, it’s almost as though some Christians forget Jesus was as Jewish as they come.

While he was a radical, Jesus was not an alien from Deep Space, but was steeped in the Hebrew (“Old”) Testament’s ethics. Knowledge and wisdom don’t arise in a vacuum; like so many greats, Jesus stood on the shoulders of giants, and was very much in the mold of the classical prophets, some of whom had to sleep out in the fields to escape the people’s wrath.

Deuteronomy, an early book—the fifth of 39—showcases an advanced concept of Jewish social justice, and is replete with instructions to protect the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widows, the orphans, the aliens, etc.

This ethical monotheism, developed centuries before classical Greek philosophy, is echoed throughout the Hebrew Bible (Exodus), and expounded upon by the classical prophets, who railed against power and cultural corruption so magnificently:

“There is blood on you hands; wash yourself and be clean. Put away the evil of your deeds, away out of my sight. Cease to do evil and learn to do right, pursue justice and champion the oppressed; give the orphan his rights, plead the widow’s cause.”—Isaiah 1:11-17

The claim, made by the dazzling Catholic controversialist Clare Boothe Luce, that “New Testament universalism superseded Old Testament particularism” can be dispatched with a reminder that the Ten Commandments preceded the Epistle of St. John.

My knowledge of Judaism, and its influence on Christianity, is superficial at best (my father is the scholar of Judaism), but even more superficial is it to deny the philosophical continuity between Judaism and Christianity.

Update VII (Jan 16): AN ASIDE. Apropos my comment above with resepct to Sephardi Jews, who “fled to Israel as refugees after 1948.” Note to paleos: these Jews are NOT in refugee camps.

The approximately 1.5 million Jewish refugees from Arab lands could have become a considerable obstacle to the Palestinian propaganda machine had Israel been as conniving as her enemies. Imagine the kind of trump card Israel might have wielded had she, like her uncivilized neighbors, kept these legitimate Jewish refugees in camps, refused to settle them, fomented hate among them for the Arab, and turned the fugitives into political pawns—as Arab nations have so masterfully done to their so-called refugees.

Update VIII: PAUL GOTTFRIED. Paul is the complete intellectual package, packing both scholarship and analytical prowess into his response to my “spirited polemic.”

Paul, Larry Auster, and Serge Trifkovic are, however, the only heavy-weight traditionalists I can think of right now, who’re both vocal about Israel and have not embraced the Palestinian cause.

THE ALL-ROUND REPULSIVENESS OF THE CRYPTO-LEFTIST NEOCONSERVATIVES: I don’t buy this excuse for the venom directed at Israel from the paleoconservative and libertarian factions. If I accept this lame excuse, I must also accept that paleos are incapable of intellectual honesty and consistency.

Have the big, bad, neocons damaged the brave Buchanan so that he must betray the truth? I respect Buchanan too much to whittle down his position on Israel in this manner.

I do understand sympathy for the self-inflicted plight of the Palestinians. Good men have a heart. Sympathy is no flaw. But puckering up in prayer for a One-State Solution, or the Right of Return; those are major flaws, when adopted by paleos who oppose the universal right of return (free-for-all immigration) to the United States, and who know only too well what will become of Israel once Muslims gain a majority there. C’mon.

Must I also accept that a gifted gentleman like Jo Sobran dabbles in Holocaust denial because of displaced anger at the neocons? This is too frivolous and insulting for words–to Mr. Sobran.

In my own professional life, such as it is, I have been far less blessed than most big-name paleos I know (even those who’ve been hard done-by). For most of my life I was tucked away in the Third World. Although I’m infinitely glad to be in the US now, the First World has not been terribly kind to me either. I remain the embodiment of an outsider–an untouchable to the Treason-type, libertarians lite, not exactly accepted (read: published) by paleolibertarians; once courted by some influential neocons, they ceased to call on me, starting with this editorial in September of 2002. (I imagine that likening Bush’s grin to that of a patient with end-stage syphilis did not enhance my popularity with the establishment.)

Other than that class act Peter Brimelow (and Paul and Tom DiLorenzo, naturally), unique in his intellectual courage and honesty, who’s helped my career among paleoconservatives?

My publishing woes for the book Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post Apartheid South Africa can’t be exaggerated. My column is forever in Jeopardy.

Have my positions waxed and waned to reflect my deep disappointments and disillusionment with America in the Age of the Idiot? Or with the intellectual honestly and tribalism of my fellow traditionalists? (Like “intellectuals” of the mainstream, so too do libertarians and paleos huddle in atrophying intellectual attics, making sure dissenters are kept away.)

Not on your life.

Similarly, Pat Buchanan has had, and is having, a good run. I could not be happier; I’m a fan. Most other paleo talent did okay until the dawn of the neoconservatives and the tyranny of political correctness.

There are no personal excuses for the paleos’ curiously inconsistent positions on Israel (or for Joe Sobran’s Holocaust skepticism, given the historical evidence. Did the big, bad, neocons drive Sobran to abandon history and embrace pseudo-history?).

Suck it up! (We all should.)

Paul writes self-deprecatingly:

“The question is whether I would reason this way about Israel absent certain factors: for example, if I had no Jewish blood, if members of my family had not fled Hitler and gone to Israel, and if my son-in-law were not an Israeli military officer. The answer is probably not.”

Once again, I don’t buy this, especially given that the most vehement critics of Israel and Jews are … Jews. Always have been, always will be. I quote my father here: “If we know anything from Jewish history it is that the very root of our tragedy is our own self-destruction.” Israel against Judea; the two tribes against the ten tribes; in the second temple there was terrible internecine conflict, even with the Romans at the gates. In the Middle Ages rabbis excommunicated each other… Ben Gurion handed over Irgun people to the British.

On and on.

“The story of Jew not lifting up a hand to Jew is a fallacy, an American superficiality,” now parroted by paleos, and “developed” in Kevin MacDonald’s Fee Fi Fo Fum “science” of Jews.

My “tribe” has no bearing on the positions I take, have taken, and will continue to take; justice does; my core beliefs do. Paul does himself and his scrupulous record a disservice to suggest otherwise.

(Update IX): “Ilana, Israel, and I.” (Richard, my writing “Robert” was a typo. But the coupling of Robert and Spencer is intuitive to those who follow Robert as well as Richard.)

Update X (Jan 17): Sigh. In response to the please-allow-me-to-remain-neutral-about-Jihad plea: In the previous thread we rehashed the issue of foreign aid, which I’ve resolutely opposed, always. This is old hat. WE ALL OPPOSE AID TO ALL SIDES. Get off this self-righteous hobby horse.

By now it is abundantly clear what I mean by philosophical affinity. Sadly, many paleos like to play at moral equivalence. They’re afflicted with a leftist malady. With all the lofty pontificating about it being impossible to adjudicate “old conflicts in the Middle East,” etc., ask yourself this: If the Israelis stopped all forms of aggression today, forthwith, would you trust the Palestinians to follow suit?
Yeah, I thought so. So much for the cycle of violence.

The Hutus (generally uglier and inclined to envy) of Rwanda slaughtered near a million Tutsis (tall and better looking). I condemn the former. I do not draw moral equivalence between the criminals and their victims. Yet one paleo dilettante declared that to him the Israeli and Palestinian conflict is but “Hutus and Tutsis.” He is unable to philosophically distinguish innocent from guilty in the latter case, and clearly is not much better when it comes to the former.

Update X (Jan 18): There, I’ve said it: Afrikaners make the most spectacular paleos. “The modern Boer,” wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the popular British writer of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, is “the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.”

And the modern paleo Boer is Dan Roodt. Roodt recently paid tribute to his Afrikaner ancestors’ “miraculous victory over the Zulu forces of Dingane during the Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838,” when “450 Afrikaners defeated an army of at least 13,000 Zulus without any losses in their ranks.” Roodt’s coda:

“The Day of the Covenant should be internationally celebrated among all those who believe that our Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian civilisation is still worth fighting for.”

No (unmanly) weirdness there.

Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Terrorism

Israeli Jews are overwhelmingly liberal. Yet they sanction an operation other lefties around the world call barbaric. Let me hazard a guess: For westerners sitting comfortably and safely in their abodes, it’s hard to imagine what living under a barrage of “harmless” rockets is like. Perhaps we too would want the state to step in and perform its one legitimate function: stop rockets from landing on our heads.

On the other hand, I could be wrong and Jews simply seek to colonize Gaza, and then conquer the world.

Reports the Jerusalem Post:

“The Israeli military operation against Hamas in Gaza enjoys the overwhelming support of Israeli Jews despite the loss of civilian life in the Hamas-run territory, a survey released Wednesday showed.

A whopping 94% of the public support or strongly support the operation while 92% think it benefits Israel’s security, according to the Tel Aviv University survey.

The poll found that 92% of Israeli Jews justify the air force’s attacks in Gaza despite the suffering of the civilian population in the Strip and the damage they cause to infrastructure.”

Updated: Israel and Hamas: Who Is To blame? By Tibor Machan

BAB's A List, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism

Hamas has embroiled Israel in a vortex of terror and counterterror. BAB A-Lister Tibor Machan has a way of clarifying complicated matters. In the following column, Tibor untangles the jerry-built justifications for Hamas terrorism.

The sequel to “Israel and Hamas: Who is to blame?” follows hereunder. Scroll down to read “Terrorism: Inexcusable,” also by Tibor Machan.

Israel and Hamas: Who is to blame?
By TIBOR R. MACHAN

When one is bombarded with information about events on which the history is ancient and so complex that hardly anyone commenting makes sense of them, it is tough to judge. That’s how it is with me and the current upheaval between Israel and Hamas.

The news reports at the beginning said Israel took military action after hundreds of missiles were being launched at it from Gaza. So to rid the Gaza Strip of the missile launchers, Israel began to target various areas from which the missiles were being launched, presumably centers where Hamas had most of its personnel and equipment located.

Further reports, especially on CNN International, observed that Israel’s response to the initiation of aggression by Hamas was disproportionate to what Hamas did to Israel. Still, as with most fights, this one had to start with someone throwing the first punch, as it were, and that seems to have been Hamas this last time. (Last time, Hamas supposedly kidnapped some Israeli soldiers, another situation that was bizarre from the start.)

The Israelis claim that all they want is for the missile launching to stop, and Hamas spokesmen on CNN say they will only stop if Israel stops its aggression. But this is confused since Hamas clearly started the launching of missiles out of the Gaza Strip and isn’t disputing this. So how could Israel be the aggressor? To aggress is to begin a fight, not to respond to one being initiated.

As I was watching report after report on CNN, while attending a conference — and getting no sleep — in Mexico, I noticed that the reporters of this news network kept repeating the claim, made by Hamas leaders and others who support Hamas and oppose Israel, that Israel is targeting innocent civilians. Yet it is nearly impossible to tell who is a civilian in the Gaza conflict, judging by the footage showing various groups of young people and adults shooting whatever weapons they have at hand and throwing rocks in the direction of the border between Israel and the strip.

Unfortunately, the reports fail to include any discussion of how one is to tell the difference between Hamas civilians and Hamas militia. I have never seen any footage showing Hamas soldiers, if they exist; Israel, however, does distinguish between its civilians and its army by way of their garb.

After about five days of the hostilities, CNN’s reporters had some Gaza government official on the air and posed some pointed questions about who is the victim and who the aggressor. It was immediately clear that the official wanted at all cost to dodge the issue of who had started the current hostilities. When the CNN reporter asked about Israel officials’ claim about the missiles that had been launched at Israel and to which Israel was supposedly responding, the spokesman was so obviously evasive that I couldn’t believe it. Who sent this person to speak for Hamas? He replied to the CNN reporter by saying “I have always been known as an opponent of violence.” So what? Why is that an answer to “Israelis say they are responding to your aggression, so what is your answer to them?”

When one is bombarded with selective, nearly haphazard information about events around the globe, events that are one’s only source of understanding of who is doing what to whom and how it is all justified, there is not much one can do but listen very carefully and determine who is making logical mistakes — who is equivocating, who is being evasive and vague, who is being clear and answers relevant questions directly, without obfuscation.

By that criterion I have to say that my provisional assessment of what is reported from the Middle East leaves me with the impression that Israel is less responsible for the recent mess than Hamas. That’s as well as I can do with the immediate information at hand. Maybe more detail, more history will lead me to alter what I think about the matter, but for now I am pretty sure that Hamas is the bad guy here, while Israel, as so often in history, is the victim.

As my mother, who lives in Europe and went through the mid-century disasters there, said to me a while ago, “Why don’t they leave the Israelis to live in peace?” Frankly, I am mystified myself. And it is also puzzling why so many Western academics seem to get on board with the anti-Israel stance. No, I don’t call it anti-Semitism because I don’t know the motivation behind their position. I do know that they nearly always favor Israel’s enemies and consider America’s official pro-Israel stance something wrongheaded, based not on considerations of justice but on the so-called influence of the Jewish Lobby.

I don’t care about any lobby. I am only concerned that when fights break out, those who start them be identified, and that their reasons and motives be objectively evaluated. That is the only way I personally can make some bit of sense of these kinds of situations of which I receive such spotty information. That is, unless I become a specialist, and for that I would need to return to school and get a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies.

Part II: Terrorism: Inexcusable
By TIBOR R. MACHAN

In discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict one often comes across disturbing defenses of anti-Israeli policies by such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah. One such line of defense I have encountered, for which even some of my colleagues in philosophy have shown sympathy, is that given the desperate situation of Arabs, say in the Gaza strip, one must accept their resort of terrorism, including, of course, the indiscriminate murder of people, many of them children and thus indisputably innocent of anything that might plausible justify killing them. And often this line of defense is put in terms of what Israel has done to Arab citizens in Gaza, placed them into desperate situations by cutting off the flow of supplies, starving them, etc.

Without going into whether the claims against Israel are true or accurate, or who is ultimately responsible for the conditions in Gaza–it is crucial to realize that even if those claims were all true, they would fail to justify terrorism, the murder of innocent people for political purposes and the like.

Say I am starving and say I believe that this has been caused by various adults around my neighborhood. Would my situation justify my recklessly lobbing bombs around the homes in this neighborhood, never mind who is being killed by my actions? Am I justified in my state of desperation to inflict violence on those who have had nothing to do with what I am experiencing? No, not at all. All one might say is that I have completely lost control over myself and am now simply flailing about madly, caring nothing about the consequences; about whether my conduct is remotely just. And in that case I need to be pacified!

It is one thing to show some understanding of the dastardly conduct of certain people in dire straits. It is something else entirely to claim that this conduct is just or justified. And over the last decades it is difficult to deny that on the whole, apart from the early terrorist actions of certain Israelis, the overwhelming majority of indiscriminate, often suicidal, killings have been done by anti-Israeli partisans.

For some reason that escapes me, quite a few people who would ordinarily be appalled at deeds of cruelty toward the innocent seem to find what these anti-Israeli parties are doing acceptable. I cannot see how the fact that Israeli policies are imperfect, disputable, sometimes over the top, serves in the slightest to justify these anti-Israeli policies.

Again, I confess that a full grasp of what is happening between Arabs and Israelis escapes me. But I seriously doubt that anyone has that grasp, given how it is tied up with a very long history, many religious convictions based on faith, and, most of all, collectivist or tribal thinking. Some of the arguments that are propounded by many who contribute to the debate, especially on the anti-Israeli side, seem also, to be linked to manufactured historical events and religious claims that are wholly unprovable.

At times simply abstaining from forming any conclusions about these matters is acceptable. But that is near impossible to do in a democracy where one is called upon to approve or disapprove policies of one’s government vis-à-vis foreign governments. Even if the entire situation in, for example, the Middle East is basically irrational and beyond hope of sorting out fully, one is simply left with a need to take a stand so as to be able to assess with some measure of competence what one’s government is doing (even in circumstances that are tainted with confusion and a history of mistakes).

I am certainly only in the process of coming to grips with the issues, not by any stretch of the imagination at the point of having formed a fixed, stable position on them all. But just as Socrates, who confessed not to know very much at all, continued to search, along with all of his pupils, for what is true, perhaps some attentive, if incomplete, reflections on the Arab-Israeli situation can help advance not only one’s own understanding, but that of others too.

Tibor Machan holds the R.C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University’s Argyros School of B & E and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). He advises Freedom Communications. His most recent book is The Morality of Business, A Profession for Human Wealth-Care (Springer, 2007). E-mail him at TMachan@link.freedom.com.