Islamic Militant Al-Ahrar Movement in Gaza: “We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews.”

Islamic Militants in Gaza: Allah’s Teachings Are the Fire with Which “We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews.” MEMRI TV. Video Clip No. 3190, November 3, 2011. YouTube. YouTube. Transcript, Transcript. Also at The Elder of Ziyon, Michael J. Totten.














Transcript:

Following are excerpts from statements made at a rally of the Palestinian Al-Ahrar movement in Gaza, a pro-Hamas group that split from Fatah, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on November 3, 2011:

Rally organizer: Praise be to you, our Lord. You have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship, through which we come closer to you.

[…]

Allah’s prayers upon you, our beloved Prophet [Muhammad]. You have made your teachings into constitutions for us – the light with which we dissipate the darkness of the occupation, and the fire with which we harvest the skulls of the Jews.

[…]

Yes, our beloved brothers, even though the entire world moves closer to Allah through fasting, through hunger, and through tears, we are a people that moves closer to Allah through blood, through body parts, and through martyrs.

[…]

Oh sons of Palestine, oh sons of the Gaza Strip, oh mujahideen – wage Jihad, wreak destruction, blow up and harvest the heads of the Zionists. Words are useless by now. The lie of peace is gone. Only weapons are of any use – the path of [recently killed] Yousuf and Ali, the path of martyrdom and Jihad. Only our wounds talk on our behalf. We speak nothing but the language of struggle, of Jihad, or rockets, of bombs, of cannons and of martyrdom-seekers. This is the language in which we talk and negotiate with the Zionist enemy.

[…]

We say to the Zionists: Like a bad seed, we shall uproot you from our land, so that it can blossom in the light of the everlasting sun of our Jihad, and of our invincible religion. Jerusalem is not yours – get out of it! Haifa is not yours – get out of it! Tel Aviv is not yours – get out of it! Oh Zionists, get out before we expel you. these are the words of the mujahideen.

[…]

Jon Stewart’s Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Jon Stewart’s Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, December 23, 2013.

Jon Stewart, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 28, 2013.

Mead:

The prevalence of delusional conspiracy thinking at all levels of Egyptian intellectual and political life is a “tell” that points to important limits on Egypt’s potential for political, social and economic progress. Societies in thrall to this kind of darkness are unlikely to develop the vigorous, forward looking and competent civil societies that can promote true democracy. Societies whose intellectual leaders cannot understand how power works in the modern world are unlikely to adopt policies that bring rapid economic progress. Given the power of these ideas among prominent Muslim Brotherhood officials and leaders, it should have been clear to the Obama administration that whatever it was observing in Egypt, it was unlikely to be a “transition to democracy.” At best, the Egyptian revolution was always likely to be an interregnum between despotisms; at worst there is still a chance (hopefully small) that the country could fall into the kind of chaos and violence that has become much too common across the Middle East.

 

Rabid anti-Semitism coupled with an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom; Nazi Germany isn’t the only country to have followed these dark stars to the graveyard of history. Many liberal minded Americans (though loathing both anti-Semitism and chowderheaded conspiracy thinking themselves) don’t like to look this truth in the eye.  It leads to some very uncomfortable reflections about the potential for democracy in many countries beyond Egypt, and casts a dark shadow over the prospects for the development of a stable and prosperous Palestinian state. It suggests that there are narrow limits on what we can expect from diplomacy with Iran.

 

Two American administrations in a row have seen their Middle East policies come crashing down because they ignored the unpleasant implications of the unhealthy thought climate so prevalent in so much of the region. President Bush and President Obama, dissimilar as they are in so many of their regional policies, shared a naive optimism about the prospects for quick transitions to democracy in the Middle East. In both cases that optimism led to unwise policy choices that made both US interests and values harder to protect. In the Bush years, those who raised questions about Iraq’s and the Arab world’s readiness for democracy were denounced as racists; in the age of Obama they are called Occidentalists or sometimes Islamophobes.

 

Not everybody in the region is caught up in the kind of thinking behind Mr. Ammar’s clownish pronouncements, and it is certainly true that Israeli actions sometimes contribute to an emotional climate that makes crazy talk appealing to minds that otherwise might be ready to take a more sensible view. But the grim reality remains: as long as feverish conspiracy thinking dominates the world views of so many regional social, cultural and political actors, civil society will be weak and both democracy and prosperity will prove elusive.

 

The whiggish optimism of American culture rebels at such thoughts, but the Middle East at the moment is not a particularly fertile mission field for liberal ideals. At the same time, the region’s role in world oil markets and its place on world trade routes makes it a region from which we cannot walk away. Managing our national portfolio under these difficult circumstances will take more maturity and patience than either the Bush or the Obama administration (so far) has displayed. We can hope that the unraveling of its once bright hopes in the region will lead the White House to a process of reflection and analysis that will bring it to a more sober understanding of the region and our choices in it. Beyond that, we must hope that the winning candidate in 2016 will bring a more sensible and grounded approach to what for some time to come will be an inescapable but difficult theater for American foreign policy.


Egyptian Author Amr Ammar Attributes Involvement In Subversive Anti-Egypt Schemes to Jewish-American Comedian Jon Stewart. Video Clip No. 4070. MEMRI TV, December 5, 2013. Transcript.

Nobody Should Fear a Merry Christmas. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Nobody Should Fear a Merry Christmas. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 24, 2013.

Most Jews Wish You a Merry Christmas. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, December 24, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Indigenous? Native American Studies and Big Lies About Israel. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Indigenous? Native American Studies and Big Lies About Israel. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 18, 2013.

Tobin:

We’ve reported about the decision of the American Studies Association to join the boycott of Israel. Supporters of the economic war against the Jewish state calling for institutions to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel have failed to gain much traction even in academia, let alone mainstream sectors of American society. As Jonathan Marks noted here the national council of the ASA that endorse the BDS resolution is largely compose of radicals. But they are not alone. The latest group of academic outliers to back the boycott is the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. As the Jerusalem Post reports:

Ohio State English professor Chadwick Allen, the president of the association and coordinator of American Indian Studies at Ohio State, wrote on the association’s website that the move followed a “member-generated” petition asking that the group “formally support the Boycott of Israeli Academic and Cultural Institutions that was initiated by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.”

 

Over the course of several months, Allen wrote, the NAISA council reached a consensus to support the boycott, and wrote their own declaration of support for the boycott. The document reads that the NAISA Council “protests the infringement of the academic freedom of Indigenous Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the Occupied Territories and Israel who are denied fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly, which we uphold.”

That another group of campus radicals with doctorates in subjects that are geared toward furthering left-wing theories would join the boycott of Israel is no surprise. That they don’t boycott China in sympathy with Tibet or any number of Arab and Muslim countries for their oppression of minorities is just the usual hypocrisy to be found on campus these days. But there are two points in their rant worth responding to.

 

One is the notion that Palestinians in the territories and Israel are denied “fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly.” This is simply false.

 

Academics in the West Bank are not suppressed. Quite the contrary, they work, publish, and pontificate in public while working in the many Palestinian institutions of higher education that were all founded after Israel took control of the area in 1967. Far from censoring activity at those schools, Israel has no input or ability to influence them whatsoever. All Palestinian colleges exist as hotbeds of support for terror and the delegitimization of Israel. The Palestinian media, especially that run by the Palestinian Authority which governs the daily lives of Palestinians in almost all of the West Bank, is similarly unrestrained by Israel and, as Palestine Media Watch reports on a regular basis, is a steady source of incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews. Nor are there any restrictions on the right of assembly for academics as the kerfuffle over the student body-supported Islamic Jihad fascist-style military parade at Al Quds University in Jerusalem proved. As for freedom of movement, it is true that Palestinians must deal with some Israeli army checkpoints that make travel difficult at times. But that doesn’t prevent them from moving about as they please.

 

It is also interesting that the Native American Studies Association include Arabs living in the State of Israel in their rant. This is entirely risible as Israeli Arabs have the same full rights that Jewish Israelis enjoy including the right to call for Israel’s destruction. The irony is that the institutions that these allege scholars want to boycott are the places in Israel that are friendliest to anti-Zionist incitement.

 

But there is a broader, more important point to make about their ridiculous manifesto. They say:

As the elected council of an international community of Indigenous and allied non-Indigenous scholars, students, and public intellectuals who have studied and resisted the colonization and domination of Indigenous lands via settler state structures throughout the world, we strongly protest the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the legal structures of the Israeli state that systematically discriminate against Palestinians and other Indigenous peoples.

By attempting to portray the Palestinians as the “indigenous people” of the territory on which the State of Israel and the administered territories exist and the Jews as the colonial settlers, they are perpetrating the big lie of Palestinian history. Jews are not foreigners in Israel as Europeans were in Africa. They happen to be the indigenous people of their ancient homeland and efforts to deny this isn’t scholarship. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and those who would deny them the same rights accorded other peoples are practicing bias, not scholarship. As with Palestinian attempts to deny the Jewish connection with the country or with Jerusalem and ancient Jewish holy sites such as the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, attempts to cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between foreign occupiers and natives is revisionist myth recast as left-wing politicized scholarship.

 

There can be honest disagreement and debate about Israel’s policies in the territories, settlements, and borders. But by extending their argument to all of pre-1967 Israel as well as by smearing the Jews as colonists in their own country, the Native American studies group forfeits its credibility. Rather than being seen as the cutting edge of enlightened opinion, their support for BDS should mark them as a pack of incorrigible haters who should be treated with the same disdain and isolation that they would like to dish out to Israelis.

The Unique Tragedy of the Palestinian Refugees. By Avi Jorisch.

The unique tragedy of the Palestinian refugees. By Avi Jorisch. Al Arabiya, December 19, 2013.

The Palestinian refugees – a realitycheck. By Yoram Ettinger. Israel Hayom, December 13, 2013.

The “refugee” diversion. By Einat Wilf. Israel Hayom, December 17, 2013.


Jorisch:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is tasked with assisting Palestinian refugees. The films, pictures, slides and prints the organization has collected on the plight of the refugees will now be displayed in Jerusalem’s Old City in an exhibit entitled “The Long Journey,” which will then tour Europe and North America. The images are heartbreakingly powerful and emotive.

 

Like all refugee stories, Palestinian stories of displacement and loss needs to be told. The question is what lessons one takes out of it. For Israel, as many prominent Israeli intellectuals, historians and politicians have argued for decades, the Palestinian plight is one that must be confronted and acknowledged with honesty.

 

What about the rest of the world, and particularly Muslims, Arabs and the Palestinians themselves?

 

The Palestinian refugees have an emotional hold in the Muslim world unlike any other refugee group. No other Muslim refugee problem, including those of conflicts in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, generates such indignation.

 

Why is that? What makes the Palestinians unique? Remarkably, Palestinian refugees in the Levant are the only refugee group to have a special U.N. agency dedicated to them. All others across the world are handled by one agency, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). According to the UN, the special treatment of the Palestinians is justified by “the scale and uniqueness of the Palestinian refugee problem.”

 

Yet by any measure, the scale of the Palestinian refugee problem is dwarfed by numerous refugee events of the 20th Century. In 1948, credible estimates recorded approximately 700,000 refugees, and in 1967 approximately 300,000.

 

To put these numbers in perspective, the displacement of the Palestinians occurred within the context of the largest population transfers in history, in the aftermath of World War II. In 1947, around the same time that the British mandate of Palestine was being portioned into one state for Jews and one for Arabs, India was partitioned to create a state for Muslims - Pakistan. This resulted in the largest movement of refugees in history, with over 14 million people displaced and the death of over 1 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.

 

Meanwhile, at least 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern and Central Europe (where they had lived for centuries) from 1944–1950, in the largest population transfer in modern European history.

 

In 1923, Greece and Turkey engaged in a forcible population exchange that turned 2 million people into refugees. And since the 1950s, numerous African nations have fought civil wars that led to massive refugee flight. The UNHCR estimates that in 1992, there were over 6.5 million refugees across Africa, with that number remaining high in 2004 at over 2.7 million.

 

How many people have studied these events or were even aware of them? Most were forgotten because after one generation, or two at most, the refugees were integrated into other countries.

 

A long lasting dilemma

 

And that points to one aspect of the Palestinian problem that is in fact unique: unlike most others, it has lasted for generations. The original estimated 700,000-1 million refugees now number approximately 6.5 million. That is not just a problem, it is a tragedy.

 

Imagine if the Palestinians had been allowed to integrate into neighboring Arab countries – often less than 20 miles away from their original homes? Germany took in ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe, though they had not lived in Germany for centuries. India accepted Hindu refugees from the newly created state of Pakistan. Israel absorbed an estimated 800,000–1 million Jewish refugees who were expelled or fled from Arab countries between 1948 and the early 1970s.

 

The Arab League has instructed Arab states to deny citizenship to Palestinian refugees and their descendants “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” The result is that six decades later, Palestinians languish in camps throughout Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – instead of becoming productive citizens, as they have in other countries where they have emigrated. While the Arab world urges Israel to face its responsibility, it should not be an excuse to ignore its own.

 

A common issue

 

Painting the Palestinian problem as the most serious issue facing Muslims today minimizes the plight of refugees everywhere. Even through the narrower lens of the Muslim world, the Palestinian experience is not exceptional.

 

Pakistan is far from the only case. In Darfur, an estimated 2.5 million people have become refugees since 2003 because of the Janjaweed militia, backed by the Sudanese army. In Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion in 1979 until the ouster of the Taliban in 2002, 6 million refugees fled to Pakistan and Iran (5 million of whom have been repatriated since).

 

Today an estimated 2 million Syrians have left their country to escape the civil war that began in 2011. Other refugees in the Muslim world include 1.6 million Iraqis fleeing civil war in the past decade and several hundred thousand Feyli Kurds forcibly expelled by Saddam Hussein starting in the 1970s.

 

Displacement as a result of war is not distinctive. History is replete with refugee suffering, and it would be difficult to argue that Palestinians have suffered infinitely more than others in recent times.

 

It is hard to see what good can come from this false sense of uniqueness. Arguable, it causes even greater pain and trauma. It also makes it harder for Palestinians to envisage peacemaking rather than revenge, and strengthens extremists who feed on hatred and oppose any prospect for peace.

 

Is it possible to have a more nuanced understanding of the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict that does not absolve Israel of all wrongdoing, but doesn’t demonize it either? Similarly, is it feasible to recognize the pain individual Palestinians underwent but concedes that this tragedy is similar to that experienced by millions of others? Answers to both questions may ultimately help bring an end to this sad Middle Eastern chapter.

Boycott Me. Please. By Martin Kramer.

Boycott me. Please. By Martin Kramer. Foreign Policy, December 20, 2013. Also here. Sandbox.

Whatever Happened to the Arab Spring? By Madawi al-Rasheed.

Whatever happened to the Arab Spring? By Madawi Al-Rasheed. Al-Monitor, December 17, 2013.

Al-Rasheed:

Three years after the Arab Spring, the dominant narrative about this region remains articulated in terms of binary opposites: vanishing republics versus resilient monarchies, the secular versus Islamist divide and the Sunni versus Shiite schism.

 

While not denying the violent manifestations of these opposites, it is time to go beyond the apparent multiple polarizations that conceal a fundamental truth, namely the collapse or near-collapse of an old republican and monarchical order without successfully moving toward a new, stable configuration. Even after three years of protest and bloodshed in the republics and low-level mobilization in the monarchies, the Arab world is still far from shaking off the old order or a stable transition toward something that I would call democracy.

 

The old political order consisted of either militarized governments ruled by the post-colonial nationalist elite or hereditary dynasties that had been fixed in their positions by departing colonial powers. In both republics and monarchies, ruling classes consolidated as a result of achieving military hegemony, monopolizing economic resources, foreign support and a kind of nationalist or religious legitimacy. In practice, no serious structural differences between republics and monarchies were apparent, for both forms of government exercised power without representation, accountability, transparency or equality.

 

In both republics and monarchies, the ruling classes became larger but without real attempts to be inclusive or equitable. Rulers tried to liberalize their authoritarian rule, introducing empty quasi-parliaments lacking any power, expanding state bureaucracy to absorb the unemployed and opening up centralized economies in a drive toward a neoliberal market model, whose benefits unsurprisingly went to power-holders and their cohorts, a large coterie with undisputed loyalty. A service economy concealed the reality of crony capitalism and opaque markets, where corruption and nepotism flourished in the absence of legal structures and transparency.

 

After destroying any viable political society on the left, center and right, there emerged a vacuum which many Arab leaders thought could be filled with vigorous Islamism that focuses on issues such as Islamizing society, returning to God’s law and purifying the landscape of external undesirable values and norms.

 

As long as this Islamism remained focused on society and its piety, Arab presidents and monarchs thought they were immune from the winds of political change. They tolerated socially conservative trends such as Salafism and oppressed the vocal politicized Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. In countries like Saudi Arabia, Salafists delivered a society obsessed by its purity, piety and conformity and conducive to perpetuating absolute monarchy. In Egypt, Salafists were seen as a good alternative to the politicized Brotherhood.

 

All Islamists strove to control their share in the market, promoting a pious capitalism that might guarantee the newly emerging entrepreneurs a place on the political economic map of the Arab world, and now this world was increasingly drawn into global markets by the prospect of profit. Islamizing everything from banks to Barbie, Islamists struggled to have their narrative shape not only societies but also economies. Politics remained elusive, as this domain remained well controlled by the old guard.

 

At the same time, Arab leaders of all shades nourished their so-called liberal or secular constituencies, in case they needed them in future confrontations with Islamists. This instigated a deep rift between so-called liberal and Islamist constituencies, amounting to an unbridgeable ideological divide that not only affected society at large but was also felt in the sphere of the family. Ideological schisms concealed that the secular-Islamist divide was often a masquerade for deeper economic divisions and competition. In many countries, though secularists and Islamists were trying to win regimes to their sides, those regimes saw no benefit in compromise, for as long as constituencies remained divided, they could play the old game of divide and rule.

 

The Islamists were not the destiny of the Arab world, but they certainly filled a vaccuum created by oppression and exclusion at a time when liberation from authoritarian rule lacked the language under which it could be pursued. Hence the secular-Islamist divide was important to fragment Arab publics and ensure the persistence of authoritarian rule. From North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, regimes flirted with Islamism even while they might have appeared to be confronting it. There was a love-hate relationship between the two despite the multiple confrontations. Islamism served important purposes and was only curbed when it became a threat to regimes, not societies.

 

Equally, neither is the sectarian Sunni-Shiite schism in the dominant narrative about the region an inevitable destiny unfolding in every corner of the Arab world. Yes, sectarian tension and even killing are rife and tend to show their ugly faces in diverse societies such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain. Yet this sectarianism flourished specifically in those corners where either exclusion was entrenched or the regimes themselves were sectarian. Both republics and monarchies co-opted sectarian elites and rewarded them for their loyalty, but continued to exclude the rest of the communities. The regimes searched for token mediators rather than representatives, thus allowing grass-roots sectarian populist entrepreneurs to inflame the imaginations of their followers with utopias of identity politics that promise future emancipation, equality and power. Resisting exclusion from the corridors of power and the economy found a disturbing niche in the language of sectarian identity. Both Sunnis and Shiites adopted the discourse of mathloumiya, historical injustice inflicted on them because of their sect, to the detriment of seeing clearly the roots of exclusion that have grown under authoritarian rule. So sects were either indulged by the regimes in an attempt to use them against political rivals or suppressed to please their wider constituencies.

 

Negotiating this complex and explosive sectarian terrain proved to lead to cumulative problems that the Arab world is now facing, with no foreseeable chance of going beyond this Sunni-Shiite divide. The divide is not about majorities and minorities, but about authoritarian rule and the political games it entails.

 

Arab regimes can hardly be described as either Sunni or Shiite. Their loyalty is to members of their families and a circle of loyalists who may or may not necessarily share their faith. These regimes have developed a distorted “secular” logic of their own, nourished by the requirements of ruling over a disenfranchised population that includes both Sunnis and Shiites, not to mention other non-Muslim groups. There is great doubt about their commitment to promoting the interests of their own co-religionists, as their main focus remains on keeping their grip on power and resources. While the piety of presidents and monarchs remains their own business, it is clear that any religiosity they express or resources they spend on religious projects are above all strategies to achieve political ends. Before Islamists fused religion and politics, Arab dictators had already mastered the art. They saw in religion a political capital that could be invested for profit, but this transaction proved in some instances to be drenched in killing and bloodshed. It is no surprise then that those who opposed them used the same old game, namely finding salvation in religion to achieve political and economic ends.

 

Before we start inventing magical solutions for a region struggling with the outcomes of a crumbling old political order and unequitable distribution of dwindling resources, it is important to identify the real causes that have prevented a movement toward stable politics, let alone democracy. It does not help to continue to recite the set of binary opposites mentioned here.

 

It has become urgent for the foundation of the old Arab order to be shaken. This does not mean replacing one ruler with another who may turn to be nastier than the previous one. It means a structural change to replace the narrow foundation of government with a wider base that promises both political and economic inclusion. Anything less than this will prove to be futile and prolong the confrontations. Perhaps the Arab uprisings were simply the first round of a marathon that had already started. It can pause, but this marathon is certainly destined to be re-launched in the future. The last three years may be a fourth democratic wave, but all indications point to future ones waiting for their moment.

Bashar al-Assad: An Intimate Profile of a Mass Murderer. By Anna Ciezadlo.

Bashar Al Assad: An Intimate Profile of a Mass Murderer. By Anna Ciezadlo. The New Republic, December 19, 2013.

Lawrence of Arabia: The Stranger in a Strange Land. By Fouad Ajami.

Lawrence of Arabia: The Stranger in a Strange Land. By Fouad Ajami. Hoover Institution, December 19, 2013. Also at Real Clear World.

How Peter O’Toole Saved the Arabs (According to David Lean). By Juan Cole. Informed Comment, December 16, 2013. Also at History News Network.

Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia.

The Late, Great American WASP. By Joseph Epstein.

The Late, Great American WASP. By Joseph Epstein. Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2013, Also here.

Nostalgie de la Boue. By Arlene Goldbard. Tikkun Daily Blog, December 23, 2013.


Epstein:

The old U.S. ruling class had plenty of problems. But are we really better off with a country run by the self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy?

 

The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation's most prestigious schools.

 

The acronym WASP derives, of course, from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people, including powerful figures and some presidents, have been white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant but were far from being WASPs. Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton qualified.

 

WASPs were a caste, closed off to all not born within it, with the possible exception of those who crashed the barriers by marrying in. WASP credentials came with lineage, and lineage—that is, proper birth—automatically brought connections to the right institutions. Yale, Princeton and Harvard were the great WASP universities, backed up by Choate, Groton, Andover, Exeter and other prep schools. WASPs tended to live in exclusive neighborhoods: on upper Park and Fifth Avenues in New York, on the Main Line in Philadelphia, the Back Bay in Boston, Lake Forest and Winnetka in Chicago.

 

WASP life, though, was chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. WASPs had their own social clubs and did business with a small number of select investment and legal firms, such as Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell. Many lived on inherited money, soundly invested.

 

The State Department was once dominated by WASPs, and so, too, was the Supreme Court, with one seat traditionally left unoccupied for a Jewish jurist of proper mien. The House of Representatives was never preponderantly WASP, though a number of prominent senators— Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett A. Saltonstall, both of Massachusetts, come to mind—have been WASPs. Looking down on the crudities of quotidian American politics, Henry Adams, a WASP to the highest power, called the dealings of Congress, the horse-trading and corruption and the rest of it, “the dance of democracy.” In one of his short stories, Henry James has characters modeled on Adams and his wife Clover, planning a social evening, say, “Let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.”

 

So dominant was WASP culture that some wealthy families who didn’t qualify by lineage attempted to imitate and live the WASP life. The Catholic Kennedys were the most notable example. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port—the sailing, the clothes, the touch football played on expansive green lawns—was pure WASP mimicry, all of it, except that true WASPs were too upstanding to go in for the unscrupulous business dealings of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. or the feckless philanderings of him and some of his sons.

 

That the Kennedys did their best to imitate WASP life is perhaps not surprising, for in their exclusion, the Irish may have felt the sting of envy for WASPocracy more than any others. The main literary chroniclers of WASP culture— F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or John O’Hara—were Irish. (Both Fitzgerald and O’Hara tried to live their lives on the WASP model.) But the pangs weren’t limited to the Irish alone. To this day, the designer Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz) turns out clothes inspired by his notion of the WASP high life, lived on the gracious margins of expensive leisure.

 

The last WASP president was George H.W. Bush, but there is reason to believe he wasn’t entirely proud of being a WASP. At any rate, he certainly wasn’t featuring it. When running for office he made every attempt to pass himself off as a Texan, declaring a passion for pork rinds and a love for the music of the Oak Ridge Boys. (His son George W. Bush, even though he can claim impeccable WASP lineage and went to the right schools, seems otherwise to have shed all WASPish coloration and become an authentic Texan, happily married to a perfectly middle-class librarian.)

 

That George H.W. Bush felt it strategic not to emphasize his WASP background was a strong sign that the decline of the WASP's prestige in American culture was well on its way. Other signs had arisen much earlier. During the late 1960s, some of the heirs of the Rockefeller clan openly admitted feeling guilty about their wealth and the way their ancestors came by it. By the 1970s, exclusive universities and prep schools began dropping their age-old quotas on Catholics and Jews, lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks. The social cachet of the Episcopal Church, a major WASP institution, drained away as its clergy turned its major energies to leftish causes.

 

Calling something elite, which was how WASPs of an earlier era preferred to think of themselves, became a denunciation. Being a WASP was no longer a source of happy pride but something distasteful if not slightly disgraceful—the old privileges of membership now seeming unjust and therefore badly tainted. An old joke has one bee asking another bee why he is wearing a yarmulke. “Because,” answers the second bee, “I don’t want anyone to take me for a WASP.”

 

The late 1960s put the first serious dent into the WASPs as untitled aristocrats and national leaders. For protesters of that generation, the word WASP didn’t come into play so much as the word Establishment, heretofore chiefly an ecclesiastical term. The Establishment was the protesters’ enemy and target. The Establishment was thought to have sent the country into Vietnam; it was perfectly content with the status quo, with all its restrictions on freedom and tolerance for unjust social arrangements; it stood for all that was uptight and generally repressive in American culture.

 

The Establishment took its place in a long tradition of enemies of American life. This list has included, at various times, Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the military-industrial complex—vague entities all. But there was nothing vague about the Establishment. They were alive and breathing, and they had such names as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, W. Averell Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Joseph Alsop, C. Douglas Dillon, George F. Kennan and Robert McNamara. The WASPs ruled the country, and for those who didn’t much like the country or the directions in which they saw it tending, the WASPs were a great and easily identifiable enemy.

 

The last unashamed WASP to live in the White House was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he, with his penchant for the reform of American society, was considered by many a traitor to his social class. He is also likely to be the last to reside there. WASP culture, though it exists in pockets of private life—country clubs, neighborhoods, a few prep schools and law firms—is finished as a phenomenon of public significance.

 

Much can be—and has been—written about the shortcomings of the WASPocracy. As a class, it was exclusionary and hence tolerant of social prejudice, if not often downright snobbish. Tradition-minded, it tended to be dead to innovation and social change. Imagination wasn't high on its list of admired qualities.

 

Yet the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a 1990 book called The Way of the Wasp, Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were “success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything.”

 

Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren’t, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life. As a ruling class, today’s new meritocracy has failed to provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.

 

Meritocracy is leadership thought to be based on men and women who have earned their way not through the privileges of birth but by merit. La carrière ouverte aux talents: Careers open to the talented, is what Napoleon Bonaparte promised, and it is what any meritocratic system is supposed to provide.

 

The U.S. now fancies itself under a meritocratic system, through which the highest jobs are open to the most talented people, no matter their lineage or social background. And so it might seem, when one considers that our 42nd president, Bill Clinton, came from a broken home in a backwater in Arkansas, while our 44th, Barack Obama, was himself also from a broken home and biracial into the bargain. Sen. Ted Cruz, the man who leads the tea party, is the son of a Cuban émigré.

 

Meritocracy in America starts (and often ends) in what are thought to be the best colleges and universities. On the meritocratic climb, one's mettle is first tested by getting into these institutions—no easy task in the contemporary overcrowded scramble for admission. Then, of course, one must do well within them. In England, it was once said that Waterloo and the empire were built on the playing fields of Eton. The current American imperium appears to have been built at the offices of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SATs.

 

Whether Republican or Democrat, left or right, the leading figures in U.S. public life today were good at school. Bill Clinton had Georgetown, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and Yale Law School on his résumé; Barack Obama had Columbia and Harvard Law School. Their wives, respectively, had Wellesley and Yale Law School and Princeton and Harvard Law School. Cruz went to Princeton and thence to Harvard Law School. Players all—high rollers in the great American game of meritocracy. Their merit resides, presumably, in having been superior students.

 

But is the merit in our meritocracy genuine? Of the two strongest American presidents since 1950— Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan —the first didn’t go to college at all, and the second went to Eureka College, a school affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Eureka, Ill. The notion of Harry Truman as a Princeton man or Ronald Reagan as a Yalie somehow diminishes them both.

 

Apart from mathematics, which demands a high IQ, and science, which requires a distinct aptitude, the only thing that normal undergraduate schooling prepares a person for is . . . more schooling. Having been a good student, in other words, means nothing more than that one was good at school: One had the discipline to do as one was told, learned the skill of quick response to oral and written questions, figured out what professors wanted and gave it to them.

 

Having been a good student, no matter how good the reputation of the school—and most of the good schools, we are coming to learn, are good chiefly in reputation—is no indication of one’s quality or promise as a leader. A good student might even be more than a bit of a follower, a conformist, standing ready to give satisfaction to the powers that be so that one can proceed to the next good school, taking another step up the ladder of meritocracy.

 

What our new meritocrats have failed to evince—and what the older WASP generation prided itself on—is character and the ability to put the well-being of the nation before their own. Character embodied in honorable action is at the heart of the novels and stories of Louis Auchincloss, America’s last unembarrassedly WASP writer. Doing the right thing, especially in the face of temptations to do otherwise, was the WASP test par excellence. Most of our meritocrats, by contrast, seem to be in business for themselves.

 

Trust, honor, character: The elements that have departed U.S. public life with the departure from prominence of WASP culture have not been taken up by the meritocrats. Many meritocrats who enter politics, when retired by the electorate from public life, proceed to careers in lobbying or other special-interest advocacy. University presidents no longer speak to the great issues in education but instead devote themselves to fundraising and public relations, and look to move on to the next, more prestigious university presidency.

 

A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are little more than “greedy pigs” (his words) without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have master’s degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.

 

Thus far in their history, meritocrats, those earnest good students, appear to be about little more than getting on, getting ahead and (above all) getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in criticism of it, was better than that.

 

The WASPs’ day is done. Such leadership as it provided isn’t likely to be revived. Recalling it at its best is a reminder that the meritocracy that has followed it marks something less than clear progress. Rather the reverse.

It’s About the Settlements, Stupid. By David P. Goldman.

It’s About the Settlements, Stupid. By David P. Goldman. PJ Media, December 17, 2013. Also at Middle East Forum.

Goldman:

Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the misnamed occupied territories, are not the obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are the acid test of peace. To argue that peace is conceivable unless the bulk of the settlements remain in place constitutes stupidity or hypocrisy. Leave aside the issue of whether Jews have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Ignore the fact that the settlers live overwhelmingly on what was waste land and turned into gardens, vineyards, and industries which have uplifted the lives of Palestinian Arabs more than all the aid that has passed through (or rather stuck to) the fingers of the kleptocrats of the PA. Leave aside also Israel’s requirement for defensible borders: that is a critical issue but not identical to the continued presence of settlements.

 

Accepting the settlements is the sine qua non of any viable peace agreement. It does Israel no good to defend Israel’s right to exist but to condemn the settlers, as does Alan Dershowitz, not to mention the leaders of liberal Jewish denominations.

 

I believe in land for peace. That is a tautology: In territorial disputes the two main variables always are land and peace. But that implies more land for more peace and less land for less peace. The Palestinian Arabs had an opportunity to accept an Israeli state on just 5,500 square miles of land in 1947, and refused to do so. The armistice lines of 1948 left Israel with 8,550 square miles, and the Arab side refused to accept that. In 1967 Israel took an additional 5,628 square miles of land in dispute under international law; Jordan does not claim it, and no legal Arab authority exists to claim it. It is not “illegally occupied.” It has never been adjudicated by a competent authority.

 

To demand the 1948 armistice lines (the so-called 1967 borders) is to refuse any penalty for refusing to make peace in the past. That is the same as refusing any peace at all. Wars end when one side accepts defeat, and abandons the hope of restoring the status quo ante by force of arms. 1947 was a catastrophe (“Nakba”) for the Palestinian Arabs, to be sure, but it was a catastrophe of their own making; until they accept at least some degree of responsibility for the catastrophe, they will not be reconciled to any peace agreement. That is precisely what Palestine’s negotiator Saeb Erekat meant when he eschewed any recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state because “I cannot change my narrative.” The “narrative” is that the Jews are an alien intrusion into the Muslim Middle East and eventually must be eliminated by one means or another.

 

The Palestinian Arabs are a people in decline, and the vehemence of their leaders reflects the dimness of their future. It is noteworthy that Secretary of State John Kerry continues to talk of a “demographic time bomb” threatening Israel, even though the data show that the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is increasing faster than the Arab population, as former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger observes. That’s based on undisputed data; in fact, Palestinian population data are inflated by an enormous margin, as a 2006 study by the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan University demonstrated:

[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS. . . . The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.

The hold of traditional Muslim society on young Palestinian Arabs, especially young women, is deteriorating: as they gain access to secondary and tertiary education, young Arabs have fewer children and more careers. And the most effective agency for the emancipation of young Arab women is the settler movement. Ariel University across the so-called Green Line is full of young Muslim women in headscarves studying computer science, and the leaders of the Ariel community–Haredi Jews–work with local Arab leaders to recruit talented students.

 

There is a parallel to what I called the “peace of the aging” in Ireland. The Irish got older. The drunken IRA killers I met in Belfast in 1970 as a student journalist had no intention of making peace. They were having too much fun at war. By 1996, when former Sen. George Mitchell presided over the Good Friday Agreement that formally ended the low-intensity civil war in Northern Ireland, those who were left had families and mortgages.

 

Distribution of Irish Population by Age (UN)

By 2040 the Palestinian Arab population will have far fewer young people and far more middle-aged people.

 

Distribution of West Bank Arab Population by Age (UN)

The Irish no longer care. They are neither Catholic nor nationalistic. The IRA thugs of 1970 came from four-child families. Today the Irish have fewer than two children on average. Let the matter simmer for another twenty years, and the Palestinian Arabs will look more like the Irish of 1996 than the Irish of 1970. At that point, the “narrative” will change, because no one will care about the old “narrative.”

 

In the meantime the Israeli settlers have built a garden and a workshop where before there were bare rocks, and thriving communities that are integral parts of Israeli society. It takes longer to get crosstown in Manhattan in traffic than it does to drive from the center of Tel Aviv to Ariel, the largest town in Samaria. This is yet another accomplishment of Jewish ingenuity and industriousness, and it is (or should be) an inspiring example to all who hope for a better life for the peoples of the Middle East. We will know that the Palestinians want peace when they admire rather than abhor this effort.

 

The utopian delusions of the Obama administration, the hypocrisy of the world, and the betrayal–yes, I think that is the right word–of Israeli interests by the liberal American Jewish denominations have put Israel in a painful situation. The threat of economic sanctions from Europe or reduced American military support if Israel refuses to swallow the poisoned bait are not a trivial threat. As Caroline Glick writes today:

With Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our throats, parameters that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms of peace that will destroy the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu needs to adopt a longer-term strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to extricate Israel from the two-state trap.

 

Yes, Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years, non-leftist Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along with the Left, and the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But Kerry’s obsessive harping, and his insistence on pushing forward with his disastrous framework deal forces our hand.

 

Either we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.

Ms. Glick is Israeli, and has a right to urge a particular course of action for her country. I am American, and direct my comments instead to my liberal Jewish co-religionists: Your support for the Obama administration and your betrayal of Jews on our front line in Judea and Samaria is a wicked and disgraceful thing. We must summon all of our strength to prevent this administration from punishing Israel for refusing to commit suicide.

 

As a religious Jew, I believe that Jews are obligated to settle our historic homeland, but I also believe that the preservation of Jewish life takes precedence. If it were possible to achieve a durable and robust peace by abandoning the settlements I would support it. But that is a delusion: we will make ourselves immeasurably less secure by abandoning the settlements than by holding fast to them.

Living Without Solutions in Samaria. By David P. Goldman.

Living without solutions in Samaria. By David P. Goldman (writing as Spengler). Asia Times, September 25, 2012.

Prof. Robert Wistrich on the Betrayal of Israel by the Left.

Pamela Geller Interviews the Preeminent Scholar, Professor Robert Wistrich. Atlas Shrugs, January 22, 2013.

Interview with Professor Robert Wistrich:

 

Q. In what ways has the Left betrayed the Jews and Israel?

 

A. Ever since the late 1940s, the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, through their cynical exploitation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, not only betrayed the Jews but their own self-proclaimed ideals of equality, social justice and opposition to racism. This betrayal continued with the new Left in the 1970s, the anti-globalists and much of the academic Left (in the US as well as in Europe) in our own day. They have demonized and systematically denigrated Israel as if it were the Devil incarnate, the anti-Christ of our time, the ultimate expression of racist oppression.

 

Q. Has your analysis been informed by your early life in the USSR?

 

A. I was much too young to be directly influenced since my parents were repatriated to Poland only a few years after the end of WWII. But my father had twice been imprisoned by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) and his experiences probably inoculated me against any illusions about the “Soviet paradise.” But it was my own direct experience when trapped as a tourist in Prague (at the time of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) which did leave an indelible negative impression of Communism.

 

Q. Why do you think that the Left is so anti-Israel? What are the roots?

 

A. As my new book clearly demonstrates, the ideological sources of left-wing anti-Israelism go back to the late-19th-century emergence of political Zionism. Already then, many socialist ideologues, following Karl Marx, treated the Jews as if they were a phantom nationality, a caste of greedy exploiters whose only real religion was predatory capitalism. These leftists believed that the advent of socialism would abolish not only capitalism but Jewry itself. Neither happened. The establishment of Israel proved their prognosis to be hopelessly wrong. So, what are they left with? Mindless, irrational denigration! The Marxist Left in particular is incapable of escaping from its own self-created ideological straitjacket.

 

Q. But why does the Left identify with Palestinian jihadists, whose values – at least outwardly – seem so very different?

 

A. The Left has always tended to identify with those whom they designate as “the poor,” the “proletariat” or the hapless victims of the capitalist system. However, the international proletariat did not live up to Marxian expectations as the “chosen class” of world history – while the Communist bloc collapsed in 1989-91. The Palestinians represent a substitute form of redemption for all these failed hopes – the prologue and catalyst for a new revolutionary would-be upheaval. And there is always the additional attraction that the Palestinians are fighting the Jews – or rather “The Zionists.” Ergo, they must be supported.

 

Q. And the jihadi component?

 

A. In From Ambivalence to Betrayal, I show that already in the 1920s, Moscow tried (unsuccessfully) to “Bolshevize” the Muslim masses in the East, especially in Palestine. They proposed a “Red Jihad” against Western imperialism and Zionism. There was some common ground. Both Marxists and Islamists divide the world in a simplistic Manichean fashion between forces of light and darkness, ruthless imperialists and downtrodden masses, between oppressors and oppressed. Jihad does have revolutionary potential and can meet Marxist requirements with the help of some dialectical juggling. Moreover, once Palestinians are defined as the absolute victims (a convenient fiction), then Zionists must necessarily be branded as absolute perpetrators and accused of committing “genocide” against them. But as I demonstrate, this is a fantasy-view. Despite its great popularity today, it is really just a “softer” remake of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories so beloved by Nazis and fascists.

 

Q. So why are so many Jews attracted to the Left, despite such attitudes?

 

A. There are several possible explanations. There is, of course, the Biblical tradition (embodied in Moses and the Prophets) of pursuing justice, righteousness and compassion for the poor – embedded in the Jewish cultural DNA. Then there is Jewish social marginality before the 19th century and the relentless persecution over centuries, which made Jews into archetypal victims and outsiders. However, in America and the West (including Israel) where Jews have “made it” they still often “vote like the poor.” Sometimes it even seems that Jews are stuck in a time-warp which makes them always see the enemy on the Right – while remaining blind in the left eye. I do hope that my book will be an eye-opener in that respect.

 

Q. Is this history the reason why so many Jews recently voted for Obama?

 

A. Well, Jews are suckers for what we might call “compassionism” and especially for humanitarian appeals, in sharp contrast to the grotesque anti-Semitic stereotype (on the Right and the Left) of Jewish “huckstering” and rapacity. Compassion is fine, even admirable in many ways. But making an ideology out of it is highly suspect. Some of the worst crimes in modern history have been committed in the name of human rights, solidarity, and defense of the poor – as the record of Soviet-style Communism unmistakably shows. Obama, in American domestic terms, is pretty much a leftist, and Jews as good Liberal Democrats naturally gravitate to him in the United States. It’s proving hard to shift those habits.

 

Q. Why do you say the creation of Israel was a “slap in the face to the Marxist analysis of the ‘Jewish Question?’”

 

A. Because, according to Marxism, the Jews should long ago have disappeared as a nation! An influential sector of the Left, long before Israel’s creation, regarded Zionism as an illegitimate “backward” and reactionary movement. It is true that for a time much of the Left did support Israel (between 1947 and 1967) as long as they could see Jews primarily as poor, persecuted, downtrodden refugees of the Holocaust who were building a “socialist” country of their own. What they could not stomach was a proud, independent, Jewishly self-affirming and militarily efficient Israel able to strike back at (Arab) enemies hell-bent on its destruction. Weeping over dead Jews is fine, but real, living, flesh-and-blood Israelis who vigorously defend their right to exist is apparently, for many on the Left (including some Jews), just too much to take. I would see that attitude as a form of latent, undeclared anti-Semitism. As for Obama, his whole mind-set and natural inclinations seem to me to reflect a kind of Third Worldist ideology. Hence, the retreat from American global supremacy. However, his hostility towards Netanyahu is truly stunning and, I think, ill-advised. Most Israelis are not stupid and they sense the US President’s obvious coldness to their cause, even as he embraces some of their worst enemies, like Egypt’s President Morsi and the Turkish leader, Erdogan (both of whom are fairly rabid Islamic anti-Semites).

 

Q. Following on from that, how then do you explain the refusal to address Islamic Jew-hatred, surely the greatest threat the Jewish people currently faces?

 

A. There are several dangerous strands of self-delusion involved in this refusal. At a more general level there is the notorious inability of Western liberals to internalize the fact that the Iranians and the radical Arab Islamists really mean what they say when they talk about annihilating the Jews, destroying Israel, bringing down America and establishing Islamic supremacy. There is a real failure to grasp the determination of such “true believers” to act on their fanatical principles, despite the overwhelming evidence before our eyes. Precisely the same failure was visible in Western (and Soviet) appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. Remember that even The New York Times was largely in denial about the Holocaust all through the war years. It simply buried the story in the back pages. Today, the liberal media are still whitewashing the Islamo-fascist threat and instead, like so many other deluded liberal voices, they prefer to bash Israel, even though it remains the only authentic democracy in the region. This is bad enough. But there is also a lot of ridiculous posturing in such fashionable positions. For instance, the need to appear as “politically correct” and, above all, not to be vilified as “racist” or as an “Islamophobe.” There are those out there, for whom any critical comments about Islam are a kind of thought-crime. Moreover, since the Western media prefer to remain largely silent about the endemic and vicious Jew-hatred in the Islamic world (while grossly inflating or manufacturing Israel’s fictitious “crimes”), ordinary people – including way too many Jews – have little idea about its genocidal nature. Worse still, even when they know, there is a clear inclination to suppress unpleasant truths rather than face up to them. To stand up to this reality has become an act of real courage in our inverted world.

 

Q. How then do you see Israel’s prospects, surrounded as it is by Islamic supremacists and the threat of annihilation?

 

A. We live in dangerous times, not only for Israel but for the whole world, including America. In my previous book, A Lethal Obsession (2010), I predicted that the rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism would sweep the Arab Middle East. It is a most telling symptom of its deep sickness rather than a solution. There is, unfortunately, no quick fix or instant therapy for the Arab world. Look at Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Democracy is not around the corner nor can it offer much to the hungry Arab masses as long as there is no stable middle-class, no functioning civil society, no way to clean out massive corruption and defuse the toxic incitement and hatred of Israel and the West that is so prevalent. The Jewish State is an oasis of freedom, economic growth, cultural creativity, scientific innovation, military skills and robust democratic values in this desert. It will ride out the storm despite the malevolence and nihilistic self-destructiveness of its enemies, including the Palestinian Hamas. It is, however, vital for the West – and above all America – to stand by its commitments to Israel’s security out of its own interests in regional stability, its good name, and its self-proclaimed mission as a beacon of freedom to the world. Israel has upheld similar values in the face of great adversity. For if America and Europe were to abandon the Jews once more, the damage to Western civilization would, in my view, be irreversible.