George Gilder - The Israel Test

The crucial assumption of the Peace Now movement is that it is within Israel’s power to choose peace, that there is something that Israel can give, a price it can pay that would finally and fully purchase peace.

This price is widely believed to be denominated in land. The utterly conventional and obviously fantastic consensus view of nearly all authorities on the subject, reflected in the policies of most of the world’s governments led by the United States, is that the key problem in the Mideast is that Israel has too much land. Their remedy is for Israel to give up land, mostly to the Palestinian state as envisioned by these same experts. Awarded to the current Palestinian regime or to some similar successor, the result would be another fanatical anti-Jewish Muslim nation-state with no identity to sustain it beyond the Palestinian sense of eternal grievance and hatred of Israelis.

The dream of land for peace enchants Westerners precisely because it appears to embody all the directness, legality and simplicity of a purely commercial transaction, suggesting that some price — this many square miles or that — would close the deal to everyone’s satisfaction and reveal jihad to be nothing more and nothing less than a negotiating position to be terminated at will when the Israelis, at long last, pay up.

The evidence of tens of billions of dollars in tribute collected from the Israelis and the West since the 1993 Oslo Accords constitute ample proof, if any were needed, that the Palestinian Authority is indeed an extortion racket. But the object of the racket has nothing to do with a few square miles of disputed land in the territories. The Palestinian regime has as little interest in land as it has in peace.

The so-called “peace” process negotiations themselves confirm this observation. The sense that, by rational “commercial” standards, the parties are so close to agreement that, as Tzipi Livni would have it, “the dove is on the windowsill,” powerfully sustains the land-for-peace illusion. With so little left to give, according to the negotiating maps, Israel could attain peaceful coexistence with only minor concessions. The implication is that the Palestinians and their backers in the Arab world have waged jihad for decades, brought death and poverty and terror on their own land and people, and unceasingly pledged death to Israel and every Jew in its domain, as a negotiating tactic.

Such a belief borders on insanity. As David Meir-Levi explains, “From 1949 to 1967 there were no settlements in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Nor was there peace. The settlements to which the Arabs objected at that time were Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hadera, Afula, etc. — in other words the settlement of Israel itself.” That is still the stance of the Arabs and Iranians who count.

Why, then, do many Israelis, including most governments since 1967, seem to take this land-for-peace canard seriously?

The answer is to be found in another tenacious illusion: the chimera of racialist self-determination, the most bewitching of all ersatz democratic ideologies and democracy’s paramount enemy for more than 150 years.

Israel is not racist and has imposed no racial standards in its own democracy. Arabs and Christians sit in the democratically-elected Knesset. Instead, the Israelis are the people in the world most universally and passionately accused of racism by — racists. Jews often battle the libel by internalizing it, overcompensating for the accusation of tribalism by lowering the defenses of the tribe in the face of its enemies — the mostly Arab regimes that are the leading protagonists of the Jew-hating cause in our time.

Goading Israel into this cul-de-sac of racial democracy is the “demographic threat,” as neatly summed up in a May 2008 Atlantic magazine cover story by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “Is Israel Finished?” What terrifies Goldberg is the prospect that “within the next several years, the number of Arabs under Israeli control — there are now more than 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel (there are 5.4 million Jews), and an additional 3.4 million or more Arabs who live in the West Bank and Gaza — will be greater than the number of Jews.” He cites a much-contested Israeli estimate that “by 2020, Jews will make up just 4 7 percent of the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” By extending Israel’s domains beyond the regions where Jews outnumber Arabs, Goldberg and his ilk believe, the settlements jeopardize both the Jewish majority and Israeli legitimacy.

Goldberg’s solution is essentially to uproot the some 400,000 Jewish inhabitants in the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem. You read that right. The expert’s solution is to remove 400,000 people not only from their homes, but from their communities, the schools and synagogues they built, and the roads and infrastructure they created.

Goldberg’s article justifies this brutal and ignominious surrender by suggesting that, together with the demographic trend, the West Bank settlements are “a catastrophe.” Echoing Jimmy Carter’s libelous sentiment in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid , Goldberg even raises fears that “Israel will become a state like pre-Mandela South Africa, in which the minority ruled the majority.”

Clinching the argument, in Goldberg’s deluded view, he writes: “If the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were given the vote, then Israel, a country whose fundamental purpose has been to serve as a refuge for persecuted Jews, and allow those Jews to have the novel experience of being part of a majority, would disappear, to be replaced by an Arab-dominated ‘bi-national’ state.”

Goldberg should be reassured. Judging from the behavior of virtually all other Arab states, any such bi-national state would be short-lived. An Arab-run Israel would quickly expel all its Jews and thus cripple its capitalist economy. Goldberg and company’s notion of the rules of democracy amounts to an Israeli suicide pact.

In ceding territory to its enemies and conceding the claims of the racial parodists of democracy, Israel would betray not only herself, her children, and her Zionist forebears but also democracy and the West itself. It is precisely by resisting the era’s most popular racialist perversion of the democratic idea that Israel defines, defends, vindicates, and illuminates democracy’s true meaning. To the extent that Israel instead concedes the claims of mere ethnic majoritarianism, Israel betrays the democratic idea.

Elections — counting heads rather than breaking them — are a prime tool of democracy, but hardly its essence. Far from the arbitrary dictate of the latest election, democracy denotes the enduring self-rule of a people assumed to be equal under the Lord and the law. Elections every day would not make a democracy of a society in which the decisive political forces are teenaged gangs with guns and terrorist courtiers doling out foreign aid to an intimidated populace.

No tenable theory of democracy allows the majority to destroy or expropriate the minority. Without a functioning and legally protected capitalist system, democracies swiftly sink into ochlocracies, ruled by the mob. Without the independent private sources of power imparted by free businesses, unbiased courts, and other institutions of economic order, any democracy becomes a despotism ruled by any tribe of thug politicians that manages to gain control. If it has oil or foreign aid, the regime may stay in power for decades, if not centuries. The failure of Israeli intellectuals and politicians (and their U.S. counterparts) to comprehend this reality is far more lethal than any predicted demographic trend.