George Gilder - The Israel Test

The world, then engulfed by a world war, mostly failed to focus on this particular threat, which seemed too bizarre and evil even to be believed. The West lost six million of its most creative and productive citizens: family members of the same people who shaped twentieth-century science, enabled twentieth-century technology, and opened the horizons for the twenty-first-century economy — the people who largely enabled the West to prevail against the Axis powers and to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. We have to acknowledge today that in his most ardent cause and most fervent war aim, Hitler largely triumphed. Some 6 5 years later, the number of Jews is still an estimated five million below the number in 1939. Poland, once home to almost 3.5 million Jews, has an estimated Jewish population of only 25,000 as of 2008. As expressed in the compulsive acts of condemnation of Israel by the United Nations, the Nazi obsession has attained a new respectability around the world.

Today, Hitler’s rants have morphed into a global program of religious education and military ideology sustained by Arab and Iranian oil money and generous subventions by American taxpayers and the United Nations. The hundreds of thousands of Brown Shirts in Germany have become millions of frothing jihadi youths similarly inculcated with anti-Semitic hatred and a lust for violence. Leading politicians in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Malaysia, Venezuela, and other nations, and jihadi imams and mullahs around the globe have declared their resolve to destroy Israel.

Unlike the Germans, who faced a formidable technical challenge in carrying out their plan, the incumbent anti-Semites benefit from the increasing availability of nuclear weapons, which could render a new Holocaust both simpler and more efficient than the first. Anti-Semites have the moral support of much of the UN bureaucracy, including its “human rights” apparatus, which is chiefly devoted to anti-Semitic agitprop. The UN General Assembly in 2008 directed 6 8 percent of its condemnatory resolutions and other strictures against Israel. The UN secretary-general has called for a global boycott of Israel for its efforts to defend itself against new campaigns of extermination. Aiding a new Holocaust is the vulnerability of the state where 5.5 million Jews live, encircled by lethal enemies bent on their annihilation.

Today, the most dangerous form of Holocaust-denial is not rejection of the voluminous evidence of long-ago Nazi crimes but incredulity toward the voluminous evidence of the new Holocaust being planned by Israel’s current enemies. Two Iranian presidents have resolved to acquire nuclear weapons for the specific purpose of “wiping Israel off the map.” Scores of nations, representing 1.8 billion Muslims, have endorsed the jihad. After the genocidal crimes of World War II and the Communist empire and recent genocidal violence in Rwanda, the Sudan, Somalia, and Zaire, deniers of a new Holocaust agenda manifest a tragic and foolhardy blindness to human nature and human history. Showing no understanding of the central and indispensable contribution of capitalism to human welfare, the world political order is heavily focused on punishing capitalists, as epitomized by Israel and the United States.

The problem is not nuclear weapons themselves. They represent another major and irreversible step in the history of weapons development. To condemn them is like condemning meteors or earthquakes or even the sun. They are now an inexorable part of the world. Moreover, nuclear weapons have a positive aspect. They reflect a generally favorable move of the world from quantitative arms races to qualitative ones, from rivalries of mass mobilization of existing manpower and resources to intellectual competition in the development of new weapons and defenses.

Quantitative arms races focus on diverting wealth from private consumption to public mobilization. Quantitative arms races favor dictatorial regimes with large populations of young men. They reward the ability to extract resources from consumption and re-direct them to the job of reproducing the best existing military tools. Quantitative arms races make a billion youths inculcated with Wahhabi frenzies into a vast and possibly decisive weapon. Quantitative arms races lead either to economic exhaustion or to war.

Qualitative arms races can trump quantitative capabilities. During World War II, the perfection of radar, the emergence of computer decryption, and the mastery of nuclear weapons counteracted the apparently decisive advantages of the Axis countries in existing industrial power and military mobilization. During the Cold War, the advance of U.S. guidance and communications technologies and steps toward effective missile defense countered the huge advantages in manpower of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. In any qualitative rivalry, millions of Jewish individuals and other researchers and inventors operating in free societies can counteract billions of jihadists in mass movements and totalitarian confinement. As Peter Huber put it in an eloquent speech after 9/11, “Our silicon can beat their sons.”

Today the superiority of America and its Israeli allies is growing ever greater. The campaigns of the qualitative arms race become increasingly more effective compared to the indoctrination of new Nazis. Hundreds of Talpions can trump millions of Brown Shirts or jihadi youth.

However, there remains an acute danger. Countering the ever-growing American and Israeli lead in new technologies are widespread abolitionist attitudes toward nuclear weapons. Together with hostility toward anti-ballistic missiles, opposition to weapons in space, resistance to civil defense, and blindness to the urgent need for technological answers to nuclear terror, a suicidal pacifism in the United States endangers not only Israel’s survival but America’s as well.

Echoing the equally corrosive influence of levelers in economics, these attitudes in the West could so inhibit the development of new counter-weapons that a mere quantitative buildup of old weapons systems cobbled together from Western schematics could prevail. A window of opportunity may be opening for rogue powers that can acquire even primitive nuclear weapons. The archaic tools of quantitative competition could trump the superior capabilities of Israel and the West.

Under these conditions, no other single international issue is as important as the nuclear threat to Israel. The case of Israel gives the lie to every notion of unilateral disarmament, every illusion that the adversaries of the West are open to negotiation, every scintilla of belief that our enemies desire peace rather than destruction. Israel is not only a major source of Western technological supremacy and economic leadership — it is also the most vulnerable source of Western power and intelligence. It is not only the canary in the mine shaft — it is also a crucial part of the mine itself.

Over the course of decades, Israel and the United States have made every possible overture toward Israel’s enemies, lavishing them with funds, relinquishing land, endorsing statehood. If the Arabs or Iranians desired peace, they would long ago have achieved it. There would be a Palestinian state thriving next to Israel. But instead, Israel faces a global mobilization against its very existence. In a world of nuclear weapons, the continued determination to destroy Israel represents a direct threat to New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as well.

In the conflict with the jihadists, inapplicable today are the lessons of the Cold War, in which we carefully learned to live with a nuclear USSR until communism and its empty economy cracked under the pressure of U.S. military advances. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union learned to live with nuclear weapons by developing a carefully negotiated set of protocols, both in their rhetoric and in their military movements. In relation to Israel, Iran and other jihadist movements are brutally breaching any conceivable definition of protocols. When high officials in major countries announce their intention to use nuclear weapons to “destroy” a nation, they must be addressed in a way unnecessary when they threatened “merely” driving that nation into the sea. All the qualitative resources of the West — all its current military powers and sources of new technology creation — must be brought to bear on the threat.