George Gilder - The Israel Test

The defense of Israel must not be reactive. Indeed, it probably cannot even be public. It must mobilize all our resources of intelligence, technology, and surprise. And most important of all, it must succeed.

Like the Germans and Japanese in World War II, our adversaries will not wait for the West to prepare. They will attempt, as they did on 9/11, to achieve surprise. With no qualitative capabilities to cultivate, they know that time is their enemy. Whether against the United States or Israel, they must launch their blows as soon as they are ready.

By eliciting the early declarations and announcements of Iran and other jihadist states, Israel has performed an enormous service to the West. When they can, these countries will obviously assault the Great Satan as well as the Minor Satan. The Israel test makes the challenge clear. It signals the real predicament of the West.

The predicament of the West is the plight of the world and all its people. The defense of Israel is vital to the defense of the world economy. People are all we have. They are the ultimate resource and the most precious one. Only in peace can they thrive and reproduce.

An inescapable fact of life is that people — and peoples — vary tremendously in their talents and capabilities, and moral integrity, their understanding of the threats against them, their moral courage to face those threats and thus in their capacity to sustain life on earth against nihilist movements such as the jihad. People differ hugely in their ability to conceive the algorithms of economic advance and military defense. Shaped by baffling mixtures of genes and culture, history and faith, civics and law, nations and individuals show a broad spectrum, from an animus for land and blood to an inspiration for creativity and peace.

Just as free economies are necessary for the survival of the human population of the planet, the survival of the Jews is vital to the triumph of free economies. If Israel is subjugated or destroyed, we will be succumbing to forces targeting capitalism and freedom everywhere. We will be willfully allowing a fatal triumph of the barbarian masses that may well end by demoralizing and destroying the United States as well. There are certainly abundant examples that this is already taking place. Any global regime of UN redistribution of resources and suppression of the creators of wealth will doom the globe to a slow retreat to a radically smaller population of far more primitive peoples.

If we have a free, competitive, and collaborative world economy, however, some people and countries will far outperform others. Their outperformance is what makes it remotely possible to feed the current six billion inhabitants of the planet. As Matt Ridley observes in his recent book The Rational Optimist , without technological innovations, “we’d have needed about 85 earths to feed 6 billion people… if we’d gone on as 1950 organic farmers without a lot of fertilizer, we’d have needed 82 percent of the world’s land area for cultivation, as opposed to the 3 8 percent that we farm at the moment.” Many of the enabling technologies, from desalinization to targeted irrigation, originated in Israel or were critically advanced there. The United States contributed the world’s most potent agricultural machinery and fertilization tools. The universe is hierarchical, and economic freedom is what makes it possible for some humans to climb the hierarchies of knowledge and build systems to sustain life for all other human beings.

Economists and politicians talk of natural endowments, energy supplies, landmasses and sea-lanes, choke points and channels, money supplies and trade balances and capital investment. Environmentalists prattle on about global warming and other alleged planetary disorders. Law professors talk of constitutional penumbra and class action suits and the “freedom to choose.”

None of these concerns can hold a candle in importance to the talents of a country’s human beings and their commitment to the discipline and devotion to innovation that drive the global economy. What permits the human race to thrive and prosper is the willingness to unleash and affirm the genius of a statistically small number of people: to embrace the encouragement of learning and discovery and collaborate with it rather than succumb to envy and suppress its achievements. The twentieth century was shaped, animated and endowed largely by a tiny cohort of the earth’s population — the Jews. In much of the world, for the majority of the history of the world, they were suppressed and constricted by various dictatorial regimes, some of which they supported. But the achievements of the twentieth century are heavily attributable to the rising prevalence of capitalism in the West and its ability to accommodate the genius of the Jews. Without them, the world would be radically poorer and its prospects for the future would be decisively dimmed.

All around the globe today, however, the leaders of nations and international organizations, prestigious academics, and passionate writers denounce the very countries in which Jews are allowed to create and succeed. These leaders claim to be anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, anti-American, or anti-capitalist, but the distinctions dissolve in the crucial fact of their naked anti-Semitism.

People who obsessively denounce Jews have a name; they are Nazis. The Palestinian Arab leaders have shown themselves to be mostly Nazis. Anyone who believes these men should command a nation-state ensconced next to Israel is delusional. There is only one answer to the claims and demands and threats of such people and that answer is “no.”

The leaders of Iran are proud Nazis. Anyone who believes that the West can stand aside and conduct amiable negotiations while they acquire access to nuclear weapons is a gull who has failed to learn anything from the history of the twentieth century. The president of Syria is equally obsessed with Jews and Israel. The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia in their madrasahs around the globe are cultivating new armies of young Brown Shirts. The civilized world must show enough courage of its quondam convictions to answer all the neo-Nazis with a resounding “no.”

In the United States, however, most elite opinion believes that this is exactly the moment in human history when disarmament is a desirable option, a moment for intensified concessionary diplomacy in the Middle East, a moment when the supreme issue for domestic and international attention should be “climate change.” Such beliefs place the very survival of the United States into question.

The Holocaust threat only begins with Israel. The entire West is vulnerable to the jihad. It can be stopped only through a combination of recognition, resolve and technology. On the front lines, Israel must face the menace earlier than the United States. Israel has already demonstrated the effectiveness of civil defense programs against missile attacks. By fleeing to underground shelters, by distributing gas masks to every man, woman and child, Israelis have incurred only a handful of deaths from thousands of hits on Israeli towns. The Israelis have maintained military forces that long succeeded in holding the jihad at bay.

The Israel test forces the capitalist world to recognize the necessity of armament and civil defense. Today the nuclear threat seems chiefly addressed to Israel. But increasing steadily is the potential for importing nuclear weapons into American cities, exploding them offshore near American ports, or detonating bombs above America’s critical electronic infrastructure. The United States must mobilize all its capabilities of intelligence and defense against these threats.

The Israel test impels us to forgo the illusion of opting out of the arms race. All too many Americans still subscribe to the “strangest dream” school of international relations, as I called it after singing along to an Ed McCurdy song with Joan Baez at Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge as a college student in the 1960s: “ Last night I had the strangest dream / I ever dreamed before / I dreamed the world had all agreed / To put an end to war / I dreamed I saw a mighty room / The room was filled with men / And the paper they were signing said / They’d never fight again. ”