Capitol Ideas / The Once and Future Israel
Bethell, Tom
C A P I T O L I D E A S THE ONCE AND FUTURE ISRAEL by Tom Bethell The longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer said in 1967 that " i f Israel fails, then history can have no meaning." The rebirth...
...the Greeks, the Slav...
...In Pravda he wrote that the solution to the Jewish question "did not ultimately depend on Palestine and military victories, but on the triumph everywhere in the world of socialism over capitalism...
...They have moved in a matter of months from being champions of the largest tax cut in American history to being champions of the largest peacetime tax increase in history...
...Today Ronald Reagan is under the professional care of Baker & Darman who believe that they can remain in power even longer than Haldeman & Ehrlichman or Powell & Jordan...
...And to those of us who would deny life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the fish along North Carolina's outer banks this is bad news...
...They won' t succeed, but if perchance they did, Communism and the Soviet Union would be the winners, and history would have no meaning [] E D I T O R I A L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ ' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G.O.P...
...Their economic knowledge at THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 5...
...There can be no doubt that, in addition to the growing number of countries that have been militarily satellized by the Soviet Union, sizable and increasing segments of elite opinion in Western Europe and the United States have likewise been morally satellized by the Soviets...
...And t h e r e , significantly enough, the undermining of Zionism (in reality, the destruction of Israel) was high on its agenda...
...A generation passed, and the Jewish state was created...
...Perhaps they should call in Senator Robert Dole, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee...
...but the Jew has remained intact...
...Russian Jews in large numbers took their government's support of the Jewish state " a s a license to express their emotions, and as a glimmer of hope that they might be permitted to leave for the Promised Land," Nadav Safran writes in Israel...
...The Soviet rulers understood that Zionism was potentially dangerous to their cause, as any rival system of belief or ideas must be dangerous--especially to something as nihilistic as egalitarian Communism...
...Some of them were permitted to leave...
...It may be, then, that Zionism, accused of racism, is seen as a t h r e a t at the UN for the more relevant reason that it is eating away at Communism and gradually destroying it...
...But t h e r e is something else of greater significance...
...It is a group of people who wish to destroy Israel, as in fact the organization quite frankly admitted at the Fatah Revolutionary Congress in Damascus in 1980 Their goal, they said, was " t h e extermination of the Zionist entity, economically, politically, militarily, culturally and ideologically...
...The ideology of Communism which energized the Bolshevik revolution and formed the basis of the Soviet state under Lenin was to a surprising extent Jewish in origin...
...they are looking to the future...
...It is not a land of producers...
...Some State Department officials feared the same thing...
...The existence of Israel, and all that it promised, vitiated the promise of Communism for the Soviet Jew...
...At the very pinnacle of its power and achievement, at the end of World War II, America simply declined to accept the major role in the world that was then easily available to it by default...
...A generation after that, and everyone was beginning to say: "No one in the Soviet Union believes in Communism anymore...
...I f this analysis is correct, then, it follows that the destruction of the Israeli state is an urgent priority for the Soviet Union and for satellite Communists everywhere...
...This message, however, does not get to Washington where high taxes always mean flush times for bureaucrats and pols alike...
...For the remainder, we may be sure, Communism became an empty husk...
...In fact, of course, this was a house of cards on the verge of collapse anyway...
...Although its advocates would in many cases share such similar dreams, Communism and Zion would move further and further apart...
...is now allowing himself to be governed by the successors to Haldeman & Ehrlichman, Powell & Jordan...
...This in turn is rapidly reducing that 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 country to a decaying husk of tyranny How strange that so many of the founders of the modern state of Israel were themselves socialists, many of them from Russia...
...Such philosophes of course have no conception of what affairs of state might be...
...He would doubtless advise that they levy a thumping tax on fishermen...
...experienced by Jews, transmitted by them...
...Alas, the record of this species of Machiavel over the past three presidential administrations has not been aweinspiring...
...It is no doubt already too late and too risky for the Soviets to try this directly...
...There is no economic evidence to support this conclusion...
...Some Israeli pilots were even trained by the Soviets, and 20 years later they would destroy the Sovietprovided Egyptian air force...
...However we explain this--mystically or in whatever other fashion--we cannot deny its truth...
...What might this be...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Perhaps in so doing America fulfilled its destiny...
...The Embattled Ally...
...The more productive the fisherman, the heavier Senator Dole would tax him: Surely that would activate the fishing...
...The rebirth of the Jewish state in the Promised Land a f t e r nearly 2,000 years' dispersion, and coming as it did so soon after the deliberate destruction of perhaps one-third of the world's Jews, is an event so improbable that one can without hyperbole call it miraculous...
...Recognizing that that country is a dangerously armed prison camp, its rulers lacking legitimacy and its subjects reduced to near slave s t a t u s , many in the West (lacking any convictions of their own and finding no basis in the "consumer society" for feeling morally superior to anyone) have simply responded to news of the Soviet Moloch with fear, and a desire to placate it (dressed up in the rhetoric of "negotiating our differences...
...Well, it convinced many of the assistant presidents around Ronald Reagan...
...One day they would be casting mightily...
...Our recent deficits have come from economic decline, and one major cause of that decline is the burdensome taxation weighing down upon productive Americans to pay for Tip O'Neill's Good Fairy Politique...
...The PLO, in short, is not a group of people with "legitimate aspirations," looking for somewhere to live...
...But a look at the PLO's weapons, and the countries from which its recruits come, shows that the Soviets h]ave not given up on the idea of achieving this destruction through surrogates...
...American liberals, many of them Jewish, have until recently likewise fancied that Israel would establish at last that decent, true, legitimate socialism that intellectuals had dreamed of for so long...
...As Eric Hoffer rightly says, it gives a meaning to history that otherwise might not be discernible...
...They are the political tacticians, the bright boys who convince politicians that they know how to keep their man in office...
...As we read about Israel daily in the newspapers, in particular the present s t r u g g l e of the Israelis with the assemblage of t e r r o r i s t s in Beirut who for nearly 20 years have been planning nothing but the destruction of I s r a e l - - t o d a y they daily grant interviews to our journalists and solemnly negotiate with our shameful emissaries--it is easy to forget how remarkable it is that the s t a t e of Israel exists at all...
...It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, that they alone have maintained, whether through the special Tom Bethell, The American Spectat o r ' s Washington correspondent, holds the DeIVitt Wallace Chair in Communications at the American Enterprise Institute...
...In the first place we see an America undoubtedly in a phase of fairly rapid decline, probably irreversible...
...What do they know about the fabled bottom line...
...Washington is the land of spenders and taxers...
...We may surmise that just as the Jewish state in Palestine 2,000 years ago was a kind of launching pad for the most momentous events in hist o r y - - t h e life and death of J e s u s Christ and the e s t a b l i s h m e n t of Christianity--so the reappearance of the Jewish s t a t e in the same geographical location today will probably be the occasion for some renewed drama...
...They have no constancy because they have no ideas...
...In fact, this may already be underway...
...The citizen of a socialist society . . . looks upon the people of any bourgeois country, including the people of the state of Israel, as upon wayfarers who have not made their way out of a dark forest...
...No doubt largely as a result of the Holocaust, almost alone among the democracies, Israel does not question its own moral legitimacy...
...Of all the oddities of the Jewish people throughout their peculiar and s t i r r i n g history, nothing can quite compare with t h e i r unassimilable nature...
...They, like Lenin, wanted to build a new society, a socialist society--with the important proviso that it also be Jewish How strange that Arab rulers such as King Ibn Saud feared that the new state of Israel would introduce Bolshevism into the region...
...Senator Dole has convinced them that interest rates will drop if the federal deficit is narrowed by higher taxes...
...It is not difficult to see that Menachem Begin is not afraid of anyone, which is the most important quality a national or any other kind of leader can have...
...Be nice to the Soviet bear--and it will devour you last...
...the northern Gauls, their auxiliaries...
...And then, when the surrounding Arab countries attacked the newborn state in 1948, Gromyko again came to the rescue, maneuvering for truces while the Soviet Union funneled arms to Israel via Czechoslovakia...
...The next day they would be in with the fish...
...The same is not true of Israel, however...
...Gromyko's mistake was to subordinate ideology to pragmatism...
...They are not looking toward the Near East...
...Does Senator Dole's reasoning sound implausible...
...Not so...
...SAPS K i t t y Hawk, North Carolina--The water here is luminously clear...
...It is a bankrupt ideology," and so on...
...the Dacian has absorbed even the Mongol...
...of which Hilaire Belloc wrote (in a book, published before World War II, urgently advocating the creation of a Jewish state): Nation after nation has absorbed larger, intensely hostile minorities: the Irish, their successive invaders...
...It is also calm...
...He raised taxes some $300 billion...
...The sole remaining locus of Communism's influence seemed to be the United Nations...
...action of Providence or through some general biological or social law of which we are ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally unfailing differentiation between themselves and the society through which they ceaselessly move...
...the British, the pirates of the fifth and eighth centuries, and the French of three centuries more...
...If we look at the world's stage today, who or where are the significant actors...
...the Italians, the Lombards...
...The unintimidated status of Israel is, of course, most unwelcome to the Soviet Union, whose influence in the world derives from f e a r and nothing else...
...The only man in the White House who has ideas, ideas about the purpose and worth of government, is Ronaid Reagan, and apparently he who once counseled with men like Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Countries d o n ' t get any younger, any more than people do...
...This was summarized recently by Ronald Steel as " t h e Zionist dream of everyone tilling the fields together, eating in communal kitchens, sharing the wealth, and playing together in string orchestras at n i g h t . " How similar this is to the vision of the Soviet Union entertained by the Communist shop steward in the British film I'm All Right, Jack: "All of them cornfields, and ballet in the evening" How strange, in retrospect, that the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, Stalin's aide at Yaita, should have played midwife at the UN birth of Israel, tile Communist bloc voting for the Partition of Palestine, and so providing the necessary two-thirds majority without a vote to spare...
...The Soviet (and Jewish) writer Ilya Ehrenburg saw the danger as early as September 1948...
...As I shall try to explain, it is just possible that the role of Israel now is to destroy the Soviet Moloch...
...When he left office interest rates had jumped and so had the deficit...
...Soviet Jews are rebuilding their socialist motherland together with all the Soviet people...
...I n a word, Americans are overtaxed...
...At the same time, however, and in the generation that has since elapsed, America did play a major role in the creation, launching, and arming of the reborn Israel...
...But they were prepared to support Israel as a way of helping to disrupt the supposedly powerful "colonialism" of Britain in the Middle East...
...There is also the Soviet Union, and today the Soviets play a role comparable to that of Moloch in the ancient world: a god that is f e a r e d and dreaded and must be appeased by human sacrifice...
...Zionism has diverted to Israel the crucial Jewish energy and faith that was needed to sustain the ideology underlying the Soviet state...
...Few of our noble political leaders have ever produced anything, aside from hot air and paperwork...
...In fact, President Carter followed this policy during the last futile presidential by R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r. administration...
...At the famed Kitty Hawk Pier, the assembled sages have been in prolonged confabulation for months, speculating on how they might activate the fishing...
...I should like to see these bright fellows in action on the Kitty Hawk Pier...
Vol. 15 • September 1982 • No. 9
