By Clifford Asness
Saturday, June 15, 2024
What explains the outpouring of protest against Israel
and the concurrent hatred toward Jews from a virulent subset of kids,
professors, and outsiders on elite college campuses? One answer, one key
answer, isn’t to be found in the Mideast but rather in the human heart and how
human beings explain the workings of the world to themselves. That answer is
“capitalism” and those who hate it. Capitalism is an inefficient label for what
is better called “free enterprise,” or just freedom as it applies to economics.
But we’ll use it for now.
First, a little necessary review before we get to the
role of capitalism in the demonization of Israel and the Jews. Hamas and Israel
maintained a real, albeit de facto, cease-fire for years, until Hamas decided
to break it on October 7. Hamas chose to rape and murder more than 1,000
Israeli men, women, and children (while wounding 3,500 others). Then Hamas
paraded the corpses of their victims before cheering throngs and have continued
to abuse, abase, and slaughter their hostages. Immediately, a decent-sized
swath of American youth decided the proper response was to show support for
those who savagely broke the cease-fire and, in effect, to demand that Israel
refrain from responding at all. The protests began with a massive Times Square
demonstration the day after the Hamas attack and continued with 400 more
rallies nationwide over the next 10 days, long before the Israeli counterattack
began on October 27. At their worst, the protests call for Israel’s
destruction, often in no uncertain terms. At their best, they merely insist
that Israel shouldn’t go after the Hamas barbarians themselves, as after
committing their historically barbaric attack, the terrorists have already
reached home base, hiding behind their own people.
The “free Palestine” mob has gotten nearly all of it
wrong, in ways large and small, and its members don’t display the curiosity
required to learn about the conflict beyond perhaps watching a TikTok. Blithely
ignorant, they sing-song words like “genocide” and “apartheid” that aren’t just
blood libels against multi-ethnic democratic Israel, but are better understood
as a form of projection, since these epithets are apt descriptors of Hamas, the
only advocates and practitioners of genocide in this conflict (not counting
Hezbollah and the Houthis and their paymasters in Tehran). The protesters and
their enablers point to the real harm done to Palestinian civilians—ignoring
that Israel takes heroic steps to minimize such harm, at great risk to its own
young soldiers—all the while believing, or pretending to believe, the casualty
statistics coming from Hamas.
It is obviously not Arab civilian deaths motivating the
protesters; they are happy to ignore those in Syria, Iraq, and most anywhere
else noncombatants are being slaughtered. And it’s almost certainly not that
they genuinely relish a theocratic authoritarian victory. Most of the
protesters care little about an actual Hamas victory, but they care very much
about Israel’s defeat, so much so that they’ll take the former if they get the
latter.
Why is this? The root cause is the far left’s worship of
failure and a concomitant hatred of success and merit—an anti-free-enterprise,
anti-Western, anti-progress, anti-prosperity dogma married to a love of power
and control regardless of the consequent deprivation and despair that always
follow when such ideas achieve control of societies. It’s a civilizational
autoimmune disorder, in which healthy organs are attacked as if they are
foreign objects or threats (and in which cancer is intentionally nourished).
Given recent events, you can be forgiven for believing
that Israel-hating, Jew-hating, and Hamas-loving are at the core of this creed,
but they are not; they are simply some of the uglier by-products. That this is
a “pan-leftist” popular-front movement is obvious to anyone paying the
slightest attention. For starters, one can just follow the money and examine
the committed anti-capitalist (and not particularly Mideast-focused) groups
helping to fund and organize these protests. For what reason other than pan-leftist
unity is Greta Thunberg, the Joan of Arc of climate change, so committed to
anti-Zionism? One would think Iran’s carbon footprint would be more likely to
draw her ire. Why are protesters hearing about the glories of North Korea at
some of these rallies? Why else would extremely progressive Jews be so
comfortable with a movement suffused with so much outright anti-Semitism? As
Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals, would say, the
issue is never the issue. In this case what’s never the issue is, oddly enough,
the Middle East. If it were, the campuses would have lit up during 2021, when
the women of Iran heroically rose up.
At the core of today’s progressivism is the idea that
success comes only from plunder and that failure is the ultimate sign of
virtue. The goal is then to indiscriminately punish the successful and blindly
reward the failed, as their success and failure are all you need to know. The
Balzac quip that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is their
Lord’s Prayer.1
***
The truth: The Jews were given a scrap of ancestral land
(actually, they bought much of it fair and square, and after decades of
organizing and building, were given a mandate to start a tiny country on it)
and defended it against five invading armies in 1948, after the Palestinians
and allied Arab countries rejected the original two-state solution the
Jews had accepted. Over the years, the Israelis then turned deserts
into orange groves and then turned orange groves into Silicon Valley,2 all
while under military assaults, surprise attacks, bombardment, terrorism, and
continued international pressure to reward their attackers for their crimes.
And they did this while maintaining a vibrant liberal democracy. Israeli Arabs,
one-fifth of Israel’s population, are still the only Arabs in the region who
enjoy the fruits of, and participate in running, such a democracy.
But to today’s progressive activist, Israel’s success is
itself the proof of its moral bankruptcy, just as perfidy is
the progressive’s only explanation for success. Israel’s prosperity, its
stunning success—in the absolute and especially when judged against its
neighbors—is something that must be defeated. Progressives would otherwise be
compelled to admit that Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism produce
the most human flourishing and also the fairest distribution of it. You might
call it a perverse immoral hazard. Far-left progressives cannot let Israel’s success
count as best practices.
In contrast, the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 and
their descendants have had a tough time of it, largely due to their leaders.
Israel took in a similar number of Jews expelled, de facto or through explicit
threat of pogrom, from the Arab world. But the Palestinians’ fellow Arabs did
not take them in, choosing instead to keep them in squalor as a bargaining chip
and a cudgel against Israel, and because they just didn’t want them (see
Egypt’s Gaza border wall today).3 United
Nations sympathizers abetted the scheme, forcing Palestinians into permanent
refugeehood based on birth (a modern serfdom) in defiance of UN principles (no
other refugees are characterized this way). Israel didn’t do any of this to
them; their supposed friends did.
Aid money sent to Gaza and the West Bank over the years
has not been used to build a productive economy. Instead, it’s been used to dig
sophisticated, ex-tensive terror tunnels, support a lavish lifestyle for
Palestinian leaders, and provide nice annuities to the families of “martyrs” as
a means of intentionally encouraging more. These leaders consciously built
failure, an economic failure married to a death cult, instead of trying for
success. Progressives honor them for it.
According to today’s progressive dogma, it’s only
outcomes that matter, because outcomes represent not equality but “equity.”4 Equal
opportunities and equal rights are insufficient; it is equal outcomes that are
truly moral. And when measured against the Israelis, the Palestinian refugees
clearly don’t have such “equity.” So Israel must be an oppressor and the
perma-class of “powerless” refugees (again, courtesy of their friends) must be
saints and martyrs. What’s a progressive to do? Credit the Israelis for their
earned success? Blame the Palestinians leaders, so clearly responsible, for
their people’s open sores? Blame the countries supporting Palestine for
cynically perpetuating their condition? No, clearly, what you do is blame the
Israelis for their sin of prospering and then head to the barricades for
barbarians because a failed society must axiomatically be a just and righteous
one.
Even outside of Israel, Jews as a people represent a huge
problem to the progressive worldview. Jews are the world’s longest-lived
oppressed minority. We are only four generations past the Holocaust (an actual genocide).5 We
are only three generations removed from a time when Jews in the U.S. faced
quotas and gentleman’s agreements explicitly and implicitly limiting our
opportunities. And yet Jews are economically thriving here in oppressor America
and elsewhere. This is a living, breathing assault on the progressive
worldview. Surely the logic of “equity” requires that Jews must be unfairly
manipulating the system to attain that success? Surely, Jews must be cheating
left and right? Otherwise, how can progressives explain the success of Jews?
For a time, due to the Holocaust, this was a question that progressives dared
not answer as they wanted to. But time and tides change. Jews (and Israel) are
now deemed guilty of imposing and benefiting from oppression based not on facts
but solely on their success.
What can be done to counteract this diseased worldview?
The place to start is with those who keep the gears of capitalism working.
Prestige corporations need to broaden their recruiting beyond the
grade-inflated radical factories that used to be our most esteemed
universities. Donors need to direct their largesse toward schools that aren’t
teaching that any achievement is prima facie evidence of racism, colonialism,
and capitalism run amok. Programs need to be funded to teach the massive (and
obvious) net good that free enterprise has done for the world, without
whitewashing the occasional faults. Graduate students and professors willing to
buck their Marxist madrassas need to be supported financially and otherwise.
Capitalism is what has made our amazing civilization
possible (and has allowed so many useless post-modern academics to live in
perpetual luxury). Rejection of free enterprise is what has caused most of the
societal failures around the world—failures that would-be totalitarians
attribute solely to oppression that can be cured only by more oppression (but
this time from them). We now face a multigenerational challenge to teach the
young to love and respect liberty as it applies everywhere, including in economics,
where it would actually lead the destitute children of Gaza to a better life.
No society that worships failure and abjures success can
long endure. Reverse this, even some of it, and much of the Jew-hatred will go
away on its own, as it has never been the real point.
***
1 Balzac
actually wrote something more nuanced: “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans
cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait,” or
“The secret of any great success without apparent cause is a crime, overlooked
because it was well executed.” “Without apparent cause” ruins the usual
progressive interpretation. But it’s the epigraph to The Godfather,
so we’re stuck with the less nuanced version.
2 Israel’s
own journey from mostly socialist to mostly capitalist is a separate tale worth
telling.
3 Whenever
Palestinians were allowed into other Arab countries (e.g., Jordan), Palestinian
leaders engaged in terrorism and sought to overthrow the government, making
themselves thoroughly unwelcome.
4 Some
of this, just a bit, reflects a positive aspect of human nature. If I turn on a
ballgame and one of my teams isn’t playing, I naturally root for whoever is the
underdog. But I don’t assume the underdog team is morally superior and deserves
to win based only on the fact that they’re losing. And I won’t stubbornly cling
to this view regardless of overwhelming evidence that I’m wrong. That’s a
perversion of a good instinct.
5 Not
“a” holocaust but “The Holocaust.”
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