The U.N. vs. Israel

By Jonah Goldberg

Saturday, December 31, 2016

There isn’t much new to say about Barack Obama’s United Nations fiasco. I just reread my post from last Friday, right after the news broke and I haven’t heard anything that changes my initial take.

But as Bill Clinton said about his marriage vows, I won’t let that stop me.

Because I have the most Jewy name this side of Shlomo Abromowitz, lots of people think I know a lot about Israel. Sometimes it’s funny. I’ve even had people refer to me as an “expert” on Israel. (It’s devilishly fun to ask them, “Why do you think that?”)

I’m not an expert on Israel. I’ve been to Israel exactly once. I’ve been to France a half dozen times, and even wrote and produced a documentary on Notre Dame Cathedral. Still, I’m not an expert on France either. Yet, almost every day some troll on Twitter or in an e-mail (or snail mail) insinuates that I am, or accuses me of being, obsessed by, or in the employ of, Israel. I write about the place maybe once or twice a year in the normal run of things. My rule of thumb is that if you think I’m obsessed with Israel, it’s because you’re obsessed with Israel and/or The Joooooooz.

But what’s amusing to me is the way some people assume my Goldbergness is what drives me to support Israel. It’s really not the case. I’m with Israel because Israel is in the right and it’s our ally. By no means do I think that Israel is a flawless country. I’m no fan of the politics of the ultra-orthodox crowd in Israel, I find a lot of Israelis rude (at least the ones in New York), and I think the Knesset makes the Galactic Senate of the Republic in Star Wars seem efficient and functional. There are things I like, even love, about it, too. The shawarma is amazing. The women are both tough and beautiful. And, most of all, Israelis persevere.

Still, I find arguments about Israel incredibly tedious. What I mean is my position on Israel is pretty close to my position on, say, Great Britain, Japan, or Australia. It’s a democratic country. It respects the rule of law. It’s a strategic ally. And, that’s sort of about it. It’s not complicated. Yes, yes, Israel’s historic and religious status as the only Jewish homeland and all that has emotional power for me — and a lot of other people.

Also, because I find so many anti-Israeli arguments and politics so fundamentally dishonest, flawed, and — quite often — repugnant, it’s easy to get really worked up on the topic.

But in a very straightforward way, that’s all a distraction. If Britain were somehow surrounded and besieged by existential enemies my position — and I hope America’s position — would be: “We’re with the Brits.” That doesn’t mean we’d automatically send troops or start a war and all that. Those are prudential, tactical, questions to be worked out with our allies, etc. But the principle couldn’t be simpler.

Now, unlike my position, the situation surely is complicated. Israel is surrounded by enemies and a few paper “allies.” I love how Israel’s critics make such a fuss about Israel’s military superiority as if it has nothing to worry about. If you’re walking into a saloon where everybody wants to kill you, you might walk in better armed than everybody else. If Israel loses a single war, it loses everything. America hasn’t been in a war like that since the Revolution. Even if we “lost” WWII, the idea that the Germans or Japanese would or could conquer North America is highly debatable. I would like to think that our culture could stay as free and democratic as Israel’s if we were under constant threat of military annihilation.

Whenever Israel is attacked, her critics bemoan the heavy-handedness of its military responses. Even in the bad cases, I tend to marvel at Israel’s restraint. Israel is a perfect example of how lefties shout “Violence never solves anything!” only when the good guys use violence.

It may seem a trite debating point given how often it’s made, but if Mexicans or Canadians (stop laughing) were launching rockets into our cities for years, while insisting that the U.S. has no right to exist whatsoever, I very much doubt Americans would tolerate anything like the military and political shackles Israel puts on itself. Nor am I sure that it would be a good thing if we did.

The U.N. vs. Israel

One last point regarding the Security Council vote. It needs to be remembered that the U.N. hates Israel because it is in the political interests of member states, particularly Arab states, which use Palestinians as a distraction from their own despotisms, to hate Israel. Think of all the horrors and crimes committed by evil governments around the world. Now think about the fact that from 2006 to 2015 alone the U.N. has condemned Israel 62 times. All of the other nations combined have received 55 condemnations. Iran? Five. The genocidal Sudanese? Zero. Anarchic Somalia? Zero. Saudi Arabia? Zero. Pakistan? Zero. China? Zero. Russia? Zero.

The U.N., more than any other player save the Palestinian leadership itself, is responsible for the horrible plight of the Palestinians because it is in its institutional interest to keep the issue alive. After World War II, there were untold millions of refugees all around the world; they all found homes and settled down — except for the Palestinians.

The Global God State

So I’m working on this book. More on that later. But yesterday I was writing about an argument Steve Hayward shared with me. In the 18th century, liberals — Locke, the Founders, etc. — finally overthrew the Divine Right of Kings. Then in the 19th century, the progressives — borrowing from Hegel — established the Divine Right of the State to replace the Divine Right of Kings. (Hegel, recall, argued that “the State is the Divine idea as it exists on earth”). As I’ve written many, many times, psychologically for many progressives the State plays the role they think God would play if God existed.

Anyway, we can return to all that another time.

But the reason I bring this up is that I think, for a lot of people, the U.N. occupies a similar place in their brains. Some people just love the idea of the U.N. so much they are blind to the reality of it. For reasons that have always baffled me, the promise of a “Parliament of Man” — an explicitly utopian concept — is just incredibly seductive for some people. So they invest in the U.N. magical properties that are utterly absent from Turtle Bay.

Yes, the U.N. does some good things. But the assumption that, if the United Nations didn’t exist, those good things wouldn’t get done is ridiculous. It’s like saying that if government didn’t pick up your garbage, garbage would never get collected. Meanwhile, the U.N. does all manner of terrible things, that wouldn’t be done if it didn’t exist.

Given how much I roll my eyes after someone tells me that the U.N. voted on this or that, I sometimes worry that I’ll have to blindly crawl around the floor looking for my eyeballs because they’ll roll right out of my head. The only criteria for membership in the U.N. is existence. This is literally the lowest standard possible. More to the point, a great many of the countries that vote in both the General Assembly and the Security Council are what social scientists call “crappy dictatorships.” So when, say, North Korea casts its vote, it has all the moral force of a wet fart as far as I’m concerned. Here’s how I put it 14 years ago in a G-File:

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who’ve tried to use the fact that the U.N. voted on something as proof that the U.N. is right. College kids will shriek the word as if it drips with self-evident authority: “It voted against the United States!” “Don’t you understand? It voted!”

Well, voting, in and of itself, has as much to do with democracy as disrobing has to do with sex. Both are often necessary, neither are ever sufficient.

I always think of “the Commission” when I want to illustrate this point. That’s what the Mafia called its confabs of the major mob families. Think of that scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone arranges for the return of Michael from Sicily (and subsequently realizes that all along it was Barzini, not that pimp Barzini, who outfoxed Santino). The Commission was democratic. It took votes on where and when to install drug dealers, bribe judges, and exterminate cops. Now, just because it took a vote, does that make its decisions any more noble or just? Well, the U.N. is a forum for tyrants and dictators who check the returns on their Swiss bank accounts — and not the needs or voices of their own people — for guidance on how to vote. The fact that Robert Mugabe, Bashar Assad, Kim Jong-Il, Hassan al-Bashir, Fidel Castro, et al., condemn the United States from time to time is a badge of honor. And the fact that we, and other decent peoples, feel the need to curry their favor and approval is a badge of shame.

It’s kind of funny. We’ve spent the last six weeks hearing how eeeeeeevill the Electoral College is because it represents the votes of states — American states — rather than the popular vote. “White supremacy! Eeek!” and all that nonsense. But a great many of the same people have no problem with a U.N. Security Council vote that currently includes the governments of China, Russia, Egypt, and Senegal. I’ll confess to not knowing too much about Senegal’s commitment to democracy (I know, you’re shocked. If only I had a Senegalese name . . . ), so let’s put them aside. But please don’t expect me to keep a straight face when you try to tell me that the Electoral College is undemocratic but the votes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Abdel al-Sisi, and Nicolás Maduro are authentic representations of the people.

Indeed, the very structure of the U.N. Security Council with the Great Powers getting permanent seats and veto power is nothing more than the institutionalization of the concept that might makes right. I’m open to the argument that, as a matter of realpolitik, this arrangement is necessary. But by definition realpolitik is statecraft minus morality or idealism.

A New Year’s Request for the Left

By David French

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Last winter, when the Republican presidential primary was in full swing, I had a late-night dinner with a campus minister who was working with students at an Ivy League school. Describing the college climate, he said, “Everything’s about race now. Two years ago it was sexuality, then came the Obergefell decision, and they decided they won. Now it’s race. The four-hour conversations students used to have about heteronormativity, now they have them about white supremacy.”

I thought of that conversation when I read Columbia University professor Mark Lilla’s long and anguished post-election essay in the New York Times, calling on his fellow liberals to abandon the extremist identity politics of the academic progressive movement. “American liberalism,” he said, “has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

Indeed it has. For his trouble, one of Lilla’s own colleagues compared him to David Duke and accused him of “making white supremacy respectable again.” Other leftists have compared Trump voters to lynch mobs, and the other day a Slate writer declared that 2016 was the year when white liberals could finally see “our unjust, racist, sexist country for what it is.”

Remember the patriotic explosion at the Democratic National Convention? Remember the defiant declarations that America was already great? That was before. That was when the Left thought it had won. Now the new Left is back to being the old Left, and to the old Left, America was never great.

It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of academic leftism to Democratic discourse. Academic leftism seeps into progressive corporations, it dominates leftist writing, and it inevitably merges with pop culture. What starts on campus moves to television, to music, to books, and to law with astonishing speed.

And academic leftism has become extraordinarily poisonous and extraordinarily ignorant. As Lilla put it in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, it has lost its sense of proportion. “Our campuses are not Aleppo,” he says, and there is a reason why “people use the word ‘academic’ not to mean scholarly, but to mean totally detached from reality.”

But don’t tell that to radical students and their radical teachers. At every turn professors and administrators are whispering in the ears of black and brown students, telling them, “Your country hates you. Your country has always hated you.” At every turn it whispers in the ears of its LGBT students, “Your nation hates you. Christians hate you.” It tells white students, “You’re despicable, and you’ll remain despicable unless you ally with us, unless you join our crusade.”

It’s impossible to converse with this form of leftism. Denials of racism are proof of racism. Even your “unconscious” self is guilty of bigotry. Disagreement is oppression.

There will always be radicals among us, but they don’t have to be so powerful. They don’t have to carry so much cultural and intellectual weight within the much larger and more moderate mainstream liberal public, and to that public I have a simple New Year’s plea.

Learn more. Understand that while we all live in our bubbles, your bubble’s walls are stronger and thicker than most. Do you realize that your urban strongholds are often less politically diverse than an Evangelical church? White Evangelicals gave 81 percent of their vote to Donald Trump. Fully 86 percent of Manhattan residents voted for Hillary Clinton. Conservatives who send their kids to public school, listen to pop music, or go to the movies imbibe liberal values and ideas. When do you ever hear conservatives speak?

New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found that while moderates and conservatives could better understand how the “typical liberal” thinks, liberals struggled to accurately explain conservative values. And those who identified themselves as “very liberal” struggled most of all. This is dangerous. It yields misunderstandings at best and hatred at worse. It damages the social fabric of a nation.

Only if you live in the bubble do you believe that “racism” or “sexism” is a sufficient explanation for Donald Trump’s victory. Only if you eat and sleep identity politics do you think that the best answer to Trump is more racial mobilization and a greater sense of outrage. Can you call Trump something worse than fascist? Can you call his supporters something worse than racist?

During my own time living in liberal enclaves in Cambridge, Ithaca, Manhattan, and Philadelphia, I marveled at my peers’ educated ignorance. They read voraciously yet seemed to know so little about their own nation. Their history was as selective as they believed mine to be. Their knowledge was narrow. And within that narrow frame of reference, their choices and beliefs were entirely logical and eminently reasonable.

They needed to change their frame of reference. That’s the hope. Not for harmony, not for unity, but instead for something far more modest — a little bit of knowledge. After all, we know more about you than you know about us, and if there is one thing I know about my liberal friends, they don’t like to be the least educated people in the room.

Obama’s Belated Response to Russian Aggression

National Review Online

Friday, December 30, 2016

With 20 days left in his second term, Barack Obama has finally decided to get tougher on Russia. On Thursday, the president expelled 35 Russian intelligence operatives from the country; imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence agencies — the GRU and FSB — and four officials; and insinuated that he plans to take other, non-public actions against Russia in retaliation for its hack of the Democratic National Committee, its attempted hack of several states’ voter databases, and other “malicious cyber activity related to our election cycle in previous elections,” in the words of the White House.

These actions are welcome. They are also several years too late.

Barack Obama’s presidency has been a cycle of Russian aggression followed by American fecklessness.

In 2010, a Russian spy ring operating in Washington, D.C., was exposed. Rather than hold the spies for interrogation, President Obama rapidly bundled them back to Russia, where Vladimir Putin did not even bother feigning embarrassment, instead praising the spies for “risking themselves and those close to them” “to benefit their motherland’s interests.” Two years later, President Obama scoffed at Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia was the United States’ central geopolitical foe, and Russia thanked him by annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine in 2014. The United States imposed sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes against prominent Russians, but the administration refused to provide military aid to Ukrainian forces beleaguered by more than 10,000 Russian troops. When Russian-backed separatists shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Donetsk Oblast, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board, the Obama administration did precisely nothing.

Since then, Russia has adventured far beyond its own neighborhood. Moscow is facilitating Iran’s nuclear aspirations and shoring up Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, and the Obama administration’s response has been to wag a limp finger.

After all of this, it can hardly come as a surprise that Putin was bold enough to permit cyber-machinations against the United States directly. In fact, it should not be a surprise to anyone in the White House, since the Democratic National Committee saw evidence that it had been hacked in the fall of 2015, and within a few months the president’s top aides were discussing the issue with Russian officials. But the Obama administration decided to “kick the can down the road,” a high-level government official told NBC News, because they were confident that Hillary Clinton would win the election. If President Obama and the Democrats are suddenly Cold Warriors, it’s only because she didn’t.

A president should be expected to put American security before partisan gain. Unfortunately, President-elect Donald Trump’s attitude toward Russia has ranged from apologia to admiration, and about Russia’s attempts to influence the election he has been dismissive. A reality check is in order. Vladimir Putin’s ultimate aims are the consolidation of his own power and the expansion of Russian influence, and at home and abroad he has been ruthless in pursuit of those ends, up to and including murdering his political opponents.

A forceful response is long overdue. Economic sanctions are a useful tool, which President-elect Trump ideally would expand, but hardly a sufficient one. It is crucial that the United States find ways to roll back Putin’s influence abroad. That will mean thinking creatively about how to empower allies — such as those in Ukraine and the Baltics — and to deal expeditiously with enemies gravitating toward a renewed Russian sphere of influence. Trump also should not delay reaffirming his commitment to NATO.

At home, the federal government must begin taking cybersecurity seriously. It’s not only Russia. Under the Obama administration, confidential information of about 21.5 million government employees dating back to the Reagan administration was stolen from the Office of Personnel Management — a breach described by some as “Cyber Pearl Harbor,” and the worst cybersecurity breach in American history by an order of magnitude. An audit found that OPM had failed to implement even the most basic protections. John Podesta’s Gmail illiteracy may have provided Russian hackers part of their Democratic e-mail trove, but the federal government is vulnerable to even modestly sophisticated cyberattacks.

Likewise, cybersecurity efforts should be paired with rebuilding the human-intelligence capabilities that the Obama administration has systematically dismantled over the last eight years. Drones have their limits.

Barack Obama began his presidency hoping to “reset” Russian relations from a Bush-administration approach that he found primitive. Eight years later, his indefatigable naïveté has finally given way, and he has repaired to his Republican predecessors’ tough-minded position.

Better very late than never.

This Is the Moment for an Israeli Victory

By Daniel Pipes

Saturday, December 31, 2016

The U.S.-sponsored Israeli–Palestinian “peace process” began in December 1988, when Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat met American conditions and “accepted United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism” (actually, given Arafat’s heavily accented English, it sounded like he “renounced tourism”).

That peace process screeched to an end in December 2016, when the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 2334. Khaled Abu Toameh, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Palestinian politics, interprets the resolution as telling the Palestinians: “Forget about negotiating with Israel. Just pressure the international community to force Israel to comply with the resolution and surrender up all that you demand.”

As 28 years of frustration and futility clang to a sullen close, the time is nigh to ask, “What comes next?”

I propose an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat. That is to say, Washington should encourage Israelis to take steps that cause Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashal, Saed Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi, and the rest of that crew to realize that the gig is up, that no matter how many U.N. resolutions are passed, their foul dream of eliminating the Jewish state is defunct, that Israel is permanent, strong, and tough. After the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population at large will follow, as will eventually other Arab and Muslim states, leading to a resolution of the conflict. Palestinians will gain by finally being released from a cult of death to focus instead on building their own policy, society, economy, and culture.

While the incoming Trump administration’s Middle East policies remain obscure, President-elect Trump himself vociferously opposed Resolution 2334 and has signaled (for example, by his choice of David M. Friedman as ambassador to Israel) that he is open to a dramatically new approach to the conflict, one far more favorable to Israel than Barack Obama’s. With his lifelong pursuit of winning (“We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning”), Trump would probably be drawn to an approach that has our side win and the other side lose.

Victory also suits the current mood of Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He’s not just furious at being abandoned in the United Nations, he has an ambitious vision of Israel’s global importance. Further, his being photographed recently carrying a copy of historian John David Lewis’s Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History signals that he is explicitly thinking in terms of victory in war: Lewis in his book looks at six case studies, concluding that in each of them “the tide of war turned when one side tasted defeat and its will to continue, rather than stiffening, collapsed.”

Finally, the moment is right in terms of the larger trends of regional politics. That the Obama administration effectively became an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran scared Sunni Arab states, Saudi Arabia at the fore, into being far more realistic than ever before; needing Israel for the first time, the “Palestine” issue has lost some of its salience, and Arab conceits about Israel as the arch enemy have been to some extent abandoned, creating an unprecedented potential flexibility.

For these four reasons — Security Council Resolution 2334, Trump, Netanyahu, and Iran — the moment is right to meet the new year and the new administration with a revamped Middle East policy, one aiming for the Palestinians to “taste defeat.”