By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Clifford May tells this story about George Schultz
sending off newly confirmed ambassadors as secretary of state: “He would show
them a very large globe. And he would spin the globe, and he would say, ‘Show
me your country.’ And with great pride, they’d point out Brunei or Equatorial
Guinea or some place in Latin America. And he would invariably shake his head and
say, ‘No, that’s not your country. Your country is the United States of
America. You should never, ever forget that.’”
“America First!”
is the slogan of the day, and not only on the right, though populist Democrats
generally prefer a slightly different rhetorical formulation. (Barack Obama
called for “nation-building here at home” and complained about “free riders”
abroad, and even tried to rehabilitate Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism.”
To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to.) One might be forgiven for wondering how seriously people
take that slogan: Democrats do not act as though, e.g., our immigration
policies should be shaped according to the interests of the American people;
Republicans’ “America First!”
proclamations often end up meaning “Boeing
First!” or “Nucor First!”
But we all, it is supposed, know which one is our country.
Of course, Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) doesn’t
believe that. She has argued in the past that American Jews suffer from divided
loyalties vis-à-vis Israel, an ancient anti-Semitic libel that should be
obvious enough to Representative Omar, who no doubt is aware that certain knuckle-dragging
elements in our national life believe roughly the same thing about Muslims,
that they can never really be good citizens and good Muslims both.
Israel is the other special relationship. The
original “special relationship,” the one we have with the United Kingdom, has
received some attention from President Donald Trump and his administration,
partly because Trump believes he sees his watery reflection in the Brexit
movement, which is at least a little bit true. (Who, then, is the Nigel Farage
of U.S. politics? Steve King, maybe?) But Israel is much more on the political
map.
Why?
U.S. interest in the Middle East was rekindled after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Israel’s liberalism and democracy were
shown in starkest contrast to the savagery of those attacks and the savagery of
those around the Muslim world who endorsed and celebrated them. Israel’s social
and economic success story is, cynically seen, a great big raised middle finger
to the backward and stagnant quarters that incubated and harbored the likes of
Osama bin Laden.
And much has been made of the American Right’s religious
interest in Israel — perhaps too much. There are American Christians who take a
proprietary interest in the Jewish state for religious reasons, including
apocalyptic ones. But that tendency is overstated in the public mind. And the
old Moral Majority’s style of Evangelical assertiveness is at a low ebb, with
neither conservative Protestants nor Reaganite Catholics looming quite so large
in Republican and right-wing politics as they once did. This has to do mainly
with conservatives’ winning the Cold War and losing the Sexual Revolution. Win
some, lose some. The hot Bible-based politics of the moment is explaining
President Trump as an avatar of King Cyrus, the ungodly pagan who was divinely
anointed in spite of his infidelity. There’s at least as much motivated
reasoning in theology as in the law.
But the American Left takes an intense interest in Israel
as well: The Left hates Israel, and many of its leading lights wish to see the
Jewish state as such liquidated. Representative Omar is hardly alone in that,
nor are anti-Israel invective or outright anti-Semitism ever more than an arm’s
length from the Democratic mainstream. No less a figure than Barack Obama has
felt himself obliged to bend the knee just a little to Louis Farrakhan. As my
colleague David French notes, the group that had planned to host Representative
Omar and Representative Rashida Tlaib on a trip to Israel not only is knee-deep
in the boycott-Israel campaign but also has published Jew-hating propaganda
written by avowed neo-Nazis.
Writing in the New York Times, Tom Friedman has,
as he often has, a funny way of looking at this. President Trump cannot
proclaim his love of Israel and the Israeli people often enough or loudly
enough. (His trusted son-in-law and his beloved daughter are, it is worth
remembering, Orthodox Jews.) But Friedman sees only darkness in this: “Trump’s
way of — and motivation for — expressing his affection for Israel is guided by
his political desire to improve his re-election chances by depicting the entire
Republican Party as pro-Israel and the entire Democratic Party as anti-Israel.”
Well. Imagine going back in time to the 1930s and explaining to a refugee: “At
some point in the future, the American president will kiss up to an
independent, self-governing Jewish state, but only because it’s good politics!”
Glory be.
Friedman is not 100 percent wrong in his argument here —
and he is about 80 percent wrong, on average. It may not be that the entire
Republican party is pro-Israel, but the GOP is overwhelmingly pro-Israel, and
has been with and without Benjamin Netanyahu in office. And it is not the case
that the entire Democratic party is anti-Israel, though it
unquestionably is the case that the ascendant left wing of the Democratic party
is anti-Israel. Representative Omar is bitterly anti-Israel, to the point of
trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes. Representative Tlaib is anti-Israel. A
whole lot of Democrats who support the BDS movement are anti-Israel.
The Right’s celebratory interest in Israel is easy to
understand, even if you think some of it is a little dopey. But why is the Left
so intensely interested in Israel? Of course, there are things to criticize
about Israel and its government. But it is by any measure of decency and
liberalism a top-tier country. I am not aware of a boycott movement directed
at, say, Pakistan. Or Turkey. Or Egypt. Or Venezuela. Or Russia. Or Burma. Or
China. Or the Palestinian statelet, for that matter.
(I once was accosted by one of those clipboard-wielding
cretins in Union Square who wanted me to sign on to boycotting Israel on
behalf of the Palestinians. I told him I planned to start boycotting the
Palestinians as soon as they managed to produce something worth boycotting.)
There are many countries in the world that merit
criticism. Why is the American Left fixated on the Jewish state? Belgium can be
pretty rough on refugees. Have you ever heard an American progressive collapse
into a weeping fit about Belgium? Israel, though . . .
And, really, are Thomas Friedman et al. quite confident
that it is Donald Trump and not, say, the people looking to economically ruin
Israel as a pet political project, making the U.S.-Israeli relationship a
partisan issue? It is easy to see an argument that a thriving Israel accords
with U.S. interests abroad. Is there an argument that a diminished and
destabilized Israel — or an Israel consumed in fire, as Representative Omar’s
rambunctious little Hamas buddies would prefer — is in the interest of the
United States?
If there is, I have not yet heard it.
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