In Reply to Beckeld: What Is “the West” Nowadays?

Benedict Beckeld has written for Merion West over the weekend a provocative defense of the Israelis in their present struggle against Hamas, with which I essentially agree. That he begins his defense by citing one of my favorite political thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, renders me even more well-disposed toward what Beckeld tells us in his elegantly phrased essay. I was further impressed by his willingness to bring up a cultural and moral distinction that most commentators may be too cowed by the enforcers of political correctness to mention: Jews, guided by the moral teachings of Hebrew Scripture and Rabbinic law, have no ethical scruples about visiting destruction on those who inflict violence upon them. The Christian teaching about turning “the other cheek” to one’s enemy is foreign to the Jewish religious tradition, as it is to Islamic Sharia. We may, therefore, assume that Jewish pacifist sentiments, unlike those that are found in the Christian community, have less of an ancestral or divine validation.

But we may, nevertheless, feel inclined to ask why Christians have so rarely been pacifists until the modern era. We may also note that despite sound biblical instruction, Jews have been among the most enthusiastic backers of filling Western countries with their Muslim enemies. Such disastrous political decisions have contributed to recent eruptions of Muslim anti-Semitism, a phenomenon on which Beckeld properly dwells in his commentary. This course, as I have noted in my own recent discussions, has been based not on religious principle but on the lunatic assumption that an enhanced Third World presence will help protect Jews against Christian anti-Semitism.

Of more immediate interest for me is why Beckeld believes Palestinians have no right to the territory they are claiming. Ilan Pappé, among many other Israeli historians, has proved in painful detail that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, mostly in the North of Israel in 1948. From what historians have shown, this act was done by Jewish armies. Moreover, these provable expulsions did not take place accidentally but were part of a Zionist plan to replace Arab inhabitants with Jewish settlers. It is entirely to the credit of the Israelis that they tolerate such critics. Would our establishment opposition to the Left, as typified by The Wall Street Journal, display a similar open-mindedness about Middle Eastern history?

I agree with Beckeld that not all ethnic groups have shown the capacity to build peaceful states, and I see absolutely no evidence that the Palestinians, on the basis of their existing record, would offer us something better than a corrupt, terrorist-run government, if and when they achieve statehood. I have also observed while visiting Israel that the Palestinians who are living there enjoy most of the same amenities as the Jewish majority and Christian minority. I could not imagine that Jews, even if they were allowed to live in an Arab state, would be vouchsafed comparable living or political conditions.