John Derbyshire – When Christmas and New Year’s both fall on a weekend, that week in between is the silliest of all silly seasons in the Western world. Unless there’s a natural disaster, or some non-Western lunatic tries to start a war, nothing happens. So I’m going to write at length about the one newsy thing that did happen this week: the fuss over the U.S.A. not using its veto in the U.N. Security Council to take down a resolution critical of Israel. I don’t think it’s half as important as it looks.
To judge from my email bag and donation logs, I have a surprising number of readers in Israel. I say “surprising” because I hardly ever say anything about Israel or her affairs, and don’t actually know much about the place.
The last time I wrote at length about Israel was, I think, in mid-2010 at TakiMag.com, and that was only by way of putting down a marker. I had just started writing regularly for TakiMag, which runs some anti-Israel stuff, and I wanted to make my own position plain:
Any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse, both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles.
Aside from being a well-wisher of Israel in sentiment, though, I agree with Steve Sailer that we pay much more attention to the place that our national interest justifies, for reasons to do with the over-representation of Jewish Americans in the Main Stream Media and the wealthy-donor classes.
From a cold-eyed view of U.S. interests, Israel isn’t very important—less important than Mexico or Japan, which get far fewer column inches. The problem is that American Jews are not cold-eyed, and their collective voice is loud.
For example: We found out by chance a couple of years ago that David Brooks, an American citizen who writes a much-read Op-Ed column in the New York Times, has or then had a son serving in the Israeli military [David Brooks’ Son Is In the Israeli Army: Does It Matter?[link], By Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal, September 22, 2014]—a thing that Brooks and the NYT had never told us.
Why didn’t Brooks, Jr. join the U.S. military if he felt the urge to go soldiering? I don’t know. How many other bigfoot American pundits or political donors have kids in the Israeli military? I don’t know. Do any have sons or daughters in the Mexican or Japanese military? I don’t know, but I doubt it.
And when I said the collective voice of America’s Jews is loud, I should of course have said “voices”—plural There’s a division of opinion, which this week’s ructions have highlighted:
American Jews are … overwhelmingly Democratic; Jews voted for Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump, 71 percent to 24 percent, according to exit polls.
Yet the most influential and vocal organizations that represent Jews in Washington tend to be more conservative and supportive of Mr. Netanyahu, who has had a combative relationship with Mr. Obama, and has made little secret of his happiness over the changing of the guard that is about to take place in Washington.
American Jews Divided Over Strain in U.S.-Israeli Relations. New York Times, December 29th, Link in original
The contradictions and paradoxes here have often been noted. American Jews of all positions want Israel to remain an ethnostate, a Jewish state [link]; yet liberal Jews are horrified at the suggestion that the U.S.A. should likewise maintain a solid monoethnic core.
Alan Colmes, for example, thought it shocking when, in We Are Doomed, I quoted with approval Samuel Huntington’s words that “The [American philosophical-Constitutional] Creed is unlikely to retain its salience if Americans abandon the Anglo-Protestant culture in which it has been rooted.” (You can see him being shocked below.)
Colmes’ position is the common one among liberal American Jews: ethnonationalism for me, but not for thee.
All this has been said many times, of course. Pat Buchanan has been saying it for forty years. The sheer tiresomely repetitive quality of talk about Israel in fact deters the thoughtful commentator from writing about it.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjectsfor all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He’s had two books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
SF Source The Unz Review Jan. 2017