December 29, 2001

Required Reading Just in case

Required Reading

Just in case there's anyone out there who has yet to read Mark Steyn's excellent Spectator piece on European anti-Semitism and the on-going US-Israel vs. Europe-Arab alignment, here it is. He manages to pack a great deal of trenchant observation and insight into this single column, and I think he really hits the nail on the head here:

American sympathy for Israel and European support for the Arabs are essentially cultural statements, unrelated to the finer points of the ‘Palestinian question’. America supports Israel not because it’s Jewish but because it’s democratic. In fact, Republicans support Israel despite the Jews. American Jews are urban liberals and one of the Democratic party’s most reliable core demographics. There is no political benefit whatsoever to Bush in taking a ‘hard pro-Israel line’. Au contraire, Arab-Americans are just about the only immigrant group other than the Cubans that votes Republican. Yet that will never translate into GOP support for Arab states as presently constituted. My northern, rural, conservative neighbours are, when you prod ’em a little, mildly xenophobic and share a reflexive distaste for overt Jewishness. But they’ll always back Israel over Syria or Egypt because to them liberty trumps everything else. They are also under no illusions as to the kind of state an Arafat-led Palestine would be: if you gave him Switzerland to run, he’d turn it into a sewer. So Republicans look at Israel and see not Jews but a liberal democracy.

This is obvious to most Americans who do not suffer from ideology-poisoning, but it is a fact about America's political culture that seems to be poorly understood in Britain and Europe. You often hear the opinion expressed here, in conversations with people from left, right, and center, that it is astonishing that no American politician is ever "brave enough" to dare to challenge pro-Israel policies. This isn't in fact the case; but even critics of Israel in America know, without even feeling the need to state it, that abandoning Israel to her fate at the hands of her murderous enemies would be like repudiating an essential part of the American experiment. (This does not, of course, rule out some kind of eventual arrangement for Palestinian statehood-- but it probably does rule out Arafat, since he is unwilling or unable to recognize Israel's non-negotiable "right to exist" in any serious way. There are certainly "faults on both sides;" but America's preference for the Israeli democracy over the Arab autocracies is not the solely the result of senseless, or sinister, bias, as the Europeans tend to portray it, whether sincerely or not.)

I think Steyn is also correct in his suggestion that it is precisely this instinctive, categorical support for the ideals of democracy that causes so much discomfort among European politicians and intellectuals.
If America recognises a kindred spirit in Israel, then so does Europe in the Arab autocracies. After all, when King Fahd, President Mubarak, et al. sell themselves to the West as anti-democratic brakes on the baser urges of their people, they sound a lot like the European Union. As we’ve seen yet again, the principle underpinning the new Europe is not ‘We, the people’ but ‘We know better than the people’ — not just on capital punishment and the Treaty of Nice and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes up, including national elections. When 29 per cent of Austrian voters were impertinent enough to plump for Jörg Haider’s Freedom party, the EU punished them with sanctions and boycotts. As the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson put it, ‘The programme that is developing in Austria is not in line with EU values.’ In the new Europe, the will of the people is subordinate to the will of the Perssons. Understandably, to such an elite the Oslo ‘peace process’ ought to be as remorseless and undeviating as the path to European unity: how preposterous to let something as footling as the wishes of the Israeli electorate disrupt it.

Fear of democracy is hardly a new phenomenon in the West. Yet the unequivocal triumph of liberal democracy in the war of ideas still seems to be faintly disturbing to those with an autocratic cast of mind. It is beyond question that Arab hostility towards America is bound up in a more general antipathy towards liberal democracy and the "open society." Is it a going too far to posit an outright affinity also between such people and the Eurocrats? Probably. But I believe there may be something in it.

To invoke the ideals of liberal democracy when discussing contemporary politics with a European is often to invite instant derision. To them, such ideals tend to be seen as a mere pretense, a pious smokescreen behind which we ruthlessly pursue our own narrow interests. They bring up this or that instance of questionable adventurism, this or that dubious CIA operation, and, always, the alliance with Israel, as proof of America's moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy. Certainly, strategic interests, well- or ill-conceived, do not always coincide with high-minded ideals. But in America in the aftermath of 9/11, practically everyone outside of the marginal "loony left" agreed that here at least was a case where ideals and interests were one and the same. It is self-evident that America must be defended against those who seek its destruction, and that, at the very least, our victory is preferable to our defeat. It is still shocking to Americans to confront European ambivalence on these questions. And it is certainly possible to discern something like a consistent thread running through this shocking ambivalence on the one hand, and the hostility to Israel on the other.

Posted by Dr. Frank at December 29, 2001 03:39 PM | TrackBack