How liberalism destroyed a country

Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz writes a disturbing and illuminating portrait of Israel as a country whose elites, believing that Israel is both guilty and invulnerable, have destroyed its ability to defend itself. He concludes:

Israel must prepare a defense envelope that will protect its internal environment from the external environment surrounding it. Life in defiance of the environment is an essential part of Israeli existence. [Italics added.]

In other words, as I’ve been saying since October 2000, Israel, if it wants to survive, must secure sufficient territory to protect itself from attack (which in my view requires the transfer of the Palestinians from the lands west of the Jordan) and must be prepared to live as a fortress state, forever.

A flaw in the article: Shavit attributes Israel’s self-inflicted ills to the bugbear of “political correctness,” rather than to liberalism, which suggests that he’s reluctant to criticize liberalism itself. Nevertheless, what he has done in this piece is to capture the two sides of modern liberalism: We’re guilty, AND nothing can ever harm us. In the name of our guilt, we give land to our mortal enemies; let millions of unassimilable Third-World immigrants enter our country; empower minorities that hate us, etc.; but, because we’re invulnerable, we don’t have to worry about the consequences of any of this. Israel, given its actual vulnerable position, has demonstrated these liberal follies more spectacularly than any other country. So, once again, the Jews are the canary in the coal mine, except that the poisonous fumes suffocating Israel at the moment were produced by the Israelis themselves.

By the way, where has this Ari Shavit, who is terrific, been all these years? I never read him until recently. Since he writes in Ha’aretz, we must assume he is on the left. Perhaps he is one of these Israeli leftists who just woke up to reality himself in the last month?

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Jim Kalb writes:

The “invulnerable” is an important point. Liberals seem to believe their social order is so obviously right and perspicuously required by rationality that it is necessarily eternal. Nonliberals are nonliberal because they are ignorant or irrational, and lunacy can’t be the basis of a social order, so actual physical defense of the liberal order can’t really be needed. It would be like defending the principle of noncontradiction or germ theory of disease with H bombs.

Ben writes:

Two things I picked up on.

1. Political correctness. As you pointed out, just say liberalism and be done with it. Everything he was describing was liberalism.

2. Elites. This is where I disagree with him. I see this a lot in American politics and columns as well. There is this tendency to blame everything on this mythical “elite” crowd that do not represent the supposed values of the people. I believe Olmert does represent what Israel is and has become just as Bill Clinton represented what America had become in the 1990’s. This was shown in full when the American people refused to condemn Clinton for his actions.

What’s important now is to see the Israeli reaction to this disaster of their government that they elected. Will they react and throw these men out or will they go back to being Eloi? Now that the missiles have stopped falling on to Mimi’s town, will she now proceed with more concessions to bring Hezbollah into becoming responsible citizens of the world or will she demand Olmert step down?

That’s what will decide what happens now.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 14, 2006 12:50 PM | Send