Israel Derangement Syndrome
My wife and I watched The Devil Next Door (2019) last night, the five-part Netflix documentary series about a Cleveland grandfather who is brought to trial in Israel, accused of being the infamous Nazi death camp guard Ivan the Terrible. Perhaps unintentionally, this gripping portrayal of a difficult chapter in Israeli history is also a ringing endorsement of liberal democratic institutions, due process, and the rule of law. I doubt that John Demjanjuk would have received similar treatment if he had been extradited to any other country in the Middle East. This ought to give liberal critics of Israel pause. Yet it so rarely does.
Many on the American left seem to believe that Palestinians are de facto “black”, Israelis are de facto “white”, and Israel is the Middle East’s answer to Apartheid-era South Africa. This misconception is largely a function of the American obsession with race, which is an outgrowth of its own peculiar history of race-based slavery. It has very little relevance to the Middle East. For the most part, people there simply don’t think in terms of race. But Americans think that the paradigm of race is universal, and every conflict must be slotted into it. This is patently absurd. America is not the world, and there’s no reason why the rest of the world has to go along with this gross display of American parochialism.
The notion that Israel is the Middle East’s answer to Apartheid-era South Africa is rendered risible by one simple and demonstrable fact: 55% of Israelis are ethnically Middle Eastern. They didn’t come to the Middle East from Europe, they came to the Middle East from the Middle East. As Ron Prosor rightly observes: “At the end of World War II, 850,000 Jews lived in Arab countries. Just 8,500 remain today. Their departure was no accident. After Arab leaders failed to annihilate Israel militarily in 1948, they launched a war of terror, incitement, and expulsion to decimate their own ancient Jewish communities. . . . The total area of land confiscated from Jews in Arab countries amounts to nearly 40,000 square miles — about five times the size of Israel’s entire land mass. The vast majority of these Jewish refugees came to Israel, nearly doubling its population.”
If the speed limit is 100 km/h, and everyone’s going 120 km/h, but the cops are only pulling over cars driven by black men, would this not give you pause? Does Israel speed with some regularity? Sure. But why are they the only ones getting pulled over? And why do the woke police seem so thoroughly uninterested in the dozens of countries—many of them in Israel’s neighborhood—that are tearing down the highway at 200 km/h? Thus far, in 2019, I’ve been asked to sign four anti-Israel petitions at work. Guess how many times I’ve been asked to sign a petition concerning China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Mali, Russia, or Uganda? Zero. Colleagues of mine have interrupted departmental meetings to denounce Israel. Have they ever stopped a meeting to denounce Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act (2014)? Nope. Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine? Nope. China’s concentration camps with over a million Muslims in them? Nope. I find this deeply suspicious.
The lack of sympathy for Israel evinced by many of liberal democracy’s champions defies expectations. It seems to violate the natural order of things. Just as I expect my neighbor to love his own children more than my children, I expect citizens of liberal democracies to love a liberal democracy like Israel more than the illiberal nations that surround it. What’s more, it speaks volumes that the international organization which claims to speak on behalf of the rights of Muslims the world over has much to say about Israel, and the alarming rise of Islamophobia in Europe, but practically nothing to say about the internment of over a million Muslims in Chinese concentration camps. At best, this makes manifest a woeful inability to perform the basic math of moral triage we expect of thoughtful grownups. At worst, it suggests that they choose the targets of their outrage with more than just the welfare of the Ummah in mind.
