I have a premonition that will not leave me. As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.
In 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, took to the podium of the UN General Assembly and observed that he was speaking just a few days after the president of Iran had claimed that the Holocaust was a lie. Mr. Netanyahu then explained that he’d recently visited a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and been shown the minutes of a meeting held there on January 20, 1942, at which senior German officials formulated precisely their plan for the extermination of the Jews. “Here is a copy of those minutes,” the Prime Minister told the UN. “Is this a lie?”1
The day before, he’d been given another photocopy—this time of the original construction plans, signed by Heinrich Himmler, for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, wherein one million Jews would be killed.
“Here is a copy of the plans,” Mr. Netanyahu said to the assembled ranks of world leaders. “Is this too a lie?”
And so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one head of government holds up the documents for the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem” because another head of government insists, repeatedly, that no such event ever took place. This is the state to which the United Nations has fallen after six decades posing as Lord Tennyson’s Parliament of Man: a sane man is obliged to prove to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.
One sympathizes with the Israeli Prime Minister, reduced, seventy years after Neville Chamberlain, to standing before the world waving pieces of paper from Herr Hitler. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & Company aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They deny it because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because, in the regimes they represent, the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality, only a self-constructed one.
And once you’re in the business of constructing your own reality, even internal logic is not required. In Iran, many of the same people who deny the first Holocaust are planning the second one. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, I’ve run into folks who simultaneously believe (a) that there was no Muslim involvement in the attacks of September 11, and (b) it was a tre-mendous victory for the Muslim people. Incidentally, by “the Muslim world,” I don’t just mean the Middle East: according to one poll, only 17 percent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11, and a majority of British Muslims—56 percent—believe there was no Arab involvement.2 And yet many British Muslims have marched in the streets under posters hailing the “Magnificent Nineteen” who carried out the attacks.
So we already live in a world in which there is insufficient agreed reality.
After America, there will be even less. To be sure, whatever the president of Iran might believe, there are plenty of fellows, even at the UN General Assembly, who understand that, yes, Auschwitz was built and, yes, many Jews died there. EU prime ministers ostentatiously participating in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day observances are certainly aware. Yet even they felt it was not, in diplomatic-speak, helpful for Mr. Netanyahu to belabor the point with President Ahmadinejad. The New York Times offered an online analysis in its dull blog, the Lede: dredging up the Holocaust business was a bit of artful misdirection from the hardline Netanyahu.3 As Robert Mackey explained, “his decision to engage so passionately with Iran’s president… helped to change the subject from a conversation that presents difficulties for Israel’s leader—how to make peace with Palestinians without alienating his supporters.”
Ah, so that’s why he did it. The whole heads-of-state-who-deny-the-Holocaust thing was a cunning distraction by the Zionist Entity.
During Israel’s famously “disproportionate” 2006 incursion into Lebanon, a reader reminded me of an old gag:
One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.
“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”
“Israel, of course.”
Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.
Think of how the Prime Minister of Israel feels at the UN. And then picture what’s left of the United States after global eclipse. Obama and the leftists notwithstanding, the effect of American retreat from superpower status will not be a quiet life but a future as the Zionist Entity writ large—no longer the Great Satan, but forever the Great Scapegoat. As Richard Ingrams wrote in Britain’s Observer the weekend after 9/11: Who will dare to damn Israel?4
Hey, take a number and get in line. Who won’t dare to damn Israel? And for whatever bugs you. In late 2010, there was a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea off the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.5 On an official Egyptian government news site, the governor of South Sinai, Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, speculated that the fatal attacks in the hitherto peaceful waters were due to “the Mossad throwing in the deadly shark to hit tourism in Egypt.” Other sources wondered if the Mossad had gone further and equipped the aquatic predators with GPS. Could be. Governor Shousha has undoubtedly seen the famous Hollywood film about a killer shark terrorizing a beach resort—Jews. Oh, c’mon, you’re not gonna let a one-vowel typing error in the poster throw you off what it’s really about, are you?
Directed by the same infidel who made Schindler’s List, if you get my drift.
The Governor of South Sinai is not the only political colossus to take the view that the world’s troubles are due to a tiny strip of land that at its narrowest point is barely wider than my New Hampshire township. Only a few months before the shark attacks, Bill Clinton had been in Egypt and told an audience of local “businessmen” that solving the Israeli/Palestinian problem would “take away about half the impetus for terror in the whole world.”6
Only 50 percent of global terrorism is all down to Israel? Are you sure you’re not underestimating?
In rationalizing the irrational, you not only legitimize it but create a self-fulfilling prophecy. After the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, Bruce Haigh, a retired Australia diplomat who’d served in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, went on TV and explained why hundreds of his compatriots had been blown up: “The root cause of this issue has been America’s backing of Israel on Palestine.”7
So we’re conceding that if a fellow in Indonesia is “frustrated” by Israeli “intransigence,” then blowing up Australian tourists, Scandinavian back-packers, and German stoners in Bali makes some kind of sense. For centuries, Jews were the handiest scapegoat in every two-bit duchy and principality across the map. In essence, the argument of Bill Clinton & Company simply affirms the ancient paranoia that the Jews are behind everything.
There is an element of humbug about all this. Just as Europe’s rulers, while happy to pander to anti-American sentiment among the citizenry, are well aware that the United States has been the guarantor of the Continent’s liberty since 1945, so Araby’s rulers, happy to pander to their subjects’ Judenhass in public, are privately rather appreciative of the Zionist Entity.
Diplomatic cables leaked in 2010 revealed that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was publicly urging the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and had even indicated to the Israelis that come the big night he’d make sure his kingdom’s radar facilities were switched off so nobody could tip off Teheran.8 Were Israel to take up his offer, His Majesty would be the first in a long parade of Arab potentates and European foreign ministers lining up to denounce Zionist “disproportion.” But it’s heartening to know that, whatever lunacies they subscribe to in public, both Arabs and Europeans retain a few residual marbles in private.
Not all the scapegoaters are nuts, maybe not even the governor of South Sinai. Maybe he’s just tossing a little red meat, a little shark bait to the Jew-hate crowd. But from Sharm al-Sheikh to the UN General Assembly, sane men find it politic to string along with the loons.
As the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Israel knows what America’s in for. Like the United States, it is militarily superior to its enemies. If it were merely a matter of weaponry, they would have won decades ago. But, if that’s all there is to it, where’s the U.S. victory parade in Afghanistan? The Palestinians were among the first to realize that, in a media age, you can win on other battlefields. Stone-throwing youths have won more victories for Palestine—at least in the European press and on North American campuses—than the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies ever did.
One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. You can understand why the entire left and much of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. The Jewish state felt the same way in the early Nineties. There’s an Israeli coinage that was popular back then: “normaliut”—the desire to wake up each morning and live a normal political life, as John Podhoretz described it.9 In the early Nineties, Israelis wanted normaliut, badly. They regarded themselves as a western democracy and wished to live like one. Instead of having to be on the military call-up list till you’re European retirement age (fifty-five), they wanted to be like other westerners and worry about their vacation destinations and the quality of their stereo systems. The Oslo Accords were a vote for normaliut—a vote to be like Oslo, for the chance to live as a Middle Eastern Norway. In return, they got an Arafatist squat and then exterminationist Iranian proxies on their borders, and suicide bombers on their buses, and in the wider world isolation, demonization, and delegitimization, accompanied by a resurgent and ever more respectable anti-Semitism.
In 2008, the U.S. electorate voted to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it’s all a bit of a bore and they’d rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan. In the old days, declining powers seeking to arrest either their own decline or another’s rise would turn to war—see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napole-onic, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have post-modern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely.
In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. It too yearns for normaliut.
So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009.
How’s that working out?
In 2010, Zogby International and the University of Maryland conducted an “Arab Public Opinion Poll” for the Brookings Institution.10 They interviewed respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—the so-called “moderate” Arab Street. So how did President Obama do with the citizens of our allies after all the Islamoschmoozing and other outreach to the Muslim world?
In 2008, the last year of the Bush Texas-cowboy terror, 83 percent of Arabs had a very or somewhat negative view of the United States.11 By 2010, the second year of the Obama apology tour, 85 percent had a very or somewhat negative view. So much for the outreach.
So if they don’t like Obama, who do they like? The poll asked which world leader (other than their own) do you most admire? Here’s the Top Twelve: 1) Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey (20 percent); 2) Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela (13 percent); 3) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (12 percent); 4) Hassan Nasrallah, head honcho of Hizb’Allah (9 percent); 5) Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria (7 percent); 6) Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France (6 percent); 7) Osama bin Laden, Abbottabad’s leading pornography aficionado (6 percent); 8) Jacques Chirac, the retired Gallic charmer (4 percent); 9) Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi (4 percent); 10) Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt (4 percent); 11) Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid, Emir of Dubai (3 percent); 12) Saddam Hussein, Iraq War loser (2 percent).
What a hit parade! Twenty percent voted for the avowedly Islamist leader of a formerly secular pluralist Turkey; 57 percent voted for current dictators, dead dictators, thugs, terrorists, and a couple of wealthy minor princelings of the Muslim world; and the remainder celebrated diversity with Hugo Chavez and a pair of French roués. Maybe if Obama abased himself even more ostentatiously, maybe if next time he bows to the King of Saudi Arabia he licks the guy’s feet, maybe then he can boost his numbers up to Jacques Chirac level.
But, just as fascinating was the so-called “realist” reaction of the pollsters’ clients, the Brookings Institution. They took all the above as a sign that America needs to work harder to distance itself from negative perceptions that it’s too closely allied with Israel.
I don’t think so. America could join Iran in a nuclear strike on the Zionist Entity, and those numbers wouldn’t shift significantly. Because sometimes who you are is more important than anything you do. America will discover, as Israel did, that a one-way urge for normaliut will lead to a more dangerous world. In the vacuum of U.S. retreat, anti-Americanism will nevertheless metastasize and crowd in from our borders. In 2010 Die Welt reported that, on his recent visit to Teheran, Hugo Chavez had signed an agreement to place Iranian missiles at a jointly operated military base in Venezuela.12 In the years ahead, distant enemies will seed new proxies in Latin America (as Iran did to Israel with Hamas and Hizb’Allah), and suicide bombers will board our city buses, too.
American isolation is already under way. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer, the world’s biggest exporter, the post-colonial patron of resource-rich Africa, the post-downturn patron of cash-strapped Mediterranean Europe, and the biggest trading partner of India, Brazil, and other emerging powers. Why be surprised that in such a world, getting on with America matters less and less? Sometimes that’s good news: Washington and its geriatric EU allies wanted the bonkers Copenhagen “climate change” deal; Brazil and India joined with China to block it.
Sometimes it’s not so good: the leaders of Brazil (again) and Turkey, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and flattered by Obama during his first year, flew in to high-five Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and subsequently took China’s position on Iranian nukes.13 But, either way, second-tier powers around the globe are making their dispositions, and telling us very plainly about what awaits. In 2010, the Royal Australian Navy participated in its first ever naval exercises with Beijing;14 a few weeks later, Britain and Germany declined to support the U.S. in its efforts to get China to increase the value of the yuan.15 Even for America’s closest allies, the dominance of both the Pentagon and the almighty dollar is conditional.
The world after America is beginning to take shape, a planet where the loons and the hard men make the running and the rest go along to get along.
Picture the UN a few years down the road: for three of the Security Council’s permanent members (Britain, France, Russia), an accommodation with Islam will be a domestic political imperative, and getting along with China will be the overriding foreign priority. In the practical sense, this will shrink “the West” and destroy the post-war balance of power in which three permanent members from the free world balanced two authoritarian powers.
Nudge things a little further down the road—a fractious planet of hostile forces—Russia, China, a semi-Islamized Europe, the aspiring caliphate, whatever the new Chavismo bequeaths Latin America—all mutually anti-pathetic yet for whom the flailing America remains the biggest and most inviting target. There will be no “new world order,” only a world with no order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, whatever survives of the United States will still be the most inviting target—first because it’s big; and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.
Listen to the way Washington’s European “allies” and Sunni Arab “allies” and UN “human rights” bigwigs talk about the Jewish state today. That’s how they’ll be talking about the U.S. tomorrow. In a post-American world, the kind of world Barack Obama is committed to building, America will be surrounded on all sides by hostile forces and more globally demonized than ever. Another half-a-decade on, and there’ll be an informal Islamoveto over European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America’s not.
They got the post-American world they always dreamed of, and, as they adjust to a poorer and more violent planet, they will blame Washington for the horrors of the new age more furiously than ever. Think of Netanyahu alone at the podium trying to demonstrate objective facts to a roomful of madmen, liars, and appeasers. He’s the warm-up act, and that’s the reception Washington will get in a world after American power.
Western civilization is a synthesis—a multicultural synthesis, if you like: Athenian democracy, Roman law, the Hebrew Bible, dispersed by London to every corner of the globe. If Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem are the three temple mounts of the modern world and all its blessings, none has had a rougher ride than the last: attacked, besieged, captured, and recaptured dozens of times across the centuries—and twice destroyed. Today, Jerusalem is home to the Knesset and all Israeli government ministries, and the universally unrecognized capital of a universally delegitimized nation. Because the civilized world could not summon up the will to prevent Iran going nuclear, Israel will live on a thin line between the advanced civilized state they have built and oblivion, a permanent state of high alert in which the difference between first-world prosperity and extinction will come down to the hair-trigger reactions of bureaucratic monitoring of an implacable foe.
But in leaving Israel to its fate we have told our enemies something elemental and devastating about the will of a decaying West, and of the supposed global superpower. Around the world our foes will draw their own conclusions. Just as there are neglected and rubble-strewn Jewish cemeteries from Tangiers to Czernowitz to Baghdad, one day there will be abandoned American cemeteries, too. Across the globe there will be towns and countries where once were Americans and now are none—from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Germany and Japan. What’s left of the republic will hunker down and finally understand what’s it’s like to be Israel. Washington will be the new Jerusalem—a beleaguered citadel in a world that wants to kill it.