Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  V. ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM

  Israel is different. In Israel the great temptation of modernity—assimilation—simply does not exist. Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.

  Because most Israelis are secular, however, some ultra-religious Jews dispute Israel’s claim to carry on an authentically Jewish history. So do some secular Jews. A French critic (sociologist Georges Friedmann) once called Israelis “Hebrew-speaking gentiles.” In fact, there was once a fashion among a group of militantly secular Israeli intellectuals to call themselves “Canaanites,” i.e., people rooted in the land but entirely denying the religious tradition from which they came.

  Well then, call these people what you will. Jews, after all, is a relatively recent name for this people. They started out as Hebrews, then became Israelites. Jew—derived from the Kingdom of Judah, one of the two successor states to the Davidic and Solomonic Kingdom of Israel—is the post-exilic term for Israelite. It is a latecomer to history.

  What to call the Israeli who does not observe the dietary laws, has no use for the synagogue and regards the Sabbath as the day for a drive to the beach—a fair description, by the way, of most of the prime ministers of Israel? It does not matter. Plant a Jewish people in a country that comes to a standstill on Yom Kippur; speaks the language of the Bible; moves to the rhythms of the Hebrew (lunar) calendar; builds cities with the stones of its ancestors; produces Hebrew poetry and literature, Jewish scholarship and learning unmatched anywhere in the world—and you have continuity.

  Israelis could use a new name. Perhaps we will one day relegate the word Jew to the 2,000-year exilic experience and once again call these people Hebrews. The term has a nice historical echo, being the name by which Joseph and Jonah answered the question: “Who are you?”

  In the cultural milieu of modern Israel, assimilation is hardly the problem. Of course Israelis eat McDonald’s and watch Dallas reruns. But so do Russians and Chinese and Danes. To say that there are heavy Western (read: American) influences on Israeli culture is to say nothing more than that Israel is as subject to the pressures of globalization as any other country. But that hardly denies its cultural distinctiveness, a fact testified to by the great difficulty immigrants have in adapting to Israel.

  In the Israeli context, assimilation means the reattachment of Russian and Romanian, Uzbeki and Iraqi, Algerian and Argentinian Jews to a distinctively Hebraic culture. It means the exact opposite of what it means in the diaspora: It means giving up alien languages, customs, and traditions. It means giving up Christmas and Easter for Hanukkah and Passover. It means giving up ancestral memories of the steppes and the pampas and the savannas of the world for Galilean hills and Jerusalem stone and Dead Sea desolation. That is what these new Israelis learn. That is what is transmitted to their children. That is why their survival as Jews is secure. Does anyone doubt that the near-million Soviet immigrants to Israel would have been largely lost to the Jewish people had they remained in Russia—and that now they will not be lost?

  Some object to the idea of Israel as carrier of Jewish continuity because of the myriad splits and fractures among Israelis: Orthodox versus secular, Ashkenazi versus Sephardi, Russian versus sabra, and so on. Israel is now engaged in bitter debates over the legitimacy of Conservative and Reform Judaism and the encroachment of Orthodoxy upon the civic and social life of the country.

  So what’s new? Israel is simply recapitulating the Jewish norm. There are equally serious divisions in the diaspora, as there were within the last Jewish Commonwealth: “Before the ascendancy of the Pharisees and the emergence of Rabbinic orthodoxy after the fall of the Second Temple,” writes Harvard Near East scholar Frank Cross, “Judaism was more complex and variegated than we had supposed.” The Dead Sea Scrolls, explains Hershel Shanks, “emphasize a hitherto unappreciated variety in Judaism of the late Second Temple period, so much so that scholars often speak not simply of Judaism but of Judaisms.”

  The Second Commonwealth was a riot of Jewish sectarianism: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, apocalyptics of every stripe, sects now lost to history, to say nothing of the early Christians. Those concerned about the secular-religious tensions in Israel might contemplate the centuries-long struggle between Hellenizers and traditionalists during the Second Commonwealth. The Maccabean revolt of 167–4 B.C., now celebrated as Hanukkah, was, among other things, a religious civil war among Jews.

  Yes, it is unlikely that Israel will produce a single Jewish identity. But that is unnecessary. The relative monolith of Rabbinic Judaism in the Middle Ages is the exception. Fracture and division are facts of life during the modern era, as during the First and Second Commonwealths. Indeed, during the period of the First Temple, the people of Israel were actually split into two often warring states. The current divisions within Israel pale in comparison.

  Whatever identity or identities are ultimately adopted by Israelis, the fact remains that for them the central problem of diaspora Jewry—suicide by assimilation—simply does not exist. Blessed with this security of identity, Israel is growing. As a result, Israel is not just the cultural center of the Jewish world, it is rapidly becoming its demographic center as well. The relatively high birth rate yields a natural increase in population. Add a steady net rate of immigration (nearly a million since the late 1980s), and Israel’s numbers rise inexorably even as the diaspora declines.

  Within a decade Israel will pass the United States as the most populous Jewish community on the globe. Within our lifetime a majority of the world’s Jews will be living in Israel. That has not happened since well before Christ.

  A century ago, Europe was the center of Jewish life. More than 80% of world Jewry lived there. The Second World War destroyed European Jewry and dispersed the survivors to the New World (mainly the United States) and to Israel. Today, 80% of world Jewry lives either in the United States or in Israel. Today we have a bipolar Jewish universe with two centers of gravity of approximately equal size. It is a transitional stage, however. One star is gradually dimming, the other brightening.

  Soon and inevitably the cosmology of the Jewish people will have been transformed again, turned into a single-star system with a dwindling diaspora orbiting around. It will be a return to the ancient norm: The Jewish people will be centered—not just spiritually but physically—in their ancient homeland.

  VI. THE END OF DISPERSION

  The consequences of this transformation are enormous. Israel’s centrality is more than just a question of demography. It represents a bold and dangerous new strategy for Jewish survival.

  For two millennia, the Jewish people survived by means of dispersion and isolation. Following the first exile in 586 B.C. and the second exile in A.D. 70 and A.D. 135, Jews spread first throughout Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Basin, then to northern and eastern Europe and eventually west to the New World, with communities in practically every corner of the earth, even unto India and China.

  Throughout this time, the Jewish people survived the immense pressures of persecution, massacre and forced conversion not just by faith and courage but by geographic dispersion. Decimated here, they would survive there. The thousands of Jewish villages and towns spread across the face of Europe, the Islamic world and the New World provided a kind of demographic insurance. However many Jews were massacred in the First Crusade along the Rhine, however many villages were destroyed in the 1648–1649 pogroms in Ukraine, there were always thousands of others spread around the globe to carry on.

  This dispersion made for weakness and vulnerability for individual Jewish communities. Paradoxically, however, it made for endurance and strength for the Jewish people as a whole. No tyrant could
amass enough power to threaten Jewish survival everywhere.

  Until Hitler. The Nazis managed to destroy most everything Jewish from the Pyrenees to the gates of Stalingrad, an entire civilization a thousand years old. There were 9 million Jews in Europe when Hitler came to power. He killed two-thirds of them. Fifty years later, the Jews have yet to recover. There were 16 million Jews in the world in 1939. Today, there are 13 million.

  The effect of the Holocaust was not just demographic, however. It was psychological, indeed ideological, as well. It demonstrated once and for all the catastrophic danger of powerlessness. The solution was self-defense, and that meant a demographic reconcentration in a place endowed with sovereignty, statehood and arms.

  Before World War II there was great debate in the Jewish world over Zionism. Reform Judaism, for example, was for decades anti-Zionist. The Holocaust resolved that debate. Except for those at the extremes—the ultra-Orthodox right and far left—Zionism became the accepted solution to Jewish powerlessness and vulnerability. Amid the ruins, Jews made a collective decision that their future lay in self-defense and territoriality, in the ingathering of the exiles to a place where they could finally acquire the means to defend themselves.

  It was the right decision, the only possible decision. But oh so perilous. What a choice of place to make one’s final stand: a dot on the map, a tiny patch of near desert, a thin ribbon of Jewish habitation behind the flimsiest of natural barriers (which the world demands that Israel relinquish). One determined tank thrust can tear it in half. One small battery of nuclear-tipped Scuds can obliterate it entirely.

  To destroy the Jewish people, Hitler needed to conquer the world. All that is needed today is to conquer a territory smaller than Vermont. The terrible irony is that in solving the problem of powerlessness, the Jews have necessarily put all their eggs in one basket, a small basket hard by the waters of the Mediterranean. And on its fate hinges everything Jewish.

  VII. THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE

  What if the Third Jewish Commonwealth meets the fate of the first two? The scenario is not that far-fetched: A Palestinian state is born, arms itself, concludes alliances with, say, Iraq and Syria. War breaks out between Palestine and Israel (over borders or water or terrorism). Syria and Iraq attack from without. Egypt and Saudi Arabia join the battle. The home front comes under guerrilla attack from Palestine. Chemical and biological weapons rain down from Syria, Iraq and Iran. Israel is overrun.

  Why is this the end? Can the Jewish people not survive as they did when their homeland was destroyed and their political independence extinguished twice before? Why not a new exile, a new diaspora, a new cycle of Jewish history?

  First, because the cultural conditions of exile would be vastly different. The first exiles occurred at a time when identity was nearly coterminous with religion. An expulsion two millennia later into a secularized world affords no footing for a reestablished Jewish identity.

  But more important: Why retain such an identity? Beyond the dislocation would be the sheer demoralization. Such an event would simply break the spirit. No people could survive it. Not even the Jews. This is a people that miraculously survived two previous destructions and two millennia of persecution in the hope of ultimate return and restoration. Israel is that hope. To see it destroyed, to have Isaiahs and Jeremiahs lamenting the widows of Zion once again amid the ruins of Jerusalem is more than one people could bear.

  Particularly coming after the Holocaust, the worst calamity in Jewish history. To have survived it is miracle enough. Then to survive the destruction of that which arose to redeem it—the new Jewish state—is to attribute to Jewish nationhood and survival supernatural power.

  Some Jews and some scattered communities would, of course, survive. The most devout, already a minority, would carry on—as an exotic tribe, a picturesque Amish-like anachronism, a dispersed and pitied remnant of a remnant. But the Jews as a people would have retired from history.

  We assume that Jewish history is cyclical: Babylonian exile in 586 B.C., followed by return in 538 B.C. Roman exile in A.D. 135, followed by return, somewhat delayed, in 1948. We forget a linear part of Jewish history: There was one other destruction, a century and a half before the fall of the First Temple. It went unrepaired. In 722 B.C., the Assyrians conquered the other, larger Jewish state, the northern kingdom of Israel. (Judah, from which modern Jews are descended, was the southern kingdom.) This is the Israel of the Ten Tribes, exiled and lost forever.

  So enduring is their mystery that when Lewis and Clark set off on their expedition, one of the many questions prepared for them by Dr. Benjamin Rush at Jefferson’s behest was this: “What Affinity between their [the Indians’] religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?” “Jefferson and Lewis had talked at length about these tribes,” explains Stephen Ambrose. “They speculated that the lost tribes of Israel could be out there on the Plains.”

  Alas, not. The Ten Tribes had melted away into history. As such, they represent the historical norm. Every other people so conquered and exiled has in time disappeared. Only the Jews defied the norm. Twice. But never, I fear, again.

  The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998

  CHAPTER 13

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  THE ’80S: REVIVAL

  Rarely does history respect the calendar, but this time events have conspired to demarcate precisely the 1980s. Christmas, 1979, the day of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, marks the apogee of the Soviet empire. November of 1989, with the communist crackup in Eastern Europe, marks its nadir. What happened in the interval defines the ’80s. They will be remembered—long after the avarice, the corruption and the other delightful excesses of the time are forgotten—as the decade of the revival and triumph of the West.

  Nineteen seventy-nine was the annus mirabilis of the Soviet imperium. In that one year, Iran turned fanatically anti-American, and the Soviets or their clients seized Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Cambodia and, just to rub it in, Grenada. It was also the West’s post-war low, as oil shocks, inflation and the hostage crisis completed America’s post-Vietnam demoralization.

  Then, the great turn, which came not with Reagan’s inaugural but, in the interest of historical neatness, in 1980, the last year of the Carter administration. It was a post-Afghanistan Jimmy Carter who reasserted a foreign policy hard line (arming the mujahidin, embargoing Soviet grain, cutting off aid to the Sandinistas). It was then too that Carter’s Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, began squeezing the economy to break inflation.

  Reagan finished the job with a vengeance. He let Volcker’s cruel but inflation-breaking recession proceed through the 1982 election year. He challenged the Soviets to an all-out arms race with which they could not keep up. He brandished SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), which the Soviets read as a sign that the United States was prepared to use its technological superiority to trump Soviet military power, their one claim to superpower status.

  NATO then held together for the most overlooked geopolitical victory of the ’80s: the successful deployment of the intermediate-range nuclear missiles (INF) in Europe, thus facing down both Soviet threats and the West’s peace movement. The final straw was the Reagan Doctrine, which put American arms and money behind a worldwide anti-communist guerrilla campaign that gave the Soviets bleeding wounds on three continents.

  And just when they thought they had America down, the combination of INF, SDI, the Reagan Doctrine and the huge defense buildup made it clear to the Soviets that they were facing a future that they could only lose. American resilience in this decade came as a shock to the Soviets. Their new foreign policy is the residue of that shock.

  After all, the Soviets had achieved something astonishing: For 40 years they had single-handedly taken on the most formidable alliance of great powers in history—the United States, Britain, France, Japan, two-thirds of Germany and a host of other highly industrialized countries—and held it to a draw. At the end of the ’80s, it became clear to Gorbachev that this could not continue. In July o
f 1988, Eduard Shevardnadze before his own Foreign Ministry workers scornfully rejected “the idea, which gained a firm hold in the minds and deeds of certain strategists, that the Soviet Union could be as strong as any possible coalition of states opposing it.” Their only hope was to abandon a losing contest. They sued for peace.

  Who killed communism? There is a lot of credit to go around. But certainly none goes to those who since 1972 have urged, “Come home, America.” Who opposed the defense buildup. Who inflamed the nuclear hysteria of the early ’80s and joined its panicked, now merely quaint, call for a nuclear freeze. Who called for a moratorium on INF, i.e., a surrender to the street. Who denounced the Reagan Doctrine on the grounds that it was the road to Vietnam, when, in fact, it turned Brezhnev’s empire into a Soviet Vietnam.

  Wrong on every count. Now foreign policy liberals are reduced to arguing that the monumental collapse of the Soviet empire is the work of one man whose rise is some complicated accident of Russian history. The Gorbachev reversal is no accident. It was the premise and the goal of the entire policy of containment, as outlined by George Kennan in 1947. “It would be an exaggeration to say that American behavior unassisted and alone could … bring about the early fall of Soviet power in Russia,” he wrote. “But the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate … and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” The ’80s represent the final fulfillment of that policy.

  Which is why with the waning of the decade the conservatives’ time might soon be up. Voters are not sentimental. They don’t give points for past achievement. They turned out Winston Churchill less than three months after V-E Day.

  The rule is: What have you done for me lately? After the Democratic Party built the magnificent structure of the New Deal, it ran out of ideas, and the voters threw the rascals out. Conservatives have done what they were asked to do in 1980: break inflation and restore Western power. Their job is done.