I cannot help interpreting as a “sign” that, a few minutes after publishing Chronicle 845 questioning the West’s ability to defend itself against enemies so barbarous that they oblige us to give the Nazis credit for trying to hide their crimes rather than recording them with GoPro cameras, I learned that a Pulitzer Prize had been awarded to Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha for his essays published in The New Yorker “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience,” as though it were the duty of Westerners to demonstrate their sympathy for the victims of Israel’s response to the unprovoked slaughter and torture of over a thousand of its citizens from a perspective that is essentially that of their murderers. Which is as good a demonstration as any of the need for Judaism to survive alongside Christianity—and a lesson to the Jews of today as much if not more than to the Christians.
It is infinitely sad to see Jews, and Jewish-based businesses and organizations such as the New York Times, that still have not learned that self-hatred will not save them in a world that they themselves have encouraged in its denigration of the fundamental Jewish valorization of ourselves on the pretext of avenging the West’s historical victims—toward whom its long-past behavior, wholly typical of its age, need not be defended save in that its consequences have been beneficial to all.
And of all peoples the Jews are truly exemplary in this regard. The settlers who displaced, often brutally, the so-called Indians, (whose cruelty, like that of Hamas, indeed reflected a lower level of civilization that that of the West), did not find their models in the Jews, who were not themselves the original Hebrews who conquered the territory of Israel from their rivals, but those who were first defeated and then expelled by the Romans, and who paid for any arrogance they may have been guilty of in the days of the Temple(s) with two millennia of exile devoid of military power.
And it puts once more in question the ultimate value of the West’s unquestioned superior ability to understand and control the natural world and to create the world’s freest known societies in the face of the crude power of radical Islam’s claim to love death more than we love life—to truly be willing to sacrifice their lives for their belief, however absurd, in the definitive truth of the Koran, with its promise of an Islamic “end of history.” I do not think that we should explain this Pulitzer merely as an abject gesture of submission toward our potential conquerors, whose inferiority in the technical sphere is made up for by their unshakable faith in their cause. It is a gesture whose abjectness is at the same time a sign of admiration toward those whose acts, however unspeakably cruel, do not, unlike ours, involve the least recoil from the utter engagement of their bodies and souls, not in a Pascalian wager, but in a primitive and all the more unshakable certitude.
That it is we who have invented these “weapons of mass destruction” is but one more example of the folly of intelligence that fails to control its products. Israel’s enemies are like a society of illiterates that wins the world chess championship by kidnapping their opponent’s best players. Perhaps Allah told them, “Bide your time, let the unbelievers create terrible means of destruction, for you alone, through your boundless faith in Me, are worthy to control them.” After all, the supreme principle of the sacred is the survival of the community, not of the individual. The sadistic barbarism of Hamas should not lead us to forget that its actions are wholly focused on the triumph of the human species in what its partisans believe is its highest, and therefore most durable form, irrespective of the individual fates of its partisans. The question we have to answer, and “we” includes the ignorant mobs who self-righteously urge us to support the victory of the ”Palestinians” over Israel, is whether this is indeed the element of humanity that we deem best suited to carry forward its banner toward the future.
As for the alternative anti-Western model represented by China and North Korea, these so-called “Marxist” tyrannies rely less on faith and more on naked coercion. It is indeed difficult to evaluate the degree of subjective belief in the minds of those who follow this path; is the “wager” of these populations in any sense a free choice? And above all, is this model’s success at all self-generating or does it necessarily depend upon exploiting the “softness” of the Western culture that has struggled to defeat its jihadist enemies? Would China threaten the US’s dominance had it not been able to easily steal so many products of Western creativity? But can we truly imagine a showdown comparable to that of WWII in which an alliance of Western nations could defeat their Eastern and “Southern” rivals by sheer superiority of firepower and resolve?
Would it not be the greatest irony of all if the West had been eliminated before the last round of the “final conflict,” given that, after all, Islam and “Marxism,” the two remaining contestants, can both trace their origins to the Hebrew God? Neither is conceivable without the West—without the Hebrews, nor without the Jews, if only as the seemingly imperishable residue of the latter.
Concerning the Jews, Jonathan Foreman’s “The Untold Story of How Israel Failed on October 7” in the May issue of Commentary is a devastating critique of the Israeli strategic negligence that allowed the success of the Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023, at the root of which was the deadly combination of overconfidence in their own forces and underestimation of the determination of their enemy—as though nearly 80 years of survival had somehow demonstrated that Israel no longer faced existential danger.
And even now, one wonders if the IDF will, by finally winning the war they have been fighting for over a year and a half, provide the much-needed demonstration that, as in the pre-Oslo past, the dominant surviving element of Western civilization will be Judeo-Christian and not Islamic. Islam can learn to live with this, just as the Jews were forced to learn to live in Christian society, but it must be forced to recognize its necessity.
The West’s indulgence in its pseudo-masochistic enthusiasm for the barbarism of the jihadis is a betrayal of civilization itself. Its shamefulness reflects what we may hope is the final decadence of the epistemology of resentment, which in its beginnings at least reflected genuine grievances—the proof being that it had not yet converged with antisemitism in its “autocritique” of Western civilization.