Better than rue

In a recent substack posting Benjamin Kerstein wrote about antisemitism’s psychological toll on Jews, in which he argued we must as a first step acknowledge the devastating impact the contemporary explosion of antisemitism since October 7 2023 has had on us. For myself, I must admit that every time I read of another Israeli soldier’s death I get upset, angry and sad. And then the words of A. E. Houseman’s poem, With Rue My Heart Is Laden, come to mind: “With rue my heart is laden/ For golden friends I had, /For many a rose-lipt maiden /And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping /The lightfoot boys are laid; / The rose-lipt girls are sleeping /In fields where roses fade.” And then my own rue rises up at not only the ongoing deaths of soldiers but also at the massacre and mutilation of all the Israeli victims of the Gaza Palestinian attack on October 7, including the abduction of hostages.

It is of little solace to stay stuck in rue, which can rise up in us any time we think of loved ones who are no longer here. No one who died in Israel as a result of October 7 is someone I knew. Yet my outrage knows no bounds, and the galloping antisemitism that exploded in the western world in its aftermath has only fuelled my outrage and reinforced my conviction about what Israel should have done long ago and ought now to do. Thinking about all this has also led me to conclusions about what Jews the world over should be doing as well. What follows are my thoughts on this matter.

The surge in antisemitism across the western world once Israel invaded Gaza in response to the attack of October 7 shocked even me. I knew from my professional experience as a sociologist that the Marxism espoused by my colleagues had inculcated in subsequent generations of students a crazy ideological reading of reality, but did not imagine the latter would be so corrupted as to engage in such wilful and wild warfare on Jews reminiscent of Nazi attacks in the 1930s. Nor did I imagine that the leaders of every country in the western world would abandon Israel and backstab her, rushing to support the Palestinian cause which was so manifestly historically wrong, both factually and morally; and this so soon after the Holocaust, which the same West would even invoke to turn Jewish victims into genocidal Israeli perpetrators.

Of course I knew that the woke reading of reality was thoroughly incorrect. I also knew that my colleagues in the social sciences and humanities across the western world were responsible for training successive generations in this faulty reading of reality. But I could not imagine that the warped minds of these people had gone so far as to fuse with their passions, unleashing this frenzy of Jew hatred on a par with what goes on across the Muslim Arab world. My takeaway from this is simple: the West is finished. I do not know what will replace it. Perhaps the woke leaders of western countries will be rejected by their populations as happened recently in the United States with the election of Donald Trump; but even should that happen I do not believe the rot will be repaired, just as the rot that set in to the Roman Empire in the third century could not prevent its ultimate decline and fall, however salutary the attempts at reform appeared to their contemporaries.

One thing is clear. There is no place for Jews in the societies of the western world. Of course we have not been exterminated yet, but no Jew can possibly forget the betrayal by governments and fellow citizens which the past year and a half has brought us. The only response we can have to that is a staunch and stalwart defence of Israel as the only country in which we can feel safe and flourish. We should be encouraging our children to move there and we ourselves should make every effort to do the same, however difficult such a move would be for people like myself who are nearing the end of their lives.

Prime Minister Netanyahu can argue until he is blue in the face that Israel is fighting not only to defend itself but to defend the West as well. I think it is worthless to say this, not only because the West does not want to defend itself, but also because it is not worth saving. The West which is committing cultural suicide has tainted everything which made it so attractive to the Jews who embraced modernity, in large part because we had set it in motion so very long ago. It is now up to us to create that modernity anew in that small strip of land on the shores of the Mediterranean which was once known as holy. And so we have nothing to say to the West to counter its daily dose of slander other than to ensure that Israel is safe, powerful, and thriving. That and that alone is the only way to counter the contemporary version of the oldest hatred. And also the only way not to fall ourselves into the whirlpool of sadness and lamentation which has been far too long part of our history. If seven million Jews the world over brought their talents and capital to the Jewish state, Israel would thrive as never before. But that means the Jews too would have to jettison the woke mentality to which they have been exposed and far too many of them have subscribed.

As for Israel, it has only to continue on the path down which it has started after the attack of October 7. It has drastically weakened Hamas in Gaza, decimated Hizbollah in Lebanon, made a serious dent in Iranian military capabilities, and taken over territory in Syria in the wake of the newest version of Sunni jihadism that has assumed power in Syria. But the mentality of containment and mowing the grass which led to October 7 has not yet disappeared from Israeli elites nor has it translated into a new public consensus likely to produce a change in the way Israel governs itself. The old Yishuv elite ensconced in extra-government institutions - the legal confraternity, the judiciary, the media, academia, the literary scene, the upper echelons of the army and economy, the rabbinate and most of the political parties - still advances the same tired mantra about compromise, peace with Israel’s neighbours, the need for international partners, and the never-ending sniping at Netanyahu, who almost alone has steered the ship of state to what looks like an approaching victory.

I have often read that October 7 produced a sea change in the Israeli public’s outlook about what the future holds for the country, especially with respect to the Palestinians. But when I look at opinion polls I see not much of a change in the support for all existing parties; nor do I see the heads of those parties announcing they will resign in favour of younger ones. I even see that the National Religious Party often does not even pass the threshold for seats in the Knesset, even though its leader, Finance Minister Smotrich, has been one of the leading intelligent voices asserting the need for Israeli sovereignty over Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Had his voice been heeded on the hostages, they would have been home by now. Dead or alive, but home; and the Palestinians would have paid the price as they deserved. Which leads me to a sine qua non of what must be post-war Israeli strategic policy if Israel is to survive and provide the safe national home for Jews the world over.

As the Knesset has recently voted, there must be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan river. Yes, it will be good for Israel to get rid of the head of the snake, the Ayatollahs’ Iran, and good for the Iranians too; and should the United States not join Israel in doing that, Israel will have to do it alone. But the real existential threat to Israel remains the Palestinians, murderous, treacherous, and crazed as ever. Living in close proximity, they are the ones who even today murder Israelis in their streets and would continue to murder Jews who will make Aliyah. Therefore Israel must rip up the Oslo Accords which the Palestinians have never respected, enter Ramallah and dismantle the Palestinian Authority, and work to expel the Palestinians from Judea and Samaria and Gaza. If Israel does not know how, it can take a page out of the playbook of Kuwait that got rid of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for dancing in the streets when Saddam invaded that country. Israel can also learn from the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and other Arab countries following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Nor should we forget the Farhud of 1941 in Iraq.

Israel has also to hold on to territory in southern Lebanon and the Syrian side of the Golan Heights to ensure that no threat ever emerges again on its northern border. It has to force Egypt to withdraw its military forces from Sinai in conformity with the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel and to allow Palestinians to leave Gaza by land and not only by sea. No need to apologize for any of this. No need to explain to critics who will assert Israel is not abiding by international law, the very one with which the West gleefully pillories the Jewish state. There is, after all, the age old law of war and the language which even Muslims understand: when you lose a war you start you lose territory too, and people even sometimes have to leave.

Of course it is doubtful if all this will occur unless Israel reforms its political system and Zionism itself undergoes a cultural revolution. Extreme proportional representation has to go. Geographical constituencies would be a much better basis for election to the Knesset. A new political party cutting across religious and secular and populated by the rising generation which supplied the military muscle in the current war would be a welcome contribution. Its platform prior to an election should include, in addition to the above security policies, at the very least the drafting of haredim for army service, a much needed curtailment of the power of the judiciary, and the integration of the attorney-general’s office into the government. If all this is not possible, then perhaps Israel needs a constitutional convention to draft a written one. Whatever happens, the age-old Jewish tradition of tribal governance extended into exilic communal rule must come to an end. As must the idea that Jews are powerless, now extended to the state of Israel, which must therefore take into account the need for Great Power protection. Strange that one never reads of Saudi Arabia or Columbia or South Africa, let alone Sudan or Somalia, thinking that way, though none of them has nuclear weapons.

All this, I know, some people will label pipe dreams. Others will dredge up all kinds of reasons not to do any of it. I know them all myself and read about them every day. I no longer care. I no longer care about answering charges that Israel is in violation of international law. I no longer care about explaining what historians have already better explained why Israeli sovereignty over all land west of the Jordan River is justified. I no longer care about showing the dead-end depraved nature of Palestinian society, tribal, Muslim and duplicitous. Nor do I care about the stupid sensibilities of my neighbours with their idiotic moralism and imbecilic literary tastes. I even think I no longer care about the human race and its destiny, which strikes me as rather pathetic in evolutionary and interstellar perspectives. But within the limited frame of my personal and my people’s lives, I cast my vote with Judaism and Zionism, with the intertwined Book and Land which has, all things considered, been more of a blessing than most human innovations. Out of Zion, it is said, shall come forth the law and the word of God from Jerusalem. True then and true now. And that, I suggest, is better than rue.