West is weak, divided and
lacking in self-worth
TONY ABBOTT
The Western democracies are now feeble and divided,
having militarily, industrially, and even culturally
disarmed in the years since their seeming triumph in the
Cold War against the old Soviet Union. Facing
unprecedented challenges – including a militarist
dictatorship in Moscow, an Islamist dictatorship in
Tehran, and a communist dictatorship in Beijing – this is
clearly a “civilisational moment” because others clearly
don’t believe in us, as they were supposed to after the
“end of history”; and we no longer quite believe in
ourselves, despite all the objective evidence about the
merits of the Western achievement.
One of the reasons Russia is now slowly grinding down
gallant Ukraine is because Ukraine’s friends in the West
have helped it enough to avoid defeat, but not enough
actually to win. Partly from fear of what a humiliated
nuclear-armed tyrant might do.
Partly through internal division over the extent to which
other people’s wellbeing is our business too. And partly
through resistance to the industrial mobilisation needed
to match an economically declining but geopolitically
driven dictatorship.
After initially being the largest non-NATO contributor to Ukraine’s defence, primarily through the delivery of some
100 Bushmaster armoured vehicles and by helping to train
in Britain the Ukrainian infantry, Australian support has
now almost dried up, with even a recent request for coal
refused, presumably because that might add to the
temperature in Kyiv.
Likewise, one of the reasons Israel is bogged down in
Gaza, hesitant to destroy the Hamas leadership, is because
its friends can’t quite grasp the moral distinction between
a liberal democracy prosecuting a just war against a
terrorist statelet pledged to its destruction, and an
apocalyptic death cult that uses civilians as human
shields. Somehow, civilian deaths in Gaza are not the fault
of the terrorists who put command centres and military
stores underneath schools and hospitals but of the Israeli
Defence Forces, even though the Israelis have been far
more fastidious about avoiding civilian deaths than
Bomber Command ever was. In a further perversity, global
institutions, invoking bogus morality, have bid to arrest
both Israel’s and Hamas’ leaders for war crimes; and to
restrain the actions of Israel but not Hamas.
This is the moral confusion arising from the left’s long
march through the institutions, with a generation of
students conditioned to see issues in terms of oppressors
and oppressed, with Israel damned as a settler state with
“white privilege”. And thanks to a generation of
permissive immigration, there are now Islamist
subcultures within Western countries for whom sectarian
solidarity is what matters most.
It’s this growing conviction of the democracies’ decadence
that’s emboldening Beijing in its intimidation of
practically independent Taiwan. They doubt our will to
resist.
Partly because of the economic cost of decoupling from
China. Partly because US commanders now question their
ability to win an air-sea battle in the Taiwan Straits. And
partly because societies that have had it so good for so
long are simply unprepared for a potentially existential
struggle, even on behalf of a country like Taiwan that
testifies to the universal appeal of the Western way of life.
It’s telling that for the first time since the ANZUS treaty in
1951, Australia has just refused a US request for military
help, declining to send a freedom-of-navigation frigate to
the Red Sea. Our government is using its commitment to
AUKUS submarines a decade hence to mask cuts to our
fighting capacity now. Rather than admit to an instinctive
pacifism, it would prefer to tell our allies that we’d like to
help, but lack the means to do so.
This general decline of the West is the dispiriting
background to our strategic disarray. People have never
had more access to information, yet rarely been so
ignorant; never been more materially rich, yet rarely more
culturally and spiritually bereft. And whatever might
distinguish today’s leaders – in business, the academe,
the law, the military, and the church, no less than in
politics – it’s rarely character, conviction and courage.
Historically, at least in the Anglosphere, our most iconic
institutions have worked for the protection of society
against the state, and for the freedom of the individual
against oppression.
From centuries of trial and error, the
king was under the parliament, the parliament was under
the people, the people were under the law, and the law
was under God – or at least some concept of the common
good. At its zenith, there was an expectation of humility.
Even for exalted people and institutions, our pride was supposed to vest in the things beyond ourselves; an
attitude most wonderfully conveyed in the statement of
our late queen on her 21st birthday that: “My whole life,
be it long or short, shall be devoted to your service and
that of the great imperial family to which we all belong.”
Our strategic confusion is just another example of the
myriad problems that arise when people are ignorant of
their own story, fail to understand how their culture has
evolved, and haven’t grasped how society is a trust
between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-beborn.
It’s actually an abundance of respect for all cultures other
than our own that’s now the mark of most Western
countries.
It’s very hard to mount a defence unless there’s
something worth defending. Yet all the main Anglosphere
countries are now angsting over their self-worth: America
over slavery, Britain over the empire, and Australia over
settlement and dispossession.
What else can explain our present government’s
insistence that no important announcement be made
except in the presence of three flags: the national one,
plus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones. These
days entities that wouldn’t dream of toasting the king at a
formal dinner, or beginning any official proceedings with
a prayer, now routinely begin their activities with an
acknowledgment of the traditional Indigenous owners, as
if that’s the only cultural inheritance that matters; and
even though Christianity, or “the coming of the light”, is
almost certainly more important to more Indigenous
people than ancestor worship.
Until we have elected leaders brave enough to drop the pieties that imply that our country belongs to some of us
more than to all of us; and to stop flying the flags of some
of us co-equally with the flag of all of us, there’s really no
hope of reversing the cultural decay that’s behind our
strategic confusion.
Are we collectively capable of recovering the historical
memories and cultural self-confidence required to face
this civilisational challenge? Sterner times could soon
force us to rediscover our better selves.
This is adapted from a speech this week to the Danube
Institute in Budapest.
One of the most famous lines in recent cinematic history belongs to a (then)
youthful Tom Cruise in the blockbuster flick A Few Good Men. Cruise plays a
hot-shot young navy lawyer with thinly veiled daddy issues, and in the film’s
most famous scene he has a perfectly wicked Jack Nicholson on the stand in a
tense courtroom showdown.
Nicholson plays a decorated US marine colonel who secretly has gone rogue,
and Cruise is trying to goad him into confessing to murder. Nicholson is, of
course, brilliant, channelling hints of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest as he stares down Cruise’s impassioned demands for the
truth. You can’t handle the truth, he bellows in return. And thus a legend
was born.
This was a work of fiction but we are living it today, this aversion to the
truth. Australia collectively is incapable of facing up to so many of the things
challenging who we are and the values we’ve built across generations, the
values hewn from the blood, sweat and tears of Australians from all
backgrounds, creeds and faiths.
We may not be able to handle it, but believe me when I say Australia needs a
headfirst encounter with the truth.
There is no greater example than the war against Hamas, which I might point
out is a war against terrorism that the global community is happy for Israel
to fight alone.
As this awful, necessary conflict continues, as the Israel Defence Forces edge
closer to the goal of wiping out Hamas, there have been repeated calls for a
ceasefire because of the start of Ramadan, which began this week.
As the Muslim holy month began, Australians, both notable and beautifully
including the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, wished our Muslim community
Ramadan Mubarak. This represents the Australia we want to be part of, truly
tolerant in the face of significant differences.
However, the calls for a ceasefire because of Ramadan ignore important
truths. Let me lay them out for you. Hamas broke the ceasefire and started
this war on the Sabbath, the Jewish holy day. Not only was it the Sabbath but
the violent orgy of murder, rape and mutilation was carried out on
Torah, a time of Jewish celebration to mark the completion, and the restart,
of the annual cycle of reading the Torah.
Another truth, courtesy of 1973: the Yom Kippur war was started on the
holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Day in, day out, every month of every year
since, rockets have been fired at Israel and its citizens on any and every
single day, especially on the Sabbath. Israel’s enemies know many soldiers
will be in synagogue.
What I’ve just shared isn’t my opinion. It is the truth that Hamas started the
war last year on Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. It is the truth that the Yom
Kippur war was started on Israel’s holiest day. It is truth any ceasefire
without surrender is simply an opportunity for Hamas to regroup and do
what it says it will – repeat October 7, not only in Israel but in all Western
countries. It has promised it; we best believe Hamas means it.
This is the awful truth, and millions of Gazans are suffering because Hamas
continues to knock back every ceasefire deal put on the table. This is the
truth.
So many Australians, especially in the progressive left, simply can’t handle
it. They continue to deny the cancerous culture of anti-Semitism that has
been laid bare in this country since October 7. They deny. They deflect. They
gaslight anyone who dares call it out. They follow any conversation around
the brutality of Hamas’s use of sexual violence with the word “but”.
Ah, the truth is hard, the truth hurts. There’s a reason that’s a cliche and
that’s because it’s true.
Psychologists have studied a phenomenon called the
backfire effect, a term to describe what happens when someone presented
with irrefutable truths on a matter that should shift their thinking instead
doubles down.
Gregg Ten Elshof is a professor of philosophy at Biola University in the US. In
2009 he wrote a book called I Told Me So, in which he unpicks humanity’s
seemingly unmatched capacity for self-deception. Ten Elshoff unravels, with
excruciating accuracy, what happens when finding the truth becomes the
secondary motivation for asking questions. It turns out humans are masters
in the art of embracing denial when it suits us.
So, in the Australian context, what is the primary goal? Is it electoral? Is it
fear of being wrong, is it the pain of having to look at your ideology and
accept it’s flawed?
Beyond the war in Gaza, there are many examples of what I’m talking about,
few as striking as the treatment of gender dysphoria in children.
This past week in Britain, the National Health Service announced that
puberty blockers would no longer be prescribed to anyone under 18. This
follows the damning scandal and subsequent closure of that country’s
Tavistock gender identity clinic and a growing bank of evidence on the danger of these treatments more broadly, which includes links between
transgender hormone therapy and cancer.
This is truth. Australia? Still stuck on the fence. Clinging to the idea that
gender-affirming care is the only valid approach.
The British decision is based on truth, based on science. Finally, the truth in
this space is being accepted but here in Australia so many still hold that
children who the law recognises are too young, too emotionally (and in all
other ways) vulnerable to consent to sexual relationships, can decide to take
life-altering medication from which there is no return.
So many other issues. Our energy mix and reckless refusal to consider
anything other than renewables. The plight of Indigenous Australians who
live in places that are out of sight, hence out of mind.
What will it take? This question runs laps around my mind and my heart daily
and this is where I have landed.
We need an encounter with the truth. Australia and Australians need a
headfirst, deep-hearted, full-frontal collision with the truth.
Not “my” truth, or his or her truth, the facile indulgence that allows people
to construct and reconstruct various matters to suit their own narrative. But
the truth.
Most of us in this country do not understand existential threat. We have the
luxury of not knowing what it’s like to have to defend our borders or go catch
the bus wondering if you’ll be knifed or shot by a terrorist. So many times
I’ve said to people, in relation to the Hamas war, what if it were your
daughter who had been raped and desecrated? What if it were your son who
had his eyes gouged out in front of his children while being forced to listen to
the sexual brutalisation of his own wife? Would that be an encounter with
truth enough?
We don’t need any more facts. We have scant need for more information. But
boy, do we need a collective come to Jesus moment on more than one front,
and I pray this happens without a need for first-hand experience.
If history is a guide, the answer is no. But we are right to believe in miracles.
The Israeli government has only weeks to finish, or at least change fundamentally, its operation to destroy the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza. International pressure on Israel is mounting drastically. The humanitarian cost in Gaza, though entirely the moral responsibility of Hamas, is unsustainably high.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be moved by the Albanese government signing a defective, one-sided UN resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire but not even mentioning Hamas by name, nor its October 7 atrocities.
It’s demoralising, of course, the defection, and confusion, of Australia, which was once at the centre of the Western alliance.
But much more important is the attitude of US President Joe Biden, who warns that Israel is losing international support. Biden himself is under immense pressure for solidly backing Israel.
The biggest operational problem for Israel remains the 500km of Hamas tunnels. Israel must destroy or disable these if it is to capture or kill top Hamas leaders and permanently disable Hamas militarily. The international pressure is immense. Israel will finish its operation by January or change its methods such that large-scale humanitarian aid can enter Gaza.
But it’s what happens the day after the operation ends that is where the biggest disagreement between Jerusalem and Washington (and Canberra, though Australia now has no influence at all with Jerusalem) comes in.
The Biden administration, like most international opinion, wants negotiations to resume towards a two-state solution, a Palestinian state living next door to Israel. Given that’s agonisingly distant, in the short term it wants the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, to administer Gaza.
Netanyahu says no on both scores. He doesn’t want the PA in charge of Gaza and he now rejects the two-state solution. My guess is he’d compromise on having the PA back in Gaza. The two-state solution, however, extraordinarily complex and difficult, seems impossible operationally.
Nothing generates more ignorant cliches than the Israel-Palestine dispute. Much discussion of it just involves endless recycling of familiar cliches that mostly float clear of reality. The difficulty with the two-state solution is that Palestinians, and in the past their Arab neighbours, and now their Iranian sponsors, have rejected every single genuine offer of a Palestinian state.
Until recently, most Israelis wanted a two-state solution. As anyone who has visited Israel knows, it’s a successful modern democracy, with a vibrant society, ethnic diversity and great economic achievement. It yearns to live normally, in peace. But decades of relentless attack by regional enemies who don’t accept its right to exist has changed its attitude to the utility, and dangers, of peace negotiations.
Notwithstanding three regional wars aimed at Israel’s annihilation, and almost constant lesser attacks from a collection of enemies that would fill a fat phone book, Israel has on at least four separate occasions offered a full state to the Palestinians, who each time rejected it.
It starts in 1947. The last uncontested sovereign power over the land of Israel, before modern Israel was created, was the Ottoman Empire. Ditto for the West Bank and Gaza. After the Ottomans, Britain ruled under a mandate first from the League of Nations, then the UN.
In 1947 the UN decided to split the land between Jews and Palestinians, with Jerusalem belonging to neither state but administered internationally. The Palestinians could have had their independent state right then. Israel would have been much smaller. Instead the Palestinians, plus all their Arab neighbours, rejected the deal. In 1948, when Israel declared independence and was formally recognised by a vote at the UN, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan all attacked, planning to wipe the Jews out of existence.
There was terrible fighting. Several Jewish towns were massacred. Some 750,000 Palestinians left Israel. This had several causes. One is they expected Jewish soldiers to be as savage with them as Arab soldiers had been with Jewish residents. Another is they expected Arab nations to quickly overwhelm Israel. Then they would return. Some Arab leaders advised Arab residents to flee temporarily. Some Palestinians were certainly driven out by Jewish soldiers. Large numbers of Palestinians remained, and today 20 per cent of Israel’s population is Arab. About the same time, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and North African countries where Jews had lived for millennia, although often as a persecuted minority.
Israel’s Arab neighbours were determined never to accept a Jewish state. In 1967 they were making troop movements preparatory to attacking Israel, and declaring they were about to attack. So Israel launched a pre-emptive strike and in the process took control of the West Bank, which had been in Jordan’s possession, and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt had controlled, and the Sinai Desert, which also belonged to Egypt. Neither Jordan nor Egypt had ever tried to set up an independent Palestinian state in these territories.
Following this war the Arab states declared their policy of “three noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.
In 1973 Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, and Syria, with a degree of help from some other Arab nations, launched a surprise military attack on Israel that became the Yom Kippur war. At terrible cost, Israel won that war.
Despite his anti-Semitic past, Sadat made a historic peace with Israel in 1979. Critically, Israel returned the vast Sinai desert to Egypt, giving up all the strategic depth it had afforded Israel, and all its mineral resources, in exchange for a durable peace treaty. Israel evicted Jewish settlers who had moved to Sinai. But in terms of the politics of a subsequent Palestinian state, here is the most powerful lesson of all. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, enraged at Sadat making peace with Israel, assassinated him in 1981
The Egyptian peace treaty demonstrated conclusively Israel would trade territory for peace, so long as it got real peace. The US underwrote the peace and it stands today. The Egypt-Israel treaty showed everyone peace was possible. Sadat’s assassination showed everyone it would always carry a high price.
The Oslo peace accords kicked off a process in the 1990s that led to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, under the sponsorship of Bill Clinton, offering a full Palestinian state to Yasser Arafat.
Barak offered 96 per cent of the West Bank, some compensating territory from Israel proper, all of Gaza and the Palestinian neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem. Israel would keep only the large Jewish settlement blocs near Jerusalem, a couple of per cent of West Bank territory, and give territory from Israel proper in compensation. Barak wanted a full guarantee of peace and an end to all other Palestinian claims on Israel.
Arafat refused the deal. He tried to tell Clinton that Jews really had no historic connection to Jerusalem. He couldn’t meet the requirement to end all claims. And he demanded that all four million of the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who left in 1948 be allowed to return and live permanently in Israel, not in the new Palestinian state but in Israel itself. This is the so-called “right of return” and it’s an absurdity.
Every other refugee population that goes to live elsewhere is permanently resettled. But, of the neighbouring Arab countries, only Jordan offered Palestinians citizenship. Generally, Palestinian refugees and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were kept as notional refugees so the UN would pay for them in perpetuity, and as a bargaining chip against Israel.
The Palestinians could have had an independent state from Clinton and Barak, flooded with international aid, sponsored by the US, the EU and the Arab world. But had Arafat taken this deal he would surely have been killed by his own extremists eventually, just like Sadat. It’s likely Arafat never remotely wanted a deal. Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid once told me that Arafat had told him privately that it was his ambition “to throw all the Jews into the sea”.
Barak’s remarkably generous deal, which would have involved uprooting many Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, was improved and offered to Arafat again. But again the Palestinians rejected it, making the third clear time they refused to accept a state.
In his memoirs, Clinton makes it clear Arafat bears responsibility for the failure to achieve a Palestinian state. If we’re sceptical of Israeli sources, we can read the detail in numerous memoirs of US officials intimately involved in the negotiations.
The fourth clear offer from Israel of a Palestinian state came at the end of the prime ministership of Ehud Olmert, in 2008. A year later, Olmert gave me his first and most extensive interview on this peace plan. Everything he said to me was later confirmed in the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state at the time.
“From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008, I think I met Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas, then and now the Palestinian president) more often than any Israeli leader has met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations,” Olmert told me.
“On 16th September, 2008, I presented him (Abbas) with a comprehensive plan. There would be a territorial solution based on the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes (by this Olmert meant the three biggest Jewish settlement blocs).
“In total it would be about 6.4 per cent (of the West Bank, with Jewish settlers outside those blocs forced to leave the West Bank). In return there would be a swap of land (to the Palestinians) from Israel as it existed before 1967. I showed how this would maintain the contiguity of the Palestinian state. I also proposed a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. It would have been a tunnel, fully controlled by the Palestinians but not under Palestinian sovereignty.
“Jerusalem was a very sensitive, very painful, soul-searching process. While I always believed that historically, and emotionally, Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people, I was ready that the city should be shared.
“Jewish neighbourhoods would be under Jewish sovereignty, Arab neighbourhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, so it could be the capital of a Palestinian state.”
The area of the holiest sites, sites holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, Olmert proposed, should be administered by five nations – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the US. On the right of return, Olmert offered a symbolic return of 1000 Palestinians a year for five years to Israel itself and an international fund to recognise Palestinian suffering.
By then the descendants of all the Palestinian refugees, living in many countries, numbered five million. It’s insane to imagine Israel would invite five million Muslim Arabs to come and live in the state of Israel itself. The only purpose of the right of return is to give Palestinian leaders an excuse to reject a state. There would also need to be some security guarantees, such as the Palestinian state not acquiring conventional military weapons.
Rice in her memoirs says she was thrilled by this offer. She found it breathtaking and incredibly generous, the most that could ever be imagined. There was no absolute guarantee Olmert could have delivered this deal, but if the Palestinians had said yes, and the Americans had backed it, it would have been unstoppable. Except, perhaps, by a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.
Olmert told me: “I said this is the offer. Sign it and we can immediately get support from America, Europe, all over the world. I told him (Abbas) he’d never get anything like this again from an Israeli leader for 50 years. I said to him, do you want to keep floating forever, like an astronaut in space, or do you want a state?”
Abbas said he would come back next day with experts and advisers. But his office rang and said he’d forgotten a pre-planned trip. He’d come back to Olmert the next week. But Abbas never responded to the offer at all.
That was a fourth clear chance for a Palestinian state, clearly rejected by the Palestinians.
Later, even Netanyahu for a time would commit himself to a two-state solution, which he now rejects, but for many months the Palestinians refused to negotiate with him. The offers from Barak and Olmert involved immense courage, huge concessions and rare social and political strength. They meant Israel would trust a Palestinian state not to launch terrorism or worse against it. One part of the West Bank looks directly down on Tel Aviv airport. The whole of Israel could be paralysed if a neighbouring Palestinian state launched any attacks.
But every time an agreement looked possible, Islamist extremists would launch terror attacks on Israel designed to derail the peace process. They want conflict. That was a key reason Hamas was set up. Even with security guarantees, it’s now all but impossible for Israelis to trust a Palestinian state.
So in the meantime there are serious efforts to make life better for Palestinians in the territories. Netanyahu allowed Qatari aid to flow to Gaza and hundreds of Gazans to work in Israel proper. The aid was misused for weapons and tunnels and some of the workers supplied Hamas terrorists with detailed information regarding Israeli targets for the October 7 atrocities. How can Israel now trust any Palestinian state?
Further, what evidence is there a generation of Palestinians, raised on hate-filled anti-Semitic indoctrination in their schools, would ever accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state next door? There would always be incentive for Islamist extremists such as Hamas to assassinate any Palestinian leader who made peace or declared an end of claims on Israel.
This is one of many reasons the Albanese government was so ill-advised in changing to calling the West Bank and Gaza “illegally occupied Palestinian territories”. If Israel’s occupation is illegal, it must withdraw. Who then does it hand the territories over to? Hamas?
All the while Iran funds and co-ordinates the extremists: Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, militias in Syria and Iraq. Under Biden, the US has lost influence in the Gulf, so it’s more difficult for everyone to resist Iranian money, guns, threats and influence.
Eventually, a two-state solution will have to come back, but eventually is a long time. The Israeli government, not unreasonably given everything, sees no prospect of it in the near future. No doubt Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong know better.
Open letter an exercise in distorting
history
HENRY ERGAS
Late last week, a “Letter from journalists to Australian media outlets” urged
newsrooms to “adhere to truth” rather than “bothsidesism”, including by
“providing historical context” in reporting on the Middle East.
As a prime example of the “important contextual references” which “it is
the media’s responsibility” to provide, the letter cited “the expulsion of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands in 1948 to
make way for the state of Israel”.
That now endlessly repeated claim clearly implies that the founders of the
state of Israel deliberately provoked the refugee outflow. But far from
accurately portraying the historical context, it grotesquely misrepresents, in
a manner exemplary of the letter’s “one-sideism”, a complex reality.
Thus, when a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed a partition of
the British mandatory territory of Palestine on November 29, 1947, the major
Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed plan, despite its draconian
conditions.
But the Arab states not only rejected the plan; they launched what the Arab
League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase
(Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”.
Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In
one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey
was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated
before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation.
And even after the Arab armies declared that they would abide by the Geneva
Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a long-standing pattern of barbarism, they
also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews
into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.
A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the
territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as
they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel
Defence Force – adopted the “Dalet plan” in March 1948, which ordered the
evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of
Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement.
The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably
imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of
the massive outflow of Arab refugees, which was well under way before it
came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres
committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away
from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely
violent, conflict that also displaced a high proportion of the Jewish
population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led
by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to
“temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake
their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon
return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately,
leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised,
especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely
cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to
the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to
them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden
flights of civilians that have always accompanied wars, including the vast
population movements associated with the collapse of the Ottoman,
Habsburg and Russian empires, the capitulation of Nazi Germany and the
dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
And it pales compared to the suffering caused (at almost the same time as
the war in Palestine) by the partition of British India – a blood-soaked
catastrophe, displacing tens of millions of people, which the distinguished Indian judge and essayist G.D. Khosla recalled as “an event of unprecedented
horror”.
But while the mass outflow was not unusual, its sequel was. In the other
major cases, refugees were ultimately absorbed into their country of refuge.
By 1960, the 12 million ethnic Germans who, after centuries of settlement,
fled or were forcibly deported at the end of World War II from central and
eastern Europe had fully merged into West German society. Equally, the
illiterate Hindus who flooded, entirely destitute, into East Punjab
underpinned the Indian Punjab’s momentous transformation into the
country’s breadbasket.
And the 750,000 Jews – a number slightly greater than that of Palestinian
refugees – brutally expelled (and comprehensively expropriated) during and
after 1947 by the Arab states eventually became an integral part of Israeli
society.
Moreover, in none of those instances, or even of the vast population
transfers between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, were there durable
revanchist movements, much less any expectation of a “right of return”.
Not so in respect of the Palestinian refugees, who became permanently
homeless. That was, at least in part, the UN’s fault.
As many studies have shown, a central element in the remarkable success of
the Turkish- Greek population exchange of 1922-23 was the tying of all
international resettlement assistance to the unfettered integration of
refugees into the country of refuge.
The Refugee Settlement Commission (1923-1930) was therefore explicitly
based on the principle that help would never suffice unless refugees were
“forced to prosper”.
Operating under a strictly time-limited mandate, the RSC depended entirely
on loans that could be repaid only if the refugees, rather than devoting their
lives to terrorism, were productively employed.
But instead of heeding that precedent, the UN established the UN Relief and
Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy
whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’
“refugee” status, regardless of the fact that they and their parents were
actually living in the land of their birth.
Yet the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which
increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt,
manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab
kleptocracies elevated Jewhatred into the opium of the people – and
empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm
worldwide.
Of course, none of that matters to the open letter’s signatories.
Flaunting their keffiyehs, these armchair warriors, who are far removed from
any risk of being butchered by terrorists, have convinced themselves that
they are the guardians of the truth, and that anyone who calls out their
grievous errors is in bad faith. To say they are one-eyed would be wrong;
drenched in bias, ignorance and self-righteousness, they are no-eyed. The
tragedy is that anyone would follow them in their blindness.
Calling out Hamas evil demands moral
clarity - HENRY ERGAS
Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, I knew what an
existential battle for survival meant. That war had been no ordinary contest.
It was a struggle against an adversary so monstrous that the consequences of
its final victory were literally beyond calculation.
The laws of war required the suffering on the two sides to be constantly
weighted – painfully, dreadfully, as the bombing of Dresden and the use of
the atomic bomb brought home with stomach-wrenching force.
But the enormity of the horrors that would have accompanied the Allies’
defeat ruled out easy judgments. There were no ready scales for comparing
the harm a military decision could inflict on innocent civilians against the
overbearing significance of freeing humanity from regimes that were the
very embodiment of radical evil.
When those regimes’ complete destruction finally wrenched a chance of
peace out of the rubble of broken cities and the misery of broken lives, the
world thought it had drawn the lessons.
The United Nations, US president Harry Truman declared at the
organisation’s founding conference, would “provide the machinery which
will make future peace not only possible but certain”.
And empowered by a newly established International Court of Justice,
international law would be given the means to hold those who committed
“crimes against the peace” accountable, removing the need for individual
countries to wage punitive war.
But the god of our dreams is also the god of our nightmares.
From the slaughter fields of Ukraine to the charnel house that is Syria, those
aspirations have gone up in flames.
As the UN descends into irrelevance, the laws of war, which were intended to
protect the innocent, are being used to shelter the terrorists who deliberately
place them at risk.
Hailed as a triumph of civilisation, they have become a tool facilitating barbarism’s relentless advance.
That leaves the people of Israel once again facing the fearfulness, the sense
of danger, the perception of the struggle’s ultimate character, which
pervaded the memories in which I was raised.
Like Hitler, Hamas has never hidden its genocidal intentions: the opening
passage of its Covenant says “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will
obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. And in one of his most
authoritative texts, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, its recently deceased spiritual
leader, wrote: “The latest punishment of the Jews was by Hitler; the next,
with the help of Allah, will come from the Muslims.”
Those goals have been there for all to see; what Hamas proved on October 7
was that for so long as its military capabilities remained intact, it would
relentlessly pursue its interpretation of the Koran’s command to “plant
terror in the heart of the enemies of Allah”, eroding, to the breaking point,
the viability of Israelis’ daily lives.
None of that implies the Palestinians have no grievances; but the Germans
had their grievances too. It was, for example, undeniable that there were
large German majorities in both the Sudetenland and Danzig, the crisis
points of 1938 and 1939. When the Nazis demanded those territories, their
claims were, much like Hamas’, couched – and this was the pretence – in the
respectable language of self-determination. The London Times, in endorsing
appeasement, had no difficulty in describing them as “justified by ethics and
policy”.
It was, however, a grotesque illusion to believe – as the appeasers did – that
because no “government with the interests of its own people at heart would
expose them to the horrors of war”, a territorial concession here, a bit more
power there, would avoid “the ultimate evil of a general conflict”. For the
Nazis’ goal was never a greater share of the pie; it was, exactly like the
Islamists, to inaugurate, over the charred bodies of their adversaries, a new
millennium.
Moved not by want but by hate, they had no real interest in agreements,
regarding them as mere tactics, all the better to subjugate the enemy.
Hamas, which believes “Jews, who are by their nature liars, cannot keep a
contract”, has felt free to breach every agreement it has ever entered into;
the Nazis’ ethics, if one can call them that, were no better.
Confronting them required moral clarity – the moral clarity to distinguish
radical evil, which endangers everything that is decent in this world of ours,
from ordinary enmity. Instead, the appeasers, by conjuring a moral
equivalence between victims and executioners, sowed the confusion that made the cataclysm all the more certain.
Today, moral confusion yet again fills the air. And our government, far from
correcting the confusion, compounds it – by repeatedly claiming, for
example, that Israel, as a democracy, should be “held to a higher standard”
than its adversaries.
It is, however, surely obvious that the demands of morality do not depend on
the nature of a regime: to believe the Holocaust was any less of a crime
because it was committed by a dictatorship is so plainly contrary to moral
principle and international law as to be absurd.
But the “higher standard” claim was never intended to withstand intelligent
scrutiny. A weapon disguised as a platitude, it smuggled in a double standard:
one for Israel, another for Hamas.
And by transforming the virtue of being a democracy into a vice, it served to
justify the singleminded focus on Israel, which obscures, if it does not
entirely occlude, the atrocities Hamas commits day after day, including by
indiscriminately shelling Israeli homes, schools and hospitals.
The babies in the hospitals of Gaza, who are the unintentional victims of a
legitimate military operation, count; those in the hospitals of Israel, who are
the intentional victims of terror attacks, don’t.
No less egregious is the constant pairing of vicious anti-Semitism with the
taunts some Muslim women have experienced for wearing hijabs.
Those taunts are utterly despicable; but an abyss separates their severity
from the menaces that have forced the Jewish community to guard creches,
schools and synagogues from potentially deadly attack. To pretend otherwise
is not merely foolish: by placing murderous rage on a par with ordinary
stupidity, it trivialises – and hence excuses – the Jew-hating fury that
disgraces our streets.
The government argues that it is being even-handed, so as not to deepen
current divisions. But its lack of clarity has the opposite effect: by
relentlessly blurring the line between right and wrong, it gives Hamas’s
supporters a legitimacy they do not deserve, fuelling the radicalisation that is
tearing us apart.
In the end, national unity demands moral direction, not moral equivocation.
So too does our ability to face the future, for the unhinging of the nation’s
moral compass doesn’t merely extinguish the courage to speak the truth: it
erases the courage needed to see it. In a world that is far from being at peace, and where devastating cataclysms are not simply the painful memories of
the old but looming threats to the young, that doesn’t just blind – it kills.
Subsidies for
electric vehicles are a huge
mistake.
These
cars are conceptually the
same battery
and motor as
a fourth-grade
science project—not a
great innovation. And given high prices for
EVs, subsidies are mainly a
giveaway to the already welloff. If you add up carbon emissions from manufacturing,
daily use and end of life, EVs
have total life-cycle emissions
30% lower than gasoline-powered autos. In Silicon Valley,
something is considered truly
transformational if it’s 10 times
better, not a third.
And now there’s a glut of
them. Ford is losing billions,
and Honda and General Motors have scrapped plans to
build affordable EVs. Instead
of throwing taxpayer money at
EVs, President Biden could
have been a hero and helped
bring autonomous vehicles to
the market faster.
Why? Start with the 42,795
traffic fatalities last year. Costbenefit analysis involves
something called the Value of
Statistical Life, and the Transportation Department uses
$12.5 million per traffic death.
Lowering annual crash fatalities to 10,000 would be worth
$400 billion to the U.S. economy every year. Technology
seriously reduces driver error,
a cause of many accidents.
Another reason? With fully
autonomous vehicles, the U.S.
would need only half of its
Autonomous Cars Beat EVs
nearly 300 million cars. Most
sit around doing nothing.
Transportation as a service
would become reality—no need
to own cars; simply click and a
driverless one shows up when
you need it. That would mean
way less emissions and no
parking hassle or road rage.
So what’s the problem?
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving capability, priced at up to $300 a
month, still runs stop signs.
The company uses simple
CMOS image sensors, like
those in an iPhone, instead of
more-expensive Lidar pulsed
lasers. Teslas get confused and
sometimes run into emergency
vehicles with flashing lights. I
recently rode in a Model 3 in
self-driving mode that botched
a simple yield.
It has been a bad few weeks
for autonomous driving. Selfdriving taxis from Cruise and
Waymo in San Francisco halt
at unexpected construction
barriers. Or at least they used
to. GM’s Cruise cars had their
California driverless permit
revoked last month after a pedestrian hit by another car
was pinned under a driverless
Cruise. A rare case, but it did
happen.
But, even with their problems, a joint study (albeit a
very early one) by Alphabetowned Waymo and the insurer
Swiss Re showed 95% fewer
injuries and 76% less property
damage from autonomous
driving vs. humans. That’s a
preview of 10 times. Auto insurance may force an autonomous shift. Imagine $500 a
year for autonomous-car insurance, but $2,000 if you
want to drive.
The Society of Automotive
Engineers defines basic cruise
control as Level 1 autonomous.
Tesla’s FSD, which still requires human attention, is
Level 2 autonomous. Last
month, Mercedes announced
Drive Pilot, which uses Lidar
and is currently the only Level
3 “conditional driving automation” system approved in the
U.S. and Europe. Drivers can
take their hands off the wheel
and eyes off the road, even
surf the web, but only while
driving less than 40 miles an
hour and following another
vehicle in dry conditions during the day. What’s needed for
an economic transformation is
Level 4: autonomous driving
at all speeds in clear weather.
Level 5 is self-driving even in
rain, snow and fog.
What can government do?
Help the imaging systems in
cars, which will never be totally accurate, by actively letting them know where things
are. Stop signs could emit signals with their GPS locations.
Traffic lights could digitally
broadcast red, yellow and
green. Digital signal transmitters in highway markings—
dotted line, solid line, etc.—
would digitally paint the road.
Car sensors could see the real
signs or paint and confirm
them digitally. Ambulances
and police cars could broadcast their locations and warn
others to slow down and stay
away. Construction barriers
and traffic cones could broadcast their location and indicate
how long they will be there to
help cars update their maps.
Cars could even negotiate who
gets to go first at a four-way
stop sign. Encrypted signals
would prevent hacking.
Don’t confuse this with
smart cities or smart roads,
the dreams of central planners. The Silicon Valley adage
works here: Intelligence
moves out to the edge of the
network. Make cars smart,
and roads dumb but digitally
visible.
Expensive? Back-of-the-envelope math: There are 4 million miles of road in the U.S.,
with perhaps 10 to 25 signs
per mile. So we need to update
100 million metal signs and
300,000 traffic lights. I’ll assume the cost of sign transmitters is $100 and roadmarking transmitters to paint
the lines digitally is $10 for
every tenth of a mile. Even if
I’m off by a factor of 10, the
government could spend less
than $400 billion to save
32,000 lives a year, reduce
emissions, lower capital costs
of transportation, and transform the U.S. economy. That
sure beats subsidizing the EV
purchases of climate-smug
rich folks.
The cost of EVs and batteries was going to fall anyway
without handouts. It would
have been better to spend that
money making autonomous
driving viable. What a waste.
Write to kessler@wsj.com
GREG SHERIDANIt’s the oldest hate of all, and the most terrible.A few weeks ago, long before the Hamas atrocities and the inevitable Israeli response in Gaza, I attended a modest suburban function. I couldn’t believe the security, the twostage vehicular entry, the multiple guards. Even in peaceful, cheerful, law-abiding Australia, a Jewish community centre needs perpetual guarding.Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, is deranged, but widespread.It’s the most difficult hatred of all to understand, partly because it’s irrational, evil and nourished from wildly divergent sources.Today, several main strands of anti-Semitism disfigure our world. It’s to be found in the conspiratorial swamp fevers of the far left and far right, casually among cowardly universities (what’s the collective noun for vice-chancellors? a “lack” of principles), inferentially and unconsciously in countless media reports. It has a strong identity in the Arab world and in Islamist movements.But let me say straight away the biggest source of anti-Semitism throughout history is Christianity.These are hard words to say. I’m someone who believes Christianity is true, and that it’s been overwhelmingly a force for good. But the inheritance of anti- Semitism is a blight on Christian history.It comes from faulty theology surrounding the idea that the Jews killed Christ. Of course, Christ was executed under Roman authority. The New Testament has remarks critical of “the Jews”. Properly understood, these refer exclusively to the temple authorities in Jerusalem at the time. Today we might say the Russians decided to invade Ukraine. Moral culpability resides only with the Moscow government, not the whole Russian people, or Russians in perpetuity.John Barton in his absorbing treatment of Bible translation, The Word, recounts a proposal to substitute “Judaeans” to make clear the New Testament references are to a specific group of individuals at a specific time. Most modern bibles refer to “the Jewish authorities” rather than to the Jews.In any event, it’s all 2000 years too late. The overwhelming majority of anti-Semitism today is not Christian. But it draws on centuries of images, stereotypes and lies perpetrated against Jews by some Christians.Many of these images were propaganda inventions and fevered fantasies. In medieval times there grew up the idea that Jews killed Christian children to mix their blood in ritual bread. This was an imagined mimicry of Christ’s suffering and death. It was obscene, completely untrue.This “blood libel” was condemned as a lie by popes, but it held an evil grip on popular imagination.Much anti-Semitism was Catholic, though many Catholics understood the Jewishness of their own religion and admired the Jewish tradition. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, drew on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.The Reformation didn’t help Jews, and Protestants did their share of Jew hating. Martin Luther was a formidable theologian, but at a certain point he turned against Jews and authored some of the most savage anti-Semitic abuse. Over centuries, Jews were expelled from one European nation after another.This, then, is religious anti- Semitism. It’s been denounced now by every Christian denomination.Pope John Paul II apologised for Christian sins against Jews, saying: “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”There’s religious anti-Semitism in Islam as well. The Koran, like the Christian New Testament, contains disparaging passages about Jews. Islamist extremists conflate this with political disputes involving Israel.Much popular Arab media discourse is now frankly anti-Semitic; so is a portion of school curriculums.Each new iteration of anti- Semitism has drawn on earlier iterations, especially the negative imagery and stereotypes. This is how evil lives on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russian secret police concocted an epic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This purported to recount the proceedings of a group of Jewish elders plotting world domination, not least through finance power. Though everything about the Protocols was a lie, they are one of the most successful acts of black propaganda in history.The Nazis combined the global domination lie of the Protocols with a racialised version of religious anti-Semitism. Because Jews had rejected Christ, they were seen as alien to Western culture.The Nazis detested Christianity, as they detested all religion. But they knew they needed some kind of ersatz Nazi Christianity as part of their ideology.Like some arms of Palestinian propaganda today, the Nazis thus decided Christ wasn’t really Jewish. They reserved special hatred for Paul, who with his universalism – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” – had severed the link between blood and nationality, between ethnicity and citizenship.The far right today continues with all the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism – Jewish global dominance, Jewish cultural otherness, and so on. If the Jews dominate the world, how did the Holocaust happen, you might ask. Just shows how fiendishly clever they are, is the demented right-wing conspiracy response.Arab anti-Semitism always had its virulent side. The mufti of Jerusalem met Hitler in 1943 and the two were as one in their hatred of Jews. During the war, the mufti lent his support to Nazi SS recruitment campaigns.The communist left always had a strong element of anti- Semitism. But popular left anti- Semitism really took off in the Cold War, during the alliance of Israel with the US. Leftist ideology grants no rights of indigenous identity to the Jews of the Middle East, casting them as a colonial, racist power acting on behalf of, or manipulating, the West.Thus Jews are hated on the right because they are allegedly alien to Western culture, and they are hated on the left because they are allegedly exemplars of Western culture. The left’s antipathy to Israel, and its ignorant idealising of Islamist hatreds as “resistance”, have led to an irrational, hysterical hostility to Israel which is antiSemitism by another name.All the different strands of anti-Semitism seem weirdly happy to link up and crossfertilise, to draw on the images and insults of their contradictory conspiracy theories and serially monstrous misunderstandings of the world.In truth, the Jewish tradition is one of the most sublime, profound and beautiful the world has produced. Spend some time in the Old Testament if you don’t believe me. Read as your commentary the works of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.It’s also the case that the Jewish contribution to the arts, to science and to all branches of culture is magnificent. The world owes the sure knowledge of one God, the essence of monotheism, to Jewish experience and tradition.The Old Testament in many ways is a continuous song of protest against the barbarities of ancient paganism.Perhaps that’s the real cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews brought the Ten Commandments to the world. And the spirit of evil has never forgiven them.