Might Makes Wrong?

 

Nazi antisemitic poster, courtesy of Alamy

Some days ago, I suggested the recent Tory slippage in the Canadian polls had to do with the growing strength of Donald Trump in the US, allowing Trudeau to run against Trump instead of Poilievre. Now my sister has suggested another theory.

She suggests it is young people pulling away from Poilievre for his support of Israel. Trudeau has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, as Hamas and the left-wing protesters demand.

Raising the next question: why are young people and the left, in Canada and in the US, on the side of Hamas, and against Israel, in this conflict?

I say it is because the left, and the educational system they control, have rejected the concept of morality, “conventional morality”. So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a surprise terrorist attack, however violent; there is nothing wrong with sucker-punching a "fascist," after all. Or, intrinsically, in raping women, or beheading babies, or taking hostages. They see everything as about power. The only issue is that there must be “equity,” and no “power imbalances” or “income inequalities.” No “bullying,” bullying simply meaning, to them, the exercise or mere possession of superior force.

It follows that if it comes to a disagreement, anyone who is poor is in the right, and anyone who is rich is in the wrong. In violent confrontations, whoever is losing is in the right; whoever is winning must be in the wrong. It is a childish cartoon morality, simply the inversion of “might makes right.” It makes Hitler and Japan the innocent victims of World War II, and Bin Laden the victim of 9/11. And children always right if they disagree with their parents.

That last is perhaps a clue as to why it is appealing to the young.

This is why, to the left, police and prisons are the causes of crime: abolish both, and we could all live in peace. This is why, at a recent symposium, a University of Minnesota professor declared “the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed.” This is simply and definitionally true from the fact that the US is the richest and most militarily powerful nation so far in history.

And this is why Israel is in the wrong: because they are winning against Hamas. More Palestinians are dying than Israelis. And Israelis are richer than Palestinians.

This is actually the Nazi ideology. Mussolini portrayed Italy as a “proletarian nation,” Hitler called Germany a “volkish nation,” and both played up on the idea that their nations had been exploited and bullied by the peace treaties that ended WWI. Hitler was able to turn popular wrath on the Jews because they were richer and better educated than the average German: they were supposedly the international cabal that ruled the world.

Indeed, because of their accomplishments, this doctrine of “equity,” of amoral power politics, is always going to produce antisemitism.

Sadly, because of the admirable human instinct to defend the weak against the strong, this fascist atheist doctrine is likely to appeal to an uneducated conscience, and so lead a naive or weak mind astray.

The War on Main Street

 

Uptown in King’s Square today, the traditional centre of Saint John, there was a demonstration of perhaps thirty people, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” Ironically, only a half-block away from a sign advertising Saint John’s historic Jewish Museum.

We need to be clear about this.

This is not a call for democratic government. Israel is a democracy. Arabs under the Israeli regime are freer than in any Arab state.

This not a call for peaceful coexistence. “From the river to the sea” rules out any two-state solution.

This has to be read as an intention that seven million Jews be either deported or killed. Rather more than Hitler put to death in the Holocaust.

And to what purpose? Why should this be to anyone’s advantage, since Israel is a democracy? Surely only out of anti-Semitism.

One upside: back when I was an undergrad and a grad student, it was common to argue that antisemitism was caused by Christianity. I think Rosemary Reuther was the author who became famous for this thesis. A fellow grad student, Jewish, insisted to me that all Christian children were taught that the Jews murdered Christ. Having attended Catholic schools and never having heard such a thing, I demurred. But she assured me I must be wrong.

Now this claim is never heard--Muslims have shown themselves to be more anti-Jewish than Christians. In fact, now Christians are scapegoated for being too pro-Jewish; as recently by friend Xerxes.

It should not be illegal to say such things as the pro-Palestinians uptown were chanting. But I am shocked and disturbed there is not more social disapproval. 

Our times look more like 1930s Germany every day.

Israel a Colonial Enterprise?

UN Mandate, 1948

I note people accusing the Jews of stealing land from the Arabs in order to form the state of Israel. One correspondent compares the Israeli position to Italians laying claim to England on the grounds that it once belonged to Rome.

But that is not a fair representation of the history. The Jews did not take the land. Israel was mandated to the Jews in 1948 by the United Nations. If there was an injustice done to the Palestinian Arabs, it was done by the international community, not by the Jews. Canada had a vote in the UN General Assembly; the Jews did not.  To blame the Jews is scapegoating.

What do those who make this argument now propose? That the Jews, having been legally ceded the land by the UN generations ago, are now to be evicted due to the claims of some prior inhabitants? Aren’t such theorists guilty here of exactly what they are falsely blaming the Jews for?

If dispossessing the Arabs was wrong then, by the same standard, dispossessing the Jews would be wrong now.

I would allow that the original grant was unfair to the Arabs. The world community was giving the Jews someone else’s land. The recent attempt by Hitler to exterminate them no doubt made it seem pressing to the international community that the surviving Jews be given their own homeland, where they might be secure from such mass murder. 

Wherever that homeland was established, it was going to require the dispossession of whoever was currently living there. 

Perhaps it would have been more just to give the Jews a slice of Germany, rather than taking land from the innocent Arabs. But then, a small Jewish state would never seem secure from bigger neighbours in Central Europe. Ask Poland about that.

Perhaps Canada should have offered some of its own territory, rather than voting to give the Jews some of the Arabs’.

But then, Britain was indeed altruistically giving some of its own territory for the creation of this Jewish homeland. Britain had conquered the territory from the Ottomans in the recent World War.

And Palestine made the most sense, not necessarily because it was the ancient homeland of the Jews, but because it had the largest concentration of Jews anywhere. 

This was largely because of its symbolic important to the Jews, and largely because the British had already been legally bound, by League of Nations Mandate in 1922, to create in Palestine a homeland for the Jewish people. Accordingly, they were more or less bound to allow Jewish immigration into the area. 

Stalin made a parallel attempt to set up a Jewish homeland in Siberia, but got little uptake.

The only solution I can see is acceptance of the status quo.

The Secret History of Crimea

The Jewish Khazar Empire

As the Ukraine spirals further into chaos, and the Mideast crises drag on without sign of resolution, it is interesting to ponder what might have been.

In the years just after World War II, Molotov was largely in control of the Soviet Union, and the expected successor to Stalin. He had a plan, ultimately vetoed by Stalin, to make the Crimea a Jewish homeland.

There was a lot of sense to the idea. Unlike Palestine, the Crimea had recently been depopulated. Stalin had deported the Crimean Tatars for collaboration with the Germans. So the land was up for grabs. Moreover, it had a history of Jewishness. The local Jewish population was significant, and it had been part of the Medieval Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. If Arthur Koestler is right, modern Askenazi Jews are actually mostly Khazar by blood.

Molotov's wife was Jewish

The Zionists, for their part, were not terribly picky at this point as to where their homeland was to be, so long as they were given one.

Had the plan gone through, we might have avoided most or all of the ongoing strife in the Middle East, and certainly several wars. We might also have avoided the recent troubles over Crimea. From the standpoint of the Jews, the Crimea is more defensible over the long term than Palestine, and more fertile. Moreover, it is European, as were most of the Jews who colonized Israel. It would have looked far less like the last colony of imperial Europe.