David Gelernter On Israel And The US

I mentioned David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, Orthodox Jew, and Republican yesterday as someone I've followed in the past for his views on America and Israel. So far, I haven't found much from him on the current situation, but he wrote a 2006 essay that bears on the problem, Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel? Here's his key point:

For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen--who explains that the "greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake." Who advises Israel to "hunker down," while "waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else." It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn't--or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that someone else could be using, and maybe wants to. The earth's surface did not expand to make room for him. Births have outstripped deaths on this planet for many generations. But we are not in the habit of demanding that human beings justify their existence or be mowed down, and the idea is equally bad in the case of nations.

Life is valuable in itself--human life or the life of nations; one of the main differences being that it is so much harder to create a nation. That the Israelis have done so--have created in fact a free nation and a hugely productive one that treats all its citizens humanely and is a world center of science, medicine, scholarship, and argument (all flavors)--is one of the stunning facts of modern history.

And, of course, the origins of no two nations more resemble each other than Israel's and America's, both created by Europeans clutching Bibles, searching for freedom, prepared to fight for a room of their own. Both populated by human beings, a species not noted for perfection. Yet both strongholds of democracy, freedom, and tolerance nonetheless. Anyone who has decided that Israel is a mistake is likely to come around to the same view of the United States.

So we're back to the question I raised yesterday -- why do the people who call for "death to Israel" see such internal logic in also calling for "death to America"? I keep coming back to the question of natural law. The US Declaration of Independence refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- Thomas Jefferson, the author, was a freethinker himself and surrounded by like-minded Freemasons and deists, but he still clearly believed in a natural law. He also refers to "self-evident" truths. Abraham Lincoln referred to the Declaration as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression,” with the strong implication that this rebuke comes from natural law itself.

Gelernter accuses US Jews of acting against their own interests, at least as of his 2006 article, which is remarkably prophetic:

Most Democratic politicians speak up for Israel. But grassroots Democrats are increasingly dangerous to the Jewish state (not to mention the American state). Still, American Jews vote for (and bankroll!) Democrats. And each time they repeat this performance, the risk is greater.

. . . American Jews (especially the intellectual leadership) have a tragic history of acting against their own professed interests. In the years before Pearl Harbor, U.S. intellectuals on the whole (especially New York intellectuals) vehemently opposed American entry alongside Britain into the war against Nazi Germany. Of course many New York intellectuals were not Jews, and many American Jews didn't care for New York intellectuals. But journals like Partisan Review helped shape the cultural climate--and were fiercely antiwar until Pearl Harbor--and were shaped, themselves, by Jewish intellectuals. Leading Jewish intellectuals signed a Partisan Review statement explaining that "Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. . . . The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties."

He mentions Pearl Harbor several times as a key turning point, and I think that's significant, because Pearl Harbor is the main justification for US involvement in World War II, which had several implications. Had it not taken place, the eventual Western reponse to the Holocaust, as well as the circumstances of Israel's creation, would have been different. The Allied effort in World War II appears, with some exceptions if one considers the fire bomb raids on German cities or the atomic bomb on Japan, to have been consistent with just war doctrine as enumerated in Paragraph 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which amounts to yet another attempt to make natural law concrete.

So we're effectively back to the Old Testament, the dialectic by which natural law was in large measure expressed and developed in Western Civilization, and the particular effort to realize an understanding of natural law in the founding and operation of a country. Gelernter's main conmplaint about Jewish Democrats is that they're dangerously inconsistent in their support for natural law, which is to say Jewish, principles.

The question of Israeli "atrocities" in Gaza in the current conflict is something I haven't seen Gelernter address yet, if indeed he ever will. Dershowitz makes the frequent point that the Israeli military does far more than any other country to avoid civilian casualties. But we still have the uncomfortable issue that God's intent for ancient Israel was that they occupy a particular territory and subdue the aboriginal inhabitants (insofar as any particular group is aboriginal anywhere).

This is a messy question. The Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, who argues that there is scriptural authority for the death penalty, also argues that use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese was an atrocity, when God Himself delivered nuclear-level destruction against Sodom and Gomorrah, and Joshua was clearly executing the divine will in the siege of Jericho, when, "Following God's law, the Israelites killed every man and woman of every age, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys."

About all we can say is that these things are working themselves out day by day.