The path to peace is not through negotiations but through invincible rejection of terror, joined to real opportunity for Palestinians who choose life over death. Over the next two decades, Israel will grow into the dominant economy in the Middle East and one of the most productive economies in the world. Palestinians must be made to see that displacing Israel is futile, but buying and selling its products and supplying labor for its factories and offices can make Palestinians once again the most successful of all Arabs, as they were between 1967 and 1987. Saved from the Nazi obsessions of their ruling clique, the Palestinians can become major beneficiaries of the emerging new global economy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Time for the Test
Now, every human being on earth who cares about facts and can tell a lie from a truth knows that there was no such thing as “Palestinian nationalism” until modern Zionism created it out of whole cloth, by placing enormous value on a piece of land that used to seem as precious to its landlords as a rat-ridden empty lot in a burnt-out neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, in the suburbs of nothing.
The Jews gradually got possession of an arid stony wasteland… complete with the odd picturesque, crumbling, dirty town; and they loved it. They turned it into a gleaming, thriving, modern nation, not only a military but an intellectual powerhouse.
And so it is only natural that the former owners’ descendants want it back, and remember how much their ancestors loved it, and how the new owners only got possession by wickedness and deceit. Such memories have the strange property of growing clearer instead of cloudier every day….
There is no irreconcilable difference in the fight between Israel and the Palestinians, no bone-deep dispute that will haunt humanity forever. There is only greed and envy. They never disappear, but can easily move from one target to the next. The problem will be solved as soon as the world stops trying to solve it.
All right, now is the time for the test.
In the early 1940s in Europe, as Hitler ranted about the depravity of the Jews, the Nazis were already proceeding with the “final solution” that he had promised in Mein Kampf. They were preparing concentration camps near railroad lines at Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and dozens of other cities. They were lining up railroad cars and gas trucks. They were mobilizing scientists and engineers to develop efficient techniques for the extermination of their fellow human beings. They were transforming a generation of young men into Brown Shirt brigades frothing with hate and lusting for violence against Jews. They were enlisting foreign allies such as the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini to extend the killing to Palestine.
The world, then engulfed by a world war, mostly failed to focus on this particular threat, which seemed too bizarre and evil even to be believed. The West lost six million of its most creative and productive citizens: family members of the same people who shaped twentieth-century science, enabled twentieth-century technology, and opened the horizons for the twenty-first-century economy — the people who largely enabled the West to prevail against the Axis powers and to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. We have to acknowledge today that in his most ardent cause and most fervent war aim, Hitler largely triumphed. Some 6 5 years later, the number of Jews is still an estimated five million below the number in 1939. Poland, once home to almost 3.5 million Jews, has an estimated Jewish population of only 25,000 as of 2008. As expressed in the compulsive acts of condemnation of Israel by the United Nations, the Nazi obsession has attained a new respectability around the world.
Today, Hitler’s rants have morphed into a global program of religious education and military ideology sustained by Arab and Iranian oil money and generous subventions by American taxpayers and the United Nations. The hundreds of thousands of Brown Shirts in Germany have become millions of frothing jihadi youths similarly inculcated with anti-Semitic hatred and a lust for violence. Leading politicians in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Malaysia, Venezuela, and other nations, and jihadi imams and mullahs around the globe have declared their resolve to destroy Israel.
Unlike the Germans, who faced a formidable technical challenge in carrying out their plan, the incumbent anti-Semites benefit from the increasing availability of nuclear weapons, which could render a new Holocaust both simpler and more efficient than the first. Anti-Semites have the moral support of much of the UN bureaucracy, including its “human rights” apparatus, which is chiefly devoted to anti-Semitic agitprop. The UN General Assembly in 2008 directed 6 8 percent of its condemnatory resolutions and other strictures against Israel. The UN secretary-general has called for a global boycott of Israel for its efforts to defend itself against new campaigns of extermination. Aiding a new Holocaust is the vulnerability of the state where 5.5 million Jews live, encircled by lethal enemies bent on their annihilation.
Today, the most dangerous form of Holocaust-denial is not rejection of the voluminous evidence of long-ago Nazi crimes but incredulity toward the voluminous evidence of the new Holocaust being planned by Israel’s current enemies. Two Iranian presidents have resolved to acquire nuclear weapons for the specific purpose of “wiping Israel off the map.” Scores of nations, representing 1.8 billion Muslims, have endorsed the jihad. After the genocidal crimes of World War II and the Communist empire and recent genocidal violence in Rwanda, the Sudan, Somalia, and Zaire, deniers of a new Holocaust agenda manifest a tragic and foolhardy blindness to human nature and human history. Showing no understanding of the central and indispensable contribution of capitalism to human welfare, the world political order is heavily focused on punishing capitalists, as epitomized by Israel and the United States.
The problem is not nuclear weapons themselves. They represent another major and irreversible step in the history of weapons development. To condemn them is like condemning meteors or earthquakes or even the sun. They are now an inexorable part of the world. Moreover, nuclear weapons have a positive aspect. They reflect a generally favorable move of the world from quantitative arms races to qualitative ones, from rivalries of mass mobilization of existing manpower and resources to intellectual competition in the development of new weapons and defenses.
Quantitative arms races focus on diverting wealth from private consumption to public mobilization. Quantitative arms races favor dictatorial regimes with large populations of young men. They reward the ability to extract resources from consumption and re-direct them to the job of reproducing the best existing military tools. Quantitative arms races make a billion youths inculcated with Wahhabi frenzies into a vast and possibly decisive weapon. Quantitative arms races lead either to economic exhaustion or to war.
Qualitative arms races can trump quantitative capabilities. During World War II, the perfection of radar, the emergence of computer decryption, and the mastery of nuclear weapons counteracted the apparently decisive advantages of the Axis countries in existing industrial power and military mobilization. During the Cold War, the advance of U.S. guidance and communications technologies and steps toward effective missile defense countered the huge advantages in manpower of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. In any qualitative rivalry, millions of Jewish individuals and other researchers and inventors operating in free societies can counteract billions of jihadists in mass movements and totalitarian confinement. As Peter Huber put it in an eloquent speech after 9/11, “Our silicon can beat their sons.”