Israel Among the Nations

In recent months, Israel has restored its territorial integrity and national pride after the massacre on October 7, 2023, of nearly 1200 citizens, the wounding of 3300 others, and the abduction of 240 people as hostages by Hamas. These ingenious military strikes have changed reality in Gaza and Southern Lebanon, resonating across the Middle East. Israel’s responsive James Bond-like execution of Operation Grim Beeper and the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership have left Israel’s enemies stupefied. Israel fully understands, as it must, that the defense of the country remains a vital necessity in a world of ceaseless Islamic terrorism.

However, what also emerged soon after Israel began pursuing its war aims against Hamas and Hezbollah was opposition from vital Western countries, including America. Israel’s confrontation with both the governing elite of Europe and Progressive politicians in America who have morally condemned Israel for disproportionate responses to the terrorist attack could prove even more significant than Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their master, Iran. By “more significant,” I mean “significant for America and Americans.”  Guiding these elites’ reactions and judgment is a progressive, humanitarian ideology that dethrones patriotism and the defense of one’s national home, leaving them incapable of understanding a country that means winning a war, imposing terms on the enemy, and bringing peace to its people.    

The United Kingdom has now suspended 30 of the 350 weapons licenses that it provided to Israel. This hardly endangers the Israeli war effort, but the justification provided by U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy cited a potential “risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” When asked to name any provisions of international law or the laws of war that Israel had violated, Lammy declined to answer, merely stating that the loss of life in Gaza had been unsatisfactory for the current government. As the kids say on social media, “Tell me that you think Israel has committed war crimes without telling me that you think Israel has committed war crimes.” 

Europe’s Humanitarian Illusion

French President Emmanuel Macron, in November of 2023, only one month after the massacre, stated, “De facto - today, civilians are bombed - de facto. These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So there is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop.” Left unmentioned by Lammy and Macron is that the context of Israel’s assault on Hamas featured a terrorist enemy that had constructed hundreds of miles of underground tunnels and had deliberately established itself among civilians in Gaza. What did they expect Israel to do? De facto - permit Hamas to escape?

Macron further observed, “It's extremely important for all of us because of our principles, because we are democracies. It's important for the mid-to-long run as well for the security of Israel itself, to recognise that all lives matter.” Macron, like Lammy, declined to cite actual international rules of war that Israel had violated. He mentioned “the security of Israel” but did not articulate the principle that a military or, in this case, terrorist force cannot, in effect, inoculate itself against an opponent by hiding among civilians and thus receive the shield of innocents. This protection proves immensely valuable, even more so when such a terrorist group then inflicts harm on its opponent. Declining to recognize this principle would render the defense of the opposing country a moral impossibility. This constitutes a moral inversion of political reality, one that protects terrorists while marginalizing the defense of nation-states.

European elites and American progressives have absorbed the delusions of humanitarian ideology and the dangerous categories of identity politics. Humanitarianism here is a universalist ideology, a belief in the immanent unity of humanity, with man as the measure of everything.  It is what the French political theorist Pierre Manent calls “the religion of Humanity.”   It rests at the heart of the contemporary European Union. It requires ignoring real differences in cultures, religions, and forms of government. Underneath them, all are one, and all are welcome. This governance, by what Manent in Democracy Without Nations (2007), calls “pure democracy” ignores the reality that the nation, filled with law, culture, and historical memory, is a necessary component of democratic government. Manent articulates that the new European wish is for democracy without a body, replacing it with a “confused idea of human unity.” 

The European Union governing class aims to surrender the political form of the nation, believing in pure faith that the world will increasingly unify on terms that express the poles of an unbounded individualism and social democratic welfare-ism. In its reduction of human persons to egalitarian sameness, the humanitarian view erases the mediation points that define the experiences of human beings at all times and places. The insistence on the erasure of borders undermines the pride of membership that citizens rightfully have in their country. When this happens, there is no proper separation between those who have given their lives, their services, and their loyalty to a public repository of the national trust and those who stand outside the nation but are ushered in by human rights treaties and morally confused public officials.  

This process discloses that Europe, the civilization that initially produced the modern political form of the nation in response to the Reformation and the wars of religion, now chooses to retreat from the nation and the many benefits it offers its citizens (real continuity with the past, a real community of belonging, a political body that can act in the world). However, a Europe and a West retreating from the political nation will only be confused by a nation that insists on defending itself. Manent observes that the “political role of Israel exposes our naïve dreams of global unification.” The Muslim world rejects Israel for theological and political reasons. Europe, according to Manent, does so for its own religious reasons, those of the atheistic religion of an autonomous humanity.  “The religion of humanity so powerful in Europe has scarcely any better understanding of a nation that desires to preserve its existence and sovereignty by means that include the force of arms.”  

Calling Europe by Its Name

On one level, Israel has frequently faced “enlightened” opposition to its military and political goals. Its victory in the Second Intifada in 2004 was only achieved by defying world opinion. In the end, Israel earned something immensely more valuable: respect. But Israel’s problem goes deeper now as the European Union largely buries most of the continent’s religious, political, and cultural heritage, subsuming itself in an antipolitical combination of progressive individualism and social and economic rights. Israel’s defense of its national home has provoked a Western political and cultural intelligentsia for whom the defense of the nation has become an offense against an always unifying humanity, of which it is the harbinger and avant-garde.

Matters go deeper, though, when we consider the “contradiction” this nation represents to Europe. The proud nation-state Israel represents the opposite lesson of what European humanitarians have drawn from the history of Jews in modern times.  Israel has been built by struggle, sacrifice, and pride. The near destruction of the Jewish people by Hitler’s Germany is frequently invoked as the founding impetus for the unifying goals of the European Union. The villain in the EU’s political narrative of unity is the nation, the so-called springboard of naked aggression and warmongering on behalf of the superiority of a people. Brussels promises to bring this to an end with the promise of endless union and unification of peoples. As Manent states, “the [contemporary] Jewish state thus displays the limits of a universalism [Europeans] believed to have deduced, in part, from the longtime misfortunes of the Jews.”

According to Manent, there is more.  Israel, he writes, “asks Europe for its name.”  “Who are you?”  An empty humanitarian wasteland of “democratic values” and ever expanding borders, or something substantial, something distinctive and real, therefore limited, something to be loved, cherished, and, yes, defended? Contemporary Europe wants to escape from itself. It refuses to defend itself, to love itself. In this turnabout, Israel switches from being threatened by Europe’s endless condemnations of its actions to the unwelcome moral savior of the continent. Manent reasons that in asking Europe to say its name, Israel says to Europe and each nation in it that “empty—hollow and vain—is any humanism that claims to detach itself wholly from all responsibility toward or for a particular people, or from any distinctive view of the human good.” What will be the European response?

America the Confused

Regarding America’s reaction, the Biden administration has been deeply divided amongst itself as certain staff members, many of them junior level, protested mightily against President Biden’s early support of Israel in the wake of October 7th. Their opposition has been strident and constant for suffering Palestinian civilians. In a dramatic turn, the Biden administration, including the Kamala Harris campaign, repeatedly attempted to proclaim its sympathy for Islamist protest groups in Michigan, among other places. The concern for Palestinian civilians seems to mask an ideological belief, otherwise called “settler colonialism,” that Israel is a primeval oppressor that must be eradicated if justice is to be achieved. In any event, the constant progressive refrain has been that Israel’s bombing of Gaza killed far too many civilians.  We addressed this claim earlier.

This led President Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to state that Israel must accept a cease-fire and bring an end to the current hostilities. Yet, the Biden administration knew that Hamas, not Israel, was the chief impediment to any cease-fire. Hamas reportedly answered that if the first round of hostages returned could be dead ones, then they would consider a cease-fire. Promises, promises.

Israel indeed asked what a cease-fire is in this instance. How does a nation make peace with assassins? How does a nation make peace with a terrorist enemy that refuses to accept an Israeli state within any borders? The Biden administration offered no answers to these questions. Instead, it has chosen to apply maximum public pressure on Israel for purely domestic political reasons. While Biden did ship weapons to Israel, in the long run, the moralizing tones of his positions cannot but signal that future Democratic presidential administrations will turn on Israel. 

President Biden publicly turned against Israel’s tactics in March of 2024, threatening to withhold certain weapons if it invaded Rafah, a portion of Gaza where over a million Palestinians had fled. There were even hints from the Biden administration that Israel was engaging in war crimes, although the portions of international law that had been violated were again never cited. In that month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in the well of the Senate intervened in Israeli politics, calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be replaced in a new election. The ultimate result of these rhetorical ploys was a delay, as Israel, aware of international opinion turned against it, deliberated what to do next. That didn’t stop the ultimate incapacitation of Hamas as a fighting force, but that outcome took longer than needed—which, paradoxically, likely occasioned more civilian casualties than would have occurred if Schumer had kept his mouth shut.

The only cease-fire that Israel can legitimately accept is surrender and the return of all hostages without conditions. The one-sided concern for Palestinian civilians seems to mask an identity politics belief, now regnant in progressive circles, that Israel is a settler colonialist oppressor that must be morally refuted if justice is to be achieved. 

American progressives believe (or profess to believe) that peace and unity could be achieved if only Israel would de-escalate and restrain from fully defending itself. One of the Biden administration’s last dictates to Israel was to increase food shipments to Gaza (despite widespread knowledge that Hamas was also intercepting the previous Israeli-provided food shipments and medical supplies) or risk America withholding future military funding. Left unsaid was how any of these shipments would actually reach Gaza civilians instead of the remnants of Hamas, given that most civilians have evacuated the area or that Israel has been feeding for months the same populace, ostensibly governed by Hamas. There is no international legal warrant for a belligerent nation to take such action unless you are Israel.  

As we said above, these lessons are not simply about or for Israel.  Americans have observed students on college campuses across the country deeply influenced by identity politics ideology, categorizing Israel as an oppressor nation that must be eliminated or marginalized. Few inside Israel or among American Jews expected the terrorist sympathizing mobs that have formed on elite college campuses in America. Beyond sympathies for the Palestinians, many of these student groups engaged in antisemitic violence that was publicly supportive of Hamas and Hezbollah. These students directly targeted Jewish students and faculty. The Columbia University encampments festered for weeks and created no-go zones for Jewish students with little attempt by the administration to stop blatant anti-Jewish discrimination by the mobs. Jewish Students at Cornell University and Cooper Union College were forced to hide for safety on certain occasions. Certain Jewish students last spring at UCLA were actively impeded from walking around campus or going to class. 

Israel’s defense of its collective existence could portend not only the defeat of its enemies but also remind a deeply confused and morally troubled West that it cannot hide behind humanity and escape from itself. In a recent lecture in Paris, Manent poignantly offered that a Europe that turns its back on Israel forfeits its soul. 

Israel witnesses to the apostles of humanitarianism and identity politics that the modern Western nation, at its best, provides a politics of sanity and prudence because it first provides countless citizens a home, citizenship, and the possibility of the common good. These concrete political goods cannot be equaled or surpassed by grandiloquent assertions of unity founded on abstractions. To insist that such verbal moralizing is the greater good is to risk everything. Israel, at its core, is demonstrating this truth.

Richard M. Reinsch II is the editor of Civitas Outlook.