The Emergence of Conservative Affection for Israel

In recent years the State of Israel has become an object of deep affection for many of the Western world’s conservatives, especially in the United States. For example, in his campaign material, Senator Ted Cruz—probably the most conservative of the Republican candidates at the recent presidential election—stated, “We stand with Israel. We must make it clear that the US–Israel alliance is once again a strategic bedrock for the United States.” This was not simply a campaign ploy for votes, since few American Jews were likely to vote for him, but what appears to be a sincere commitment. “Ted Cruz Loves Orthodox Jews—and They Love Him Back”, is the way the website Politico put it last year. Similarly, newly-elected Vice-President Mike Pence, also an extremely conservative Republican with an across-the-board record of supporting all conservative positions, and a Roman Catholic, referred to Israel as “America’s most cherished ally”. He visited Israel in 2014 to express his support, and in 2016 as Governor of Indiana (a state where Jews comprise less than 1 per cent of the population) signed into law a bill which bans Indiana from having commercial dealings with any company that boycotts Israel. In Australia, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu was greeted by Malcolm Turnbull and his cabinet on his recent trip here like visiting royalty, in a manner which surely exceeded any required diplomatic protocol.

This love affair by many of the Western world’s conservative leaders with the State of Israel—and, by implication, with the Jewish people—is a recent development. Into the 1960s and beyond, there was a lingering unease by many Western conservatives with both the Jews and Israel, an attitude which may still exist among components of the British “Establishment”. Indeed, until fairly recently, many on the Right were overtly or covertly anti-Semitic; until 1945 (or beyond) anti-Semitism was almost always a major component of the ideology of the continental European Right. While the grosser forms of anti-Semitism were usually absent from the political Right in the English-speaking world, it always existed as a social attitude, probably until the 1960s.

Several factors comprised the bases of traditional right-wing anti-Semitism. Theological anti-Semitism—the Jews crucified Jesus and have stubbornly refused to recognise His Divine status as Saviour—was always a major driving force, especially in Europe. However, one factor in particular was probably the main element in right-wing anti-Semitism in the modern period until the 1940s: the rootlessness and statelessness of the Jews, their status as the only Western people without a geographically contiguous area of settlement, the necessary prerequisite for independent statehood. In contrast to all other peoples, the Jews were seen as a permanent class of aliens and strangers wherever they went.

The lack of a contiguous territory led to all the other distinctive and negative social characteristics of the Jews which set them apart from all other peoples. They lacked an aristocracy, a peasantry, and a military component of soldiers. The peculiar social structure of the Jews lay behind the image of the Jews as not merely different from any other European people, but dangerous, sinister and repellent. The unique failure of the Jews since Roman times to have a territory or state of their own was perhaps the most important single element in Hitler’s anti-Semitism, referred to in demented and ranting terms in Mein Kampf:

Since the Jew never possessed a state with definite territorial limits and therefore never called a culture his own, the conception arose that this was a people [of] nomads … [but] the Jew never thinks of leaving a territory he has occupied, and he sits so fast that even by force it is hard to drive him out … The Jew was never a nomad, but only and always a parasite in the body of other people … He is and remains a typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him.

Although (by definition) Hitler’s views are probably uniquely extreme, the core of his attacks on the permanent rootlessness and statelessness of the Jews was widely shared among European conservatives before 1945. Their rootlessness led Jews to be seen as constituting an international conspiracy, masterminding virtually every malign facet of the modern world—exploitative finance capital, communism, depraved and pornographic modern culture, atheism—all with the aim of destroying traditional European society, leading to control of its successor by the Jews.

What primarily accounts for the almost total reversal of Western conservative and right-wing attitudes towards the Jews in today’s world compared with the situation eighty years ago? The main reason, surely, has been the creation of the State of Israel and its maintenance against its Arab enemies by military force during the past seventy years.

Jews are no longer seen as cowards and parasites without an army, but, via the Israel Defence Force, a military superpower which has, time and again, vanquished its enemies. Perhaps the most visible facet of Israeli society apart from its soldiers is its Ultra-Orthodox religious sector, evidence that Israel is a nation which reveres its millennia-old past. It now has a normal social structure rather than an abnormal one. More basically, the Jews are no longer unique among European peoples in being without a contiguous geographical territory or stateless.

This fundamental change in image has allowed the Jews to be seen, not as subversives, but as one of the main progenitors of Western society, which invariably defends itself against its destructive enemies and more recently against terrorists by force. In other words, all of the distinctive characteristics of Israeli society as it has evolved since 1948 have accentuated its conservative values and diminished the radical and destructive image of the rootless Jews. It is also the case that Israelis are culturally self-confident about their national identity, patriotism and the morality of their national self-defence, in a way which is the opposite of the attitudes of today’s left-liberal elites and radical activists in most Western countries. While there are certainly left-wing Israeli dissenters from the actions of their government, they are smaller in number and more marginal than in Europe, America or Australia. The great majority of Israelis reflect a position of confident patriotism that has been absent from most Western discourse since the 1960s.

The reasons why the West’s conservatives now support Israel are the mirror image of the reasons why the West’s extreme Left hates Israel: in the Left’s eyes Israel is a military behemoth which usurped the land it occupies and is oppressing the Palestinians by force. As always, the Western Left’s hallmark is its drive for destruction, and especially the destruction of successful conservative institutions. It is also hallmarked by hypocrisy, in this case by ignoring or whitewashing the barbarity of the Islamic states and their terrorist movements with which Israel has to deal every day.

There has, in short, been a reversal of anti-Semitism during the past thirty or forty years, with hostility to the Jews moving from the extreme Right to the extreme Left. While many Jews, especially outside the United States, are well aware of this reversal, the large American Jewish community still remains mainly on the political Left (it is estimated that 75 per cent of American Jews voted for Hillary Clinton at last November’s election). Elsewhere, however, most Jews now support the right-of-centre parties—in Australia, in Britain, and in Israel. Instead of being proponents of radical change, they are now proponents of stability, which is how most of the gentile world now perceives them.