Kristol’s Thanksgiving Meditation Makes Central Role of Israel in Neo-Conservatism Clear
For those, particularly in the timid or
intimidated U.S. foreign-policy elite, who still pretend or somehow make
themselves believe that Israel is not absolutely central to the neo-conservative
worldview, I commend this week’s Thanksgiving editorial by Bill Kristol,
scion of one of the movement’s two founding families, in The Weekly
Standard, entitled “The West Fights Back”. While it deserves to be read —
and deconstructed — in full, here’s the meat:
For what the West stands against is
terror—whether the terror of modern secular totalitarianism or the terror of
an older, and now revitalized, religious fanaticism. From the Great Terrors of
Stalin and Hitler to the attacks on New York and Tel Aviv, and on Madrid,
Bali, and Mumbai, terrorists of all stripes know who their enemies are. They
attack across the world and kill Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—but they
grasp that the centers of resistance, the nations that stand most squarely in
their path, are the United States and Israel.
And so these two very different
nations—Christian and Jewish, large and small, new world and old (though the
new world nation is older than its newly reborn old world counterpart)—find
themselves allied. More than allied: They find themselves joined at the hip in
a brotherhood that is more than a diplomatic or political or military
alliance. Everyone senses that the ties are deeper than those of mere allies.
Israelis know that if the United States fails, so shall Israel. Americans
sense, in the words of Eric Hoffer, “as it goes with Israel so will it go with
all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon
us.”
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