This is my third and final post prompted by the dialogue between Nick Gillespie and Charles C.W. Cooke. The issue is foreign policy, and although they did not discuss Israel, I think that it is about that country that conservatives and libertarians get most confrontational–and uncharitable–with one another.
Conservatives want a strong national defense, and some libertarians (seemingly including Gillespie) are ok with that. However, conservatives often want to intervene in this barbarous world, and libertarians are against intervention.
One libertarian argument against interventionism is that the U.S. government that is our agent to perform such intervention is the same flawed, bumbling entity whose intervention in domestic affairs we fear. Cooke concedes that point. However, he does not regard it as a decisive argument against any and all intervention.
There are more than a few libertarians whose vehemence against Israel makes it difficult for me to picture them joining a conservatarian coalition. The most charitable interpretation that I can come up with for the libertarian antipathy toward Israel is the following:
American libertarians are anti-interventionist. Israel is a country that wants America to intervene in ways to protect its interests. America has sometimes (often?) done so. Without Israel there would be less American intervention, and because of that Israel deserves to be singled out for opprobrium.
The conservative view might be the following:
Israel’s and America’s interests generally align. Along the civilization vs. barbarism axis, Israel is far more civilized than its enemies. American intervention is constructive and appropriate.
Some libertarians and progressives blame Israel for the costly, counter-productive attempt to force democracy on Iraq. I think it is unfair to hold Israel responsible. While some Israelis, notably Natan Sharansky, indeed were keen on spreading democracy, his views were much more popular in the U.S. than in Israel. Faith in democracy as a solution to the problems in the Middle East is as American as apple pie. If anything, President Obama took that faith even farther than President Bush.
My own feelings about Israel are similar to those expressed by George Gilder in The Israel Test, which I wrote about a couple years ago. Gilder sees hostility to Israel as reflecting a dislike for dynamism and entrepreneurial success. Progressives can seem nostalgic for the socialist poverty that Israelis shared before the liberalizations that took place over the past 30 years or so.
For some American Christian conservatives, support for Israel has a religious basis that is off-putting to more secular people (and to many Jews). Otherwise, I think that American support for Israel among conservatives is based more on Israel’s circumstances than on its diplomacy or lobbying. If there were as many medieval fanatics surrounding Singapore or Switzerland, my guess is that the conservatives who see America as the Indispensable Nation would want us to be heavily involved in those areas as well.
Another possible argument for leaning against Israel is that one should do so in order to counter Jewish political pressure. However, my sense is that most Jews feel a stronger affinity to the cause of progressivism than to Israel’s government, particularly with a conservative at its head.
Yes, there are American Jews who advocate for the U.S. to pursue hawkish policies in the Middle East, but they are far outnumbered by other American Jews who loathe the hawks. My guess is that if Binyamin Netanyahu wanted to get into a popularity contest in America with Barack Obama, he would do better if American Jews were excluded from taking part in the poll.
Finally, I have to say that I have concluded that this is a topic on which people have a hard time disagreeing with one another charitably. If you (or I) want to voice an opinion on Israel in order to vent, then fine. But you (or I) should not expect that someone’s mind is going to change as a result. Instead, expect an uncharitable response.
While I expressed some of my views on Israel, they are beside the main point, and feel free to ignore them. The main point in this post is simply the observation that Israel profoundly divides conservatives from a significant group of libertarians. If you disagree with that, or you think that the divide is caused by something I have not mentioned, then by all means weigh in.
I’m neither Jewish nor Christian, but I am curious all the same as to why one group’s affinity (if you will) for another, on the basis of spirituality, might be off-putting?
Because they believe in Armegeddon. Holy War for the End Times is off-putting to many people.
Judaism believes in a coming Messiah, and an end of times, or Armegeddon, if you prefer. Holy war is in the eye of the beholder. But I ask again, and not to be difficult, but off-putting for whom?
Having grown up amongst them, perhaps I can give a better answer. The off-putting comes from a strain of fundamentalism which determines, from scripture, what Israel’s boundaries should be. Some bibles even have maps in the back illustrating these. Believers cheer on any war news or policy shifts which advance Israel to these boundaries, and regard any setbacks as only temporary, which God will soon intervene to fix. The boundaries are subject to some interpretation, but generally include all of the Palestinian lands, plus half of the Sinai penninsula, plus a fair chunk of Lebanon and some bits of Syria.
Some believers seem to want to help God along alternatively trying to delay the or hasten the end.
Now, on the Jewish front of the question.
According to some Chrisrian Fundamentlists, the survival of a Jewish State is indispensable to the rise of the Antichrist (some old school Fundamentalists even link him to the Pope, see Jack Chick’s tracts, for instance) and the Second Coming of Christ. According to them, the Jews will either be crushed by the Antichrist or convert to Christianity, tht is, their religion and culture will be gone. As useful as those prophecies can be for Israel, it is not difficult to see that the role they got can be off-putting for the Jews. Do you remember how some American fundamentalists said that Rabin’s death was God’s will because he was negociating with Arafat?
An ethno-nationalist state does not appeal to libertarians for many of the same reasons it’s not appealing to liberals.
I think a lot of libertarians see/hear about Israelis bulldozing Palestinian homes in the west bank and they see a predatory, collectivist government using force to take property from one group of people and transfer it to another. They hear about travel restrictions and have the same thoughts. They hear about the IDF restricting shipments of goods in and out of Gaza, etc. Nobody seems to have any opinion on how to deal with the militias that operate in Gaza, launching rockets at anything and everything there, though.
Libertarians often don’t deal well with these kinds of inter-group conflicts, given how individualist they (we) are.
Matt H and Jeff R make good points. I would add that more generally, your political language analysis could benefit from recognizing that many liberals and culturally leftish libertarians also engage in civilization-barbarism thinking. It’s just that we believe tradition, especially religious tradition, to be an enemy of civilization rather than a foundation of it. In looking at America this means we see coastal elites as civilized and traditionalist heartlanders as barbarian. In looking at Israel we see the cosmopolitans of Tel Aviv and Haifa, who have powered the entrepreneurial dynamism there, as civilized and the hardline ethnonationalists (especially the settlers) who anchor the present Israeli government as barbaric.
A recent Washington Post article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/24/why-most-american-jews-vote-for-democrats-explained/) argues that a majority of American Jews will support the party that is most committed to a separation of church and state. Republicans lose that support when they reach out to white Protestant evangelicals.
Of course, evangelicals have been losing ground in the culture war. If they ever find it in their own interest to support a libertarian separation of church and state, then they may find common ground with other religious minorities.
I think I’m mostly libertarian – I sometimes say practicalist libertarian.
It’s hard for me to see “local empowerment” as a way to less government – governments seemed to have arisen as protection rackets that overcame various local groups.
So the “solution” to the Arab/Israel dispute (and many others) requires a world in which there are no nation states, there is uniform fair just police services (a kind of pipe dream) and people are free, and perhaps to some degree required, to travel far and make world wide connections. A world in which being arab/palestinian/jewish/german/french is of low import, and having connections in south america, europe, and australia while living in japan is the source of identity, roles, and economic strength.
Barring such a much more integrated, high quality small government, world, we can expect violent conflicts to continue.
Again, it really depends what you mean by ‘conservative’. Paleoconservatives were never big fans of Israel, and don’t like interventions or foreign entanglements. For example, many were opposed to Kennedy’s foreign interventions, even though these were anti-communist efforts.
At a very minimum, I recommend people reread Hayek’s Why I am not a Conservative from 55 years ago. If you find that there is very little daylight between the sentiments that Hayek is expressing, and someone currently calling themselves a ‘conservative’ today, then the contemporary ‘conservative’ is really some kind of Libertarian or Neoconservative who is playing a little fast and loose with political terminology.
I judge, for example, that Yuval Levin and Jim Manzi, whatever they like to call themselves, are both closer to Hayek that the ‘conservatism’ he is criticizing and from which he is distancing himself. It’s off for his intellectual descendants to therefore call themselves ‘conservatives’ without explaining where they think Hayek went wrong.
I’m also surprised you didn’t mention the Palestinian and Occupation issues. Not that they really matter, but people certainly claim that these are the things that really matter.
But the reality is that Israel simply has a special salience in our political culture. People have strong and obsessive opinions on it, and the US relationship with it, that are completely out of proportion to their other foreign policy concerns, and orders of magnitude more intense than similar circumstances in other countries, which if they were doing what Israel is doing, those events would barely be deemed worthy enough to warrant a footnote, let alone the front-page headlines that the Israeli situation gets.
“If you disagree with that, or you think that the divide is caused by something I have not mentioned”
Race! Kling wants to avoid the issue of race, but that’s the heart of it. Jews are a sub ethnic grouping of whites. Many other ethnic groups hate Jews and hate whites. President Obama has spent most of his adult life advancing ethnic centric issues to benefit blacks often against the interests of whites. Israel has actually done genetic testing to verify the Jewishness of potential immigrants, so they are very racially motivated as well.
I’m stunned this crowd can hold these conversations and just avoid the central driving topic of race.
I’m only ever stunned at how often people are stunned. How exactly does race factor in let alone represent the main issue?
Jews expelled Palestinians, Arabs expelled Jews. It seems like everyone over there is cool with some form of race and or religious nationalism. If the Palestinians have a country, then we are left with a Jewish country and its national defense.
This where the left jumps the shark. I don’t know how they manage to make the oil rich, racist, barbaric Arabs (not all of them, just the definitionally barbaric ones- like the ones who expel Jews and treat Palestinians geopolytically opportunistically) out to be the oppressed but they try. I guess it boils down to who seems to be doing well must be the oppressor.
The Jews for their part acted a lot like the Palestinians act now before they staked claim to the land.
“How exactly does race factor in let alone represent the main issue?” <– How does race factor into whether people love or hate the ethnic nation state of the Jews? People who hate Jews and whites, typically hate Israel which is the official symbol and representation of those groups? Is that not obvious?
I wonder if many people are, in effect, unwilling to be ambivalent about ‘big’ questions.
I’m ambivalent about Israel. However, ambivalence is compatible with having a preference, even a half-hearted one. I agree with Walter Kaufmann’s observation that most conflicts are not a clash of Right vs. Wrong, but Wrong vs. Greater Wrong. Despite the legitimate criticisms that can be made of Israel — and despite sympathizing with the Arab position in some particulars — I tilt towards Zion.
I am reminded of Ayn Rand’s seeming lack of ambivalence about Israel, which is … interesting. There is, ahem, just a little tension in being a ‘radical for capitalism’ and strongly supporting a state that, however understandably, is of the ‘welfare-warfare’ variety.