Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Christian Lebanese Arabs
actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the
neighborhood, and was responsible, at some theoretical level,
for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps.
Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the
world's outrage at the killings. Commenting on these events,
the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in
disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"
I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The
fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists,
several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports
Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have
said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish
lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have
expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this
way: While I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers"
(perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this
stuff comes pretty close though I should say in fairness, most
is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot
of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab
terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American
politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer
blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her.
Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead
Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some
were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered
or abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think
these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-
Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American
involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is
hesperophobia.
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest.
Its roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west"
and phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an
English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate." Hesperophobia
is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical
stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my
last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am
sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as
they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it
seems to have been current among educated late-republican
Romans.]
Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The
name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in
Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries,
European civilization the West is widely hated. Matter of
fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as
you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.
I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of
Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow,
hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab
hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the
Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs
don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we
humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their
culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the
other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand.
Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society
achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing
all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these
other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction
of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the
Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the
encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them,
like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or
less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are
still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the
Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have yet been able to attain
rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at
the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab
world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's
book, The Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those
first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift,
deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of
elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate
constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling,
ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot.
(That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs
the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-
conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants
while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the
West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of
one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated
since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-
thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial
Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad
about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the
Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not
have forgotten the Gulf War.
If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and
bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to
imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York
Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas,
synagogues, or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls
or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the
West as much, or more.
Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that
Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of
Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the
hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely:
Hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since
the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab
apologists that the Jews were contented and well treated in the
old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: More often than not,
they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan
Peters's From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the
Middle East Crisis</a>. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or
any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate
creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy
and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts
for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an
alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder
of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the
squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture
by comparison with another.
So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we
doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well,
U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any
position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging
full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my
Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at
least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-
Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West
must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American
isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in
other places.
What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if
carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If
we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend
themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market
take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash
on the nail? Apparently not: Several of my correspondents have
explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of
their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons,
then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they
already have lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't
arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries
China, for example are gleefully arming the Arabs and other
Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?
And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our
support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few,
and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state,
and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen
since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what?
Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho
chips in hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a
vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.
Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes
down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces
of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist,
nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the
pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up
to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend
not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli
policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or
Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have
to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is
being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours,
at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and
the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand
times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is,
you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies'
imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What
happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-
Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism. It was in part
all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of
hesperophobia.
By John Derbyshire Sept. 13, 2001
