The world goes mad: Behind society's obsession with Israel
The past eight months have felt absurdly Kafkaesque. Our bizarre and disorienting reality defies any logical explanation. We feel utterly powerless in facing an angry mob which shrieks “Death to the Jews.” The world has gone mad.Jonathan Tobin: Netanyahu is right to reject vassal-state etiquette
That these malicious threats come from our Arab enemies is tragic but understandable. Our enemies in the Arab world have consistently opposed any Jewish presence in Israel. The issue for them isn’t borders, refugees, or the suffering of innocent Palestinians but rather their outright denial of the right of any Jew to breathe air in a sovereign Jewish Israel.
However, what is illogical and even dystopian is the odd coalition forged to support rapists and serial murderers. It is surreal to watch crowds of Asian college students blindly back mass murderers while vilifying the victims of savage brutality. It is appalling to witness African Americans, whose legitimate rights Jews have heroically defended, turn their backs on us while spewing venomous antisemitism. And amid this theater of the absurd, the most farcical scene is that of the LGBT community, known for its policy of unconditional embrace and tolerance, suddenly turn into a hate-filled assembly of bigots.
Why have members of Generation Z lost their minds and their senses? What is causing this wholesale insanity, and what does this say about our own culture?
The age of bewilderment
Often, when humanity experiences sudden and dramatic change, confusion sets in. When the old system is unceremoniously and swiftly swept aside, humanity is plunged into an identity crisis.
Sometimes this leads to healthy progress. The Renaissance period emerged in the aftermath of the black plague of the 14th century which wiped out up to half of the European population. Further cultural disruptions such as the invention of the printing press and the discovery of the New World prompted humanity to rethink its basic assumptions. The ensuing cultural reboot led to the empowerment of man, the unleashing of his human potential, and the dramatic modernization of the human condition.
However, rapid and unpredictable change can also cause cultural anxiety and societal vertigo. Prolonged cultural dizziness doesn’t often end well.
World War I completely washed away the existing world order, obliterating empires and redrawing the maps of Europe. Additionally, the transportation revolution shrank the world, while industrialization relocated populations into crowded cities. Newly discovered scientific theories altered the way we viewed ourselves. Instead of inhabiting a space cut to human size, we were now just an infinitesimally small part of “a billion years and a billion spheres.” Humanity felt incomprehensibly displaced from itself.
As Kafka wrote in his short story “The Hunter Gracchus”: “My ship has no rudder and no compass and no steering wheel; I am driven forward by the wind, which gives me no time to look around, not even a chance to consider where I am going.”
Inter-war Europe didn’t know what to do with itself. Its inner angst metastasized into incoherent rage directed at the perceived cause of this cultural displacement. Jews are always easy targets.
Generation Z is experiencing a similar maelstrom of confusion and anxiety. Like the printing press 700 years ago, the Internet revolution has radically transformed our lives, our communication, and both our communal and personal identity. The development of AI is just as revolutionary as the discovery of the New World and will be just as transformative. The world feels both larger than ever and smaller than ever. Once again, like a century ago, confusion and bewilderment are fueling rage and discontent.
Pushing back pays dividendsIt's Springtime for Mahmoud Abbas
The claim that Netanyahu’s outspokenness is damaging the alliance misses the point. Israel may be an American client state, but given the existential nature of the conflict that was reignited by the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, it simply cannot afford to behave like a docile vassal.
Indeed, if there is anything that Netanyahu has learned in his long tenure as prime minister it is that those who always counsel caution and silence in the face of American betrayal don’t succeed. It is only by speaking up and making Israel’s case to the world, and most specifically, the American people, that it can maintain the alliance.
Obama seethed when in 2011—with him sitting right there—Netanyahu lectured him about the unacceptability of a forced Israeli retreat to the 1967 borders at a public White House media availability a day after that was the substance of a presidential speech. Later, the Obama White House depicted Netanyahu’s 2015 address to a joint meeting of Congress in which he urged Americans to reject the Iran nuclear deal as an unprecedented insult to the United States, the presidency and Obama personally. In both cases, Netanyahu’s behavior was denounced as destructive to the relationship and beyond the pale.
But he was right to understand that talking back to Obama strengthened dissent against policies aimed at undermining Israel and strengthening Iran, both in the United States and abroad.
By demonstrating a willingness to defend Israel’s vital strategic interests, even at the cost of being depicted as an extremist or the dispute being a function of his own partisan interests and personal animus for Obama, Netanyahu achieved real results. Given Obama’s determination to make it his signature foreign-policy accomplishment, he couldn’t stop the Iran deal from being adopted. But his speech emboldened the GOP to move further towards Israel. It also showed the Arab world that while Obama was leaving them to the tender mercies of the terror-funding Shi’ite tyrants of Tehran, they could count on a strong Israel as an ally against it. In retrospect, Netanyahu’s speech must be seen as the first step in developing the 2020 Abraham Accords.
Who is playing politics?
Biden came into office claiming that he would be different from Obama and keep disputes with Israel private. That changed once Netanyahu won the November 2022 Israeli elections and returned to the prime minister’s office. Since then, the hostility that Biden and the rest of the Obama alumni running American foreign policy have for Netanyahu has not been kept under wraps. The administration has not merely undermined the Jewish state but has openly conspired with the Israeli opposition, and even members of the military and intelligence establishment, in an effort to topple Netanyahu’s government both before and after Oct. 7.
At this point, Netanyahu has nothing to lose by not allowing Biden to get away with slowing down the flow of arms to pressure Israel to stand down at its borders on the north and south.
There are plenty of cogent criticisms to be made about Netanyahu, including those involving Oct. 7 happening on his watch and the dysfunctional nature of his governmental coalition. Regardless of how long Netanyahu lasts in office—and right now, it is not the prime minister but Biden who, in appeasing the anti-Israel intersectional left wing of the Democratic Party, is playing politics over the war—or what you think of his character, policies or tactics, he needs to use every form of leverage to counter U.S. pressure that could ensure victories for Hamas and Iran. With so many lives at stake, client-state etiquette should be the last of his concerns.
For his part, Abbas is working hard to capitalize on the present moment. His government has announced that it is prepared to provide a “political solution” to the current situation in Gaza, post-ceasefire. And at the recent Gaza Emergency Humanitarian Response Conference in Jordan earlier this month, the PA proposed an ambitious three-stage recovery plan encapsulating its vision for the enclave.
That plan is extensive—and expensive. The first phase alone, focused on a six-month “emergency response” period, would cost a whopping $1.3 billion. The money, naturally, would come from international donors, and the PA would administer it to create “social protection and housing provision, as well as health, education and infrastructure programs”—things that the West Bank itself needs significant help with, and international oversight over.
In other words, the Palestinian Authority is asking the international community to empower one failed state to rebuild another.
Nevertheless, Abbas’ pitch might just end up working. The international community is increasingly desperate to secure a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians by any means necessary. As international desperation has grown, what would ordinarily be something of a non-starter, given the PA’s abysmal governance record, has become more palatable to policymakers in Washington and beyond.
That is a shame, because the Palestinian Authority has proven itself thoroughly unfit to govern. “Under different circumstances—if the PA were a more effective, clean government, better trusted by its people—one might imagine it returning to Gaza when this war ends and leading the process of reconstruction and recovery,” Washington Institute scholar Ghaith al-Omari has observed. “But Palestinians have no confidence that the PA has their interests at heart; the international community does not trust it to administer funds on the scale of those that will be needed for reconstruction; and the PA anyway lacks the institutional infrastructure to do the job.”
Under these conditions, entrusting the PA with administering the “day after” in Gaza isn’t a workable solution, no matter how appealing Abbas’ current pitch might be at the moment. It is, rather, simply a surefire way to throw good money after bad.
Sadly, Washington and its allies seem more and more inclined to do just that.