Sailer on Carter

From Taki's magazine:

A Separate Peace (Part One)
By Steve Sailer

Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid has been highly controversial due to its title, and not just for its puzzling lack of punctuation. (Isn’t Palestine Peace Not Apartheid missing a colon and a comma?)

When I heard it was being furiously denounced for anti-Semitism by all the usual suspects, I hoped that meant that the 82-year-old Carter had reached that highly entertaining stage of the Presidential life cycle identified in John Stewart’s America (The Book) as “The President as Angry Coot.” I was looking forward to another Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s bestselling 1974 collection of the aged Harry Truman’s fascinating fulminations.

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, however, turns out to be blandly suave, a reasonable and readable quick introduction to the well-known problems besetting the Holy Land, although hardly the final word on this convoluted and endlessly contentious subject.

The main evidence for Carter having given in to the cranky pleasures of Elderly Tourette’s Syndrome is his use of the A-Word in his title, which has given the Neocon Establishment fits. [More]

Part Two will be later this week in Taki's.

Noted foreign policy commentator Leon Hadar emails in reply:

In general, I probably agree with the main points you raised about the demographic problems that Israelis are facing (in fact, I had written two pieces on the topic for The American Conservative) and the need for "separation" or being "apart."

My main problem is with your insistence on describing Israel as a "European" outpost in the Middle East as opposed to say, a "Westernized" nation-state (like Singapore, for example). I'm not sure that the notion of a conflict between "settlers" and "natives" reflects the reality of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians which is not very different from the ethnic and tribal conflicts in most of the former Ottoman Empire, in the Balkans (no need to elaborate there) and in the Middle East (Kurds/Berbers/Maronites vs. Arabs).

In fact, some of the Shiites in the Arabian Peninsula are descendants of Persian "settlers" and there has been a large wave of Moslem settlers from Egypt and the Levant into Palestine during the 19th and 20th centuries (and let's not forget the population exchanges between Turkey and Greece).

Now. It's true that most of the founders of the Zionist movement were from Eastern and Central Europe. But the majority of the Israeli-Jews who were born in Israel since 1948 descend from Mizrahi/Sepharadi Jews or from mixed marriages between Ashkenazim and Sepharadim that has produced a Hebrew nation with its own territorial identity, language, culture that is not very different from that of Greece and Ireland and is also much "apart" from the American-Jewish community. In fact, as I pointed in my piece in TAC, some of the non-Jewish immigrants from Russia who settled in Israel are gradually becoming part of this Hebrew nation without converting.

In general, the problem in Israel/Palestine is more similar to what has happened in the former Yugoslavia, or Cyprus, or Iraq, in terms of a struggle between ethnic/religious groups over territory than to what took place in South Africa. The two communities will have to separate or to continue living in this never-ending civil war.

Certainly, Israel is becoming more of a Middle Eastern culture and less of a European one as time goes by.

Yet, that can't account for the extraordinary passions it excites around the region and around the world. In Lebanon, in contrast, local Christians, Muslims (of two kinds), Palestinians (Christian and Muslim), and Miscellaneous (Druze) pounded each other for 15 years from 1975-1990, but the world got heartily bored with the Lebanese civil war after the first year, with interest reviving only, tellingly enough, during Israel's 1982 invasion.

So, why the human race's obsession with Israel? First, it's the Holy Land. People really do get worked up over Jerusalem (e.g., the Crusades and the Jerusalem Syndrome that regularly causes manic episodes among tourists in Jerusalem).

Second, the Israelis are Jews, and people get heated up, pro and con, over Jews (e.g., no doubt the comments section of my blog will illustrate this!).

But third, Israel is the only new country of Europeans established outside of Europe since 1945. To much of the world, it looks like a Western colony, and the age of Western colonies is supposed to be over.

Now, you can point out that Israelis are listening to less Mahler and to more Oriental Jewish pop music, but as long as they keep winning wars like a Western power fighting natives, they'll be perceived as Westerners. (Of course, judging by recent Israeli trends -- military ineptitude against Hezbollah; pervasive corruption; the naked, drunken, pervy ambassador to El Salvador being recalled in shame -- Israel appears to be getting more Third Worldy, so perhaps it won't provoke such resentment among its dysfunctional neighbors in the future as it descends more toward their level of competence.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer