Israel: Leader of the Free World
For eight decades after the end of World War Two, America’s proudest title was “Leader of the Free World.” Today, that title properly belongs to Israel both on grounds of practical leadership and grasp of what it means to be a free people.
The issues in the Middle East could hardly be simpler. The opposition is between tyranny, dependency, and resentment on one side, and liberty and its fruits on the other.
The essence of liberty is self-government, of which political democracy is but one component and not the most important. First and foremost, liberty means not equal participation in government of others but governance of the self.
A self-governing people can be recognized by two traits. The first is that they do not whine. They do not expect to be catered to like children. They take responsibility for their own thriving.
No nation in the world today excels in self-reliance more than Israel. Israelis don’t complain; they fight. The very essence of Zionism is that no Jew should ever again be a pet, dependent on the forbearance of some alien elite for their very survival.
The second trait of self-governing naturally follows the first. Free people create more than they consume. Creative in the image of their creator, they flourish. Afflicting the world is arbitrary misery, along with plagues and lean years. There are tempests and earthquakes. Yet even these always seem to strike the hardest where liberty and the prosperity it naturally creates are scarce.
Liberty invites every man to contribute to the general prosperity by work oriented to the needs of others. Tyranny wastes a people’s energy, not merely through bureaucracy and interference from without, but by envy, resentment, and violence stemming from refusal to take responsibility for one’s fate. If Gaza is a hellhole, the refusal of self-government is what made it so.
Envy is the sin of Cain and leads naturally to murder. The question put repeatedly to a free people is whether they view the exceptional accomplishments of others as examples to admire and emulate, and new sources of opportunity, or whether they greet these achievements with envy and demands for some unearned “fair share.”
How a person or a nation responds to the merit of others, who excel them in intellect and accomplishment, is what I have called “the Israel Test.” My book by that title—“The Israel Test: How Israel’s Genius Enriches and Challenges the World”—will be republished later this month with a new Foreword by Dennis Prager and a new Introduction by me. A nation’s reaction to Israel has become the most crucial test of a free people.
That the United States now equivocates between Israel and its enemies, even to tolerating antisemitic violence at home, may be the most alarming signal yet of American decline and refusal to lead for liberty.
Israel’s leadership, remarkably, is not merely moral but supremely practical.
Forty-plus years after Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, America still does not have a serious missile defense. The U.S. Patriot air defense system is more expensive and less effective than Israel’s system, which includes not only Iron Dome but also the longer-range David’s Sling and Arrow systems. Arrow can and does take out ballistic missiles above the atmosphere.
The U.S. Aegis system, now with laser capabilities, is an astounding achievement. Alas. it is deployed in the lost cause of defending a carrier force made obsolete by satellites that can find the lumbering ships anywhere, exposing them to relentless attack.
The United States could not repeat at scale anything like Israel’s near-perfect repulse of the mass Iranian missile and drone attack of last April. If, as seems increasingly likely, Iran goes to all-out war against Israel, it will be Israel, not the United States, that defeats our greatest enemy in the region. If the Iranian nuke program is terminated, it will be by Israel and not the United States. Israel is now fighting our wars and winning. So, who is the leader of the Free World now?
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