My observations and experiences during my April-May trip to Israel continue to stimulate my mind.
What I call the Holocaust In Slow Motion, the daily killing of Israeli civilians over a four year period (1999-2004), had a profound effect on Israelis and subsequently on me.
I’m sure that several academics are writing 600 page books on this subject. I’m a thinker with no academic pretense, so I’ll explain what I see as the converging realities and the discarded realities as presented in concentrated form in Israel.
Commerce meets tit-for-tat.
The big converging reality is the triumph of modernity and commerce. This triumph is well described in Daniel Yergin’s Commanding Heights. The end of the Cold War and ten years of uninterrupted American economic and productivity growth at historically high levels were overwhelming forces as we entered the 21st Century.
When Israelis recently awoke from the Jews in Diaspora experience (I’ll get to that in a moment) they found the reality around them was the triumph of commerce. Israelis have almost totally accepted that as their new reality and discarded the old socialist order that had been the foundation of the State of Israel.
Tit-for-tat is an absurdly simple, but profoundly important discovery. Game theory, using computer simulation, found to a high level of certainty something philosophy hadn’t noticed in three thousand years, or that philosophy got wrong: tit-for-tat.
Tit-for-tat is the observation that the best way to interact with other human beings in nearly all situations is to treat them kindly until they first abuse you, then you immediately abuse them back until they change their behavior and revert to kindness, if they ever do revert. This is true for individuals and may be true for states.
Jews have been an oppressed minority for several thousand years and they have generally been abused. Jews never got much chance to learn tit-for-tat theory because it only applies when the other party cannot or will not totally wipe you out.
So Jews developed and supported many modern institutions that protect minorities, in an effort to create protections for themselves. Jews helped create minority-protecting institutions such as democracy, rule of law, rational and scientific thinking, notions of universal human rights, socialism and unions. Jews also tried to make themselves valuable to their majority dominators in the fields of medicine and banking.
When Jews became Israelis they promptly realized that cowardice and servility only got them killed in their 8th Century Arab neighborhood.
Some Israelis tried to bring their Arab neighbors into the 20th Century using the same principles: democracy, rule of law, rational and scientific thinking, notions of universal human rights, socialism and unions. Need I say it didn’t work?
Many other Israelis intuitively became strong, forceful, forthright and powerful. They created the most powerful and effective army on the planet. They demonstrated their military and technical power twice by defeating the Arab neighbors who were five times their size. (Of course anti-Semitism has not abated in the slightest as the cowardly Jews became mighty Israelis).
After forty years of slow movement from the Diaspora Jewish views of great thinkers like Martin Buber, Israel slowly moved toward the stronger tit-for-tat position of a forceful State.
When Arafat and the Palestinians brought Israelis the Holocaust in Slow Motion, 1999-2004, Israelis woke up from the millennia of Jewish Diaspora servility. Israelis awoke as a whole people and opened their eyes to the emerging world of commerce and the need for pure tit-for-tat behavior.
Today Israelis, and me, are challenging all the ideas and institutions that they (we) had relied on in Diaspora. Socialism and unions are clearly passé. Universal human rights have been aggressively used against Israelis, they probably should be discarded or radically altered.
Democracy and the rule of law are up for re-examination. Democracy, for a country under life threatening siege, may not work. Israel’s first great contribution to democracy under siege has been the invention of unity government. Rule of Law? The Israeli Supreme Court is tempting that core value every time they tell the military to move the security wall for the benefit of Arabs.
Only rational thought and science have survived the Arab onslaught. Now Israelis have to find out more about creating a rational (non-ideological) society.
Creating a rational society in the age of commerce is a subject the world has only toyed with in the past. It is time to take the subject seriously.