Open any American paper this spring, and you will find the same headline rephrased a dozen different ways: support for Israel is plummeting. The pollsters everyone quotes are Pew, and while Pew is not the Torah, nor the Gospel, the question raised by the headlines are worth taking seriously. How close are the Israeli and American conservative movements today?
Conservatives fight to conserve Western civilization. What conservatives in any given country actually conserve, though, depends entirely on which enemy is at their gate. Which means every conservative movement is shaped first by what is trying to destroy it, and next, by what it believes.
Both Israel and the United States share similar values despite their distinct beginnings. The U.S. is a constitutional republic founded by deeply religious Protestant Christians based on biblical values and Aristotelian ethics. Israel is an ethnonational state founded by secular Jews, coupled with a desperate need for a state in which they could live safely following the Holocaust.
But different origins mean we do not fight the same battles. Unlike American conservatives, who cling to the ideals of their nation’s founders and the Constitution, the Israeli right rejects many of the ideas of Israel’s founders, like David Ben-Gurion and his Mapai party (The Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel), which included socialism and support for a two-state solution. Decades of fighting radical Islam have forced the Israeli right to realize something that an atheist-based left could never possibly understand: this is a religious war.
2+However, Israel’s right sometimes fails to see that in the war against the West, the battlefront where Jews and Christians face Islam is not the only one. Mark Levin wrote in Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, “The Conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny.” There’s no doubt that what Israel faces in the form of ‘Palestinian’ liberation is tyranny – all it must do is look to any other Muslim country, and it will find the oppression of Christianity and Judaism, among other examples that oppose Western values.
Israelis must understand that tyranny can also come in the form of licentiousness and socialism. American conservatives are fighting on a different battlefield, against that very type of tyranny. The progressive left, in the name of what Concordia University professor Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy, butchers close to a million babies a year in abortions, mutilates people in ‘sex assignment surgeries,’ opened America’s borders to hordes of third-world migrants with incompatible cultures, and on a wider scale, takes a wrecking ball to all of the institutions on which the West is built.
2+Israel has been spared the worst of the leftist mind virus, although we still have symptoms like a soft-on-crime judicial system, the enlistment of women into the armored corps, or holding a Pride festival at the historical location of Sodom and Gomorrah. Israel’s constant struggle to exist prevents our society from looking inward and engaging in cultural self-criticism. In other words, we’re focused on Hamas, not transing our kids.
None of this is just an accident of culture. It is also an accident of geography. The United States is an extremely privileged country, rich in resources and weaponry, with an advanced culture, governmental structure, and size. No less important is its location. Two countries and two oceans neighbor America, and though Canada and Mexico are flawed in their own right, they are immensely preferable to any country surrounding Israel, and unlike Israel’s neighbors, they do not openly wish to destroy America and everyone in it. This grants the U.S. many more opportunities to engage in social experiments with terrible ideas. The threat on the border is just different.
2+Lastly, there is the obvious point of distinction, and the very reason political disagreement exists in the first place, which is religion. U.S. conservatives are largely Christian, and Israel’s right is almost entirely Jewish and tends to be religious. But funny enough, Judaism and Christianity differ very little as a basis for society.
American conservatives and the Israeli right may have distinct characteristics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they disagree politically. Each focuses on different enemies of Western civilization: Israel on Islamism, and the U.S. on progressivism. Those enemies, the red-green alliance, grow ever-closer. American and Israeli conservatives can win by sticking together and focusing on what we do have in common – our civilization.
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Golan Israel is an international correspondent for C14 Israel. Views expressed are his own.