ISRAEL IS ENGLISH, THE ARABS ARE FRENCH:

Democratic State (Lee Smith, 3/02/11, Tablet)

Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

Of course, Israel too started out French, in its socialist founding, but has moved as far as it can into the Anglosphere without formally converting to Christianity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2011 6:31 AM