This morning’s One Jerusalem conference call was with George Gilder, the Reaganomics revolutionary who’s now a capitalism and technology guru. His new book is the The Israel Test. The book’s argument is two-fold, per a couple of Gilder’s lines from the conference call: “Israel’s technologies lead the world today” and Israel is hated precisely because “what Israel does is the best in the world.” Israel is despised not because of where it supposedly fails – human rights violations, occupation, etc – but because of where it’s most successful – capitalism. The left’s blind and irrational anti-Israel fanaticism is driven by pure, old fashioned resentment.
The audio from the call should be on the One Jerusalem frontpage soon enough. You should at least take 5 minutes to listen to Gilder’s synopsis of the book – clear, concise, powerful. In the meantime other bloggers from the call – Carl from Israel Matzav, Clyde Middleton from Patriotroom.com, and Rick Richman from Jewish Current Issues – will probably also post their thoughts.
Gilder’s Israel Test has a relatively precise definition:
The [Israel] test can be summarized by a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to their excellence or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?
In a lot of ways the book takes Gilder’s old argument that anti-capitalism emerges out of old-fashioned vulgar resentment and applies it to the contemporary Middle East. That a lot of anti-capitalism is tied up in ugly envy is pretty straightforward. You can see it in the eyeroll-inducing schadenfreude that erupted across Europe last year:
The spectacle of highly paid American bankers falling on their faces inspired smug lectures from afar about the reckless pursuit of profits, disdain for regulation, and manic risk-taking that characterize U.S.-style capitalism. The tsk-tsk-ing reached a new level with a cover story in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, “The End of Arrogance”: “The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics.” The piece notes the delicious irony of the United States having to nationalize parts of its financial system. “The Americans are now paying the price for their pride,” it notes. “Gone are the days when the U.S. could go into debt with abandon.” Gone, too, are the days of “turbo-capitalism” imposing its mores of “avarice and greed” on the global economy.
It’s a vicious cycle. Hatred of Israel, a shining jewel of the free market, fuels anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism, which gives the Jewish State breathing room to excel, fuels anti-Semitic resentment.
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