A Failing Culture Tries to Assert Itself

David Goldman has rendered us an inestimable service by conjuring the ghost of a famed seventeenth century French statesman, Cardinal Richelieu.

Considering the strange things that are happening in the world today, getting a ghost’s opinion does not seem completely out of line.

Richelieu’s theory seems original. At the least, it is uncommon. It wants us to be aware of the danger posed by dying cultures. When your culture is dying, when your language is becoming useless, when you are about to be absorbed in a larger, more successful culture, you might think that you have little choice but to go do war.

Since war is the ultimate form of competition, a failing culture might resort to it in order to assert its putative greatness.

Yet, the Richelieu theory emphasizes low birth rates. Cultures die out because their people do not reproduce. 

Surely, Ukraine, a dying culture, riddled with corruption, suffering a failure to replace its citizens, has every interest in fighting a war against Russia. Not because it is going to win the war, or because it can win the war, but because standing its ground against Russia enhances the country’s importance. 

If you were to ask what the tee-shirt model of a president is gaining from the war, the answer is clear: Volodymyr Zelensky went from Dancing with the Stars to being the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. The sense of self-importance that has surrounded this unimpressive man rubs off on to other Ukrainians. They are on the front lines of a war for the future of civilization. Surely, it beats belonging to a dying and failing culture.

As for Palestine, Richelieu remarks that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It was invented recently to cover up the simple fact that the Arabs who were displaced in the founding of the state of Israel were rejected by their fellow Arab states. 

When Jews were expelled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries, Israel accepted them. When Arabs chose to leave the Jewish state after its founding in 1948, they were not accepted by other Arab states. Many of them ended up in camps.

If this refugee population cannot settle in Israel, it will need to find homes in other Arab states. And, according to Richelieu, the Arab states still do not want them.

Half the Arabs living in Palestine before the declaration of the Jewish state were economic migrants who came when the Zionists began rebuilding the country. They were not a nation, but only hostages to the Arab states’ refusal to accept Israel’s existence. If, perchance, the Arab states should make peace with Israel—and in particular Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s holiest places—the Palestinians would have no reason to be there in the first place. They would simply be stateless Arabs.”

One might suggest, respectfully, that the issue has other layers of complexity. Aside from the fact that a Jewish state was first founded in the time of Moses, roughly three millennia ago, and that Palestine, as a country, was a twentieth century invention, it is also true that the modern Jewish state, founded as a response to the Holocaust, has as its basis, the need to keep Jewish culture and the Jewish religion alive.

So, allow me a variation on the Richelieu theme. I suggest that the Palestinian problem is cultural and civilizational failure. Israel has been a world class success. Its citizens have built a great modern nation out of nothing. 

Palestinians felt shamed by Israel’s success. How did it happen that their God did not allow them to prosper? One recognizes that the Israel/Palestinian civilizational clash should provide a definitive refutation of the theory, proposed by geographer Jared Diamond, that geography explains why some cultures succeed and others fail. In the case of Israel, they are living on the same land that Palestinians previously inhabited. And they have done great things, while Palestinians have been reduced to low tech slaughter.

Those who believe that America’s success, to take an obvious example, was built on criminal exploitation of people of color, will find the same narrative defining the Palestinian experience. People who seem incapable of building much of anything are reduced to destroying what others have built.

One recalls, from the days after the 9/11 attack that people were saying that Islam needed a Reformation. One understands that the terrorist attack on America was an effort to humiliate a nation that had out competed Muslim nations in the clash of civilizations.

Of course, the solution is not to deconstruct more successful cultures. The solution is for Muslim nations to join the modern world, to compete in the marketplace, to become technologically advanced, to produce wealth and to support their people. One day the oil is going to run out.

If such is the goal, Israel is the solution to the problems faced by the Arab Muslim world. It is not the problem. For this reason, more than a half dozen Muslim countries made peace with Israel during the Trump administration. 

And this explains why Saudi Arabia has been leading the march toward Muslim modernization. The issue of a Saudi alliance with Israel is the Saudi move toward the modern world. If MBS is right about this, the Palestinian leadership has gotten it completely wrong. They have sacrificed three generations of their people to a bad idea.

This suggests, as Cardinal Richelieu told David Goldman, that the Gulf States might pay lip service to the so-called Palestinian cause, but they are not going to tank their culture over a lost cause.

Richelieu said this:

The Gulf States are painfully aware that they have incubated a monster and are more anxious than anyone to be rid of it.”

So, a backwater third world failed culture decides to show that it is not quite as impotent as it appeared to be. Its supporters around the world cheered this assertion of high self-esteem. And yet, it was a pyrrhic victory, one that will soon be forgotten in the rubble of Gaza. 

Using borderline primitive means of destruction, the Hamas terrorists wreaked havoc and murdered hundreds of innocent civilians. Of course, everyone with an ounce of sense recognizes that murdering defenseless and unarmed civilians, women and children, makes you a coward, not a hero.

And yet, considering the record of Palestinian failure, it feels like success. Hopefully, the Israeli forces will make clear that a coward’s success is not a success at all, but a prelude to an even greater failure.

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