RUTHFULLY YOURS

Critics have taken to calling the leftist agitators who are running roughshod over university campuses hypocrites. The reasoning is that these self-described social-justice warriors, by shouting down speakers, silencing dissent on social media, and forcing resignations from those they accuse of “injustice,” are betraying the very toleration that allows them to speak freely. Unfortunately, the charge mischaracterizes, not just campus crybullies, but also campuses themselves. Agitators from various radical campus groups, like their predecessors of the 1960s, are not pursuing or even advocating tolerance as a core value (though they may take advantage of those who offer it to them). Rather, they are pursuing power. What is more, those expecting toleration to bring sanity back to campus are placing their faith in the wrong principle. Toleration is a highly useful tool for ordered liberty, but it is far from sufficient for ordered liberty. In practice, toleration is what those in authority give to dissenters; it is not a condition of equal respect for all opinions. Indeed, all societies value some perspectives over others, and to pretend otherwise is to leave the door open for the most radical among us to tear down our society in the name of “progress.”

The progressive myth of an ever-expanding openness to diversity of opinion always has been at best unrealistic and at worst a falsehood uttered in bad faith. The idyll it presents is perfectly suited for the preening of progressive academics, who see their campuses as, properly, neutral spaces within which Truth is pursued by calm, civil, rational individuals concerned only with testing ideas and hypotheses for improving society. The idea is that one can have a community in which there are no orthodoxies, only the free exchange of ideas. Of course, the myth of a neutral square is a particularly false and dangerous orthodoxy, for it puts debate into the straightjacket of scientism (a false sense of what empirical reason, divorced from first principles, can accomplish) and leaves the public square less neutral than open to explosions of emotivism. By pretending that the public square can do without authority, those who actually exercised it for several decades—progressive rationalists—undermined their own already suspect legitimacy, opening the way for the latest round of radicalization.

Our universities abandoned tolerant, civil discourse long ago in favor of a soul-numbing emptiness. The emptiness was sold to us as “free inquiry,” but actually was an attempt to eliminate traditional norms in favor of a caricatured version of the scientific method that purports to value reason above all else. As it has succeeded, this campaign has been replaced by a more vigorous movement to replace supposedly value-neutral faux-scientism with raw emotion and politics. Today’s students and their enablers among professors and administrators seem far more dangerous than their scientistic predecessors. But in truth they are their logical successors and are no more intolerant than those who paved the way for their ascendance.

The problems begin at home, and so do the solutions,” concludes Elliott Abrams in his trenchant analysis of why growing numbers of American Jews are drifting apart from Israel. He most certainly is correct: the drift described in his essay tells us far more about the internal dynamics of American Jewish life than about Middle Eastern realities.

Abrams might have added: ’twas ever thus. Israel has always been a canvas upon which a good many American Jews have projected both their aspirations and their insecurities. That was the case during the early years of statehood when American Jews saw themselves as indulgent patrons of their somewhat primitive Israeli clients. It was so when American Jews drew strength and pride from the military prowess of the Israel Defense Forces, in whose feats of battle they did not have to shed an ounce of blood. It has been true more recently as Birthright Israel has sent over a half-million young Jewish adults on free trips to Israel in order to help them reconnect with their Jewish identities and return as more engaged Jews in America. And—alas—it continues to be the case today, when, absorbing the hostility directed at Israel by journalists, academics, and other elites, growing numbers of Jews have found it harder to summon positive reasons for identifying with the Jewish state.

And why, after all, should they? Does any other group in America identify as strongly with the inhabitants of a foreign country? True, when an earthquake or other catastrophe strikes abroad, altruistic Americans send money and supplies to help the victims. But the longstanding preoccupation of sizable numbers of American Jews with the Israeli condition is probably without parallel in the American historical experience.

Such unnatural concern can only be driven by powerful convictions: a shared religious faith, a deep grasp of the common fate binding all Jews, and an intuitive understanding of the profound link between the two countries’ shared values and interests. Fortunately, a majority of Americans of all faiths partake of that last-named intuition. Unfortunately, growing numbers of American Jews, as Abrams observes, have become so deracinated that they no longer associate themselves with any of these convictions.

For my part,I would distinguish among different types of dissenters. It is evident from opinion research that growing numbers of American Jews are enamored neither of Israel’s present prime minister nor of specific policies formulated by Israel’s government. I am not especially put off when American Jews debate the merits of particular Israeli policies; Jews, after all, are a notoriously contentious and verbal people. What makes the contentiousness worrisome is not disagreement but the breakdown of civil conversation in communal circles.

The misnamed “State” of Palestine is preparing another assault on Israel at the Palestinians’ favorite “international” venue, the United Nations. The Palestinian Authority circulated a completely one-sided draft Security Council resolution to UN diplomats earlier this month.

The Palestinian draft resolution demanded that Israel “cease all settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.” While condemning “all acts of terror” and expressing “serious concern over continuing violence against civilians,” the draft resolution blames specifically only Israeli settlers for “acts of terror, violence, destruction, harassment and provocation.” There is not a single word about the constant violence committed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians.

The draft reportedly has the support of enough members of the Security Council to be adopted, absent a veto by the United States. In an effort to forestall such a veto, the Palestinian drafters focused the resolution on Israeli settlements, which the Obama administration has routinely condemned.

In addition, the Palestinian drafters incorporated some sweeteners in their proposed resolution, no doubt intended to persuade the Obama administration to at least abstain. For example, the draft refers positively to the Middle East Quartet, of which the United States is a member. It calls on “all parties to exert collective efforts to launch credible negotiations on all final status issues in the Middle East peace process” according to terms endorsed by the Quartet. The draft calls upon both parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “to act on the basis of international law, including international humanitarian law,” and to “refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric.” The draft encourages “a genuine commitment to the two-State solution,” referencing in particular the Arab Peace Initiative. The Arab Peace Initiative, which President Obama has praised, offered Israel normalization of relations with its neighbors in return for Israel’s complete withdrawal from the “occupied territories” (“including East Jerusalem”) to essentially the pre-1967 lines and a “just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Resolution 194 stated that any refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”