Israel and the Multipolar World

By Kevin MacDonald for the Occidental Observer

The new Israeli government is by far the most radically right in its history—and that’s saying a lot. As a result, there have been a number of protests against Israel and Zionism both in Israel and on American college campuses recently. These are likely to increase in number and intensity because of the new government which is the result of a long process of demographic change resulting from the high fertility of Orthodox and strongly ethnonationalist Jews. As we are well aware, demography is indeed destiny.

Recently there was a large protest against Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in Washington. Since the new government was installed, there has been increased settler and IDF violence, and “Smotrich called for the Palestinian village of Huwwara to be ‘wiped out.’ His remarks have received widespread condemnation. The U.S. State Department called them “disgusting,” but approved Smotrich’s visa.”

This is a typical U.S response to Israel—big on words but no action. Smotrich also told an audience in Paris that “there’s no such thing as “Palestinian people”—again the U.S. complained but again, nothing will change. Smotrich outlined his belief that Israel has exclusive Jewish, God-ordained rights to the land, and the lectern was adorned with a map of Israel that included the occupied Palestinian territory and the country of Jordan as part of Israeli territory.” And after Jordan, all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates as promised in Genesis. After the speech, Jordan says it is reviewing its relationship to Israel

This is having repercussions in the U.S., at least among liberals. What Israel is doing is the direct opposite of the Wokeness promoted by the left in the U.S.:

For the first time in Gallup’s polling, going back to 2000, Democrats said they sympathized with Palestinians more than with Israelis in the long-standing conflict between the two: 49% of Democrats said they sympathized more with Palestinians, 38% with Israelis and 13% said they favored neither side.

Overall, a majority of Americans, 54%-31%, sympathize more with the Israelis, the poll found, but the gap between the two in U.S. opinion has narrowed significantly. Much of the shift in U.S. opinion has come from millennials, whose sympathy for the Israelis has dropped sharply over the last decade.

The old guard in the Israel Lobby and the big money are still on the side of whatever Israel does. But over time, the skepticism many younger Americans have about the use of U.S. power overseas will likely change American policy as Israel becomes an increasing embarrassment to the woke West.

A particular focus of the protests is the attempt to have the Knesset, which is decidedly on the right, be able to override Supreme Court decisions which have “repeatedly defended the rights of vulnerable populations in Israel, including Arab Israelis, LGBTQ people, non-Orthodox Jews and women.” So progressive American Jews in the U.S. are furious:

The Progressive Israel Network, a coalition that includes J Street, Americans For Peace Now, T’ruah, and the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, organized a demonstration outside [Smotrich’s] hotel that also targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. “This is a moral emergency,” said National Council of Jewish Women CEO Sheila Katz during a speech at the event. “We must name this deep pain that so many of us feel for what’s happening in Israel right now, a place that we love.”

Various Reform rabbis are calling it an existential crisis for American Jews (the word ‘existential’ will appear quite a bit in this article), and Israel’s president has warned “He who thinks that a real civil war, one that costs lives, is a line we won’t reach, is out of touch. In this moment, of all moments, in the 75th year of the state of Israel, the abyss is within reach.” Moreover, the protests are

taking place without a constitution. This means, for instance, that the government can decide to hold elections once every ten years instead of the standard four-year limit still in effect, and no one can override it; or it could pass laws granting the government total control over the media, or it could put LGBTQ people in jail. But the true crisis will emerge when the Israeli High Court of Justice repeals the judicial reforms and regards them as illegal — that is when the state will enter a constitutional crisis without a solution. Who will the Israeli security apparatus obey: the government or the judiciary?

Ironically, Biden called Netanyahu urging some kind of compromise, even though many in his own party want to pack SCOTUS to achieve permanent dominance of the left in the U.S.

While all this is going on, the recent Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China is another huge concern for Israel and its supporters because it portends an ever-wider coalition arrayed against the West—China and Russia (which are already allied), Iran (allied with Russia), Syria (the Saudis had been supporting the rebels, while Iran and Russia have been supporting Assad), other Arab countries (Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are reviewing the relations with Israel, undoing Jared Kushner’s work in the Trump administration), and quite possibly India—Prime Minister Modi recently spoke of India’s “unbreakable friendship” with Putin and pushed to avoid any joint communique because of disagreement about the war in the recent G7 meetings.

What this confrontation is really about is the globalist, woke West still tolerant of Israel versus nations that reject the Western model of exporting wokeness in defense of their own traditions and culture. Putin’s recent speech emphasizes this:

Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages. Bless their hearts, let them do as they please. Here is what I would like to say in this regard. Adult people can do as they please. We in Russia have always seen it that way and always will: no one is going to intrude into other people’s private lives, and we are not going to do it, either. …

The Western imposition of wokeness is already happening in Ukraine. Christopher Caldwell of the usually neocon friendly Claremont Institute and author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020), notes that

Few people have paid attention to how rapidly Ukrainian society has been evolving since the Maidan protests [of 2014]. In a recent interview in the New Left Review, the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko described a power bloc that has lately come into being, uniting Ukraine’s globalizing oligarchs, Western-funded progressive foundations, and Ukrainian nationalists The latter argued for ripping up the Minsk accords and ripping out the Russian roots of Ukrainian public life and high culture, leaving Ukraine with a hard-line form of [pro-Western] political correctness.

Opponents were driven out of public life. All of these countries have traditional cultures that are out of step with the West’s wokeness. Caldwell calls attention to Western NGOs pushing wokeness, such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Hungary requires that NGOs that get donations from abroad be publicly labeled as foreign funded, and Russia has banned several foreign NGOs linked to politics, including the Open Society Institute and Amnesty International. Because of the saliency of Soros as a funder of woke causes (including liberal-radical prosecutors, such as Alvin Bragg who indicted Trump) and the fact that he is well known to be Jewish, the activist Jewish community has attempted to ban any mention of Soros as funding the left.  When Trump highlighted Soros’s support for Bragg, the JTA wrote that he had “once again invoke[d] the name of a Jewish billionaire who is at the center of antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

Putin emphasizes U.S. warmongering since 9/11 and its support for imposing neoliberal totalitarian values on the rest of the world.

According to US experts, almost 900,000 people were killed during wars unleashed by the United States after 2001, and over 38 million became refugees. Please note, we did not invent these statistics; it is the Americans who are providing them. They are now simply trying to erase all this from the memory of humankind, and they are pretending that all this never happened. However, no one in the world has forgotten this or will ever forget it.

None of them cares about human casualties and tragedies because many trillions of dollars are at stake, of course. They can also continue to rob everyone under the guise of democracy and freedoms, to impose neoliberal and essentially totalitarian values, to brand entire countries and nations, to publicly insult their leaders, to suppress dissent in their own countries and to divert attention from corruption scandals by creating an enemy image. We continue to see all this on television, which highlights greater domestic economic, social and inter-ethnic problems, contradictions and disagreements. …

Russia is an open country and at the same time, a distinct civilisation. There is no claim to exclusivity or superiority in this statement, but this civilisation of ours — that’s what matters. Our ancestors passed it to us and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on to them….

This message of preserving traditional cultures is obviously at odds with the woke values that the West is attempting to impose on the rest of the world. It’s a message that undoubtedly resonates with many societies with unwoke cultures that would like to preserve and may well be one of the main reasons we are seeing the new alignment mentioned above.

Putin continues:

Step by step, they proceeded to revise the existing international order, to dismantle security and arms control systems, and plotted and carried out a series of wars around the world. To reiterate, all of that was done for the sole purpose of dismantling the post-WWII architecture of international relations. This is not a figure of speech. This is how it all unfolded in reality. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they sought to perpetuate their global dominance regardless of the interests of modern Russia or other countries for that matter.

The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, “Russia’s strategic defeat.” What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country.

An existential threat. I take him at his word, and that means that the feel they cannot lose this war, which could lead to a nuclear Armageddon because the West apparently also sees it as existential given their full-on, ever-escalating support of Ukraine. What our elites really hate is Putin’s claim that “There is no claim to exclusivity or superiority in this statement, but this civilisation of ours — that’s what matters. Our ancestors passed it to us and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on to them.” This is an anti-globalist manifesto. Combined with Russia’s attitudes on LGBTQ+, it’s easy to see why Western elites are furious.

Recently Putin complained that NATO is proposing to expand to countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, further exacerbating Russian paranoia.

Putin’s claim that the West has sought to perpetuate its dominance resulting from the fall of the Soviet Union is quite correct. In the 1990s Jewish neoconservatives saw a unipolar world as in the interests of Israel, surrounded by hostile countries in the Middle East. From a paper I wrote in 2004, “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement”:

With the end of the Cold War, neoconservatives at first advocated a reduced role for the U.S., but this stance switched gradually to the view that U.S. interests required the vigorous promotion of democracy in the rest of the world. This aggressively pro-democracy theme, which appears first in the writings of Charles Krauthammer and then those of Elliot Abrams, eventually became an incessant drumbeat in the campaign for the war in Iraq. Krauthammer also broached the now familiar themes of unilateral intervention and he emphasized the danger that smaller states could develop weapons of mass destruction which could be used to threaten world security. A cynic would argue that this newfound interest in democracy was tailor-made as a program for advancing the interests of Israel. After all, [despite the reality of Israel as an apartheid state], Israel is advertised as the only democracy in the Middle East, and democracy has a certain emotional appeal for the United States, which has at times engaged in an idealistic foreign policy aimed at furthering the cause of human rights in other countries. …

Krauthammer was on the cutting edge of neocon thinking on how to respond to the unipolar world created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Krauthammer has consistently urged that the U.S. pursue a policy to remake the entire Arab world—a view that represents the “party line” among neoconservatives (e.g., Michael Ledeen, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Richard Perle). In a speech at the AEI in February 2004, Krauthammer argued for a unilateral confrontation with the entire Arab-Muslim world (and nowhere else) in the interests of “democratic globalism.” He advocated a U.S. foreign policy that is not “tied down” by “multilateralism”: “the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will—and interests—of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet—ours.”

Krauthammer’s claim that this is in “our” interests is clearly an attempt—common among neoconservatives—to present themselves as American patriots, but his declaring war on the Islamic world is clearly far more in the interests of Israel than it is in the interests of the United States. Continuing from my 2004 paper:

Democratic globalism is aimed at winning the struggle with the Arab-Islamic world [quoting Krauthammer]:

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries…. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in an … existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious.

“Existential.” Meanwhile, neoconservatives with their post-racial framing of the West welcome Third World immigration throughout the West from Muslim countries. Again, it’s hard to see how this is in “our” interests.,

This post-racial neocon interest in “promoting democracy continues today, except that once again, as in Soviet days when a formative influence on the neocon movement was that Jews were gradually being pushed out of the Soviet elite. But now the target is Russia. It’s interesting that Max Boot, formerly a self-described neocon, has recanted, tweeting: “I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking.” But he’s all in on the Ukraine war which has also been advertised as a war for democracy. In fact, he’s become a liberal interventionist typical of MSNBC and CNN and fits right in with The Washington Post, where he puts out op-eds quite compatible with their far-left views. The neocons (or whatever they call themselves now that the term has come into disrepute because of previous disasters like the Iraq war) attempt to dominate both sides of U.S. foreign policy, as the Israel Lobby has always done. They are now well ensconced in the Biden Administration, the notorious Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (main operative in the 2014 coup against the pro-Russian government), Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken—all Jewish and all involved in masterminding the war in Ukraine.

The neocon interest in destroying the Arab-Muslim world intersects with their interest in destroying Russia via victory in the Ukraine war. As noted, Russia has supported both Iran and Syria, both of which, especially Iran, are seen as enemies of Israel. It’s thus no surprise that today’s neocons (including veteran neocon Bill Kristol) went ballistic when Ron DeSantis (along with the much-hated Donald Trump—who can forget neocon “Never Trump” hysteria in the 2016 election campaign when comparisons to Hitler abounded) stated that the dispute between Russia and Ukraine is a simple territorial dispute and not relevant to U.S. national interests. In the mainstream media, Tucker Carlson has also championed such views.

Chiming in with Kristol were other prominent Jewish neocons (Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Mark Levin, Jonah Goldberg) and their gentile allies (Rick Wilson, David French, Adam Kinzinger, etc.). This list includes “ex-neocon” Max Boot who retweeted one of Bill Kristol’s meltdown tweets against DeSantis.

The Saudi-Iran deal is important because for decades Israel has been attempting to make peace with the Arab world while continuing to oppress the Palestinians. The agreement also signals that the Arab world is pulling away from the U.S. and the West, likely reasoning, like Russia and probably China, that aligning with the West intent exporting wokeness is definitely not in their interest. The U.S. is once again complaining about Israeli behavior, as they have done since the 1967 war, but this will have no effect on the fanatics now running Israel and the powerful Israel Lobby will continue to dominate US foreign policy in the Middle East.

The multipolar world is coming into being and is being speeded up by the war in Ukraine. For the neocons in charge of U.S. foreign policy, it’s an existential moment because their much yearned for unipolar world run by the U.S. in close alliance with Israel may be unraveling, in large part because of their own ambitions to destroy Russia—a hatred borne of old grievances specific to the long sojourn of Jews in Russia, where anti-Jewish attitudes have a long history, as recounted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 200 Years Together, and even under Bolshevism. Then there was Putin’s banishing of politically involved Jewish oligarchs like Michael Khordorkovsky who dominated the Russian economy and media after the fall of the Soviet Union,  Russia’s alliances with Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria, their rejection of globalism in favor of nationalism (the ADL considers calling out any Jew for supporting globalism as “anti-Semitic“), and their support for traditional Russian Christian culture rather than, e.g., LGBTQ+ which is championed by powerful Jewish organizations throughout the West. Recently White House spokesman John Kirby said that supporting LGBTQ+ is a “core part of our foreign policy,” presumably including funding drag queen shows in Ecuador.

It’s interesting therefore that in a recent UN General Assembly vote, earlier this month calling for an end to the fighting and Moscow’s immediate withdrawal from Ukraine, Russia voted against, while China, India and South Africa abstained. Add to that the recent Saudi-Iran rapprochement along with Syria and the U.S. may well be looking at an alliance among Russia, China, India, and much of the Islamic world that rejects what the West has become—promoting globalism at the expense of nationalism (which comes down to a small cadre of Western oligarchs and multinationals as represented by the World Economic Forum running the world) and moral crusades at the expense of traditional cultures which are inevitably seen as retrograde and change-worthy by the woke elites that run the West.

Ukraine’s transformation under Zelensky is paradigmatic. This transformation is clearly top-down exactly like those that have occurred in all Western countries beginning with the elite media and academic culture. I suppose that this transformation has a long way to go to capture the hearts and minds of Ukrainians, but, as with the West, control of the media and academic culture along with Zelensky’s heavy-handed methods of handling dissent (banning political parties and religions that dissent from the war despite constantly be advertised in the West as a democracy) may prevail in the long run in whatever is left of Ukraine.

In summary, there is quite a bit of evidence that U.S. hegemony has become intolerable for much of the world and this hostility is rapidly creating a multipolar world centered around the China, Russia, Iran and the Arab countries, and perhaps the emerging economic powers of India and Brazil at a time of U.S. decline. The BRICS coalition

has become the hottest ticket in geopolitics. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS) have been toying with the idea of forming a political/monetary counterweight to U.S. dominance since 2001. But beyond some aggressive gold buying by Russia and China, there was more talk than action.

Then the floodgates opened. Whether due to the pandemic’s supply chain disruptions, heavy-handed sanctions imposed by US-led NATO during the Russia-Ukraine war, or just the fact that de-dollarization was an idea whose time had finally come, the BRICS alliance has suddenly become the hottest ticket in town. [Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their own currencies, and Russia is using the yuan to trade with Africa, Latin America, and Asia.] In just the past year, Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Egypt have either applied to join or expressed an interest in doing so. And new bilateral trade deals that bypass the dollar are being discussed all over the place.

Combine the land mass, population, and natural resources of the BRICS countries with those of the potential new members and the result is more or less half the world. …

• If the BRICS have the commodities and the US and its allies are left with finance, pricing power for crucial things like oil and gold will shift to Russia, China, and the Middle East.

• Falling demand for dollar-denominated bonds as reserve assets will send trillions of dollars now outside the US back home, raising domestic prices (which is to say lowering the dollar’s purchasing power and exchange rate).

• The loss of its weaponized reserve currency will lessen the US’ ability to impose its will on the rest of the world (witness China as Middle-East peacemaker and India buying Russian oil with rupees).

None of these countries has any particular love for Israel.

What does this mean for White interests?

First, anything that weakens or discredits the U.S. establishment is good for us given that the system is completely broken and can’t be reformed at the ballot box. Granted the neoconservative disaster in Iraq did not result in them losing power, but this time, if U.S. hegemony is seriously weakened, it could be very different. The U.S. has benefited greatly from having the world’s reserve currency, for example by lowering borrowing costs and being able to impose economic sanctions on countries it doesn’t like. Quite clearly, this nascent alliance is motivated to end dollar supremacy, especially given the sanctions imposed on Russia and Iran, both of which have already been trading Russian oil in rubles. Such a transition would bring economic repercussions to the US addicted as it is to massive deficit spending that has allowed it to fund our foreign wars while funding the huge entitlement programs that keep millions of Americans reasonably content. But this transformation would affect all Americans negatively. Ideally, a sane America that was not spending trillions to export wokeness and impose it here could right the ship. But I can’t see that happening.

And since Israel is linked to the West, it would also hurt Israel, as it will remain an outsider in this rising alliance. The Israel Lobby remains in the driver’s seat because of its financial clout, but surely at some point, wiser heads will see that neoconservative foreign policy centered around wokeness and the interests of Israel is an ongoing disaster. Nevertheless, the U.S. political system runs on money, and there is no evidence that Jewish financial clout—~75% of Democrat money and ~ 50% of Republican money—is diminishing.