The mobilization of the international system – from the UN through American and European Left to the Hague courts – against Israel and for Hamas forces upon the Jewish State a necessary change in its outlook upon the pervading world order.
Since the end of the Cold War, Israel has firmly planted itself in the camp of the status quo powers. This was done mostly by instinct within the almost automatic trend of following the American lead, but also because the Israeli policymakers – some of them with globalist aspirations of their own – believed that the preservation of the world order as created on the ruins of Communism is indeed Israel’s best interest.
Obviously, an additional factor in Israel becoming a status quo power was the fact that most of Israel’s mortal enemies – Iran first among them – were clearly revisionist in their outlook, seeking to change the regional balance of power, achieve hegemony, and turn the clock all the way back to 1947 with regard to “Palestine”. Israel itself, addicted to the concept of “soft power”, spent most of the last 20 years trying to trade parts of the land it controls for peace which Israeli globalist elite considered the only real strategic asset. The Israeli Left saw itself as a herald of globalization in Israel, seeing it less as an economic or even cultural phenomenon and more as spreading of the universal “rules-based order” which will provide Israel with permanent acceptance and security in exchange for abandoning Jewish particularism of the Right – secular and religious both.
Then came October 7, and this whole edifice of belief in the benevolence of the global Left came crashing down among the screeching of American elite students and professors and European Leftist politicians about “Israeli genocide” and “free Palestine”. Even the memory of the Holocaust was brutally raped and perverted to be used as a tool in a lawfare against the Jews. Courts established to provide for global justice became instruments for blood libel. Humanitarian conventions signed by Israel in good faith turned into shackles with which the “international community” attempted to paralyze Israel in the face of an openly genocidal enemy. Instead of safety and acceptance for Israel, the globalist Left has reopened the conversation on the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence. Speeches and tweets of the leading Western “progressives” became indistinguishable from Ayatollah Khamenei’s.
Faced with such reality, Israel can no longer afford a foreign policy of a status quo nation, since it is now clear that a globalist status quo means Israel’s demise. To accept this status quo now means to accept Israel’s disarmament through ICC and ICJ and Israel’s dismemberment through the combined pressure of the US, EU, and UN. Regardless of the preferred solution to the “Palestinian problem”, all Israelis must realize by now that their long-term existence is not a priority for the “international community”.
Yet, for separate but connected reasons, the forces opposing the status quo are rising now to challenge the globalist Left’s concept of a preferred world order. The conservatives, the populists, the nationalists, the separatists, the Trumpists, the Eurosceptics – the anti-globalist movement is widespread, multifaceted, and chaotic. Parts of it are simply unpalatable to any Jew with a rudimentary sense of history. In place of the globalist order, many of them can offer only chaos.
And yet, just like during World War Two, when Churchill famously quipped “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”, Israeli national interest clearly requires that, at least, we present a friendly face to the enemies of the globalist Left, and refrain from actively helping those who would like to throw us “at the trash heap of history”. It’s not just because it would be pleasant to see such enemies of Israel as Josep Borrell, Mark Pocan, Yolanda Diaz or Gustavo Pietro get what they richly deserve. It’s because the ideology they represent threatens the Jewish future.
This is far from the first time in history when the prevailing global order failed the Jews. This time, however, Jews have their own state and can play the system just like anyone else.
This time, chaos can be a ladder.
Arik Elman is an Israeli political and PR consultant and commentator.