In American politics, there are shifts all the time. Shifts, in fact, are a constant. Today, most of the Right is strongly pro-Israel. Obviously, the truest Buchananites are like Pat (as true Buchananites should be, I suppose). But the Right at large is pro-Israel.
Although I take Nikki Haley’s point: “Mark my words: Those who would abandon Ukraine today are at risk of abandoning Israel tomorrow.”
Ukraine and the Right is, for some of us, a curious and painful topic. In a piece a year ago, I wrote,
Once upon a time, Ukraine would have been a great cause on the American right. Here is a post-Soviet republic, an escapee from the “prison house of nations.” It is working to find its way as a free, independent, and democratic country. It is invaded by a revanchist Russia, led by a former KGB colonel. Russia seeks to re-subjugate Ukraine through terror. The Kremlin is visiting atrocities on the Ukrainians that it never visited on the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechoslovakians in 1968.
So, here is a classic case of a free and independent country being invaded and brutalized by an expansionist dictatorship that seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. As of old. Also a case of a national David against an imperial Goliath.
This would have been a natural cause of conservatives (American conservatives, forgetting their European and other counterparts). Is it? Hardly.
Hardly.
Once upon a time (to use that phrase again), the Right was not admiring of Israel, to put it mildly. (I am speaking in general terms here.) A friend recently mentioned to me a letter that Leo Strauss sent in November 1956 — a year after National Review began publishing. He sent it to Willmoore Kendall, the Yale political scientist, onetime teacher of William F. Buckley Jr., and early National Review figure.
(Ask some of the senior-most among us about the “Kendall Couch.”)
“For some time,” began Professor Strauss to Professor Kendall, “I have been receiving The National Review.” (That has been a curse to us for almost 70 years now: People want to put the definite article in front of our name.) Continued Strauss,
You will not be surprised to hear that I agree with many articles appearing in the journal, especially your own. There is, however, one feature of the journal which I completely fail to comprehend.
What was that?
It is incomprehensible to me that the authors who touch on that subject are so unqualifiedly opposed to the State of Israel. No reasons why that stand is taken are given; mere antipathies are voiced. For I cannot call reasons such arguments as are based on gross factual error, or on complete non-comprehension of the things which matter. I am, therefore, tempted to believe that the authors in question are driven by an anti-Jewish animus; but I have learned to resist temptations.
Strauss went on to say that he had spent the 1954–55 academic year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “and what I am going to say is based exclusively on what I have seen with my own eyes.” Here it is:
The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East.
What’s more,
Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and in high schools: the Hebrew bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that “everything good is heritage.” I know of no country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.
What an interesting phrase: “Everything good is heritage.”
Some more:
. . . the country is poor, lacks oil and many other things which fetch much money; the venture on which the country rests may well appear to be quixotic; the University and the Government buildings are within easy range of Jordanian guns; the possibility of disastrous defeat or failure is obvious and always close. A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.
True. And let me repeat something that Strauss said, back in ’56 (two weeks after the end of the Suez Crisis): “The possibility of disastrous defeat or failure is obvious and always close.”
More:
On Page 16 of the November 17 issue of the Review, Israel is called a racist state. The author does not say what he understands by a “racist state,” nor does he offer any proof for the assertion that Israel is a racist state. Would he by any chance have in mind the fact that in the state of Israel there is no civil marriage, but only Jewish, Christian and Muslim marriages, and therefore that mixed marriages in the non-racist sense of the term are impossible in Israel? I am not so certain that civil marriage is under all circumstances an unmitigated blessing, as to disapprove of this particular feature of the State of Israel.
One more excerpt (although the whole letter, of course, is fascinating):
Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of “progressive” leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.
Professor Kendall asked Professor Strauss whether NR could publish the letter as a letter-to-the-editor. Strauss consented, with modifications. The letter was published in our 1/5/57 issue.
In all probability, a betting man would not have said that, in the 2020s, the Right would be strongly pro-Israel and not so keen on Ukraine, fighting for its life against a Russian invasion. But here we are.
And there are many conservatives — maybe not enough to pack CPAC or what have you, but many — who back Israel and Ukraine, both.
There are three countries, chiefly, whose right to exist is under question, or under attack: Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. They are sister nations, in a sense, and they — like freedom generally — need all the help they can get.