In 2012, as a Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney flew to Israel to boost his foreign policy bona fides.
And raise money from rich dual-citizen Israelis.
He told the crowd, that paid $25,000 a head, that their wealth, and the success of Israel as a country, was “cultural,” and evidence of the “hand of providence.”
In other words, God looks favorably on some people and unfavorably on others.
This argument no doubt played well to the audience of well-off American Jews. We are the Chosen People, after all. God said so. Or someone of importance in the Torah said so. I could never quite get it straight.
As a child, every time I would hear someone say we were the Chosen People, I would think, “Chosen for what?”
But Romney wasn’t content to simply point out the cultural superiority he perceived in U.S. and Israeli Jews - and presumably Mormons like himself.
“You see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita… across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000… you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” he told the gathering of Chosen. “And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.”
There is so much bullshit to unpack in that statement, I don’t know where to begin. We can start with the fact that “the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority” means the West Bank. He didn’t even mention Gaza, which had been governing itself - per se - since 2005.
(By “per se” I mean, “A mafioso-like ruling body that had grown out of the poverty and degradation we have been taught to associate with the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s.)
We can also point out that the West Bank - though titularly under Palestinian Authority control* - was also at that moment being colonized by religious Israelis, with the blessing of their government.
Hell, walls have been built to bisect towns, so that Palestinians have to go through Israeli checkpoints to visit family and friends.
And let’s not forget that many Americans who move to Israel do so because of their hard-right religious leanings. They not only believe in providence, but that the hand of providence is woven into their kippahs.
The Very Model of a Modern Major Colonizer
Romney credits the theme of his 2012 speech to David Landes’ “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” a book which made me so angry, I stopped reading halfway through, and which I describe as “the even more racist, academic apologia for Ayn Rand.”
Landes, a former Harvard professor, essentially argues that white Europeans were culturally superior to the dark-skinned people they colonized in the Global South. And that superiority manifested in money.
The subtitle of his book might as well have been: “The British and Dutch were more refined than the people they slaughtered.”
As I was reading this book in the aughts, I would look up every once in a while and see the row of Dickens books in my bookcase. Both authors were writing about the same period, in the same cities, and yet Dickens’ depiction of wealth and poverty differed exponentially from the same culture that Landes lauded as industrious and prosperous.
I mean, I suppose the Artful Dodger was industrious. Even if he was sleeping in the streets.
Right now, I’m reading current Harvard Professor Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit,” in which he argues that mankind’s fear of some divine hand of nature (drought, disease) crystalized after the Protestant Reformation as the notion of good versus evil.
As Sandel noted, this “reflects the belief that the moral universe is arranged in a way that aligns prosperity with merit and suffering with wrongdoing.”
So, Romney’s extrapolated argument goes, the people in the West Bank and Gaza are just inherently unworthy and suffer because of that. And the people who are taking their land, and herding them into what has been described as “the world’s largest open-air prison” are worthy because they are not suffering. They are winning.
Which is why I think the October 7 Hamas terror attacks have unsettled so many around the world in a way that, say, the razing of Nagorno-Karabakh just weeks prior did not. It upsets our international internal order, which, as Romney noted, takes as truth that Jews are better than Muslims, that America is better than Mexico, and that Ecuador and Chile are neighbors.
The Moral Argument
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calls the view that Israeli lives are more valuable than Palestinian lives a “moral miscalculation” in the current war.
“Israel has suffered a horrifying terrorist attack and deserves the world’s sympathy and support,” Kristof wrote, “but it should not get a blank check to slaughter civilians or to deprive them of food, water and medicine.”
This is exactly how people in the U.S. - who have always been taught that Americans are chosen - reacted to 9/11.
There’s a sense of “How DARE they!” There’s a sense of revenge, or proving to the world that we are better by, in fact, acting worse.
“How DARE people from Central America cross our borders! We must kill them with spikes in our rivers, and rip their infants out of their arms! Don’t they know we’re better?”
“How DARE you suggest government policies should help people. Don’t you know THOSE PEOPLE will just use that money for drugs?”
Just as in 9/11, when these unspeakably brutal murders happened in Southern Israel on October 7, the world was aghast, and in sympathy with Israel.
And just as after 9/11, if Israel exacts the revenge it says it’s going to, the world will go back to seeing them the way they see the U.S. - arrogant, murderous, self-absorbed.
The sad part here is that many of the Israelis who were murdered and taken hostage are supporters of peace. They are kibbutzniks, or in U.S. parlance, socialists. Many of the relatives of the hostages don’t want Israel to put at risk the 1 million children living in Gaza - 1,500 of whom have been killed in the last two weeks.
And if the hostages die, their families will blame their government, not Hamas.
I feel like we are at an inflection point. But it’s a test we are likely to fail. As Romney demonstrated 11 years ago, our entire Western civilization and economy is based on the notion that some people are better than others. Even if they’re children.
*The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has, itself, been beset by corruption, but that’s another story. Though one that does intertwine with this one.
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Thank goodness for you Carrie. The world and I need someone to break it all down for us. And in this piece you have. Simple. Factual. Clear. Thanks!