Samuel Huntington, prominent Harvard political scientist and author, died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81. In his magnum opus, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Huntington discussed what he viewed as the most dangerous illusions of the Western elites in their perception of world order and international behavior. He introduced the term Davos Man, referring to those who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite's global operations”.
Now that the State of Israel has returned to the bitter tips of leftist academics’ tongues, it may be worth understanding the implications of Huntington’s theses, even if only posthumously.
Implicit in the left’s standard anti-Israel position (and somehow the standard position seems to always recommend the trying of IDF officials as war criminals) is what appears to be an acceptance of Davos Man. We are routinely led to believe that the Israeli and Palestinian people all want the same things (peace, a home, and economic prosperity), and that their representative bodies are killing each other’s children in spite of this. Israel is just always the worst offender.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Hamas is not much of a legitimate, democratically elected body. The Palestinian Authority itself gains legal legitimacy from the Oslo Accords, which Hamas has systematically rejected. However, they did receive enough votes in the PA’s parliamentary election to find themselves in the position they're in now. And the Gazans they represent chose them because – well, some combination of Fatah corruption, Fatah infighting, change they could believe in, and plain old ideology. If universal healthcare was on the docket, I didn’t hear about it.
So maybe Davos Gazan isn’t appropriate. Anyone with any knowledge of the complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict should reject the idea that the only thing standing between war and peace is a "road map" with more Palestinian concessions here, a forfeiture of key West Bank settlements there, and a Golan Heights to be named later.
But perhaps I’m getting too far ahead of myself. For Huntington’s rejection of a non-cultural, internationalist community of states governed only by their utilitarian interests can actually be found in the same quarters examined before. European spokesmen of all sorts seem to find incoherence a habit too difficult to break with respect to the United States’ Imperialist Stooge of Nations. For how many times have we heard the cries of ‘disproportionality’ when Israel engages any of its amicable neighbors?
Israel, the thinking goes, should distribute force in a manner proportional to the damage incurred by its own population. Proportions refer to fractions, and while the easiest strategy is to compare the respective death counts (which of course ignores Hamas’ role in grotesquely padding its own score sheet by using innocents as shields), the initial rocket attacks on Southern Israel produced a fraction that is mathematically undefined. The denominator (Palestinian deaths at the hands of the IDF) was zero between the unilateral pullout of Gaza by Israel and the initial campaign back across the Gazan border.
All this means is that (surprise!) the standards of conduct for Israel are just that much higher than for Hamas. There is something about Israel that owes us civilized restraint and Hamas that will deliver savagery no matter what. Culture is not everything, but as Huntington sought to demonstrate, it surely is something. We’re willing to admit that much. Now we have to decide whether certain regimes can operate in an arena where the actual interests of its own people and the people of the world are taken for granted as objectives. For the sake of free society, some of the other organizations, with Qassam in one hand and Iranian aid in the other, should be crushed for good.
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