Freedom, Justice, and Economics

There’s something that makes me uncomfortable about many discussions of anti-Semitism. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but it has to do with (i) the extent to which I think about being Jewish as racial versus religious, and (ii) how I feel about proponents’ tight linkage between the State of Israel and Judaism.

More or less, I think of Judaism as a religious thing, as a set of beliefs, rituals, and cultural factors that can in principle be separated from bloodlines. I’m aware that at this point in my life, many of these “cultural factors” are so deeply ingrained in me that they might as well be racial characteristics. But I nonetheless resist the absoluteness of the racial definition, in no small part because it aligns me with people like the ultra-Orthodox who are more different from me than (say) many secular Christians and Muslims.

Second, I think of Israel as a state– a political entity– rather than a dream.  As a result, to my mind a priori exclamations that “Israel has a right to exist!” don’t suffice. To what extent does any state have a “right to exist”? Who decides? On what principles?

It was recently decided that Iraq didn’t have a right to exist in its form as a repressive Baathist regime; some might argue that Sudan doesn’t have a right to exist now in it’s current genocidal incarnation. Broadly, the question is when states engage in sufficiently awful behavior that the international community can “legitimately” contemplate infringing on sovereignty. After thirty years of severely restricting the political and economic freedoms of a third of the population it controls, a serious (though perhaps not ultimately convincing) case can be made for Israel’s illegitimacy.

On many of these matters I’m obviously different from other Jews. They purport to speak for me when they insist on equating criticisms of Israel and challenges to Israel’s “right to exist” with Anti-Semitism, but my feelings obviously differ. As a result, despite my cultural and philosophical loyalty to Judaism, I’m stuck outside of the political debates. I’m pleased for the possibility of high-level international discourse about Anti-Semitism, but concerned that noone will represent my voice, and that the absence of this kind of moderate perspective — which rigidly separates hatred of a group from hatred of a State — will make true reconciliation less likely.

One justifiably prominent question as we approach the fifth anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks is: Why have there been no subsequent attacks on American soil? I propose a politically suicidal answer that may nevertheless have some merit: Al Qaeda and the other terrorists aren’t really such a big deal. They don’t have the skills, the determination, the incentives, or the resources to pose a particularly great threat.

This is an obviously controversial position. I cursorily propose eight reasons to take it seriously:

1. The 9/11 attacks did not make use of unconventional weapons.
2. Al Qaeda members and leaders were “surprised” that the 9/11/2001 plane-projectiles caused the collapse of the WTC towers.
3. The passengers of United Flight #93 demonstrated that hijackers would never again be able to use a plane as a projectile.
4. Al Qaeda financial resources, so far as they are publicly documented, amounted to only a few tens of millions of dollars per year prior to the 9/11/2001 attacks.
5. Subsequent attacks on the US would provide no benefit for Al Qaeda in its hypothesized efforts to topple the Saudi regime.
6. Radicalized Muslim communities are uncommon in the US.
7. Vulnerabilities abound in the US: it wouldn’t take much sophistication to pull off a major attack.
8. Whatever the size of the threat, domestic politicians have strong incentives to exaggerate it.

If, with the trillions of dollars the US has spent on homeland security and defense since 9/11/2001, further attacks hadn’t been “prevented,” I would have been surprised.