In his new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, Josh Hammer argues that the West should support the State of Israel as an embattled democracy and an indispensable contributor to Western civilization. The attorney, senior editor with Newsweek, and host of The Josh Hammer Show podcast strongly supports America’s alliance with Israel while advancing a “realist” foundation for relations with the Jewish state. American aid as currently structured, he argues, “does far more harm than good for both countries.” He embeds this argument in a disquisition on Jewish contributions to Western civilization in general and America’s spiritual affinity with Israel in particular.
With a per-capita GDP of around U.S. $50,000, Israel can support itself and, as a matter of self-interest, should not accept aid with political strings attached. “The aid arrangement,” Hammer avers, “hinders Israel’s pursuit of military self-sufficiency, disincentivizing its world-renowned technology and defense firms from putting in the work to innovate and produce the necessary arms and materiel at industrial scale.” Missile defense, including directed-energy weapons, may be the most important new defense technology of the 21st century, and in some respects Israel is ahead of the United States in this field.
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At present, Israel and Turkey are the strongest nations in the Middle East, but according to the United Nations Turkey’s working-age population is projected to fall 40% by the end of this century. Iran’s will suffer a similar decline. Israel’s, by contrast, will double. If GDP varies in line with working-age population, Israel’s economy will be larger than Turkey’s by mid-century. As a source of innovation, Israel is indispensable to America’s defense.
Unfortunately, Hammer laments, neoconservative foreign policy has undermined American relations with Israel:
Tragically, American support for the State of Israel, and for strong and durable US-Israel relations, has in recent decades often been subsumed into the latter US foreign policy paradigm (universalist neoconservatism) at the expense of the former paradigm (prudential realism)…. Those relations have suffered an indirect casualty—certainly on the Left, and even on small but growing swaths of the America Right—due to the empirical failures and abiding deep unpopularity of the liberal internationalist and neoconservative agenda.
Because the neoconservatives think parliamentary democracy is a universal salve for all polities, they “often tend to support the establishment of an independent Palestinian-Arab state” to Israel’s detriment. Hammer might have added that the same “Freedom Agenda” that prompted George W. Bush to force majority rule in Iraq also led his administration to sponsor the 2006 Gaza and West Bank elections. Hamas won, preparing the way for its violent takeover of Gaza the next year.
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Hammer suggests that the 2020 Abraham Accords, brokered between Israel and the Arab Gulf States during President Trump’s first term, will allow the U.S. “to wind down its myriad far-flung military bases in the Middle East (such as the now-infamous Tower 22 in Jordan) and strategically retrench more generally.” Such a retrenchment, Hammer continues, will allow the U.S. “to redeploy scarce assets to the Indo-Pacific to ward off the Communist Chinese hegemony that is America’s foremost twenty-first-century civilizational threat.” He proposes that America follow the “Abraham Accords model” to arm nations in the Indo-Pacific whose security interests align with our own—including Japan, South Korea, India, and the Philippines.
I am skeptical about the usefulness of shifting legacy assets to Asia, where China fields thousands of satellite-guided anti-ship missiles. Our Middle Eastern bases failed to suppress Houthi attacks on shipping, and Chinese capabilities are orders of magnitude greater. Without technological breakthroughs in missile defense the United States cannot overcome China’s home theater advantage. That is where Israel’s unique talent for technological innovation may be indispensable to American security.
Maintaining America’s alliance with Japan and South Korea is fundamental to U.S. security policy, to be sure, but Hammer’s analogy with the Abraham Accords seems fanciful. Containing Iran and deterring China are different problems. China has almost 50 times Iran’s GDP and just over 15 times its population, and the world’s largest and most sophisticated manufacturing capacity. Iran is a near autarchy, while China’s Asian neighbors are enmeshed in its supply chains and domestic markets. The toxic fuel of religious fanaticism is absent from Asian affairs. What the Asians seek is a careful balance between economic integration and strategic independence, rather than guardianship of holy sites.
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Apart from this flight of enthusiasm, Hammer’s emphasis on foreign policy realism is sound and convincingly argued. That is half of Hammer’s story; the other deals with America’s cultural and religious affinity to Israel. These two strands do not easily intertwine, but that is not the author’s fault. Settled in the hope of building a new City on the Hill through a New Mission in the Wilderness, America nonetheless required a constitution that sorted the mundane practicalities of competing interests. Apocalyptic hope and present-day practicality are incommensurate—but we cannot do without either of them. The image of the city lifts us above the egoism of the marketplace, and embedding self-interest in our Constitution restrains us from confusing hope with reality.
Hammer recounts at length the Jewish contributions to Western civilization, focusing on 17th-century English theorists who drew on the Talmud as well as the Bible. The story has been told before, by Eric Nelson, Yoram Hazony, and Ofir Haivry among others, but Hammer presents it well. This is good so far as it goes, but the full story of the Jewish contribution to Western flourishing has barely begun to be told. It extends far beyond the English Hebraists—for example, in the emergence of the concept of the Infinite in the 17th-century scientific revolution, as well as the birth of modern literature in the Spanish Renaissance.
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But that was then. What does the living presence of the Jewish people and the flourishing of the State of Israel mean to the West today? It is nice that the American Founding drew on Jewish sources, but what does that have to do with real, living Jews, and the present Jewish state? It is perfectly possible to acknowledge the Jewish contribution to civilization and oppose anti-Semitism on moral grounds, while dismissing today’s Jews as a vestigial remnant of a long-superseded ancient world, as did G.W.F. Hegel.
America cannot prosper without both James Madison and John Winthrop. Without the goal of the Heavenly City raising our perspective to the infinite we cannot sustain our nation’s moral character. At the same time, if we confuse our workaday republic with the real City on the Hill, we become idolaters. That is why the presence of the living Jewish people has practical significance for the United States. The fact that the actual City on a Hill once again is the capital of a Jewish state reminds Americans that we are the “almost chosen” people, in Abraham Lincoln’s ironic bon mot. It is a gauge of our proclivity for national narcissism that we read “almost chosen” as praise rather than admonition. It is much like being “almost pregnant.”
Our proclivity for self-adulation is a flaw that could become fatal if not mitigated. The presence of the Jews, and especially a Jewish state, helps provide a corrective. Israel’s virtues as well as its flaws remind Americans that the Jewish idea—importing hope for the Messianic future into the practical life of the present—is dauntingly difficult to achieve, even with great devotion and discipline.
The living Jewish presence is just as important for Europe, but in a different way. The state of Israel is a standout exception to the demographic decline that threatens the future of the West. Infertility is the Cain’s mark of cultural decline. Americans rankle at Europe’s indifference to its own defense, and with good reason—but why should young men sacrifice themselves for future generations that never will be born?
America’s demographic future is not much rosier than Europe’s. “Israel’s birth rate, which is roughly three children per woman, is almost double that of the United States,” Hammer notes. It should be a source of wonder that Israel, the only nation that survives from the Bronze Age with its language and scriptures intact, residing within restored ancient borders, is also the only wealthy nation in the world with a secure demographic future.
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America’s characteristic flaw is to confound the earthly and heavenly cities. Europe’s historic flaw was the impulse to be elect in its own skin. European nationalism was tragic: for centuries, German priests blessed cannons to kill French Catholics, and vice versa. The atavistic nationalism that gripped Europe from the Thirty Years War through the world wars of the past century distorted the Biblical concept of election: from the 17th-century contest between France and Spain to the Nazis’ master race delusion, the European nations twisted the notion of election into an obsession with national superiority. Many Europeans today eschew nationalism altogether in response.
The presence of the living Israel, as opposed to the mere theological concept of Israel, motivates today’s European patriots to regard it as one among many fatherlands, rather than as an exclusive avatar of the Davidic kingdom. Israel thus becomes not an abstraction, but the “exemplar and paragon of a nation,” as the theologian Franz Rosenzweig put it.
Many of today’s European patriots agree with Rosenzweig. Dutch conservative leader Geert Wilders, for example, echoed the theologian’s argument in a 2024 essay for Breitbart:
What we need today is Zionism for the nations of Europe. The Europeans should follow the example of the Jewish people and safeguard the sovereignty of their nation-states…. [A]fter the Second World War the Jewish people did the opposite of what the Europeans did. While Europe’s political elites began to abolish the European nation-states and dissolve them in a supranational institution, the Jewish nation proudly reasserted itself as a sovereign nation-state and vigorously defended its borders…. [Israel] is a beacon for nations striving to maintain their national identity.
In different but equally vital ways, America and Europe benefit from the mere presence of Israel among the nations of the Earth. And as Josh Hammer rightly emphasizes in his important book, there is a convincing foreign-policy realist basis for America’s alliance with Israel. We cannot change who we are. America was constituted with hope as well as calculation, and the Jewish state will remain a beacon of that hope as long as it survives. Without it, we would be greatly diminished.
