Teaching History: The Point of the Revolution Is Always The Revolution

[Offthemat]

 

[Offthemat]

I’ll just put this here:

 

The tale of civilization at a crossroads is told in words and pictures.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s September 22 speech at the United Nations offered a rousing celebration of civilization. “Do we want to live, under this state of affairs, with a return to the law of the jungle?” he asked rhetorically. “Or do we want to live in a civilized international society?” Close readers of Macron’s translated words will note that this is a false choice. “International society” need not be at the core of civilization; indeed, in a world where bad actors seek to impose not the law of the jungle, but their own morality, their own theology, and their own way of life, civilization as we know it may be incompatible with internationalism.  

Nevertheless, Macron rallied the internationalists gathered at Turtle Bay to “continue lending our support to the International Court of Justice and supporting the central role it plays” in upholding “international humanitarian law.” He did so because, “as we’ve often said, there cannot be peace without justice.” In his view, the world has come to tolerate not mere injustices but “a new era of barbaric acts…El-Fasher, Bukavu, Gaza.” Two of those metonymic places are unlikely to be familiar to anyone who does not follow world events in granular detail because they—sites of mass executions and other atrocities—have been dwarfed in the “civilized international” imagination by the third. Israel’s supposed barbarism responding to the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, once again manages to upstage all else. Nor was Macron done castigating Israel with blithe comparisons to actual barbarism:  

What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza?... It is shameful. Shame on all of us. Look. Just look at what’s happening in the West Bank where day in, day out we are seeing violations. And in the name of what? Hamas was never very active in the West Bank.

While its premier fulminated against a putative ally fighting a multi-front war against Iranian-backed terror groups, France was descending into riots. At the end of September, student complaints about overcrowded, dilapidated classrooms had escalated into schools burned and ransacked, a principal doused with gasoline, firefighters chased off their own engine, acid thrown at officers, and hundreds of police and school staff hurt while trying to keep order. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said 24 schools had been “burned and ransacked”; Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu put the human cost at 215 students and 85 school staff injured—“the heaviest toll in decades”—and police have reported more than 600 officers injured and over 6,000 arrests, most of them minors.  

One can forgive questioning whether Macron is the right man, at the right moment, to champion the cause of civilization against barbarism. Despite his lofty words about peace and justice, images emerging from his country told the story of a failing effort to integrate a huge influx of foreigners and minorities into a millennia-old society. For all the talk of civilization, French youth were burning down their schools.  

Back at the UN, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retorted with a speech about his own civilization—albeit in a different register, and not just because it leaned into mockery and scorn. He began by defending his use of force to achieve his goals on the world stage. Rather than rely on the UN or ICJ to defang the Iranian nuclear threat, Netanyahu and the United States have bombed Iran repeatedly over the last 18 months. “It was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister,” Netanyahu explained, “because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.” But “the ultimate irony in defending itself” was that “Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall,” who walked out in demonstrated solidarity with Macron’s condemnation. Viewing his nation as the spear-tip of civilization, Netanyahu made no apologies for doing what had to be done when diplomacy failed. He used force to defend civilization against its enemies.  

Nor would pummeling Iran be the end of Israel’s willingness to defend itself in deed. Days after Netanyahu’s UN speech, a group of Israeli passengers successfully foiled an attempted hijacking on a plane from Dubai to Tel Aviv. Led by a plumber who leaped to subdue the compromised first officer, these workaday Israelis treated the wounded captain, wrested control of the nosediving aircraft, and negotiated an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Under constant threat, Israelis have learned not to be paralyzed by fear or naïve about their enemies’ intentions. There are people out there who hate the Jewish state and will do evil things to try to destroy it. Once you accept that, you accept responsibility for your own defense. It may be a bloody enterprise, but it is worth it; civilizational do-overs don’t come often, so defend the one you have.  

That is the essential difference between Macron and Netanyahu, and between the nations they represent. Their divergent understandings of peace and justice, and the role each sees international institutions playing, follow from their fundamental disagreement about whether their nation would lose something miraculous if it lost its sovereignty. It is the difference between a civilization that welcomes erosion of its culture and shared-sovereignty arrangements with compromised institutions, and one not only willing to rise to its own defense but primed to see threats as they arise because it is hyper-attuned to its own precarious, precious existence. 

Netanyahu’s speech brimmed with the confidence of a leader whose nation believed its survival was worth defending—a clear view that Western civilization is worth defending. It comes out as a set of recognized, if unpopular, truths about what it takes to maintain sovereignty, which is what you care about when you think your role in the world is worth preserving. “We will continue to defend our state,” he told the UN, in one of his favorite refrains. “We will continue to win because we have no other choice in this battle against the barbarians.” 

By contrast, Macron appealed to universalist abstractions because he was unwilling or unable to say that the Western way of living is any better than anyone else’s. Vaunted French national pride may live on among many French people, but its leadership is more concerned with pacifying a world that seethes against the West for good reasons, bad reasons, and no reason at all.  

Does that mean his calls for peace and justice are hollow? Not necessarily. To understand them, though, we must understand those terms considering Macron’s widely shared obsession with castigating Israel, which is either the angel on Europe’s shoulder or the devil, depending on your perspective. Macron lashes out against Israel repeatedly because it does not apologize for decimating its enemies, because it takes that enmity seriously, and because it stands for the proposition that it believes it is civilized and its enemies barbaric. Macron does not eschew using that distinction but thinks what is truly barbaric is drawing a stark line between us—the good guys—and them.  

We all agree that peace and justice are good, and worthwhile goals of the international order. Those sympathetic to Netanyahu’s position, which is dominant but eroding on the American Right, simply disagree about what they mean. Defunding the ICC and ICJ (and maybe the UN and its agencies, too) could advance those goals because those institutions are not in trustworthy hands. Their understandings of those terms are shaped by rotten people and rotten regimes with goals Americans and Israelis overwhelmingly consider illegitimate. 

There are no Flight 93 elections for international institutions. Yet we can learn from the Israelis who saved themselves and their nation from catastrophe that there is nothing wrong with being alert to threats to our sovereignty and rising in vigilant defense against a world that would prefer to burn it down.  

Tal Fortgang is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and Legal Policy Fellow and Advisor to the President at the Manhattan Institute.
 

https://www.civitasoutlook.com/research/bibi-and-macron-at-the-un-7e073e22-d5a3-4d2c-95be-f60599fa8c24

 

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Matt Walsh