The Extraordinary and the Resented
Abe Greenwald for Commentary Magazine
This week, I had a discussion with an Israeli friend about the Eurovision song contest. It’s hard for me to overstate how little I care about Eurovision (or much of anything beginning with the prefix “Euro” or ending with the suffix “vision”). The music is groundbreakingly bad, the performances are desperately campy, and the attending crowds chant for Jewish blood.
All of which is to say, the contest is, in the end, a pretty accurate representation of Europe’s vision.
My Israeli friend’s point was that Israel just wants to be treated like a normal country, and Western liberal opinion is making that impossible these days. The anti-Israel protests at Eurovision are but one poignant example. “But Israel is not a normal country,” I said. “It’s an extraordinary one.”
I can hardly blame Israelis for wanting to be left in peace when they travel abroad and wanting to be accepted into international competitions and festivals. They want to be treated as human beings.
I want all those things for them as well. Given the cyclical nature of history, the global surge in anti-Semitism is sure to wind down. And until that happens, I will do my part to hasten it.
But I don’t expect Israel ever to be treated like a normal country. Just as I don’t expect that for the United States. Nor do I aspire to see it happen. If either nation is ever thought of as just another country, it will mean that it has become as weak and compromised as all the rest. That would be a world-historic tragedy.
What does one even mean by “a normal country”? My guess is that they mean something vaguely like the late-20th-century idea of a Western European country: free, modern, democratically governed, well-meaning but proud, and culturally distinct.
Well, those countries are not so normal anymore. They’re still relatively free, provided you’re not visibly Jewish. If you are, freedom comes with dangerous new risks—and that’s not freedom at all. In some instances, such as in Birmingham, England, Jews are told to stay away from certain recreational events for their own safety. It’s hard to call these countries modern or democratic when primitive mobs in the minority hold veto power. Elected government, having handed over such power, can no longer be called well-meaning. European leaders didn’t endorse a nonexistent Palestinian state out of benevolence. They sought to appease terrorist supporters out of political desperation. As for their being culturally distinct, these countries are being remade, day by day, in the same dreary image. Whether it’s England or Belgium or the Netherlands, the scene is straight out of a raging Islamist backwater. To the extent that the backsliding nations of Europe remain proud, it’s a pathology.
That’s what becomes of normal countries. They don’t stand for humane ideas, defend essential principles, or take up the mantle of moral leadership. So how are they treated? Like suckers. Their moral cowardice invites ruin.
Then there’s Israel and the United States, both of which continue to do all three. Both are moral nations founded on transcendent ideas. And both, unlike their European counterparts, are thriving. This humiliation ordinary countries cannot forgive. There is a price to being extraordinary.