Noted author John Wohlstetter, a national security and foreign policy expert with expertise in the Middle East and Israel, has written an excellent review of George Gilder’s new book, The Israel Test, for the American Spectator. We are pleased to share the piece with our readers…
Israel Inside
The Israel Test
By George Gilder
(Richard Vigilante Books, 296 pages, $27.95)This latest book from one of the planet’s intellectual titans of the past generation is one of his most important. Given George Gilder’s astonishing range and foresight — including family structure, welfare, the practical and moral case for enterprise capitalist wealth creation, the transformation of the computer and telecommunications industries — this is saying a lot.
What Gilder sets out to do in his poetic prose is show how Israel’s accelerating migration over the past twenty years from a socialist to a capitalist economy has transformed the Jewish state from an economic basket case to a powerhouse player in the world economy. Gilder then applies the implications of this metamorphosis to the prospects for finding a way to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel has become such a huge driving force in computing and telecommunications that Gilder intellectually riffs off the "Intel Inside" logo that sits on the exterior case of countless millions of personal computers, and says that today’s Internet and computers should be labeled "Israel Inside." Now Israel is making major moves in biotechnology, including drugs for plants used in agriculture. Symbolic of the more agile Israeli economy, one CEO noted: "The process is faster for drugs because the plants don’t have lawyers."
Calling Israel the central front in the war dividing two global camps, Gilder begins his book by framing the divide:
The prime issue is not a global war of civilizations between the West and Islam or a split between Arabs and Jews….The real issue is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism, between creative excellence and covetous "fairness," between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it….
The test can be summarized by a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishment? Do you aspire to that excellence, or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?
The Palestinians, needless to say, epitomize the wrong side of these juxtapositions, while Israel and America generally are on the right side. But now America must look toward Israel, whose Prime Minister exemplifies the right side of these divides, whereas the newly elected American President is on the wrong side — despite his having been richly rewarded by the society he now wishes to turn away from its historical celebration of private capitalist enterprise.