Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

by Daniel Pipes
danielpipes.org
National Review Online
17 August '10

As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their way of life. If democracy, free markets, and the rule of law have created an unprecedented stability, affluence, and decency; how come so many beneficiaries, fail to see this?

Why, for example, does the United States, which has done so much for human welfare, inspire such hostility? And tiny Israel, the symbol of rejuvenation for a perpetually oppressed people – why does it engender such passionate hatred that otherwise decent people desire to eliminate this state?

Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem offers an explanation for this antagonism in a profound and implication-rich essay, "Israel Through European Eyes." He begins with the notion of "paradigm shift" developed by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This influential concept holds that scientists see their subject from within a specific framework, a "paradigm." Paradigms are frameworks that underpin an understanding of reality. Facts that do not fit the paradigm are overlooked or dismissed. Kuhn reviews the history of science and shows how, in a series of scientific revolutions, paradigms shifted, as from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.

Paradigms also frame politics and Hazony applies this theory to Israel's delegitimization in the West. Israel's standing has deteriorated for decades, he argues, "not because of this or that set of facts, but because the paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has shifted." Responding to the vilification of Israel by offering corrective facts – about Israel's military morality or its medical breakthroughs – "won't have any real impact on the overall trajectory of Israel's standing among educated people in the West." Instead, the latest paradigm must be recognized and fought.

The fading paradigm sees nation-states as legitimate and positive, a means of protecting peoples and allowing them to flourish. The treaty of Westphalia (1648) was the key moment in which the sovereignty of nations was recognized. John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson endowed the nation-state ideal with global reach.

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