To turn our back on Israel is to give up on Western civilization

OPINION:

“Western civilization is under assault,” conservatives have cautioned for the past several decades.

Today, that assault manifests itself most clearly in the war against Israel, led by Hamas in the Middle East and anti-Israel, pro-Palestine “allies” in the West.

Alarmingly, in light of this recent turn against Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, many of those same conservatives are now tempted to turn their backs on the Jewish state, citing vague overtures to the “America First,” isolationist mentality common in a post-neocon party.

To be clear, we adamantly reject any characterization of us as war hawks; we are not eager to send our sons to die on foreign soil — both accusations regularly lobbed at pro-Israel advocates.

But to turn our backs on Israel is to give up on Western civilization. It is to give in to the forces that wish death upon the U.S., both ideologically and literally. It is, quite simply, to lose the war for our country.

This, of course, is in addition to the vicious, unadulterated antisemitism on the rise in the U.S. and abroad, accompanied by a chorus of calls to obliterate our longtime ally in the Middle East. Sadly, these threats do not seem to concern the purely self-motivated “America’s got its own problems” critics of Israel’s war against Nazi-level evil.

“America First Loyalist” commented “not my problem, just mind your own business and stop crying” in response to a post on X about Israelis who were raped, tortured and beheaded. “That’s an Israeli issue, we have enough of our own,” another user agreed.

But passivity in the face of such depravity is not only grossly callous but also stems from a failure to understand that the fates of these two bastions of liberty are inextricably linked.

Those who hate Israel also hate us. They have already set their sights on us, sniffing out the faintest whiff of weakness, and if we allow Israel to falter — because our “own problems” are too great for us to handle — we will signal to the international anti-West coalition that America is weak. And sensing our weakness, they will not hesitate to destroy us.

Those who hide behind the “America First” mantra seem to think that for as long as we bury our heads in the sand and focus only on “our problems,” Iran, a key player in the rising anti-U.S. world order, to whom Hamas is one of many proxies, and the rest of their radical Islamic brethren will leave us alone.

That’s a lie. Even if we withdrew our support for Israel in this conflict, Iran would still seek to destroy us. Tensions between these two ideologically divergent rivals predate recent debacles and ultimately fester from something more fundamental.

Like it or not, Israel is our proxy in the Middle East. The hatred directed against Israel is rooted in antisemitism, replete in human history from Exodus to Auschwitz, but also hatred against Western values — values epitomized by the U.S.

America is, of course, strong enough to ward off these attacks in a military sense, but not if we give up on Western culture, not if we concede to the narrative that Western culture is cruel, evil and oppressive.

The fundamental question becomes, will we fight to preserve Western civilization? Will we fight to preserve our culture? Today, amazingly, this seems an open question in America.

Culture, then, is what’s at stake. It’s a clash between two distinct worldviews, creeds and ideals. The ancient biblical city of Jerusalem is indispensable to Western thought. There would be no Western civilization without it, and no Western civilization without the Jews. While this does not mean the modern state per se, it does signify that there is a deep bond between Israel and the United States that must not be so quickly dismissed.

Israel is the canary in the coal mine for the Western world. If the intersectional interpretation of Israel as the “little oppressor” is allowed to prevail, so, too, will the interpretation of America as the “great oppressor.” If Israel is a “colonizer” nation that must be destroyed, then so, too, is the United States and virtually all of the West.

Anyone who believes in the Western world, anyone who believes in the Bible, and anyone who opposes radical Islam will ultimately be targeted.

In this conflict, it is Americans’ duty to fight for our culture and ideals and to stand by Israel as the foundation stone of Western civilization. In a fight to the death between two traditions, one evil and ruinous, the other imperfect but exceptional, Israel, the stand-in for the latter, must win. We must not underestimate the stakes. To turn our backs on Israel now is to give up on everything we hold dear.