The fundamental basis of antisemitism

Spengler — A First Things Blog » Blog Archive » “What will become of all the talk about the Chosen People?”

Envy of Israel’s election is at the foundation of Muslim antipathy to the State of Israel... Rosenzweig understated the significance of his insight, for the Gentile nations too often turned what he called the “festive costume” of ethnocentric election into a military uniform. With the hindsight of the twentieth century’s terrible events, we should look less benignly on the Gentile nations’ longing for divine election.

That is why there will be no peace between the State of Israel and political Islam, although there certainly can be peace between Israel and Muslim countries that act like nation-states first — Egypt and Jordan, for example. The way to suppress political Islam is to take its state sponsors down a notch, starting with Iran.

In thus qualifying his previously-stated objections to nationalism, it seems Spengler believes in the three- or four-(nation)state solution (among nations whose sense of covenant does not require them to seek world dominance or envious destruction of Jewish covenantal firstness): it's surely going to take some Arab nations effectively to confront the Utopian death cult preaching endless self-sacrifice and killing in the name of a global political Caliphate, and heavenly rewards for its "martyrs", that is the political Islam of Iran and the "Palestinians" (the latter being a name of convenience, in the game for the world's sympathies, that has its origins with a non-Arab, non-Muslim people; and so it will surely be cast aside should the Islamists ever succeed in pushing the Jews out of Israel's small piece of "Palestine", so that any pretense to the Palestinians being just another "post-colonial" movement for national liberation can eventually be dropped).

In any case, Spengler should now give attention to the kinds of covenants that responsible, modern nation-states will need that they do not repeat the deadly folly of the Nazis, nor their equally deadly counterparts in the bureaucratic destruction of political (covenantal) freedom that is the European Union or United Nations. If both imperialistic "nationalism" and post-nationalism or Islamism can be dangerous political religions, what is the sober alternative?