The new world (dis)order: A clash of values - opinion

Here is how it works.

We know there is always water in the air, even in dry desert air. We call it humidity. Why not capture it?

Next, zoom in again. Analyze the ideas and test their feasibility and robustness. Reject many. If needed, zoom out again. Continue the process until you converge on a viable solution.

The entire world, including Israel, sits atop a set of moving plates known as tectonic plates. These plates have been slowly shifting under our feet for 3.4 billion years. There are places where two tectonic plates meet and collide. Israel lies atop one of them, known as the Syrian-African Rift.

Colliding tectonic plates create stored-up energy that builds and is eventually released as earthquakes. Geologists say Israel is due for a big earthquake one of these days, but they don’t know when.

Politically, socially, and economically, the world is experiencing a tectonic shift. The post-World War II global financial and economic ecosystem is undergoing massive, rapid change. It is not an exaggeration to call it a global earthquake. Once orderly, today the world is in disarray.

Israel’s own earthquake shattered our lives on October 7. The proximate cause was a somnolent army and bumbling government, whose overconfidence and negligence led to disaster.

But there was a deeper cause: a global clash of basic human values between Western liberal democracy and fundamentalist, autocratic values violently hostile to it. These two tectonic plates smashed together – on Israel’s borders, and within Israel, at one and the same time.

Choose life, our Torah says. Seek death, preach our enemies. They indoctrinate small children, giving them tiny mock suicide vests to emulate their vicious elders. This collision of opposing values is playing out all over the world, but lately most violently on Israel’s borders.

There is a long history of new world orders. President Woodrow Wilson of the US initiated one, the League of Nations, founded on January 10, 1920. It failed.

The disastrous 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed huge war reparations on Germany, impoverished it, and led to the rise of the Nazis and World War II.

In July 1944, in the midst of war, a US-led gathering of Allies at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, built a new world order, based on free trade; Marshall Plan aid to Europe oiled the wheels. Post-war trade and economic growth soared. Asia in particular reaped benefits.

Welcome to the New World Disorder!

Values are defined as our preferences about what is important and how we should act. They reflect our sense of right and wrong and what ought to be. They are the glue that holds societies together.

Underlying the global balagan lies a fierce, often violent, clash of basic human values. It is particularly violent on the borders of Israel.

Metulla is in the crosshairs of Kornet squads in Kfar Kila and nearby villages. Hezbollah and Hamas also target Israeli civilians with impunity. In contrast, Israel and IDF are expected – demanded – by the world not to harm a hair on a civilian’s head – and are hauled before The Hague on genocide charges, despite strenuous IDF efforts to spare civilians.

Hezbollah and Hamas get a pass. Why? They are not countries, just terrorists. To the BBC and other Western media, they are militants. Blame the victim. Exonerate the criminal.

University of Michigan political scientist Ron Inglehart, who died in 2021, had a brilliant idea over 40 years ago. He initiated the World Values Survey, to study values worldwide and to see how they are changing, in 90 countries. The hypothesis was that as more and more people in the world escape poverty, they will think differently. Their values will change. They will give more weight to freedom, to individual liberties, to education, to modern Western democracy. As countries grow richer, people’s principles everywhere will align. Liberal democracy triumphs. A new world order. It didn’t happen.

As the business weekly The Economist notes in a recent cover article, “Western values are now steadily diverging from the rest of the world.” In much of the Islamic world – which comprises two billion people – conformity, tradition, security, religious supremacy, and power are key values. In the West, self-direction, self-enhancement, self-expression, democracy, human rights, and achievement dominate.

Russia’s Putin declares war on Western values. China and Iran join. A destructive divisive wall has been built between West and East. Populism spreads, as the underclass rebels against the educated elites. War and pandemics have generated insecurity that has led some countries to seek strong autocratic leaders.

Putin has clung to power for 24 years. A change in the Russian constitution will likely keep him as Russia’s autocrat until 2036, when he turns 84, despite his disastrous missteps.

Once, China regularly replaced its top leader every decade. Now, Xi Jin Ping grasps the reins and appears intending to rule forever. Elsewhere, too, leaders manipulate democracy to gain power, then dismantle it to retain power and steal. Hamas is near the top of the class. Had our Israeli leaders been paying attention, the lesson from the global values earthquake should have been “Mind the gap!”

The global divide between Western liberal and traditional conservative values exists as a microcosm within Israel. The latest example is the ultra-Orthodox refusal to accept military service, to defend the country that supports them. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared that young men would leave the country rather than serve. When they do, I wonder whether Canada, the US, France, Germany, and the UK will pay them liberally to sit and study Torah.

I find some comfort in history. Great progress has often emerged from horrific destruction and chaos. You can patch up an old building. Or you can tear it down and build a fantastic new one. The European Union, for example, arose from the ashes and destruction of World War II. So did a powerful global financial and economic ecosystem that lifted many out of poverty. As an old-timer, I recall this process of renewal occurring in Israel after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was painful, slow, wrenching, and often frustrating. But renewal occurred. And so it will again.

In the past few days, my Neaman Institute colleague Dr. Gilead Fortuna and I have interviewed several Israeli business leaders. What we learned is disturbing.

Israel’s economy is in deep hot water. As I write this, the business daily The Marker reports a 50 percent rise in businesses seeking court protection from creditors; “Many businesses are deep in debt and taking their last breaths.”

We’ve been in trouble before. In 2007-8, there was a disastrous global financial crisis. Israel was impacted. Then, in March 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his term of office and led economic reforms that helped boost per capita GDP by 60% between then and 2020; unemployment fell to a record low of 3.4% in the months before COVID-19 began.

But today? Netanyahu has thrown the economy under the bus, to pander to the far Right and remain in office despite massive public opposition.

We do not need massive imports. We do need massive local production. As global famine looms, Israel must remain largely self-sufficient in producing food.

Sooner or later – hopefully sooner – we, the people of Israel, will elect a new, competent government able to zoom out, analyze the situation at home and abroad, face reality, establish priorities, and zoom in to rebuild our economy in a way that responds to global disorder, while protecting our borders, returning our refugees to their homes, restoring our liberal democracy, and rebuilding trust in the IDF and our government, while restoring strategic cooperation with the US and other allies. All we need are a few good women and men.

Postscript: In the early morning hours of Sunday, April 14, Iran sent more than 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones to attack Israel. The IDF reported that nearly 99% were shot down, mainly by Israel, some by coalition forces. The attack was ordered by Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, an aged Shia religious cleric and politician, Supreme Leader of Iran for nearly 35 years. His 85th birthday was on April 19. Some 200 million Shia Muslims revere him, 10 percent of the world’s two billion Muslims. He controls the murderous Revolutionary Guards and guides their perfidy. Clash of values? Religious leader who sows death? I wonder if the ill-informed liberals in the world believe that Israel should respond by sending him a birthday bouquet of roses. ■