Hamas, Israel, the West & Death

“Hamas wants to die, obviously and visibly,” writes David P. Goldman, provocatively, as he does, explaining that Hamas Is the Norm, Israel Is the Exception. He begins, darkly:

It’s like the old joke: Why do Jewish men die before their wives? Because they want to. Civilizations for the most part die because they no longer want to live. That is the nub of my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too).They cease to believe in their own future and distract themselves from the prospect of extinction as best they can.

Hellenistic Greece was the first universal demographic disaster; it gave us prototypes of the steam engine and the computer (via Hero of Alexandria) as well as the modern literary forms. But even wealthy men exposed their daughters and the population imploded. When Aristotle taught that men naturally seek the good, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence had already turned against him. Most men seek nothingness. Soon the last surviving remnants of the classical world will disappear. In another generation, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek.

Hamas, he argues, wants to die as long as it can kill Israel in doing so, while the West, disproving Enlightenment optimism, wants to die but not in so spectacular a way. And Israel

is the only developed nation (with a fertility rate of three) that loves life sufficiently to bring more children into the world than are required to replace the existing population.  . . . Israel today, as at the time of the prophets, remains a unique and irreplaceable light unto the world, the paragon of a nation, the hope of all humanity. Today it is the proof that modern men and women can embrace life and raise themselves above the tragic fate of the peoples since the dawn of man. Anti-semitism is the vicious grudge that death harbors against life.