Yishai Edberg is Im Tirtzu's Coordinator of Foreign Affairs and a student in the masters program in Government at Reichman University. He made aliyah from America in 2023, enlisted in the IDF and served in Gaza.
Paris is burning.
The City of Light is aflame with torched businesses, its monuments are covered in graffiti and garbage. The city that once declared the Rights of Man is now amassed by a lawless swarm of foreign youth who show no deference for neither rights nor men in their parade of orgiastic destruction.
The city of the Iron Lady has been exposed and humiliated, her virtue defiled by hordes who do not even know her name.
Truly, the forces of barbarism have triumphed over the forces of civilization in "Gay Paree" - or so it would seem.
For if a civilization cannot perform the task repelling such barbarians, perhaps the most basic function of civilization, how civilized was this civilization to begin with?
The medieval philosopher ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah argued that civilization is ultimately a fleeting, suicidal project. The basis of civilization, asabiyya or “social cohesion," at first an intense solidarity bound by harsh conditions, is ultimately eroded by the fruits of its own creation, debased in the warm bed of affluence into hyperindividualism, apathy, vanity, corruption, weakness, and failure.
Perhaps France is simply no exception.
If only there was another way.
To this end, I invite the good people of France and the good people of all nations who seek nothing more than dignity and welfare to “go up to the Mountain of G-d" (Micah 4:2): to look to Israel for such a model of sustainable civilization.
Israel is a unique, living model of a civilization that is enriched, not degraded by material abundance. The civilization created by the Jewish asabiyya, or areivut (mutual responsibility) in the Jewish tradition, is exceptional in its self-sustainability in spite of the country's prosperity.
Israel has a GDP per capita 36% greater than France, and yet when the barbarians were at our doorstep on October 7, Israel mustered a 120% reserve mobilization rate and continues to fight a war with a scope, scale, and intensity unparalleled in the modern world.
Ibn Khaldun’s conventional wisdom that prosperity corrupts the social foundations of civilization, so obvious on the streets of Paris, seems not to apply to the Jewish state.
The Jewish people are the wardens of the “Tree of Life" (Proverbs 3:18), from which we benefit greatly. Through both the depths of dispersion and persecution and the heights of abundance and prosperity, the Torah’s guidance enables us to continue to embrace national life.
It is for this reason Fredrich Nietzsche regarded Israel as “beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, purest people" (Beyond Good and Evil, 185).
The State of Israel can provide the world with a unique civilization, social, political model that can sustain its own success, a new articulation of civilization, exceptional and unprecedented in history.
So to the good people of the many nations, I humbly offer Israel: “our mouths shall be filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy; then they shall say among the nations, G-d has made them great!" (Psalms 126:2).