Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Seven years ago an article appeared in the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly that contains an unintended lesson for Israel.
Mexico, we learn, is by far the leading supplier of immigrants to the United States. Between 1970 and 1996, some five million Mexicans entered the United States to stay. George J. Borjas, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy’s School of Government (and a Cuban émigré) presented a worrisome picture in that Atlantic Monthly article.
He notes that Mexican immigration is concentrated in the Southwest, particularly in California and Texas. “Hispanics, including Central and South Americans but predominantly Mexicans, today compose 28% of the population of Texas and 31% of the population of California.” [As of 2000, the figures were 32% for Texas and 32.4% for California.] More than a million Texans and more than three million Californians were born in Mexico.”
Borjas concludes: “Mexican-Americans will have open to them possibilities closed to previous immigrant groups [from Europe]. They will have sufficient coherence and critical mass in a defined region so that, if they choose, they can preserve their distinctive culture indefinitely [in contrast to European immigrants who became ‘Americanized’]. They could also eventually undertake to do what no previous immigrant group could have dreamed of doing: challenge the existing cultural, political, legal, commercial, and educational systems to change fundamentally not only the language but also the institutions in which they do business. They could even precipitate a debate over a ‘special relationship’ with [bordering and population-exploding] Mexico that would make the controversy over the North American Free Trade Agreement look like a college bull session. In the process, Americans could be pitched into a soul-searching redefinition of fundamental ideas such as the meaning of citizenship and national identity.”
If Mexican-American citizens pose a “soul-searching” problem for the future of America, what shall we say of the problem 1.2 million prolific Arab citizens pose for the future of the Jewish State of Israel?
But let us examine more recent U.S. population data. According to the year 2000 census, the rise in the foreign-born population brought with it a sharp increase in the number of people 5 years old and over who spoke a language other than English at home—47 million in 2000, up from 32 million in 1990. Of these 21 million indicated that they spoke less English “very well,” up from 14 million in 1990. Among all those who spoke a language other than English, 60% of the people spoke Spanish in 2000, up from 54% in 1990.
Multilingualism was practically the rule in California where 40% of the people spoke a language other than English at home (compared with18% nationally). Two other states bordering Mexico—New Mexico and Texas—also had rates exceeding 30%. In some communities along the Mexican border, such as Laredo, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona, more than 90% of the population spoke Spanish at home.
America has ceased being a melting pot; it is a polyglot or multicultural society (and I have not mentioned the 3 million and rapidly increasing Muslim population). Multiculturalism reinforces the moral relativism that permeates all levels of education in the United States, especially on college and university campuses. More and more “Americans” have less and less knowledge of the moral and constitutional foundations of the USA. And their is ignorance—not to say “alienation”—is fostered and magnified by the U.S. Supreme Court, so many of whose judicial decisions ignore or violate the teachings of America’s founding fathers.
The same phenomena will be found in Israel, where public school education has become increasingly secular, hence unJewish. Most subversive of the Jewish character of the State of Israel are the rulings of its Supreme Court. The court apes American jurisprudence especially as regards unfettered freedom of expression and indiscriminate egalitarianism or moral relativism. (For example, the court sanctions pornography, which reduces the human to the subhuman, as well as the obscene Arab film “Jenin, Jenin,” which portrays Jewish soldiers as inhuman!)
We see a convergence here between Israel and America. There is a hidden irony. America became great by imitating Jewish principles, as an in-depth study of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution will reveal. Notwithstanding its awesome power, however, America is in a state of moral decline precisely because, little by little, it has forsaken its founding principles.
Israel, on the other hand, was founded on non-Jewish principles—and this is why, despite its extraordinary physical achievements, it is now in a rapid state of moral decline. It may be, however, that the State of Israel, as presently constituted, must perish if Israel—the true Israel—is to fulfill its historic destiny.