At a conference in Jerusalem this past week, more than 100 influential people from around the world—theologians, politicians, judges, academics, military officers, journalists and activists—delivered messages about the future of the Jewish state. In this, the 60th year of Israel’s statehood, conference organizers asked speakers to consider this question: “Where are we going?” As I listened to the numerous attempts to answer that question—many from fine speakers with distinguished backgrounds—I kept thinking about the glaring weakness in leadership I highlighted two weeks ago in this space: the blind faith American leaders have placed in the goodness of man.

Israel’s leadership suffers from the same disease. Speakers at the fifth annual Jerusalem Conference, most of them politically conservative, are not as inclined to trust in Palestinian goodness as the Bush administration seems to be. But their faith is in man nonetheless. If Israel is to recover from its recent string of shameful defeats—the Oslo accords, Lebanon pullout, Gaza disengagement, Second Lebanon War, never-ending Kassam rocket attacks, etc.—it is the Jewish people who must heal Israel’s sickness. That was one recurring theme we heard at the conference.

Professor Uzi Arad made a number of excellent points in his speech on Tuesday. Arad, who served in Israel’s Mossad for 25 years and also advised Benjamin Netanyahu on foreign policy, said Israel was losing the war against radical Islam. Instead of confronting its enemies head-on, Israel’s present leadership is convinced that engagement is the way to peace, Arad argued.

“What is the secret charm of the appeasement policy?” he asked. “A policy of accommodating a rising power is one that defers conflict because the very process of accommodation—satisfying some new demands or objectives of the challenger—is postponing friction, postponing the possible crisis, and certainly postponing the risks of war.”

Appeasement was the policy of choice among elites and academics in Britain prior to World War ii. It became a bad word after Chamberlain’s Munich agreement with Hitler, which is why elites use different language today—dialogue, engagement, accommodation, etc.

“The reason why we are losing the war against radical Islam is because the sentiments and the values of appeasement are very deeply held now within all our societies,” Professor Arad said. “Political leaders nowadays in all Western democracies get elected by promising peace and exiting wars, not by promises of sweat, blood and tears,” he continued. “That’s a foregone era.” And that’s true. We live in a new era.

“Why are we losing the battle?” Arad again asked. He answered that with another question (emphasis mine throughout):

Who are the leaders of the Western world? Do we have Churchillian figures? … The tragic condition of the West is that in the last decade or so, we had none of that in the Western world. So what will happen in the future? If we will not have a different line-up of leaders, we may ultimately lose the battle. History knows that battles, even the most noble of battles, have been lost.

How refreshing to at least hear a leading voice acknowledge the possibility of catastrophic failure.

Shabtai Shavit, the former director general of Mossad, spoke after Arad and said he believes Israel is actually winning the war against radical Islam! He didn’t agree with the professor’s point about Israel’s leaders appeasing tyrants. Shavit is absolutely convinced that in the end, the forces for “good” will win the struggle against terror.

Nothing guarantees success, as Professor Arad correctly asserted in his speech—certainly not arrogance. Yet Arad’s prognostication, while not as bombastic as Shavit’s, is still based on absolute faith in man. “Maybe,” he said, and then repeated, “maybewe will rise to the occasion.” At the Herzliya Conference in January, Dr. Arad made a similar point: “It is in our hands.” Trust in self, in other words.

This past week, Arad wrote an article in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth titled, “Forever strong? The answer depends on us.” He wrote, “The principal component of Israel’s strength is the nation itself: its vitality, its identification with the Jewish state, its stamina in the face of the war of attrition being waged against us and its resourcefulness and creativity.”

But that is not the answer. Trusting in self might be an improvement over trusting in the goodness of others—particularly if the “others” are sworn enemies—but only incrementally. Cursed be the man, the Prophet Jeremiah wrote, who trusts in man. God says we are under a curse if we trust in the heart of man—including our own heart.

Death Stands at Attention

When the British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948, the Jewish People’s Council approved “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel,” which began with these words: “The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”

Indeed, even the “Churchillian” leaders outside Israel acknowledged as much during this foregone era. “We owe the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together,” Winston Churchill wrote on Feb. 8, 1920.

The Jewish People’s Council concluded its 1948 proclamation by saying that Israel’s founding fathers had placed their trust in the “Rock of Israel.” Israel’s birth certificate begins with the Bible and ends with faith in God.

At the Jerusalem Conference, one popular Israeli journalist said, “The only way that we can survive is if we go back to thinking again. It’s always been the thing that we’ve done best as Jews. … And when we think, we generally are able to think right.” It’s a far cry from trusting in the Rock of Israel. During the Q&A, one member of the audience said Israel needed to return to its spiritual roots in order to survive. That same journalist quickly brushed aside that admonition, saying she was proud of Israel’s all-inclusive democratic traditions of appealing to people from all walks of life—not just the religious sector.

In other words, the Book of Books and the Rock of Israel are no longer seen as rallying cries for uniting one nation under God. They are for the religious fanatics on the far right—certainly not for everyone. Therefore, the answers to the really big questions of our day depend on us.

And yet, many of the same commentators who faithfully place their trust in the ability of people to rescue us from the abyss will, at the same time, admit there are no Churchills on the horizon, as Professor Arad admitted.

But at least we can go back and learn from the original, thanks to Churchill’s prodigious pile of recorded writings. “I am perhaps the only man who has passed through both the two supreme cataclysms of recorded history in high Cabinet office,” Churchill wrote in the preface of The Gathering Storm. He lived and wrote about two world wars—and the lull in between. “Mankind has never been in this position before,” Churchill ominously warned later in the book.

Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities.Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now—for one occasion only—his master.

He wrote that in 1929—ten years before World War ii; 16 years before the atomic age. Think about what he would be saying today.

What a frightening age this is to depend on us.

To read more about Churchill’s lonely fight to warn the world of an oncoming Holocaust, read Winston S. Churchill: the Watchman.