The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
—Isaiah Chapter 11
It is a very old joke, and a very profound one. A visitor to a zoo chances upon a cage in which he sees the most astonishing of sights: a wolf lying down next to a lamb. Overcome with awe, he runs to the zookeeper and proclaims: “It is exactly as Isaiah foretold! The wolf dwells with the lamb! The eschatological era is upon us! The permanent period of peace has come! How have you achieved this astonishing state of affairs?” To this the zookeeper immediately and modestly replies: “Oh, it was easy. Every day we put in another lamb.”
The joke comes to mind as we prepare for the sorry and sordid spectacle of European leaders descending on the United Nations to proclaim their support for Palestinian statehood and to attend a conference promoting the “two-state solution.” French President Emmanuel Macron is therefore profoundly irked that Mahmoud Abbas has been barred by the Trump administration from attending. “Our objective is clear,” Macron announced, “to rally the broadest possible international support for the Two-State Solution—the only way to meet the legitimate aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.” The barring of Abbas is therefore, Macron declared, “unacceptable.” With nothing but bloodshed in the decades following Oslo, and with the Palestinian Authority giving every indication that it is still interested in finding and celebrating the murder of Jews, Europe will continue to assert its purported solution as sacred doctrine.
What are we to make of this? Is this a reflection of foolishness and preening? A refusal to admit error? A concession to voters in left-wing coalitions? All of this, yes. But there is something deeper going on here, which alone can explain why a man like Emmanuel Macron, his government in collapse and approval polls at a nadir, would choose to focus on a matter that is irrelevant to the future of his own country.
The historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, has argued that the rituals and imagery of what was once Christendom have so seeped into Western civilization that today, in phenomena such as wokeism, many are merely mimicking its rituals and expressing its concepts in a warped, secular, unconscious form. At times, Holland reflects, many in the West are akin to fish swimming in water—unaware of the cultural medium on which they draw. While there is much to critique about this thesis—wokeism is really in many ways a reversion to ancient paganism—there are moments that confirm that Holland is on to something.
Thus the now-infamous image of a woman in Gaza clutching her child—an image that newspapers around the world touted as evidence of starvation. In truth, the child had cystic fibrosis, and his brother was clearly quite healthy. As many have noted, the mother was obviously posed in the position of the Pietà—the once ubiquitous image in Western art depicting Mary clutching Jesus. A post-Christian culture, in other words, has snatched an image from the past and modified it for the pieties of the progressive present to construct a blood libel. The editors of the Times might not even know what a Pietà is, but they have subconsciously seized on a matrix of meaning that, in a now-warped and woke form, expresses how they see the world and themselves.
Keep this in mind as you consider the European political class’s obsession with the “peace process.” Bringing peace to the Middle East is, consciously or not, more than a minor matter for these political figures: It has become bound up with their own sense of self, their search for meaning in their own lives and legacies. Buried within them is the hope that perhaps they will one day be known not as failed leaders unable to address immigration issues and economic stagnation, but rather as the princes of peace. The failed leaders of Europe have embraced messianic thinking—but in a godless society, the messiah must be themselves. And so every day, they seek to put in another lamb.
In his memoir, former Israeli Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau described an interfaith conference he attended in Milan. In his public address to leading figures from around the world, he referred to Isaiah’s vision of the wolf and the lamb, and he noted that it had a precedent: Noah’s ark, where a veritable menagerie of animals coexisted peacefully. Citing an earlier rabbi, he suggested that on the ark, with the flood outside, the animals instinctively understood that they needed to work together in order to survive—and so as long as the deluge continued, peace reigned aboard the biblical boat. The point, Rabbi Lau homiletically suggested, is that humanity needed to focus on the flood-like issues that we all face.
But political leadership is hard. For leaders that have failed to be Noah—to deal with the deluge of problems plaguing their own countries—the only option is to become a messiah. Which is why the European obsession with the Middle East is not likely to disappear in the years to come—unless of course, the true messiah arrives at last.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
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