Israel and the making of nations

A little more than five years ago the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony published The Virtue of Nationalism. Its final chapter was particularly poignant. After World War Two and the Holocaust, Hazony explained, two opposing views arose as to how such evils could be prevented from happening again. One side pointed toward the creation of the European Union and held that nationalism must be repudiated and condemned. The other endorsed the creation of Israel as a nation-state for the Jewish people, with a nationalism of its own.

Israel is a test case for the survival of nationalism everywhere. That may sound like an exaggeration — surely nationalism has demonstrated ample staying power. But supporters of the cosmopolitan project would claim that the world has been swept since the 1960s not so much by waves of nationalism as by a tide of “anti-colonialism.”

With the liquidation of the French and British Empires, Africans, Indo-Chinese and others may have accepted the nation-state as a form, yet what really drove their independence efforts was opposition to outside (specifically Western) rule. After all, didn’t many of those independence movements style themselves communist? — what could be more internationalist in principle than that?

Israel, however, is different. It’s truly nationalist — and accordingly, say its accusers, it is colonialist as well. The force of anti-colonialism in the Holy Land is represented by the Palestinians, and if the prospects for a fully functional Palestinian nationstate appear dim, that only goes to show that nationhood is not really the aim: overthrowing Israeli rule — first in the Palestinian territories and subsequently within what is now the Jewish state itself — is the objective, no matter what may follow.

What the most enlightened cosmopolitans envision is not a “one-state” solution but a “no-nation” solution in which a heterogeneous population will exercise majority rule. If Jews are not the majority, they must accept what democracy legislates, not what their religion or national identity demands. The only alternative to such majoritarianism would be rule by a wise post-national, secular elite — like the kind to be found in Brussels. Only a regime of disinterested expertise may morally trump democracy.

This is what progressive opinion prescribes for the United States and Europe, too. No nation has a moral right to close its borders or to prefer its citizens to other people. Within any historically arbitrary administrative territory — a “country” — population in the aggregate, without any distinctions among persons, should be free to approve a choice of enlightened governors or to elect unenlightened but powerless representatives. Sub-national units may have a voice, but they must not have sovereignty: that would lead back to nationalism, if only on a smaller scale than before.

This is the rationalist dream of nationalism’s progressive opponents. Of course, the historical reality of power outside of a nation-state framework looks rather different. Without a minimally cohesive public, democracy is feeble, if it is possible at all. Administrative overlordship imposed upon a fragmentary populace is traditionally known as empire. But the elites who run most empires are not disinterested in strong identities: they tend to be ethnically, religiously or otherwise united into a group with its own interests.

The Ottoman Empire that controlled the Holy Land for some 400 years was of this character. What would follow the end of Israel as a Jewish state would not resemble the European Union or other fanciful Western notions of post-national order. A much more traditional alternative would soon be at hand.

Of course, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, they feel they are already living under an empire. But empire is all a people will ever experience if it cannot organize nationally. Israel itself provides a model of national self-organization, and indeed the Jewish people were such an example even in diaspora. There is a Jewish nation-state today because the Jews survived as a stateless nation for centuries.

The Jews have resisted colonialism as almost no other people in history — and they have suffered for it. They eventually fought free of the Greek Seleucid empire, founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, in the second century BC. And while they did not succeed in throwing off the later Roman yoke, they were obstinate in their struggles against it. In the course of suppressing one rebellion, the Romans, under Vespasian’s son Titus, destroyed Jerusalem in ad 70. After a further revolt led by Bar Kokhba, Hadrian had the Jews extirpated.

Tacitus, looking back on Titus’ war in his Histories, records that Jerusalem was an exceptionally well-situated and fortified city, with internal sources of water from cisterns and a spring to add to its self-sufficiency. It was built this way, he said, because the Jews knew they would face the world’s enmity: “The founders of the state had foreseen that frequent wars would result from the singularity of its customs, and so had made every provision against the most protracted siege.”

Today Israel’s Jews are menaced by the Islamists of Hamas, among others. In the Middle Ages the Jews of Christendom were frequently expropriated by kings who offered them “protection” as long as they contributed enough to the royal coffers; the racket usually ended in expulsion for the Jews and outright confiscation of their wealth. The Greeks and Romans of antiquity, for their part, detested the Jewish religion for its exclusivity. The Jews will want Jerusalem, and Israel, to be fortified no matter who constitutes the kingdoms and empires around them — no matter how enlightened kings, emperors and administrators imagine themselves to be.

The Jews need a nation, and a world of nations rather than empires needs Israel.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2024 World edition.