Zionists Oppose Ethno-nationalism … Except in Israel

As of late, Zionists have turned against the doyen of ethno-nationalists, the Israeli agit-philosopher Yoram Hazony. The self-serving antisemitism expert Deborah Lipstadt has jumped on the bandwagon against Hazony, retweeting (see above) a polemic by arch-Zionist and poser Jamie Kirchick (a portage of the former New Republic owner Marty Peretz, an anti-Arab, rabid racist akin to David Duke).

The ultra-Zionist Tablet magazine has also rebuked Hazony, accusing him of harming American Jews by failing to understand America’s unique experiment as an anti-ethnonationalist project. But all this is too transparently hypocritical.

Hazony has advocated ethno-nationalism as the essence of a nation-state, lamenting the rise of inclusive citizenship. The problem, for Hazony, is that promoting ethno-nationalism — an exclusionary national identity rooted in blood-and-soil nationalism rather than common values — has inevitably led to antisemitism.

Hazony did not expect this. After all, Israel, the Jewish State, would serve as the model for ethno-nationalism. How could his fellow travelers in, say, the U.S., turn against their North Star?

What Hazony failed to realize, and what many Zionists overlook today, is that antisemitism and Zionism are not incompatible, but often reinforcing. This is not a new reality.

Since the beginning of the Zionist projects, antisemites in Western countries, including Lord Balfour of the Balfour Declaration, viewed Zionism as the answer to the “Jewish Question.”

Years before the Declaration, Balfour had spoken out against permitting Eastern European and Russian Jews facing pogroms to immigrate to the United Kingdom. For Balfour, Palestine could become the destination for unwanted Jews.

Similarly, today, far-right nativists in every country look upon Israel as the model state: restrictive immigration rules based on Jewish ancestry, opposition to the liberal principle of “a state for all its citizens” in favor of a racially defined citizenship, an unapologetic favoritism for the preferred group, including housing restrictions, discrimination in public funds allocations, etc., etc.

The other side of the coin is the marginalization of Jews within Western nations. Far-rightists are philosemitic only in that they admire Jews over there, in Israel. Closer to home? Not so much.

The problem with Zionist critiques of Hazony is that they refuse to extend it to the very project Hazony admires above all and upholds as the nation-state that every other national project should seek to emulate.

Hazony is far from a liberal Zionist. He believes in Jewish supremacy without any allowance for Palestinian self-determination. Zionists opposing him in the U.S. fail to explain why Hazony’s ideas are perfectly fine for Israel, but bad for America. Instead, they seek to have their cake and eat it too: Ethno-nationalism where Jews are the majority, and pluralism where they are the minority.

This is pure hypocrisy, and opposition to Hazony is exposed for its self-serving opportunism, and not a principled objection rooted in liberal values.

If Israel is permitted to be an ethno-nationalist state, then why aren’t the Dutch permitted to favor the ethnic Dutch over Dutch Jews and Muslims? Here, Zionists often like to claim that “Israel is the one and only Jewish state,” but there is no spare Dutch state (or Thai nation or a host of other ethnic/religious groups).

Sometimes Zionists bring up the history of Jewish victimhood. But this is an ahistorical account that exceptionalizes Jewish suffering to permit Jewish discrimination against the native non-Jewish population in Palestine.

The fact is, if every nation behaved like Israel, this would be a less welcoming place for Jews who wish to live anywhere else, from America to Argentina. And Zionists know this, but seek to carve out an exception for Israel. This is untenable as an argument against ethno-nationalism.

There is, however, an off-ramp for Zionists. Zionists like to claim that Israel is Jewish like Finland is Finnish, but this is false.

Finland is defined by its unique Finnish majority, yes, but also by its status as a state with equal citizenship for all people. In other words: a liberal democracy. Israel, on the other hand, is not the nation-state of Israelis, but the nation-state of Jews. There is no category of “Israeli” in Israeli law.

By definition, then, non-Jews (21% of Israel’s population) are second-class citizens. One can be a Finnish Jew or Muslim, but one cannot be a Jewish Christian.

Israel could simultaneously retain its position as a Jewish-majority nation while redefining itself as the nation-state of all Israelis — permitting someone to be an Israeli Muslim or Israeli Druze. This would do nothing to diminish Israel’s status as the homeland of the Jewish people while upholding equal citizenship. The Israeli government rejects this easy formula, and Hazony supports this racist status quo.

If Zionists want to argue that race-based nationalism is wrong, then they need to start where Hazony starts in making his argument: Israel.