Israeli Nationalism: Between the European Union and the Islamic State
By Joseph Agassi, Tel Aviv University and York University, Toronto
In its recent verdict against the appeal of some Israeli citizens to be
registered in the ministry of the Interior as of Israeli rather than Jewish
nationality, the Israeli Supreme Court has observed that there are two
concepts of citizenship, the liberal and the romantic, and siding with the
romantic concept the Supreme Court rejected the appeal. This is a hot
political issue in Israel, since the Israeli premiere is planning a bill
declaring that the State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish People,
and since his demand that the Palestinians recognize this is an obstacle to
the continuation of the peace process. It puzzles many non-Israelis,
friends and foes alike, that Israel does not recognize the Israeli nation.
That Israel recognizes the fictitious Jewish nation troubles very few,
although it should trouble the non-Israeli Jews in whose names Israel
often speaks. All this requires some clarification that I have discussed
elsewhere. (The Israeli Supreme Court has referred to my book on the
issue, although the decision is contrary to my recommendation.) Here my
aim is to explain why people who are troubled by the question of their
own national identity hope to see a relief in the project of United Europe.
In his celebrated Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power, Isaiah
Berlin wrote about the politically potent nationalist passion that
traditional philosophy either ignored or pitched against liberalism (as the
Israeli Supreme Court has done (2013 8573/08)) and even against the
liberal idea that individuals should have the right to choose their sense of
identity and to act on it as much as they wish. This sense of identity is
usually identified with a sense of pride in one’s belonging to one’s
collective, be it a nation or a tribe or anything else. This is a mistake:
identity is a mix of pride and shame, of care and concern. Nationalism,
says Berlin, is both the general sense of identity and the specific
nationalist ideology. The ideology is the collectivist philosophy of the
nineteenth-century romantic philosophers, especially Georg Friedrich
Wilhelm Hegel (who died in 1833). This philosophy declared that nations
and only nations deserve political sovereignty. This of course renders
nationalism anti-liberal, and liberal philosophers should offer an
alternative to it―which they have failed to do. And so the romantic
theory prevailed and raised the problem, what constitutes a nation? The
answer is the proper essential definition of nations, and the theory of
essential definitions is passé. Still, it has a tremendous appeal, and so
debates about the essence of a nation rage. For example, an item in the
essential definition is that the nation has a national language. This is
obviously refuted and the refutations are dismissed on diverse excuses.
The claim that the Jews are or are not members of this or that nation
rested on claims that they partake or do not partake in the national
culture. The claim that they are not members of the nation are
accompanied by the claim that they comprise or do not comprise a nation.
Those who said they are a nation sought the national territory that is
required for a nation by the essential definition of a nation. This debate is
as arbitrary as any debate can be.
The liberal idea of a nation identifies it with the country’s citizenry. This
led to the confused idea that the liberal idea of the nation is that the
country belongs to all its citizens. This reduces the significance of
national identity. It is better to consider the modern liberal democratic
state a state that belongs collectively to its nation, and thus only indirectly
to its citizens. In liberal nation-states nationality and citizenry are
identical, and the citizens identify with the nation, not with the state. The
identification with the state is dangerous, as the experience with
totalitarian countries shows and as the increase danger of anti-democracy
in Israel shows too. Remember that not only in fascist countries but also
in the Soviet Union state replaced nation as the object of identification. In
the United States, where the ideology of the Enlightenment Movement
was strong, national identity first found its expression in communities,
especially in religious communities. This was rectified by the official
recognition of the American nation in diverse ways. In Israel, most of
whose citizens belong to the non-existent Jewish nation, the absence of
religious communities make the identification with the state most natural
and most dangerous.
This is in part due to Israel being in a state of siege, of course. And
indeed, its very existence depends on its having a strong army. Yet this is
dangerous as there is a great interest there in maintaining the status quo:
the Israeli and the Palestinian authorities coordinate their interest in the
status quo: when one part is more willing to compromise, the other
hardens its position.
This quick and superficial overview already allows for some interesting
observations. First, all societies, the more sophisticated or less, they all
need identification. Indeed, this is true even of smaller parts of a society.
During World War II the USA organized its forces rapidly and created an
ad hoc brigade of odds and ends called the Rainbow Brigade. Sociologists
were surprised to find that its members developed pride in their brigade
very quickly and for no reason at all except for the need to belong.
Politically, however, there is no substitute for political belonging and for
the political sense of belonging or for the sense of political belonging, it
is hard to judge. And candidates for the object of political identification
in the modern world are the nation and the community. This does not
have to be so, and indeed the European Union offers a third option, but
perhaps it is too early to judge it. For my part, I think it is a matter for the
political leadership of the European Union to decide about and to act on
some rational decision on this matter. Still, for now let me dwell more on
the past for a while. The point that Berlin made, about the neglect of the
need for identification, led to the development of the nation state rather
spontaneously. With the failure of the French revolution and with the
ensuing Napoleonic wars a reaction to liberalism developed and it had
two different expressions, both reactionary in tendency, of course. First,
rather than speak of individual liberty, as did the French Revolution, the
reaction spoke of national liberty. And whatever were its guiding ideas
that it expressed in the discussion of the definition of the nation that
deserves liberty, its chief aim was to present the traditional community as
a substitute for the modern nation: the civil society is atomized and so its
members have no community life and so they suffer from a newly
diagnosed illness: alienation. The word was new and it came from the
technical vocabulary of psychopathology: both the American Revolution
and the French Revolution led to the improvement of the lot of the
mentally sick, and a leading psychiatrist, Philippe Pinel pleaded on their
behalf, requesting that they be considered not deranged but mentally
alienated (1801).
This is not to doubt that loneliness is absent or that it is a severe condition
that demands attention. This is not to deny that the rise of rapid
urbanization contributed to it significantly. It is nevertheless an open
question whether in modern society this condition is more severe and
more common than in other societies. Some philosophers see it as a part
of the human condition. This is neither here nor there: the question is
empirical and there is too little study of this phenomenon and even of the
phenomenon of alienation from work that is decidedly due to modern life
and that there is a global movement for curing it, the movement for the
improvement of the quality of working life. However humble the success
of this movement is, it disproves the idea of the nineteenth-century
German philosophers―especially Hegel―and sociologist―especially
Ferdinand Tönnies. The latter is known for his distinction between civil
society and traditional community, a distinction that is as obvious as
possible. After all, social life throughout history and to date, with the
exception of the modern liberal societies, were and still are organized in
communities, whereas civil society is an invention conceived by western
liberal thinkers. Philosopher-anthropologist-sociologist-politologist
Ernest Gellner has suggested that the industrial revolution would be
impossible without the prior development of civil society. Yet what
Ferdinand Tönnies suggested is that communal life is real and civil life is
but a shadow of it. This shows he was aware of the fact that it is possible
to fight alienation without returning to communal life, since he opposed
this. Today a new communalist movement is evolving and seems to be
ambitious in its advocacy of communal life. Some of its leaders are
reactionaries, but not all of them: the democrats among them rightly
suggest that civil and communal social structures need not compete and
can indeed cooperate. The separation of church and state should be
conducive to it since communal life usually centers in churches. Indeed,
this is the chief source of the immense strength of religious life in the
United States that runs contrary to decades of predictions to the contrary.
Israel does not separate state and church. The political leaders strengthen
the religious sentiment by boosting religion―mainly financially but also
by other perks, including release from military duties. It looks as if the is
not true of the European Union, since its individual members do not
impose any religious discrimination. Yet the debate about the application
of Turkey to join show that possibly things are not that simple. True, the
official reason for the rejection of Turkey has to do with its maltreatment
of its Kurdish minority. Yet it would have done better had the European
Union promised to accept its application one the trouble with the Kurds
will be over. Indeed, quite a few political commentators in the European
Union spoke of Turkey as non-Christian, even though most of them were
not themselves members of any religious community.
It is my contention that the political leadership of a liberal nation―and
perhaps also of a union of nations―should facilitate communal life but
not urge it upon citizens in any way, and that it should see to it that the
citizens can identify with the nation, so that if a group is alienated, some
action is required, whether the alienated group is religious, ethnic, or
intellectual. That, further, the inability to develop civil society and
identification with it is a result of low level of political education unless it
is an intended ideological attitude. That is to say, reactionaries appeal to
the uneducated best.
I take it that the most conspicuous example against my view is Israel.
Though Israel is not as civilized as I hope it will become, it is still much
more civilized than its neighbors. I know this will raise the wrath of the
followers of Edward Said, but I cannot help it. It is a fact that we Israelis
are still not disposed to shout in political meetings, in unison Allahu
Akbar! Allahu Akbar!, or Stalin! Stalin! Stalin!, although we are on the
way there. We probably will never arrive there. For, to repeat, Israel
survives due to its military strengthe. This strength is all too obviously
not due to the great number of soldiers or of great gun-power but due to
the quality of the Isreali soldier. Thus, to take a marginal example. Israeli
soldiers are not famous for the mutilation of enemy corpses as the other
side is. For another example, when the Holy Places were not in Israeli
hands, we did not plead freedom of worship as the Palestinian leaders do
now. This does not excuse the ineptness of the Israeli authorities, of
course, and this ineptness, to repeat, is what takes us away from civilized
conduct fast.
The anti-Israeli public opinion systematically ignores Israel’s moral
superiority over her neighbors. This movement operates in the hope to put
pressure on Israel to behave in a more civilized manner. Yet their lack of
all sense of proportion dooms their actions to failure at best. The
interesting question is, why can they not speak openly and honesty? I do
not know, their belonging to the civilized world makes it unthinkable that
they are fools rather than liars. Of course, this is not judgmental since we
are liars too. It is an expression of a sincere wonderment. Also it is the
suggestion that the anti-Israeli activists harm not only the Middle East but
also the European Union. They do so by clouding issues. The European
Union is in a tough spot these days, mainly due to its gallant undertaking
to harbor political refugees, and these refugees are now largely coming
from Syria. There is a great need to assess the situation. It is clear that the
problem of immigrants rests on the immense gulf between the rich and
the poor countries and this will not go away overnight, but in the
meanwhile the need for some immediate settlement for some respite is
very urgent and so it is becoming increasingly vital for the European
Union to have Israel make peace with all of her neighbors and sign
the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and join the
liberal community of nations. These activists prevent this by clouding
issues, by deciding secretly on what is agenda and what is not and by
making it taboo to discuss important questions.