Article published May 1978.
Along with its corollary, self-determination, nationalism unites and divides the modern world.
It unites us with others by offering one of the few practical means remaining in modernity over overcoming what Tocqueville called “individualism”: the tendency of persons in large states to isolate themselves in a small group of family and friends, with little or no involvement in civic or political life. We individualistic moderns , so proud of our autonomy, nonetheless feel an obscure desire for what surpasses ourselves; we feel the pull of sociality, the attraction of the political community and passions. Nationalism promises to free us from our own limitations, to make our lives mean something larger, greater than an individual life would mean. For many, it does just that.
But nationalism also divides our world. Quebecan nationalism would sunder Canada; so abhorrent is this prospect that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that least violent of rulers, has promised to use force to resist it. Northern Ireland soaks in it own blood. France, the birthplace of modern nationalism and recently, with de Gaulle, its most eloquent defender, finds troublesome ferments of dispersion in its own provinces.
But Israelis need not search the world to know of this atomization. More than any place on earth, the Mideast feels not only the exaltation of nationalism but its agony. In that sense the Mideast, above all Israel—the alien nation in a sea of Arab nations—is the place where the character of the modern world reveals itself. Those who imagine that a mere high-sounding phrase like `national self-determination’ will justify the establishment of a `Palestinian’ nation-state should think again. The existence of such a state would threaten the existence of the Israeli nation-state.
What accounts for this inner contradiction of the principle of national self-determination, this principle that seems to create and destroy itself almost simultaneously? A comparison of Israel and the proposed nation-state on the West Bank reveals more than contemporary intellectuals and politicians prefer to consider.
Israel is a parliamentary regime, which is to say it is a regime on the primacy of speech. One may deride speech, as General de Gaulle did; it can’t defend a country against tanks. And of course de Gaulle was right. The stereotypical parliamentarian, jabbering while dictators act, was the tragicomic exemplar of Western Europe before each of the world wars and, to a lesser extent, since. But Israel more than any country has learned de Gaulle’s lesson. Israel has not committed suicide by talk. Israel talks while keeping her eyes open and her guard up.
But she does talk, and seriously. One can take Israeli talk seriously in part because it defends itself with deeds, but also because that talk reflects the meaning of Israel. Parliamentarians talk in order to win consent. Consent entails willingness, but it is no small thing to ask: on what basis do I will this policy or that? Needless to say, much parliamentary talk appeals to the passions—fear, avarice, most if not all of the deadly sins. But it also appeals to reason. Rightly understood, consent is reasoned willingness.
In talking and listening to one another, Israelis reflect and choose. By virtue of its parliamentary form their country minimizes the inevitable effects of chance and force. This produces a nation that admires merit—what is defended by reasoned argument. And because Israel admires merit it is less under the sway of comfort, money, the easy life—all of which may quickly yield to force and rhetoric. Speech inevitably lets reason in, as force does not. The cleverest rhetoricians fell to Socrates, who could only be silenced by force.
A regime like Israel bases itself on genuine self-determination. What is a human self if it is not one hat governs itself by means of the distinctively human attributes: speech and reason. Such a regime, though capable of dealing forcefully with other nation-states, prefers to deal with them by speech. But only if those nation-states share its fundamental understanding of human nature can this dialogue means anything other than a charade.
In contrast, the nation-state proposed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization shows no promise of meaningful parliamentarism, any more than seen in Egypt, Syria, or Iraq. The `self-determination’ proclaimed by PLO officers confines itself to the will of the ruling elites. That will has little to do with reasoned speech. For them, consent is a problem resolved by force garnished by violent rhetoric.
`Consent’ conceived that way reflects a radically different understanding of human nature than that displayed in real parliament. Not merit but chance rules such countries: the chance of who happens to get the power to impose his will for now. Reason serves force and force serves the ruler’s will–inverting the moral universe of genuine self-government. It is no accident that military, not civilian rule characterizes these regimes.
A country’s form of government—its true form, not always the form it shows the world—reflects its understanding of human nature. Whereas a nationalism based on true self-determination, on what is genuinely human, need not destroy itself by ever-escalating, irrational, absolutist demands both in the world and within its own borders, a nationalism based on will, on force, inevitably attacks the world and convulses itself. For the passions cannot restrain themselves. Absent reason, their only limit is exhaustion, destruction, or imprisonment.
The establishment of such a nation-state on the West Bank would strike at Israel’s heart geographically, militarily and, most of all, in spirit. By definition that nation-state could never satisfy itself; by its own character it could not. When I wrote that the Mideast is the place where the modern world’s character reveals itself, I meant that it is here and now that the genuinely human confronts absolutist irrationalism. It has done so before; it may do so again.
2018 NOTE:
Four decades later, not a word needs changing here. The problem remains the same: Palestinian Arabs want not only Gaza and the ‘West Bank,’ but Israel and Jordan, as well. While a ‘two-state’ solution may look good, considered in abstraction, it collides with that (so far) insurmountable fact.
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