A “Jewish state”?

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

In this long moment of crisis, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza, I am not invested in defending Zionism. But I do see a need to counter how many people misunderstand every wrong committed in the name of Zionism as an inevitable consequence of aims baked into Zionism at its core. That misunderstanding often rests on over-reading what Zionists mean by a “Jewish state” to cast Zionism as an inherently racist, unjust, and therefore illegitimate form of nationalism.

To pursue Palestinian liberation effectively, without slipping into implicit antisemitism, we must understand what Zionism is and is not.

• A state?
• Theocracy?
• Genocide?
• Apartheid?
• Minimum viable Zionism
• Ordinary Westphalian nationalism
• The point

Defining Zionism

There are many strains of Zionism. Individual Zionists vary in their thinking about what Zionism should entail. To define Zionism, we must name what all Zionists agree that Zionism means.

After the founding of Israel in 1947, Zionism means support for the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state in some form.

Thus much rests on what Zionists intend as a “Jewish state”; I like to refer to the vision shared among all Zionists as “minimum viable Zionism”.

Before describing that, let us first dispell important misconceptions.

A state?

Many assume that Zionism has always pursued a Westphalian nation-state: a soveriegn, geographically-bounded polity among the 200+ nation-states which we have divided the world into.

An understandable confusion. We have come to take the Westphalian order as normal. Zionists did found the state of Israel. Zionists now support Israel’s continued existence.

But it is an astonishing turn of historical contingency that Zionism eventually produced the state of Israel. At the founding of modern Zionism in response to the emerging Westphalian order the 1897 First Zionist Congress released the Basel Program manifesto, which offers a different definition:

Zionism seeks to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law

At that time, Palestine was not a state, nor was it a country in the pre-Westphalian sense; “Palestine” named a region within the Ottoman Empire. The Empire was a very different entity from a Westphalian nation-state.

The “home” pursued by the Basel Program was not a euphemism for a nation-state. An oppressed ethnic minority carving out a soveriegn nation-state independent the Empire was wildly implausible. Many early Zionists saw a nation-state as not just unachievable but undesirable.

Early Zionists thus imagined an creating an ethnic enclave within the Empire, roughly analagous to the Pennsylvania Dutch, as we can see with the rest of the Basel Program (emphasis mine):

To achieve this goal, the Congress envisages the following means:

1. The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.
2. The organization and bringing together of all Jews through local and general events, according to the laws of the various countries.
3. The strengthening of Jewish feeling and national consciousness.
4. Preparatory steps for obtaining the governmental approval which is necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose.

This early history does not matter much in understanding contemporary Zionism; the existence of the state of Israel reframed Zionism to mean supporting the state’s existence. But it matters a great deal in countering the misunderstanding that Zionism has contemporary Israel as its foundational vision.

Theocracy?

Many assume that Zionism means theocracy. An understandable confusion: Judaism is a religion.

But Jews can also be understood as an ethnic people, like Turks or Arabs or Aleuts or Kurds or countless other peoples. Many Jews do not practice the religion but do understand themselves as members of the Jewish ethnic community; I am one among them.

While Zionists often embrace Jewish religious poetics, Zionism has always very explicitly framed itself as a secular movement which addresses all Jews as a single ethnic people. Israel neither obeys nor exerts religious authority. Israeli society includes many with vigorous religious practice, including a few who do want a turn toward a theocratic Israel, but there are far more Israeli Jews who are not very observant, even not observant at all.

Zionism opposes theocracy.

Genocide?

Many assume that Zionism aspires to a society of only Jews, requiring a genocidal purge of gentiles.

Another understandable confusion. As I write this, Israel is deep into a genocidal effort to annex Gaza which has already killed over 80,000 people. Before the founding of Israel, Zionist militias killed and displaced many Arab Palestinians, which escalated in the 1948 Nakba to killing over 10,000 Palestinians and driving 80% of the Arab population of the newly-formed state of Israel from their homes. The West Bank is still subject to de facto occupation, seizing increasing amounts of territory for Jewish settlers. There have always been hardliner Zionists who do want a nation composed only of Jews through what is euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing”.

It does not excuse these horrors to say they do not define Zionism.

When Israel was founded, the Arab Palestinians who remained became citizens of the new state. Today, one in four citizens of Israel is a gentile, most of them Arab Palestinians. There have always been many Zionists who have vigorously opposed the murder and disenfranchisement of Palestinians. Israel has not only expanded the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank; at times they have rolled back settlements and other claims.

We must recognize how Zionists have done genocide. But Zionism does not mean genocide.

Apartheid?

Many assume that Zionism requires an apartheid state in which gentiles are denied equal legal rights & protections.

This is the most defensible confusion. Israel is now and always has been an apartheid state. Israel hardliners deny this by pointing to the big population of gentiles holding Israeli citizenship, but that is disingenous; gentiles have always been second-class citizens in countless ways, both in explicit legal inequities and in many more rights which are only equal on paper. Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank are not Israeli citizens and have been even more disenfranchised under the shadow of Israeli guns.

It does not excuse these and other real horrors to say that apartheid does not define Zionism. In the time of Zionist enclaves within the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, apartheid was not even conceivable. Since the founding of Israel, liberal Zionists have always fought hard for equality for gentiles; hardliners have always held the upper hand, but they do not deny that the liberals are Zionists.

We must recognize that Zionists have done apartheid. But Zionism does not mean apartheid.

Minimum viable Zionism (MVZ)

If a “Jewish state” of Israel does not require theocracy, genocide, or apartheid, what does define it?

The core vision which all Zionists agree on includes:

The continued existence of the Westphalian nation-state of Israel …

1. governed as a secular liberal democracy
2. where Jewish culture is ordinary (rather than exceptional as it is everywhere else)
3. inviting Jews from all backgrounds to become new citizens

Point 1 merits skepticism. Actual Israel — and all too many Actual Zionists — betray it. One cannot claim to have a “liberal democracy” while maintaining a de facto apartheid society. Too many Zionists square that circle by denying the injustices of Israel’s history & present, and by pursuing ugly measures to ensure a perpetual Jewish demographic majority in Israel.

But those disingenous Zionists would not work so hard at the lie that Israel is a true liberal democracy if Zionism were not defined by the ideal that Israel should be a liberal democracy. (They parallel bigots in the US denying how we fall short of our own creed of equality.) Hardliners consider liberal Zionists wrong and dangerously naïve, but do not deny that they are Zionists because Zionism does not refuse equality for gentiles.

Point 2 articulates what Zionism means by a “Jewish state”. All states have some shared culture without any authoritarian imposition by the government. Shinto shrines abound in Japan. Spain all but shuts down during seista time. Sugared avocado smoothies are readily available in Brazil. Such cultural norms are not authoritarian impositions on people who do not share those inclinations.

Readily available kosher food and workplaces closed for Yom Kippur do not constitute unjust inequalities.

Point 3 reflects the purpose inscribed in the Zionist project, a Jewish state as a haven for Jews around the world fleeing oppression and worse. All states choose whom they allow to easily claim citizenship. Many states make it much easier to become a citizen if one has ancestors from that country. Such rules can be a bit weird: Liechtenstein has a path to citizenship through winning a public municipal vote, and many countries open the door to people with particular skills.

That invitation is compatible with the obligation many people (including me) see to also offer citizenship to the descendents of Arab Palestinians displaced in the Nakba.

Israel’s invitation is no more peculiar or unjust than any nation’s immigration policy.

Yes, Israel as it exists now exercises what we might call “Jewish supremacism”, and there are strains of Zionism which want even worse. But that is not inherent in Zionism, as many Zionists stand against it.

The modest ethnic preferences of MVZ are compatible with respecting a truly sovereign Gaza & West Bank, with a gentile majority in Israel, with return & reparations for Palestinians displaced by the Nakba, with true equality for everyone in Israel. MVZ is compatible with a more egalitarian society than any realworld nation today.

An ordinary Westphalian nationalism

Anti-Zionists often fault Zionism as distinct from most other founding national principles in seeking an “ethnostate”, evoking an image of something comparable to a Klansman’s dreams of white nationalism. But MVZ is nothing like that.

Ideas like “the Spanish people” were invented to justify the Westphalian order, claiming that countries have sovereignty over their citizens and territory because the citizenry constitue A People with that territory as their homeland. Casting “Spain” as the nation-state of the “Spanish people” — asserting a primacy of that over Catalans and a distinction from “the Portuguese people” — asserts a relationship between ethnicity and nation. There is no bright line between those kinds of national foundations and minimum viable Zionism.

Early Zionists were fearful of the implications of the Westphalian world animated by these logics which was emerging in the late 19^th century. As a diaspora ethnic minority with a long history of suffering genocidal pogroms, they predicted that if Jews did not find a chair before the music stopped — a homeland — we would end up disenfranchised forever … at best. The events of the early 20^th century proved that Westphalian myths of unified national peoples were a terrible threat to diaspora ethnic minorities. Not only did that Westphalian sensibility animate the Nazi genocide of Jews (and another diaspora ethnic group, the Roma, as well as many others) that sensibility led other countries to close their doors to refugees from that genocide. Zionists rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered together with half the world’s Jewish population while other movements failed to save Jewish lives.

In that context, I cannot fault Zionism as a hopelessly poisoned nationalist project. The vision of a Jewish state I call “minimum viable Zionism” is no less legitimate than that of any other state … or of any other ethnic nationalist project like, say, Catalan independence.

The point

I do not count myself a Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a more just alternative to Israel. But the history which produced Zionism and then the state of Israel helps animate the respect I have for many Zionists. I respect Israelis whose Zionism consists simply of loving the only home they have ever known. I respect Zionists who defend the Zionist project as having rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from genocide in Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries while all other movements failed. I deeply respect liberal Zionists who have fought hard for a truly egalitarian Israel.

Nor do I count myself an anti-Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a truly just Israel. But the history of Israel — the horrors of the Nakba, the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank, the oppression of Arab citizens of Israel, the current genocide in Gaza — helps animate the respect I have for many anti-Zionists. I respect those whose anti-Zionism is just an extension of their opposition to the entire Westphalian order. (If they have a compelling alternative to offer, I am interested.) I respect Palestinians who use “anti-Zionism” to mean nothing more than resistence to the injustices they have suffered under the flag of the state of Israel; I wish they would frame their position as “Palestinian liberation” instead, but it is best to honor how they describe themselves.

I wrote this post because I do not respect anti-Zionism which misrepresents the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” as a distinctly illegitimate form of nationalism. There are many reasonable objections one may make to Zionism as an ideology and a movement, but misrepresenting what a “Jewish state” means to cast Zionism as an inherently unjust foundation for a nation is ultimately antisemitic.

Opting out

Henry Fudge’s essay Degeneracy Is A Symptom is bleak and clarifying.

Consider what it means to be a young adult in a developed economy, and consider it across the same three stages.

In the hedge stage of being alive (call it 1955 to roughly 1975 in the Anglosphere), a median wage covers the median life. You leave school, you get a job, you find a partner, you buy a house at three or four times your annual income, you have children, you save into a pension that your employer co-funds, and at the end you retire on something approaching your final salary. Cash flows cover principal. The future is, in the literal financial sense, affordable. The system is hedge-financed at the household level.

In the speculative stage (call it 1980 to roughly 2008), wages cover the running costs of a life but not the accumulation of the assets a life requires. You can pay your rent but you cannot accumulate a deposit at the rate house prices are rising. You can service your student loans but you cannot retire them. You take on more debt to bridge the gap. You roll your overdraft. You buy your house with a 95% mortgage at six times income because there is no other way to buy it. The system is functional so long as credit remains available and asset prices keep rising. You are speculatively financed. You are, in Minsky’s terms, depending on the music continuing.

In the Ponzi stage (call it now), wages do not cover even the running costs of the life that previous generations defined as normal. The deposit is unreachable; the family is unaffordable; the retirement is fictional; the career path that was supposed to deliver these things has been replaced by a sequence of contracts. The only way to access the reference standard of living is to acquire assets that rise faster than wages, which means either inheriting them, marrying them, or speculating into them. Productive labour, in the Ponzi stage, is a losing strategy by construction. You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.

What does a rational agent do in the Ponzi stage?

She does not work harder at the losing strategy. That would be irrational. She pivots to strategies with the property that their upside actually reaches the reference threshold, even if their expected value is poor. She buys lottery tickets, metaphorical and literal. She speculates on crypto. She gambles on football. She starts an OnlyFans. She day-trades. She marries for money. She sells her eggs. She joins a multi-level marketing scheme. She bets her redundancy on a single hand at the roulette wheel of life because the steady strategy has a known terminal value below the threshold she needs to clear.

Found by way of Silverman On Security, who says:

This is a great analysis of an interesting article. What goes unsaid, and I expect it is only because Paul doesn’t work in the discipline, is that what is being described has been known as Differential Social Organization, which is the beginnings of Social Learning Theory.

It grew out of the response of Sutherland, the father of modern criminology, to his colleagues at Chicago doing the neighborhood studies for the Cook County Courts. Those studies were an attempt to apply sociology & demography to questions of juvenile delinquency and other criminal activity.

As the lore goes, when Sutherland looked at his colleagues’ results he told them what they were really looking at was not normatively versus deviantly organized communities in different neighborhoods & areas (zones) of the city.

Rather, the neighborhoods & areas with the highest levels of delinquency, deviancy, and crime weren’t maladapted, they were differentially socially organized.

What he meant was that in order to be able to survive, function, and live under the socio-economic & socio-political conditions those Chicagoans were living in, it made perfect sense for men, teens, and boys to engage in criminal activity as there were few decent paying jobs. Since their was almost no reward to engaging in the licit economy, the risks of engaging in the illicit one were lower because it was pretty much that or nothing. Similar for women who chose to engage in sex work.

When I read the excerpts that Paul include, clicked through to the piece he’s responding to, and then his take on it my impression was this is a description of Differential Social Organization with two other, and related to each other, empirical sociological / criminological explanations.

Institutional Anomie, which is the macro- to meso-level modern variant of Weber’s classic anomie theory and General Strain Theory, which is the more micro- to meso- version of Weber’s classic. Specifically the alienation from each of the societies socio-economic, socio-political, and social realities.

Differential Social Organization is very apt and useful to look at what happens to states & societies and the groups & people within them under different socio-political, socio-economic, socio-religious, and societal conditions. I’ve used it in my work on Iraq & Afghanistan for the Army.

The information environment

I shoulda assembled a linkpile of resources long ago. For now, just one key one:

Nothing moves the needle

A reflection on how mainstream news media have been compromised … and why even when they do report what is happening it does not shape our poltics as it once did. Its reflection on Russian disinformation is particularly good, neither under- nor over-stating its relevance:

⋯ Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a troll farm in St. Petersburg— didn’t invent a new method. It merely industrialized Surkov’s domestic playbook and aimed it at a country with no immune system for it—the United States. The clearest illustration isn’t abstract: the IRA organized both a pro-Trump rally and a counter-protest, at the same place and time, in Houston in May 2016 — manufacturing both sides of a street confrontation among real Americans who had no idea the same operation was staging them against each other. That is Surkov’s method, exported and automated.

None of this is speculative. The Mueller Report and Volume 5 of Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2020 findings — written under Marco Rubio as the committee’s acting chairman — documented real coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. That’s not a theory. That’s the official record. What’s happened since is the payoff: a Republican Party that has largely stopped treating Kremlin-aligned talking points as disqualifying, and a pipeline — tracked in detail by researchers like Renee DiResta at Stanford — that launders Russian-state narratives into American conservative media until nobody can quite trace where a given talking point originated. It doesn’t matter anymore whether it started in Moscow. It’s ours now. There’s an old Soviet intelligence term for what Surkov practiced: reflexive control — shaping what an adversary believes to be true so thoroughly that the adversary defeats itself, freely, without ever feeling coerced.

The ascent of social media made Surkov’s method exponentially more effective. It led to the creation of thousands of siloed news platforms governed by algorithms which grew increasingly impenetrable. Before long, Russia and its American assets—knowingly or otherwise— began promoting so many conflicting and contradictory narratives that it was impossible for a single shared narrative to dominate the whole culture.

So that’s what I mean when I say freedom of the press doesn’t work anymore—at least, not the way we always assumed it did. It isn’t that the First Amendment stopped protecting reporters, or that fewer scoops are landing. It’s that Surkov’s method, and its automated heirs, did the one thing capable of neutralizing the whole system: they got to the audience before factual reality did.