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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Israel Emerges As an Avatar Of Nationalism |
| 2018-09-21 |
| [NYSun] Many of the latest headlines boil down to a conflict about nationalism. Great Britain’s exit from the European Union. Presidentr Trump’s attempt to erect a border wall and to renegotiate the terms of international trade agreements. Russian meddling in American politics. Even public marches by avowed racists wind up being described in the press, accurately or inaccurately, as actions by "white nationalists." Into this fray comes Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, with a new book, "The Virtue of Nationalism," just published by Basic Books. Mr. Hazony argues that nationalism ‐ "when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference" ‐ is preferable to the alternative of imperialism, of "uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime." ...The most vivid argument of Mr. Hazony, though, may be his least abstract one. "I have been a Jewish nationalist, a Zionist, all my life," Mr. Hazony writes. Mr. Hazony quotes David Ben-Gurion, a founder of the state of Israel, speaking in November 1942 bemoaning that Jewish children and elders were being "buried alive in graves dug by them," "because the Jews have no political standing, no Jewish army, no Jewish independence, and no homeland." Though Zionism long predated the Holocaust, the Holocaust became important to Jewish nationalism. For most Jews, in other words, the absence of a Jewish state ‐ not enough nationalism ‐ led to the Holocaust. Yet as Mr. Hazony notes, there’s a competing, "almost perfectly irreconcilable" view in which German nationalism led to the Holocaust. "According to this view, it is not Israel that is the answer to the Holocaust, but the European Union," Mr. Hazony writes. It’s that juxtaposition that is Hazony’s strongest case. To most Jews the answer to this one is self-evident. It doesn’t require reading a lot of abstract philosophical tracts. It’s a simple choice. Safety and survival and freedom are far more likely to come from having a land with borders and a military under the control of one’s own people ‐ a nation ‐ than by relying on a distant bureaucracy in Brussels or at the United Nations that emits lofty language about universal ideals and liberal internationalism. Reminded me of Anderson's No Truce with Kings |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |