What America can learn from Israel on the Anniversary of October 7
A year after Hamas fighters swarmed into Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the regional conflict that many predicted is here. As Iranian ballistic missiles overshoot Tel Aviv, and Beirut burns, the only question in the Middle East is how far hostilities will now spread.
Plainly they’ve already spread into ideology and contemporary Jewish and anti-Jewish forms of self-identity both inside Israel, the United States, and Western Europe. Over the past year, US universities especially have become hotbeds of Hamas sympathizers, who at best minimize the dangers of political Islam by focusing on Arab victimhood, and at worst actively support terrorist actions as part of what they view as a legitimate struggle against colonialism.
Anti-Israel rhetoric in the United States and Europe is now unmistakably a Leftist phenomenon: it is no longer Jewish cosmopolitanism but Israeli nationalism which presents a flashpoint of opposition from the perspective of the postcolonial, “anti-racist” ideology which is today hegemonic across the global Left. Anti-Zionism connects Leftist intellectual elites and the mobilized population of Muslim migrants in the West who have brought their anti-Jewish sentiments to their new countries, and in some cases deepened them, even as the addition of “Islamophobia” to the arsenal of Leftist police concepts protects the new population from skepticism. Meanwhile, nationalist sentiments are displaced onto Palestinian nationalism while the nationalist opposition to population replacement in the West is suppressed.
The symbolic importance of Zionism as a proxy for Western concerns is what fuels the fixation on Israel outside of Israel itself. There was always regional Arab resistance to the state of Israel, and college campuses have always been hotbeds of radical leftism. What is new is the way that these forces are fusing to create a joint front against a shared nationalist enemy that Israel represents as a cipher for Western power as such.
Arguably the central delusion of radical Leftism is that peace is the natural state of the world and war an aberration. The closer one gets to Jerusalem, holy city of three faiths, the clearer it becomes that truth is the exact reverse. Here, the iron taste of blood is always in an atmosphere that still retains a shadow of the terraformed malarial swamps. Every so often some new mosquito-borne disease takes flight as a reminder of the pestilential natural state of the Levant: an expression of the same primordial force as the rockets and the stabbings.
Citizens brush against off-duty soldiers as they board public buses, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Violence here is everywhere and normal. The trendiest item of clothing in Nablus among the natives, when I visited last year, was a tracksuit with AK-47 logos on the legs and arms. Children played with plastic replicas of guns.
In a terraformed country whose population speaks an ancient language raised from the dead, much of what has elsewhere has been reduced to ideology retains a mystical aura and power. I look at the proud Israelis, ready to fight for their country, and wonder when it was last acceptable to be proud of being American, and being ready to fight for America. This is the element that the contemporary Left cannot stand, and the element which the West should recover.
But this element is obscured and confused by the narrative of antisemitism that the global Left continues to wield against its national enemies in the US and Europe, even as they criticize Israel, and also by Zionists, in the cause of defending Israel. According to this story, because Jews have been persecuted for millennia, above all in the Holocaust, Israel is legitimate as a defense against discrimination and all attacks against Israel are fundamentally antisemitic.
What those who embrace this story fail to accept is that the Leftist mythos of victimhood is now pointed at Israel itself, because the Left sees it as white. For the Left, there is no such thing as a white victim, only white oppressors. The issue of whether Israelis are in fact white is irrelevant: Israel’s European legal structure, high degree of technological development, and recognizably colonial history mean that it is classified as a white oppressor country in the Leftist ideological imaginary, and targeted for opposition on this basis. Zionists fundamentally are anti-Communist Jews who the Left has no trouble placing with the rest of their anti-Communist enemies. Israel is comparable with apartheid South Africa as a white racist colony of America and Europe that the Left intends to eradicate in the cause of Third World social justice.
If only for this practical reason, although there also are others, Israel and the Jewish diaspora should jettison the false friend of racialized victimhood politics and reassert the Nietzschean heart of the Zionist project. Zionism rejected the ethos of the groveling Shtetl Jew and his ponderous rabbinical consciousness in the cause of creating an Israeli New Man as an agrarian artist-warrior, the liberator of his own consciousness through his own will to power.
A rich vein of Nietzschean thought animates the writings of early Zionists Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ahad Ha’am, and Martin Buber. All these men today have streets named after them in Tel Aviv. This vital character of the project remains exhibited physically in the bodies of its strong and tanned citizens, the most fertile in the developed world. Fertility is a sign of vital will, and the lack of European and American fertility demonstrates absence. Even in the secular sectors of the country, the streets ring with the shouts of children, who are born at an average rate of three per woman.
Psychedelic trance pounds in the desert, carrying its message for miles over the scrub and sand: we do not care about your way of life. What we are giving birth to here is our own, and it matters nothing to us if you understand it or not. The global media didn’t know what to make of the Nova festival that was the site of Hamas’ massacre on October 7. They called it a peace festival, but psytrance in Israel is not exactly about peace; it is about freedom, transcendence, and transfiguration. Uniquely adapted to both the desert landscape, and the topography of the Israeli mind, psychedelic trance is the anthem of the Israeli New Man. Where trance doesn’t reign, Israelis blast modern Mizrahit, a creole form of Hebrew music derived from Arabic forms brought to Israel by Middle Eastern Jews. Israelis couldn’t care less that it’s uniquely abrasive to newcomers; it is what they like to hear.
Where unique forms of art and culture unpalatable to outsiders flourish unapologetically, a healthy national identity exists. Contrast this with the shame and uncertainty of contemporary Americans: ashamed of country music and wrestling, ashamed of cars, ashamed of our cuisine. Desperate to be European, we forget the roots that make us great.
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Israel’s Nietzschean ethos translates geopolitically to the doctrine of might is right: the doctrine that has defined politics in practice for all human history. Plainly “antisemitism” has nothing to do with this, and it also has nothing to do with the modern doctrine of human rights, which was born the same year that Israel was established and in an important respect conflicts with its project.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights appears at first glance to be derived from the classical doctrine of natural rights, but in reality represents its inversion. Importantly, the declaration excised the divine and substituted the liberal demiurge of progress. It also included many rights-to in addition to freedoms-from which fundamentally changed the nature of the concept. The right “to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control,” for instance, both states a demand and implicitly prescribes the form of governance needed to provide for that demand: the doctrine is different in kind to the rights to freedom from tyranny and arbitrary arrest.
At the same moment that the modern doctrine of human rights was invented, the Geneva Conventions codified the legal categories of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. As noble and honorable as those ideals sounded then, their imprecision and vagueness have seen them degrade into cynical instruments wielded by geopolitical bad actors. Nowhere is this clearer than with incessant, absurd claims of genocide.
Today, the term human rights defines a list of demands that must be provided for by governments at the behest of non-governmental organizations and lawyers, often against the wishes of their citizens. In the same way that disciplined armies and their commanders should and will respect the dignity of civilians and prisoners of war in order to preserve their own morale, national governments must respect the will of their people, not the will of an international network of lawyers. The idea that such a body can police national sovereignty is comical (as if politics was a game with rules and referees). Why not simply ban war, ban sovereignty, and police the world?
This whole way of thinking should be rejected entirely. In the Levant, they are weightless; they shimmer like mirages and they burn away. Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah don’t care about human rights or war crimes, yet invoke them as a propaganda playbook, and exploit them as a weakness. The black humor of this situation is illustrated by the discovery that UNRWA, the UN body primarily responsible for running something resembling a state in Gaza, is composed in major part by members of Hamas.
Both Jews and Arabs consider themselves indigenous to Israel, or Palestine, and each party accuses the other of being the colonizer. In an era of the fetishism of the indigenous, enormous rhetorical energy is wasted in arguing over this question. The truth is that both are, and neither is, and the question is irrelevant. Political legitimacy comes from the barrel of a gun, not a piece of paper, or patronizing land acknowledgements.
The relevant facts are the facts on the ground. In 1948 the Jews established and defended a state. The Arabs, at one time the most aggressively expansionist nation in history, tried to destroy it and lost. The fact that they would now take advantage of the rhetoric of anti-colonialism and frame their imperial revanchism as a form of resistance isn’t unnatural; this is, after all, the contemporary rhetorical weapon of choice. But the true Native American warrior spirit was respected more in the days when we named fighter planes and attack helicopters after conquered tribes, and it is this spirit that we should embrace today for ourselves.
The reality of power should be affirmed, not concealed. On this point, Israeli actions over the last twelve months can serve as an example and an antidote to the self-doubt of the United States. To be sure, Israel suffers from many internal divisions and problems. But it has proved remarkably resistant to the spiritual corruption and communism that is destroying America from within and it offers some lessons for fighting it.
Liberal ideals of progress and humanitarianism are unworkable as principles of geopolitics. If the West and Western values are going to survive the century, there will need to be a radical rethinking of the reality of war. Clear-eyed, direct, and unsentimental thought is the best defense against the Leftism that has infiltrated global media, the universities, and the minds of citizens in Europe and the United States. There are harsh realities in this world, and they must be faced.
Alexandra Lavenski is a writer living in Israel.
