Response to Yoram Hazony’s Essay,
ISRAEL THROUGH EUROPEAN EYES
By Abraham Berkowitz and Tom A. Milstein
August 15, 2010
Yoram Hazony’s essay, published in his “Jerusalem Letters”
email series on July 14,
2010 (http://via.readerimpact.com/v/1/792bc4b1ec4cad1e102bfb9bbcc0325c6b7210346658c26c),
has had a substantial impact on Jewish political opinion both in and out of Israel. Hazony certainly deserves credit for
presenting a significantly original perspective on the so-called Delegitimation
crisis now facing Israel. It
deserves the widest possible circulation.
And yet it is dangerously flawed. We wish to point out these
flaws in the context of expressing our overall appreciation of Hazony’s contribution,
which opens new pathways for understanding Israel’s
current predicament even as it closes off consideration of the necessary steps
which the Jewish state must take to overcome the dilemmas he so eloquently describes.
Hazony’s essay is deeply indebted to the ideas of Thomas
Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, first published in 1962. This approach is itself rather novel
in conservative and neo-conservative thinking, which has not previously been noted
for its sympathy with Kuhn’s remarkable sociological analysis of scientific
thought. Conservatives have tended to dismiss it as an early expression of
postmodern “deconstructionism” – and as such, a pernicious influence on Western
intellectual development. Hazony instead offers this glowing description of
Kuhn’s book,
…
the most influential academic book of the last half century, selling over a
million copies in a dozen languages. Kuhn’s book dropped a depth charge under
the foundations of academic thinking about the way we search for truth, and
about the way we come to believe the things we believe. And although the
subject of the book is the way the search for truth works in the physical
sciences, it has implications well beyond the sciences.
Kuhn describes the “progress of science” as taking place not
as a steady, incremental advance in mankind’s knowledge of nature, but through
a series of “paradigm shifts,” each of which produces what he calls a
“scientific revolution.” In between these revolutions, science does proceed in
an incremental, step-by-step fashion, locked into the reigning paradigm, which
not only supplies a coherent perspective on nature, but also a regnant
definition of the very nature of science. Until a revolution disrupts their sense
of certainty, most scientists are not even aware of operating under a paradigm.
It is only when paradoxes arise that cannot be adequately explained under the
old paradigm, stimulating “geniuses” like Copernicus, Newton or Einstein to present
alternative paradigms, that this awareness emerges. Even then, scientists
trained under the old paradigm tend to reject the new. Since paradigms define
the very nature of the factual, they find themselves unable to comprehend even
the terminology, much less the advantages, offered by the new paradigm. As
Hazony quotes Kuhn,
The
proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at
cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical assumptions that
the other needs in order to make its case…. [Thus while] each may hope to
convert the other to his way of seeing…, neither may hope to prove his case.
The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be
resolved by proofs.
As a result, actual paradigm shifts must often await the generational
shift that occurs when the older generation of scientists dies out and is
replaced by their younger, presumably more open-minded juniors.
Hazony invokes Kuhn in order to throw light upon a subject
that has vexed many of Israel’s supporters, both left and right: why Israel is
subjected to one campaign after another “of vilification in the media and on
the campuses and in the corridors of power—a smear campaign of a kind that no
other nation on earth is subjected to on a regular basis. “We know we will
again see our nation treated not as a democracy doing its duty to defend its
people and its freedom, but as some kind of a scourge.” He notes that while the
left and the right differ in their responses to these campaigns – the left
emphasizing policy changes, the right better PR efforts – the overwhelming
evidence is that neither of these two
approaches has the slightest effect in changing the minds of those who mount
these campaigns, and those who are influenced by them. This impotence prevails
despite the tremendous weight of factual evidence gathered by Israel’s supporters disproving the allegations
upon which the campaigns are based.
According to Hazony, the reason for this abject failure lies
in a tremendous paradigm shift which, unnoticed in Israel, has overtaken public
opinion in Western Europe, where most of the anti-Israel sentiment has its
home. He argues that it is this paradigm shift, not traditional European
anti-Semitism, or even the influence of Arab petrodollars, which accounts for Israel’s political isolation and progressive
delegitimation.
In order to grasp the significance of a paradigm shift, one
must first understand the nature of the paradigm which has been replaced.
Hazony argues that Europe’s old paradigm – which it bequeathed to the world
(including Israel) – was
based on nationalism. Nationalism is
the ideological paradigm of the international system which arose in Europe simultaneously with the emergence of the
nation-state:
The
defeat of the universalist ideal in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 led to the
establishment of a new paradigm for European politics—one in which a
revitalized concept of the national state held the key to the freedom of
peoples throughout Europe. By the late-1800s, this idea of national liberty had
been extended to the point that it was conceived not only as a governing
principle for Europe, but for the entire
world. Progressives such as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson championed the
sovereign nation-state, which would have the right to defend its form of government,
laws, religion and language against the tyranny of imperial actors, as the
cornerstone of what was ultimately to be a new political order for humanity.
Herzl’s Zionist Organization, which proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish
people, fit right into this political understanding—and indeed, it was under
British sponsorship that the idea of the Jewish state grew to fruition. In
1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a
“Jewish State” in Palestine.
And the birth of Israel was
followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states
throughout the Third World.
According to Hazony, the “new paradigm for European
politics” launched in 1648 was subjected to a vigorous philosophical assault by
Immanuel Kant in a 1795 essay entitled Perpetual
Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. Kant denied that the nation-state could be
the basis of a moral world order, since the selfish sovereign claims of such
states would always conflict with the universal need for global peace and
harmony. A single international state must emerge, abolishing individual
national sovereignties and bringing all of mankind under its purview.
Kant’s visionary Sketch
was relegated to the realm of the
utopian by most Western thinkers, until the carnage of two world wars came to
be seen as a result of nationalism run amok by many influential political
intellectuals, especially but not only in Europe. Although not openly declared
as their objective, the Kantian program of an international state deriving its
authority from the demolished sovereignties of formerly independent nations has
become a sort of hidden European agenda in world affairs. This hidden agenda is
the paradigm shift which has stealthily washed the solid nationalist ground out
from under Israel’s Zionist
foundations. Not Israel as a Jewish
state, not even Israel as an allegedly colonialist
imposition, but Israel as a sovereign
nation-state represents an unacceptable affront to this new paradigm, since
no realistic proposal for peace in the region can be devised which does not
involve sovereignty concessions by Israel – but no such concessions can be offered
by Israel which do not involve the eventual sacrifice of her national
existence. Europe’s peoples, who have already conceded much of their own
national sovereignties, simply cannot see what Israel’s
problem is with such concessions.
The obvious problem with Hazony’s analysis is that it leaves
Israel sealed within a
coffin with “NO EXIT” signs prominently engraved on all 6 interior surfaces. If
there has indeed been a “paradigm shift” in European and (since the election of
Obama) American politics, and this paradigm shift has left Israel stranded in a
realm of 19th and 20th Century nation-states even as the
rest of the world has rushed beyond nationalism into the heady new world of
Kantian political globalism, then Israel is well and truly doomed by the iron
dialectic of Kuhn’s scientific revolutions. All the academic writings of the think
tanks, all the military prowess of the IDF, all the political gyrations of the
government, all the economic miracles of Israeli business, are not going to put
the Humpty-Dumpty of national sovereignty back together again in such a world. Israel will be illegitimated by the new paradigm
of international relations. And since Hazony has already conceded that Israel’s legitimacy was conferred from above, that is, by the “international
community” such as it existed under the “old paradigm,”
Let’s
begin with the old paradigm, which is the one that granted Israel its legitimacy in the first place. The
modern state of Israel was
founded, both constitutionally and in terms of the understanding of the international
community, as a nation-state, the state of the Jewish people….
….In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3
majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of
dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third
World.
neither Hazony nor Israel is equipped to argue that
this community is unqualified to deny legitimacy under the operation of the
“new paradigm.” After all, the right of the “international community” under the
old paradigm to confer legitimacy was highly dubious; such powers belong to
sovereign entities, and no international organization, including the United
Nations, claimed the rights of sovereignty. If legitimacy nonetheless descends
upon a fledgling state from the supra-national realm, then how much more
credible is such a descent – or its denial – when that realm has begun to
acquire some of the attributes of sovereignty which hitherto it lacked? In
short, if we argue that the UN General Assembly’s 2/3 vote legitimated Israel’s
existence as a sovereign state, then why, constitutionally speaking, cannot the
same mechanism be employed under the new paradigm to deprive Israel of that legitimacy?
The problem with Hazony’s coffin is that it is constructed
out of the materials of Western Civilization rather than those provided by our
own Jewish tradition. It needs to be turned from a coffin into a platform. To
do so, we need only realize one thing: the
1648 paradigm shift which Hazony describes as legitimating the modern
international system never occurred. The European system of international
relations that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a grand compromise
between the Protestant and Catholic nations of Christian Europe. This
compromise was carried out not to realize but to avoid a “paradigm shift” – the
shift which the Protestant reformation had been struggling for over a century
to achieve. The architects of the Roman Catholic counterreformation were well
aware of what that shift would have meant (in many cases, more aware than their
Protestants opponents): the “Judaization” of Christianity, or, in Kuhn’s terminology,
a religious
revolution.
The core of this revolution was expressed in Protestantism’s
devotion to the “Old Testament,” to Talmudic and other Judaic sources for its
interpretation, and to a fundamental rejection of the sacrament-dispensing role
of the Church’s clerical bureaucracy. But the Reformation sued for peace before
it could achieve this program. Except for a few marginal denominations like the
Unitarians, it was never able to surrender its allegiance to the pagan man-God
savior figure of Jesus and to its accompanying Trinitarian theology which so
deeply corrupted Judaism’s monotheist worldview. Protestantism settled for
Catholic recognition of its hegemony in the lands which its princes had
conquered; the Church congratulated itself for having saved the most fundamental
principle of Christianity and hoped for a better day when it might yet triumph.
Out of this stalemated Christian schism, there emerged those twin symbols of the disgrace of religion: the all-powerful
secular state, and the Enlightenment – and a de facto international system based on expediency rather than legitimacy.
It is the illegitimacy
of the international system, the fact that the paradigm shift which Hazony
thinks occurred in 1648 was actually strangled in its cradle, that is the curse
of the modern world. Our nation did not win its independence in the U.N. It won
its independence in the same place every legitimate nation wins theirs: in a
revolutionary war of independence. Ben Gurion and his minions downplayed that
fact because it reflected too much credit on the Irgun and Menachem Begin. But
the fact is that the international system has no legitimacy to confer or deny.
It is a realm of anarchy, governed only by the law of the jungle. Its “authority”
is fictitious.
The current attack on the nation-state is real, but it is
not revolutionary. It is counterrevolutionary
in the truest sense of that word, nothing less than the recrudescence of the
unitary imperial principle in world affairs, and as such represents the failure
of the Protestant paradigm shift to take place, not its revolutionary
overthrow. Its aim is to build a second Tower of Babel,
and the tools which it will find it necessary to employ in this endeavor are
both anti-Semitic and totalitarian.
If the rise of Naziism was insufficient to mark the end of
Judaism’s deadly love affair with Western Civilization, then surely the West’s shameful
abandonment of its own highest institutional creation – the modern democratic
nation-state – in a calculated act of revenge against its own Jewish roots,
ought to be sufficient. The question is, will our best intellectuals, scholars,
and political thinkers be able to meet the challenge which this repudiation has
set? Yoram Hazony’s essay suggests that the first step – recognition – has been
taken. But what next?
