Collective Conscious

Israel is a nation-​​state. It was cre­ated by fiat to con­form to the atti­tudes about states that dom­i­nated the 20^th cen­tury and still have a great deal of sway today: that an eth­ni­cally sim­i­lar group of peo­ple deserve, with­out ques­tion, their own sov­er­eign ter­ri­tory on the face of the earth.

When Israel sets out poli­cies regard­ing its own ter­ri­tory — i.e., Gaza — no mat­ter how inhu­mane, we are forced, under that world­view, to see and respond to them with a shrug and a sigh and say: to so gov­ern is their right.

When Israel defends its right to insti­tute those poli­cies by the sword, we are forced to take the same tack.

This, I believe, jus­ti­fies Israel’s response under that world­view. To allow an infringe­ment on what they describe as their sov­er­eign ter­ri­tory in vio­la­tion of their poli­cies regard­ing it would be tan­ta­mount to the US allow­ing the seces­sion of the South, or fail­ing to uphold by force the block­ade that was main­tained dur­ing the Civil War.

The attack is a ques­tion that cuts to the very core of Israel’s right to exist. The new world is los­ing its respect for ethnically-​​oriented states and shift­ing toward an under­stand­ing of gov­ern­ment wherein supra­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, and even gov­ern­ments (such as the EU) assume some of the sov­er­eignty of sub­or­di­nate gov­ern­ments. The nat­ural right is no longer for an eth­ni­cally linked peo­ple — a nation — have the right to a ter­ri­to­ri­ally secure zone — a state.

In other words, the legit­i­macy of the nation-​​state is fal­ter­ing. As I have argued before, the United States has a great deal of inter­est in main­tain­ing the power of the nation-​​state; so too does Israel. There­fore the two are likely allies against all man­ner of con­trary inter­ests who would see power shift to a gov­ern­ment struc­ture or pop­u­lar inter­est that no longer respects mil­i­tary might or eth­nic homo­gene­ity as the basis for just government.

Israel, then, is in a bind. It has no choice but to enforce the Gaza block­ade, and the attack on the flotilla that we wit­nessed is the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of that con­straint. The world­view jus­ti­fies it.

I, for one, expect that the rest of the world is rapidly real­iz­ing that the time for nation­al­ism is com­ing to an end, and a greater inte­gra­tion — or at least the dis­so­lu­tion of the for­mal bound­aries which make up the mod­ern map — is inevitable. The EU is already a shift­ing, polit­i­cally and mon­e­tar­ily quasi-​​integrated union, despite what its inter­nal polit­i­cal bound­aries would have told a 20^th-​​century observer. This is an emer­gent trend as more and more non-​​national groups, rang­ing from cor­po­ra­tions to refugees to ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, take a place on the world stage.

Israel did was was right for them­selves, but they did it in a moral-​​legal frame­work that has past it expi­ra­tion date. The post­mod­ern world — that is, the one most of us live in — are right to decry the attack and seek a res­o­lu­tion that fun­da­men­tally changes the nature of the polit­i­cal rela­tion­ships in the Mid­dle East.

(Photo: Bird Eye)