What can we learn from the conflict between Hamas and Israel?
First, we note that Hamas’ tactical goal was to kill civilians, and to take others hostage. This is almost certainly a preview of what would happen if Hamas ever won its long struggle against Israel—the Israeli population would be eliminated. Perhaps some Israelis would be allowed to leave, but the Jewish population in situ would disappear, largely through massacres.
Of course, Hamas is a terrorist organization; people say that often, as if that concludes the discussion. But terrorism to what end? What is the underlying ideology?
It’s nationalism, and the Israelis are likewise nationalists. Any nationalist movement can kill.
And I don’t say that to assert a false equivalency, or to otherwise distance myself from this horror. Every new massacre is an escalation, and Hamas has escalated the struggle in an especially catastrophic way. But if in response Israel kills 40,000 or 140,000 civilians in Gaza through airstrikes, artillery bombardments and disease to avenge the 1,400 that Hamas killed with rockets and small arms, is that justice?
No, it’s not justice, but it’s the only justice nationalism knows. Nationalism emphasizes the differences between groups, never their similarities. Since any ethical system is built on empathy, nationalism—with its lack of empathy for out-groups—has only a blunted and primitive sense of right and wrong. Killing a hundred Palestinian civilians to avenge a single Israeli civilian does not seem unethical to an Israeli nationalist; at best it might be seen as a disagreeable necessity.
Observers often note that both sides are trapped in an endless cycle of revenge. But in truth they are actually trapped in their nationalist ideology; because of their habitual ways of thinking and feeling about the situation, they are unable to see any possible path to peace.
To the Israeli nationalists, any plausible peace settlement is simply not real, and likewise for Hamas militants. For Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate as equals, they’d have to assume their opponents were human beings capable of good faith, which is an impossible thought for any extreme nationalist.
Both sides regard the other as monsters in human form. And this belief allows them—indeed, it requires them—to commit and justify horrible crimes. And those crimes are then used by the other side to justify its own atrocities.
Both sides would benefit from peace. True peace would probably mean trade and commercial ties between Gaza and Israel, and as Europe has demonstrated, this can go a long way toward lasting peace.
Netanyahu might say, nothing good is possible without destroying Hamas. But of course he cannot destroy Hamas without re-occupying Gaza for an extended period, and that will mean heavy Israeli casualties and immense suffering for Palestinian civilians. Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005 for good reasons.
But maybe just a short occupation, of a few months? Just long enough to root the Hamas fighters out of their tunnels? But even if Israel kills 80% of Hamas, the leaders will mostly escape to Iran or elsewhere and once the Israelis leave, they will return. And as long as the people in Gaza hate Israel, the leaders will find more recruits.
So the situation is impossible for both sides. Barring some unforeseen change in the power dynamic, neither side can win. Further, neither side can benefit politically. The West is already moving to suppress pro-Hamas organizations, and public opinion in Gaza may be turning against Hamas as well. Netanyahu could be called to task by Israeli voters for his failure to guard Israel’s southern border.
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Netanyahu and his generals must know Israel’s situation is impossible, but they pretend otherwise. This brings us to a key function of nationalist movements: lying to one’s own people, which is counter-intuitive. The implicit promise of nationalist movements is of solidarity within the group; the Irish, for example, will trust and support each other in opposition to the English. That is the vision.
But this vision is seldom realized, and why not? In general terms, social unity is not common. For example, in the Irish war for independence, there were two views on the goals of the struggle against Britain. There were nationalists who wanted a republic and who were as secular as possible in Ireland at the time, perhaps including Michael Collins; on the other hand, there were those who wanted a Catholic state with the clergy dominating social services, education and family law—including access to contraception. Eamon de Valera emerged as the leader of the second group.
The key question for both factions was, why oppose British rule in Ireland? The first group, the relative secularists, would say: British rule was bad for the Irish. They were poorer, less educated and possibly less healthy than they would have been otherwise, and the poverty and lack of opportunity led them away to fight Britain’s wars.
But the second group would say, the British are Protestant, and they deny the validity of Catholic faith and the authority of the Catholic church, in Ireland and elsewhere. The British Empire was therefore a great evil, perhaps even Satanic in origin.
This difference came into sharp focus in the debate over the Treaty of 1921. Accepting dominion status and pledging fidelity to the British monarch seemed a small price to pay to the first party, the relative secularists. The benefit, after all, was the removal of British troops and police from Ireland, and the Irish managing their own affairs for the first time in centuries. Henry IV said, “Paris is well worth a Mass,” when he agreed to convert to Catholicism to become king, and the Irish pro-Treaty party felt similarly.
But the anti-Treaty forces felt the evil of the British Empire so intensely that they refused to take the oath, and were willing to kill other Irishmen in a civil war to avoid doing so.
So, despite the vision of unity, nationalist movements usually have factions which sometimes differ profoundly. And the split between the leaders, or would-be leaders, and the ordinary people is often acute. The anti-treaty Irish nationalists lost primarily because most of the ordinary people wanted peace and the British out. The Treaty got rid of British troops and police, and that was the end of the discussion for many people. By 1921 Ireland had seen enough violence and atrocities; the country wanted peace.
But the political class was divided almost evenly, and so a civil war broke out. Most of the common people and about half the political class backed the Treaty, and the British supported the Treaty party with cash and weapons. So, the result was never in doubt to any reasonable observer.
Also obvious was that once the British troops were gone, and the Irish had their own government, anyone could safely refuse to sign the oath of loyalty to the Crown. The British weren’t going to invade Ireland again to enforce paperwork.
Let’s change the focus a bit here. In Ireland, by 1921, almost everyone was a nationalist to some degree; the Black and Tans will do that. And the same may be true in Gaza today.
But not everyone is Israel is a nationalist. There is a peace party, and a government that’s willing to negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians is imaginable; Likud could lose power. And in fact the same was true in Germany under Hitler. The SPD and the Communists enjoyed significant support and the Nazis suppressed them by force. But there were still plenty of Germans who had voted for the SPD and the Communists and who were privately skeptical of Nazi ideology.
Let’s think about what it means to be a leader of a nation, and a nationalist movement, where many of the citizens aren’t nationalists, as with Netanyahu and Israel. The anti-nationalists are bound to be seen as “other” and even people who are notionally nationalist can be lacking in the eyes of a demanding leader. In the last days of the war, Hitler said that if the Germans couldn’t win, they didn’t deserve to survive. And he backed that up by refusing to evacuate German civilians from the path of the Soviet army, exposing them to horrific atrocities. This might remind us of Hamas’ indifference to the suffering of its own civilians, and Netanyahu’s to the hostages.
Nationalist leaders are often alienated from their people. Partly that’s the loneliness of leadership, but mostly it’s the lack of empathy. If you become the leader of a nationalist movement—say of Germany—then you’ve spent years rejecting empathy for the Poles, the Jews, the Czechs and the French, despite the fact that they’re your neighbors. It’s a short step from there to rejecting empathy for ordinary Germans, particularly those you believe are unenthusiastic about the cause.
But to call it a “lack of empathy” is an extreme understatement. In truth it’s an active effort to dehumanize others, and it happens continuously through the propaganda of all nationalist movements. Nationalism is built for war, and as one old soldier put it, “war means fighting and fighting means killing.” And to kill someone you must believe they are not human in the same way you and your people are.
And your own soldiers, who do the killing, also have to be dehumanized, mythologized into heroes and even gods, because the suffering of heroes and gods isn’t ordinary suffering, not what you or I suffer, but something more profound, part of an archetypal ritual of sacrifice and renewal.
But at the end of the day, they are just as dead as the enemy; they rot in the same ditches. The myth of sacrifice and renewal isn’t false, but the way nationalism exploits it is a revolting lie. The similarities between people far outweigh the differences, and nationalism’s denial of that fundamental truth sets the stage for a tragedy with no denouement. And that denial is the first lie of nationalism, the basis for all the systematic and shameless lying that is inherent to it.
Hence Gaza. Dehumanization is the heart of nationalism, and both sides are deep into it. And there’s no exit, because dehumanization poisons the well. No meaningful dialogue is possible, no compromise, no reconciliation. The crimes continue almost automatically, not the acts of individuals but the impersonal product of nationalism.
Nationalism promises unity, strength and safety. And it actually delivers none of these. How many times have we heard that Jews can only be truly safe in their own country, in Israel? And yet they are not safe, and never have been—it’s an illusion.
And it’s an illusion for the entire world, not just the Israelis.
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Could a Gandhi or Mandela emerge to lead both sides to peace? Of course not. There are probably thousands of people on both sides with the spiritual vision to play that role, but they are marginalized as eccentrics, or if they are too persistent, they are jailed or otherwise suppressed. These people are regarded by their peers as dreamers, weak and unrealistic.
And yet what could be more unrealistic than to believe that this conflict could go on forever? And what could be weaker than to let one’s people slide toward extermination? The hard-bitten realists of Netanyahu’s cabinet will sooner or later exterminate the Palestinians or be exterminated by them. Making no effort to avoid those eventualities is idiotic, but that’s nationalism for you.
Only the presence of Western and Arab public opinion has prevented extermination from happening already.
How have people made peace in the past? How did the Japanese and Americans become allies and business partners? After World War II, the Americans and Japanese agreed that Japanese nationalism had to be suppressed. Some unreconstructed Japanese nationalists remained, but they were neutralized politically. The monarchy was likewise de-politicized; that is, the Americans agreed not to hang the emperor if he agreed never to become the center of a nationalist movement. Liberal democracy was imposed on Japan, and it was able to take root because defeat had discredited nationalism.
[Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower, W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated edition (June 17, 2000). ISBN-10 : 0393320278, ISBN-13 : 978-0393320275]
The fact that democracy was linked to trade with America meant that Japan could recover economically. Ordinary Japanese rapidly came to see democracy, pacifism, and access to American markets as inevitable. The nationalists grumbled, but they couldn’t argue with economic growth.
And Japan did not become an American colony. Diplomatically, they lined up with America and the West, but they resisted any military involvement in the Cold War. The Americans would have preferred it otherwise, but if Japan was to be a democracy then the Americans had to accept their pacifism.
The basis of this peace was American ideology. Americans believed their institutions were superior, not their people; if other nations would only adopt American ways they too would have peace and prosperity. Note this emphasized the similarities between groups, not their differences. Since the American model was always federal and decentralized, local adaptations were easily made: the Japanese kept their emperor and refused to actively fight communism, and in Europe the Americans had to accept social democracy to resist communism.
Of course, in Europe the American system meant the suppression of German nationalism, and also—more subtly—the suppression of French and British nationalism. The Americans steadily opposed colonialism to the point of humiliating allies publicly, as in the Suez Crisis. This served the American purpose of blunting Soviet anti-colonial propaganda, but it also crushed French and British nationalism. What is a British nationalist without an Empire? Nationalism, like any other political movement, has to have a purpose.
The Americans not only wanted to eliminate colonialism, they also wanted to stabilize Europe itself. Anything that resembled the political situation in Germany and Italy in the 1920s had to be tamped down. In France, for example, the right-wing was militaristic, anti-semitic, anti-democratic and imperialistic. Their beliefs were similar to Nazism; French collaborators largely shared the Nazi worldview. Furthermore, there was no post-war reckoning in France with right-wing ideology, as there was in Germany and Japan. After the war, the French wanted to claw back Vietnam and hold Algeria, just as the Nazis had wanted Danzig and the Sudetenland before the war.
But in the long run, the French could not keep their empire. The Americans were never willing to help them, not even to defeat the communists in Vietnam. And few in the Western World accepted the French arguments in favor of colonialism—not the communists, not the socialists, not the liberals, and most of all, not the Americans. In the end, French nationalists were reduced to trying to assassinate De Gaulle, one of their own. This had the potential to profoundly destabilize France and Europe, but fortunately De Gaulle survived to rule France with his odd mixture of nostalgia and sharp-eyed pragmatism. French nationalism today has no foreign policy and no vision; it’s just a set of petty complaints against immigrants and America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1958_crisis_in_France
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As the Americans were attempting to discredit and weaken western European nationalism, the Soviets were doing the same in the east; German and Polish nationalism seem to have been of particular interest, although there were certainly no safe spaces for nationalists anywhere behind the Iron Curtain. But the severity of the suppression was worse in the East—British nationalists had to endure political irrelevancy, but Polish nationalists were shot or jailed.
Both the Soviets and the Americans realized they couldn’t establish a stable world order if nationalism was allowed run amok as it is doing today in Gaza, and as it did in both World Wars. The two great powers disagreed profoundly about what that stable world order would look like, but they saw eye-to-eye on the question of nationalism.
Nationalism was only encouraged in border zones, to cause trouble for the other side. The Americans encouraged Greek nationalism as a way of opposing the Greek Communist Party, and the Soviets encouraged Vietnamese nationalism to pin down the American army.
The American system was federal, and the nations in the American sphere of influence had a lot of autonomy, so long as they didn’t go communist. But the big decisions had to be made by some central authority—either Washington or the EEC. The UN could have been effective, if the Cold War hadn’t crippled it.
The Soviet system was more centralized, and the Eastern Europeans mostly did as they were told. When they didn’t, the Russians sent in tanks. But China was problematic; in the beginning it was too poor to be completely independent, but too big to be dominated by the Soviet Union.
Let’s pause to set some context here. My readers in 2024 may be surprised that both American and Soviet leadership were capable of such vision, and perhaps doubt my interpretation. And why might my readers reasonably doubt that the Soviets and the Americans saw nationalism as a destructive and destabilizing force? After all, isn’t nationalism normal?
Few people in 1946 saw nationalism as normal. And neither the Soviet nor American leadership needed any prophetic vision to see the trouble nationalism might cause—they had only to look out their windows: much of their world was a smoking ruin. Everyone was aware that the World Wars, which had nearly destroyed everything, were mainly driven by nationalism.
And in particular, nationalism made it nearly impossible to make peace. Louis XIV would have made peace in 1915, when the game was clearly no longer worth the candle, but the leaders of the time were unable to do so due to the unbridled nationalism of their people. To have made peace without victory was unthinkable even in Great Britain, not the most nationalistic of the warring nations.
But to fight on in World War One was clearly a disaster, not only because of the staggering human losses, but also because of the resulting demoralization and alienation which led to political extremism: fascism and communism. To fight on until one side collapsed like an exhausted boxer meant that a second war was inevitable, and a third highly likely.
The victory that nationalists dreamed of in World War I was never possible. Yes, the ancien regime was swept away—the Czar, the Kaiser, the Austro-Hungarian Empire—but they were replaced partly because they were irrelevant to nationalism! The Kaiser had been replaced by a nationalistic military dictatorship headed by Hindenburg and Ludendorff months before the Armistice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberste_Heeresleitung#Third_OHL
Only in Russia was the ancien regime evaluated solely on its merits and rejected in favor of another (non-nationalist) system. Communism was a humanitarian disaster, but Lenin had more flexibility than any nationalist leader: he could make peace with the Germans and keep his job. And Stalin could fight Finland without winning a total victory. Neither was a prisoner of nationalism.
Lloyd George, for example, couldn’t even fire his generals, and reportedly kept newly trained divisions in England, so that Haig couldn’t hurl them against the German trenches.
[Strategy by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Plume; 2nd Edition (March 30, 1991). ISBN-10 : 0452010713, ISBN-13 : 978-0452010710]
The Allied insistence on “unconditional surrender” in World War II may have been based on the understanding that a country dominated by nationalist thinking would never accept defeat unless it was occupied and re-made.
By 1946 the world had taken a big step backwards from nationalism. Both the two superpowers claimed to represent a trans-national ideology that would benefit all; the choice was between the two ideologies, not between American and Russian nationalism. Were both countries a bit nationalistic, nonetheless? Possibly, but everyone knew that the big issues were capitalism, socialism and democracy; the side you chose depended on your take on those institutions.
Ordinary people and leaders alike understood that world peace couldn’t be achieved without suppressing or sidelining nationalism. And the same is true today.
But today nationalism is almost standard throughout the world. This is “nationalism” but not the European nationalism of the 19th century, which usually had links to the Enlightenment or Christianity or both. Modern nationalism is therefore stripped of both reason and compassion.
Nationalism reigns unchallenged in many countries: Russia, China, Iran, and Hungary. People are not allowed to speak against the lies, the crimes, and the profound dehumanization of nationalism. They are not allowed to speak against an ideology that could wipe out the human race.
And other countries, such as India, Turkey and the United States are not far behind.
In a world with eight billion people and 195 nations—none of them autarkies—getting along might seem a foreign policy priority for every country. We are united by trade and the internet to an extent that would have been inconceivable a generation ago.
And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) this reality, countries like China, North Korea, Russia and Iran bristle like pit bulls at any threat to their fevered dreams of dominance.
And the contradiction is sharpest in China, which is at the center of the world’s trade network.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” and what is the vision of modern China? The old CCP vision of a better life for the Chinese people and for the whole world has disappeared. What has replaced it? It’s a nationalist vision of China as a great empire that has, by war and economic pressure, supplanted America. Taiwan will be conquered, and likewise the Philippines. Japan and South Korea will be neutralized and reduced to economic colonies of China. Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Africa will likewise become clients of China. The CCP does not mention that this ascent to glory will almost certainly involve a world war—and with China’s best customers!
Nationalism is always irrational to some extent, but modern Chinese nationalism is strikingly so. The Chinese economy is built around manufacturing for export; the legitimacy of the state depends on the success of that economy. Therefore good relations with China’s customers should be a necessity.
And yet China spends large sums to prepare for war against Taiwan and the United States, two of its most important trading partners. How can your foreign policy imply the destruction of your economy? It doesn’t make sense, but it makes nationalist sense.
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As with any political movement, we need to ask what is nationalism for? What purpose does it serve? Obviously, this could be a complex subject, so let’s start here: there are political ideologies that are de-humanizing, such as nationalism, and there are also humanizing ideologies, like democratic socialism or Gandhi’s Congress Party movement in India; that is, movements that raise people up and give them dignity.
If the only political expression allowed is nationalist (as is true in both Russia and China today) then humanizing political movements are in effect outlawed; if there is no political force standing up for humanity, then the people will suffer long-term dehumanization, the symptoms of which include violence, drug addiction, alienation, loss of personal relationships and nihilism. We can add more nouns: homelessness, criminality, racism, and loss of spirituality. Life expectancy falls, the suicide rate rises. People lose faith in institutions, including democracy and education.
And sensing in an unfocused way that the system is stacked against them, the people lash out in rage.
If people have experienced intensive dehumanization in their personal and economic lives, they may in turn dehumanize their enemies. Or their supposed enemies, the ones that nationalist propaganda serves up for them.
Nationalism therefore extends the dehumanization of Billionaire Capitalism onto an international stage and makes another world war much more likely.
There’s yet another aspect to this problem. In the case of a countries like China and the U.S., where the founding ideologies are explicitly Utilitarian, nationalism also acts as a permanent conversation-stopper: no one can ask, why isn’t life getting better? Don’t we have a system that’s supposed to help us? What has gone wrong?
Because the nationalists would say: we can discuss all that after we’ve defeated our enemies. Which is exactly what Netanyahu is saying to the families of the hostages.
This isn’t just misdirection, it’s actually how societies are depoliticized. If the Chinese cannot analyze current conditions in light of Marxist-Maoist thought, or Confucianism for that matter, then what’s the basis of their analysis? Nothing—and that is exactly the point. To discuss anything outside a nationalist framework was at first discouraged, then forbidden, and after some time it finally became impossible.
And to take another example, if Americans can’t refer back (say) to the ideals of the Enlightenment, then they’re stuck. Americans can’t say, how can reason and science guide us in a world full of disinformation? Or if they say it, they won’t be heard.
People have to analyze the present in terms of what they already know, but nationalism negates that knowledge. So nationalism depoliticizes society by destroying or occluding political and cultural context—by eliminating history, in other words. Nationalism makes us forget Socrates and Christ, the Enlightenment, science and democracy.
But again, early nationalist movements, like Irish nationalism, were rooted in Christianity or the Enlightenment, because early nationalism had to prove its worth in terms of what people already knew and valued. Today, nationalism is justified only by nationalism itself, which means it has no independent value system, not even in China or Russia, where Marxism retains some prestige. But Marxism is inherently political; you cannot depoliticize class conflict.
Worse, Marxism has a vision of a better world for all. The practicality or desirability of this vision—which so many people fought and died over—is now beside the point. The people are intended to have no vision of the future at all, so Marxism cannot be discussed.
So, what is modern nationalism for? Nationalism exists as a force-multiplier for Billionaire Capitalism. By depoliticizing society, it prevents any discussion of improving the lives of the people or of changes to the power structure, and it is profoundly dehumanizing. These are virtues from the point of view of Billionaire Capitalism.
Nationalism was obsolete after World War II, but the rise of Billionaire Capitalism in 1980 changed that. Nationalism was resurrected and carefully stripped of anything that resembled an independent value system; Billionaire Capitalism then turned nationalism to its own purposes.
And when I say that nationalism is dehumanizing, I mean that when you dehumanize the Other, you are also dehumanizing yourself. The same illusions that allow you to deny the dignity of the Other will eventually come around again in self-condemnation, self-contempt.
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For a long time after 1945, most of us understood that the World Wars were a dark wasteland that we could never re-visit; the human race would not survive a World War fought with nuclear weapons. But there was a paradox: as in a fairy tale, our worst fear had to be met with fearlessness. The generation that survived World War I saw the errors of militarism and nationalism, but they lacked the ideology, or the courage, to resist fascism.
So the generation of World War II had to walk the razor’s edge between peace and war, and they survived by the narrowest of margins.
Their success was largely due to their recognition of the dangers and limitations of nationalism.
And today?
The Socialist Investor 