Israel Through European Eyes Part IV

 

by  Yoram Hazony

4^th part of 4

V.

Israel continues to be threatened militarily, first and foremost by Iran. But if Israel falls, it will not be by way of Iranian missiles. It will be by way of words, as the Soviet Union fell. Jews and non-Jews will simply cease to understand why such a state should exist—and then one day, with awesome speed, the independent Jewish state will be no more.

Those who are concerned to defend Israel on the battlefield are well aware that this involves a never-ending reassessment of the sources of danger and the means needed to meet new threats as they arise. On the battlefield of ideas, the state of Israel is today in danger as never before. But the danger isn't coming from Israel's traditional enemies and it can't be fought using the traditional means. You can't fight a paradigm with facts—because pretty much any facts you've got are either dismissed as irrelevant or absorbed into the new paradigm and reinterpreted in a way that only reinforces it. You can only fight a paradigm with a competing paradigm. And the paradigm that gave birth to Israel and which held it firm, both domestically and internationally, is today in tatters.

What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in college. If you're used to academic books, it's an easy read. And if not, it's a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a clearer insight into what's happening to Israel today in the international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in Israel's universities.

After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed. There's much to be said about this, and it's not for now. But I'll leave you with just this thought as a start on it: Paradigm shifts aren't like an election campaign or a struggle over some aspect of policy, much less a short-term media battle like the one over the Turkish flotilla, which can be resolved one way or another in matter of weeks or months, if not days. Paradigm shifts are unusual in the lives of individuals. And when they happen, they often take years to work themselves out. For this reason, clashes between political paradigms tend to play themselves out over a generation or more. By the same token, the relevant media in which these clashes are played out aren't the newspapers or television or the internet. By the time we're reading the newspapers or watching CNN, we've already got our paradigm in place—just like the reporters we're watching, who just keep reporting from within their own set paradigm, over and over again. When it comes to shifts of political paradigm, these take place principally through books, which expose people to an idea at length and in depth; and in schools, where such books are studied and discussed, especially universities. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the paradigm that has served as the foundation for Israel's existence, that's where the work is going to have to be done.

 

Notes

[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1962]), p. 148.
[2] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 150-151. The quote is from Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, F. Gaynor, trans. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968 [1949]), pp. 33-34.
[3] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York, 1889), vol. II, pp. 295-296. Quoted in Kuhn, p. 151.
[4] An early study that successfully applied Kuhn's ideas to the international arena is Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton, 1976).
[5] For a more extensive discussion of the nation-state as a means of freeing mankind from empire, see my essay, "Empire and Anarchy," which is the first of my trilogy of essays on the nation-state. Yoram Hazony, "On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy," Azure 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 27-70.
[6] On the Jewish state of antiquity as a national states, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge, 1997); Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2002); Yoram Hazony, "On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy," Azure 12 (Winter 2002), pp. 34-35, 39; Daniel Gordis, "The Tower of Babel and the Birth of Nationhood," Azure 40 (Spring 2010).
[7] See, for example, Jurgen Habermas, "The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship," Ciarin Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds., The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), pp. 117-119, 160-161; Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton, 1993), pp. 151f, 170 n. 7. One scholar who recognized that these beliefs are leading to the reemergence of the Hapsburg empire as the institutional structure of Europe is Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, pp. 121-122, 200.
[8] Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," in Hans Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, trans., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1970), pp. 102-105.
[9] Jurgen Habermas, "The European Nation-State," p. 118.
[10] Speech by Ben-Gurion before a special session of the National Assembly, November 30, 1942. Central Zionist Archives, J/1366.
[11] For discussion of Israel's role as the guardian of the Jewish people, see Yoram Hazony, "On the National State, Part 2: The Guardian of the Jews," Azure 13 (Summer 2003), pp. 133-165.
[12] See, for example, Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003. An impressive Zionist response is Leon Wieseltier "Israel, Palestine, and the Return of the Bi-National Fantasy: What is Not to be Done," The New Republic, October 27, 2003.

 

 

Yoram Hazony

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