Zionism For Everyone 2026

The real reason we’re all fighting about Israel.
Alana Newhouse, Editor of Tablet.
(The Free Press)

Some change involves things that happen to us, which isn’t what interests me. I’m curious about what happens, individually and to societies, when people face an unhappy reality—however it came to be—and decide to change what looks, at least at that moment, to be their fate.

In his 2015 novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq sketches a portrait of a near-future France, in which an Islamic party allies with the Socialists to take over the country. The story follows a literature professor faced with a decision to convert to Islam for career advancement, as the country’s social and political landscape is transformed by Sharia law. His own disillusionment is heightened by his Jewish girlfriend’s decision to escape the Islamization of France by moving to the Jewish state. He almost goes with her but then doesn’t, uttering the book’s now-famous line: “There is no Israel for me.”

I remember snagging on that sentiment the first time I read it. I could see why a disgruntled non-Jewish academic might hesitate to make Aliyah, but to the extent that Houellebecq’s fictional portrayal contained a commentary on the real world, the conclusion felt wrong. There quite clearly is, or could be, an Israel for this person. It’s France, if it could just get off the course it’s on.

This is hardly impossible. In fact, throughout history, humans have changed the way they organised or conceived of themselves in order to take advantage of new opportunities or to address new challenges or threats. Such moments of reflection are often brought about by advances in technology, from the invention of the wheel to the building of roads to the invention of the printing press to time- and space-shrinking inventions like the telegraph and the radio, which in turn bring about large changes in the way human beings see themselves and envision their relationship to some large community—and which also introduce new dangers. We are in one such moment.

We are genetically editing out diseases that have terrorised humanity throughout recorded history, heading to Mars, fighting wars with drones, reshaping nature, and raising extinct animals from the dead. Are these developments good or bad? Who knows? That’s the thing about new inventions; their effects are—always, entirely—dictated by how humans interact with them.

In our case, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. The digital technologies emerging today are incredibly powerful; they’ll be used for pleasure and profit by secure, skilled, intentional humans. But there will be casualties. “This is definitely not a technology where everyone wins,” says Palantir’s Alex Karp. Whether we’re conscious of it, we’re all facing a future in which some people will enjoy the possibility of safe, ambitious, beautiful human lives, and others will become robot fuel and zombie food. It’s scary and confusing, and every day gets more so.

At just this wild moment, filled with questions so incredible they’re effectively spiritual—at what point does a genetically edited person become equivalent to a machine? Are rocks animate?!—the world suddenly entered a vortex where, instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is. . . Zionism.

Zionism, critics say, is a toxic ideology. It underpins a criminal ethnostate. It incites and justifies genocide. Do you have good or neutral feelings about this tiny country, the size of New Jersey, thousands of miles away? Do you have no feelings about it at all? That just shows how venal you are, or how stupid about the world. Israel’s actions, alone among the many countries your tax dollars are enmeshed with, are on your personal moral ledger. That small nation, driven by a dangerous doctrine, is controlling the most powerful empire in history—a nation with 50 times its gross domestic product, 34 times the number of people, 25 times the defense budget. It’s the reason you don’t have healthcare.

In response, Jews and their allies pathetically try to argue with this lunacy. The Jews are history’s most deserving victims, they say. Zionism isn’t a threat! It’s just a movement advocating for the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and the establishment of a state in their ancestral homeland—a privilege enjoyed by everyone else in the West. Who could argue with that? Smarter people are mystified, even annoyed, that we’re talking about this at all.

What few on either side focus on is that almost everyone else in the West is losing, or giving up, their own privileges of self-determination, which is what’s making it possible to imagine that Israel is somehow getting away with what no one else can. If it’s a truism of today’s politics that, especially for bad actors, every accusation is a confession, a corollary has also emerged: Expressions of disgust are often evidence of envy.

Years from now, it will be obvious why, in this specific moment in human history, as we faced high-powered technologies and political ideologies aimed at paving the way for their dominance over humans, what emerged—what had to emerge—was an intense, global debate about, of all things, Zionism. Israel is no longer an outlier in the pantheon of free societies and people; it’s a blueprint for human defence and flourishing in the coming century.

The earliest form of human organisation was small, nomadic bands that shared resources, with simple egalitarian structures. These grew into tribes, which were larger, settled groups linked by kinship, with more complex leadership but still lacking centralized power. Then came a truly radical development, when the domestication of plants and animals removed the need to constantly move for sustenance. But permanent settlements also created the need for defense and resource allocation—which begat the early villages and cities.

The possibility of rootedness led to such dramatic changes that it’s almost hard to conceptualize—because it offered people, for the first time, a tangible place around which to organize their existence. Tribal connections, mores, language, music, and so on became linked with the defense and the enrichment of a place where one’s children and compatriots could be safe and thrive. When societies were successful, it was because the humans and their personal differences interacted with the natural differences of their environments to create something specific, distinct, and recognisably singular. Something people felt connected to, that inspired them, that they wanted to protect.

Eventually, major European states like Great Britain, France, and Russia began to take root, and over time were developed by a long process of historical slow-cooking involving internal conquest and civil and religious wars. In the mid–17th century, the Peace of Westphalia gave Europe a concrete map, codifying some territories as Catholic and others as Protestant. In succeeding centuries, the European order of states—each corresponding to a specific religious identification and dominant language—expanded through waves of conquest and treaty-making. After World War I, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires established a multitude of new states across the territories of these former empires, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. Few of these existed before as separate nations, at least not in any modern form.

Although the term had not yet been coined, all of these were ethnostates, a word derived from the Greek ethnos—variously defined as “nation,” “tribe,” “people,” or “class.” It’s since been bastardized to mean a government where citizenship and residence are restricted to members of a specific ethnicity, or people who belong to the same broad bloodline. But the word ethnos, in fact, only connotes any group of humans who see themselves as sharing a potentially diverse set of cultural characteristics that ultimately distinguishes them from other groups.

People were not invented in the 1800s. What did emerge at that moment, and what dramatically influenced the creation of countries, was the conceptual framework of peoplehood. This idea derived from 19th-century German Romantic philosophy and in particular the work of Johann Gottfried Herder. In tracing the development of human civilisation, Herder noted that shared language, literature, traditions, and history forge a unique spirit, or that he argued should serve as the basis for nation-states.

When Herder went looking for an example of a group of people whose attributes—common language, history, religion—he could use as a foundation for this theory, he chose the ancient Jews, who, he argued, were the supreme example of the authentic folk expression of a people. If modern Jews had a problem, Herder continued, it was that they had been flung from their land, turning them into a “nation within a nation.” Still, that only added to their mystique: Their specific set of characteristics enabled them to maintain authentic culture—fitting in while keeping apart—and successfully adapt to successive waves of modernity, from the Roman Empire to the great religious empires of the Catholic Church and various Islamic caliphates, to the multiethnic empires of the Habsburgs and Ottomans, to the Westphalian state order born in 17th-century Europe.

Unlike, say, Bulgarians or Slovenes, who had to appeal to scraps of philology and history to prove that they had existed as separate peoples, Jews had provably existed as a nation since the beginnings of the West. Jewish particularity was a fact known to the entire world; their language, customs, and geographical attachments were attested to by a wealth of ancient Greek and Roman sources, in addition to the records left behind by Assyrians, Moabites, and other vanished kingdoms.

But there was another reason that Herder was drawn to the Jews. He believed in a “genetic method” of history, which dictated that a people’s culture is rooted in their origin, similar to how a plant grows from a seed. Except, in his conception, the “bloodline” is not simply biological; it’s a spiritual and cultural unity formed over time, often expressed through language, folklore, and poetry. While Jews to some extent preserved their origins and functioning as a tribe—or a union of 12 tribes—their origin story was always, from the beginning, unusually inclusive. Modern DNA evidence suggests that only the paternal line of Ashkenazi Jews goes back to the Middle East, suggesting a group of Jewish men who migrated to the Roman Empire and then took wives from among the native European population. In doing so, they had no shortage of precedent in Jewish tradition, even though Judaism is passed on through the maternal line: The matriarchs of the Jewish people were all converts from other nations, as was the founder of the Davidic kingly line, Ruth.

Even further back, the Book of Exodus makes clear that the Jewish slaves whom Moses (himself a person of apparent royal Egyptian origin) led out from Egypt were joined by the erev rav, or “mixed multitude”—a large number of people without any genetic link to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but who nevertheless left Egypt with Moses. While the term erev rav survives in Jewish tradition as a derogatory term meaning “rabble,” it is also clear that the erev rav were a founding component of the Israelite nation before it even reached Israel. No further mention is made in the scriptures of anyone’s origins in the erev rav.

If you squint, you can see how this complexity worked its way into the development of Herder’s concept of “peoplehood” as it could apply to others. The only truism across cultures, or peoples as he articulated it, is that they are, by definition, different from one another.

The nation-states of Japan and France may each be described as representing an ethnos, but that doesn’t mean that the definitions of each ethnos are the same. Being Japanese, or Japanese-ness, is strongly tied to the Japanese language and to blood. It is also a delicate web of manners and attitudes toward everything from family to food. However, a person of Japanese descent who didn’t speak Japanese would still be recognised by most—if not all—Japanese people as Japanese, whether they had been raised in Japan or in Peru. The question of one’s religion, which is often key to national identity in Europe, would be unlikely to affect any Japanese person’s evaluation of another’s Japanese-ness. Conversely, a fluent Japanese speaker from England, with white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, would be unlikely to be recognised by Japanese people as Japanese, even if he or she made regular visits to a Shinto shrine. My husband, who is a great fan of everything Japanese, once lived in Tokyo. When I asked him how people there responded to him when he spoke to them in Japanese, he said, “Like a talking dog.”

Now imagine the same questions asked of a French person. Would someone who grew up in Peru and didn’t speak French be recognised as French by other French people? The answer is no, regardless of how long their ancestors might have previously lived on French soil. What if they spoke fluent French? Ask French Canadians this question, and the answer is also clearly no. For the French, then, blood is less important than language and current political geography in determining French-ness.

To this day, two kinds of places on Earth can plausibly claim not to be ethnostates. First, the postcolonial states established after World War II in Africa and the Middle East, along lines drawn by colonial mapmakers precisely to keep the new possessions divided and easier to govern. In these cases, the fact that they were not constructed as ethnostates is generally cited as a reason for their subsequent weakness and failure.

The second case of countries that did not qualify as ethnostates, at least not at their start, are the “settler” nations formed by large-scale immigration from Europe. The most successful of these countries were overseas colonies of the British Empire. Others were Latin American colonies of European nations like Spain and Portugal. In none of these cases did the settlers have any ties of language, religion, myth, or ancestry to the lands that they settled or backing from international institutions or courts. They simply settled there and took the land in the name of their king or queen, whose rule was said to rest on heavenly authority.

The most unusual of these was the future United States, a country so unlike any other that it’s hard to call it “the most successful” or, really, “the most” anything—since so many of the things it would go on to achieve were singular. In no small part, this is because from its founding, America was animated by two unusual, and surprisingly durable, cultural characteristics: covenant and capital.

In fact, these two motivations, both present at the birth of the country, turned out to be so strong that they compensated for America’s lack of other cultural tethers and enabled it to generate a distinct ethnos of its own. This was especially important after the revolution, when the country took an approach to national identity that consciously downplayed common ties of blood or geography in favor of criteria that reflected a sense of common purpose and into which new immigrants could be speedily integrated.

Can countries whose populations are a mix of peoples belonging to multiple ethnicities themselves constitute or become an ethnos? Sure. Having the same skin color or physical features is an element of collective identity that is important to the Japanese but not, for example, to Israelis—whose population includes immigrants from Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Mexico. And, of course, America tied together people of different races, languages, religions, and more by demanding allegiance to two common purposes that turned out to be strong and unique enough to become effective cultural tethers.

For centuries, regardless of what specific music it made, nations’ values—both for individuals and as collectives—lay in their distinctiveness. Sovereignty and citizenship were understood to be hard-won privileges that could easily be lost. Giving up either one would only happen—until recently, at least—at the wrong end of a gun.

It is hard to process the human effort, time, blood, creativity, capital of all kinds that went into developing the identity of Western nations. Everyone was its own collective work of aesthetics and human engineering, as impressive as any physical structure built by the great empires of the past. Now, in 2026, they are experiencing massive and, in some cases, crippling identity crises—as though they’d all been struck by some force of nature, like an ice age or the impact of a comet.

In fact, it was more like a social contagion—man-made, unstoppable, and maddening to witness if you understood what you were looking at. It began 80 years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust. “As the rebuilding efforts began, alongside them came an ideological and philosophical reckoning,” explains the Swedish writer Annika Hernroth-Rothstein. Rather than accepting “that seemingly normal people under extraordinary circumstances can do terrible things,” she writes:

“Europe decided that the villain was ideology itself. Ideology, built on religious belief and defined identity, led to the formation of nation-states, borders, and divisions between places, people, and beliefs. This, the postwar idea went, was what caused conflict. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault described nationalism and the nation-state as moral and political dangers, advocating for global humanism while questioning the very idea of basing a shared identity on religious belief and nationalist sentiment. . .. And so, a war-damaged continent, having just come out of a global conflict over borders and identity, decided to do away with borders and identity altogether, assuming this would be the road to lasting peace. It was not.”

Instead of inoculating Europe against further strife, the post-nationalist ideology that developed as a response to World War II would end up destabilizing Europe, and the whole West, arguably in more lasting ways. With the heavy-handed encouragement of the Soviet Union, the confected global community began treating all Western nationalisms, and especially American nationalism, as criminal, whereas the nationalisms of postcolonial states were virtuous. These illogical rules became codified in the supposedly moral divide between oppressors, to whom everything was forbidden, and oppressed, to whom everything was allowed—an ideology that then infected international organizations, including the United Nations, which were now used by totalitarian and collectivist countries to check the power of Western countries (which, ironically, they had acquired by not being totalitarian or collectivist).
That tension might have been manageable if not for what happened next. After the end of the Cold War, the anti-nationalist ideology got another powerful boost, but from the opposite direction: the forces of global capitalism, and emerging new technologies that sought to eliminate national differences in order to optimise their own operating systems.

Politicians throughout the West, from both the left and the right, began to see themselves as members of a larger transnational “global community” that had moved beyond the crude realities of national identity to larger questions, like the composition of a global monoculture shaped by free markets and international law, with special carve-outs to help the “oppressed” catch up and join the global system.

Country by country, elites would then be shocked to discover how unpopular these bipartisan-supported universalist policies were. As it turned out, most citizens of Western countries did not want to inhabit a post-local, post-historical world. Britons were furious to find Pakistani Muslim rape gangs have been molesting their children under the de facto protection of the law; Swedes were aghast to find large areas of their major cities have become no-go zones ruled by foreign gangs; the French were repulsed by the newcomers’ rejection of secularism. Leftists and their newfound Islamist and Third-Worldist allies struggled to explain why, say, French nationalism was inherently wrong, but Palestinian nationalism was right—or why it was better for goods to be made in China by state factories using slave labor than to enact tariffs on foreign goods. Americans angered by low wages and feelings of cultural displacement elected Donald Trump twice, and Germans embraced far-right movements that had been frozen out of that country’s politics since the rise of Adolf Hitler. Some 70 years after the post-national ideology took root, it was being rejected by masses of voters on both sides of the Atlantic.

Instead, it is a consequence of the failure of Western elites to understand that the nation, like the wheel, is one of those inventions whose usefulness to humans only grows over time. As a result, they further failed to understand what living in a global society might mean for ordinary people, for whom citizenship represented their most valuable form of personal and family capital—symbols of belonging that their parents and grandparents had suffered, fought, and died for and that gave them hard-won access to opportunity, jobs, and a social safety net that was now unraveling under the pressures of mass immigration.

In response, people on both the left and the right sought comfort in the past. Leftists in Europe insisted on an even closer embrace of the postcolonial fetishisation of “the oppressed”—in the name of justice and on the grounds that the alternative would be even worse. Besides, as college students have been saying for generations, true communism has never really been tried.

For their part, conservatives proclaimed their desire to return to foundations that had been rejected as rank bigotry since the end of WWII—from the open embrace of racism and antisemitism and appeals to the authority of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. These people got branded as “far right,” which they embraced as badges of honour, imagining it meant that prissy people couldn’t handle their necessary appeals to nationalism.

In America, things were no better. In fact, they were worse on account of us being the richest and most powerful country on the planet. This began with George W. Bush’s use of our military for what turned out to be the enrichment of lobbyists and defence companies. As disastrous as the results of the Global War on Terror were on their own, they acquired metastatic potency by becoming the excuse for Barack Obama’s attempt to gut American power, both abroad and at home.

Most dramatically, the Obama years saw outright attacks aimed at severing the two special tethers in the American ethnos: capitalism and the covenant. From Obamacare to multibillion-dollar deals with tech companies like Microsoft, the administration consistently used its power to boost massive corporations over the heads of the marketplace. The administration used “social justice” to turn the Democratic Party (and then the whole federal government) into a laundering machine for corporations and billionaire NGOs, which was so effective at breaking people’s trust in the capitalist system that it’s hard not to see it as intentional. Two years into his term, Occupy Wall Street emerged, and the popularity of socialism has been growing year over year since.

Obama also personally went out of his way to cut America’s tie to its other foundational tether, asserting that he believed in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As if exceptionalism were a matter of liking one’s country. In fact, as Obama must have known, the American sense of being an exception was a unique and inventive cord in the nation’s identity, one designed not for chauvinism, but to hold together disparate and divergent parts. As America’s two unique characteristics were eroded, the weakness of the country’s cultural identity was exposed, leading to a series of miserable (and ongoing) debates about whether America could be singularly defined as white or Christian or creedal or whatever. By repudiating our roles as either saints or strangers, we became ghosts.

On the traditional left, the people are just a zombie food movement gathering steam. Bernie Sanders’ endless Vegas act took on secondary headliners in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani and started attracting bigger audiences—almost none of whom were smart enough to notice that the solutions being offered were literally from the 19th century. (Industrial unions? Made up of whom, exactly? The robots?)
Fortunately for the left, their ranks were big enough, and enmeshed enough with Silicon Valley, that someone somewhere finally realised they’d do well to at least cloak their anti-American, internationalist aspirations in future-y garb. An idea was born: Let’s use technology and surveillance to build our version of utopia!

Donors paid their tabs; front men were found. They even stood up their own cool social movement, known as effective altruism. What’s fascinating about EA is how clear it is about being anti-culture—indeed, anti-anything that respects or even admits differences between humans, let alone nations. “The implicit model [of EA] is that moral weight is fungible and location independent. A life saved is a life saver, regardless of relational distance,” noted one who explained that, in rooting its principles in boundarylessness and math as opposed to one’s high-touch relationships with real humans whose lives and fates are directly tied to your own, EA becomes a system not for tackling the hardest questions of life, but for avoiding them. The critic continued, “Morality isn’t just an allocation problem. . .. You have moral obligations because you’re situated. Because you’re a parent, a neighbor, a member of a community, a participant in a local web of mutual dependency.” If, however, you are none of those pesky human things, you create less friction for global, digital systems—which is the point.

What almost no politician seemed able to offer is a type of politics that could appeal to a sense of collective purpose that would inspire and mobilize a majority of citizens. In the absence of such an appeal, the result across the West has been a series of fractured coalition governments riven by street politics that increasingly resemble outright warfare.

Almost out of nowhere, the one thing that seemingly everyone—elites, normies, old, young, right, left—suddenly agreed on was that their problem was. . . Zionism. Israel is uniquely evil, they claimed, because it is an “ethnostate.”

At first, this seemed like an odd answer to the most important challenge of the moment, which was the dangerously rapid decline of their own “melting pot” states. But when seen in this light, it becomes obvious that the attacks on Israel were in fact attacks on everyone else’s national identities. If Zionism, as a nationalist movement, is held to be somehow lacking in legitimacy, it’s in order to make sure that France and Germany—much younger nations, with long histories of starting wars with their neighbors and conquering other peoples and territory—are also illegitimate.

If Zionist settlers have no place living in Palestine, a land in which no previous sovereign nation-state had ever existed over the previous millennia, that was established as the national homeland of the Jewish people under international law, and where Jews continue to practice the same religion and speak the same language as their ancestors 3,500 years ago, then by what possible right can citizens of settler nations like the United States or Australia claim to inhabit their own countries and to own their homes?

Zionism did not become a target because of the supposed “crimes” of the Israeli government, which ordered the invasion of Gaza in response to a massive attack on its own country in which Islamist terrorists raped women, murdered elderly Holocaust survivors, massacred leftist kibbutzniks, and mowed down hundreds of partygoers at a rave. Zionism became a target because it represented what Westerners on the right claim to desperately want but are unable to attain, and what Westerners on the left wish to define as impossible: a form of nationalism that is oriented toward the future rather than the past and that is able to defend its own particularism while protecting individual and social freedoms.

Here are four survival tests for free societies that, as of today, only Israel passes:

1. Can you maintain your demographics? Israelis have kids above the replacement level, which makes them unique among Western States. Israelis are voting in the most unmistakable and important way for their own future.
2. Can you defend yourself? Israelis are willing to fight and die to defend their country and each other in a way that citizens of other Western countries simply are not. (In this month’s attack on Iran, the head of the Israeli Air Force wasn’t in a control tower or office; he was in the skies with his pilots, flying one of the planes. People who are unwilling to fight for their own survival tend not to survive.
3. Are you happy? Israel is regularly amongst the happiest nations on Earth, despite being involved in frequent violent wars. Is it a placid society with no civil conflict? Nothing could be further from the truth. What they are is a people close to the land who are also tech innovators; who travel the world but, when they’re in the country, spend every Friday night with their family; who are secular enough to have one of the most open as well as a different city so steeped in the history of religious longing; a country where people sip lattes near sites containing artifacts dating back to 125 BCE, and boys go up to talk to girls in real life.
4. Final test: In a world of ultrapowerful information tools that allow small numbers of people unprecedented leverage over real-world challenges, national success is no longer a question of who can field the largest army or the biggest workforce. Instead, success goes to whoever can recruit the smartest and most cohesive teams. If I told you, at the dawn of an AI revolution likely to redefine everything about humans and their output, that you had to be president of one of two countries—either a nation of almost 350 million people, many of whom struggle with drugs or obesity, or do not wish to accommodate or openly hate their neighbors and the wider culture, or a country of 10 million people, half of whom (both men and women) have been trained and have served in an army, and another whole swath of whom learn an obscure and intense legalistic document all day—which one would you choose?

This alchemy of old and new, of taking control of one’s own fate and changing the stream of history in midcourse, is characteristic of Zionism. It is also how Zionism, having fulfilled its promise for the Jews, becomes a technology for national renewal that could, conceivably, be used by anyone.

To see what I mean, contrast what’s happening throughout the West with Javier Milei’s presidency in Argentina. In answer to a country whose economy was collapsing and whose national culture had become mired in anxiety and depression, Milei presented Argentines with the prospect of being part of a new and hopeful experiment in which they could define their country as something other than a scenic economic basket case. The usual choice was between the fashionable but corrupt oligarchy of the left, with their cozy deals with trade unions driving the country into bankruptcy, or the right’s more traditional Latin American oligarchy of hereditary landholders, backed by the institutions of the Catholic Church and the military generals who had misgoverned the country through a nightmarish era of military rule. Instead, Milei offered a new solution, one that was both wildly idealistic and at the same time entirely pragmatic: a radical market-based “shock therapy” that every smart person in Argentina knew the country needed but no politician ever had the wherewithal to enact.

For anyone looking to reanimate or build free societies driven by and for the advancement of human beings in all their mess and glory, the question facing you is twofold.

First, are you willing to see yourselves as part of an ethnos, a nation somehow different and apart from others? Or do you see national identities as relics of the past? This isn’t coy. Many good people today view countries as assortments of individuals bound together by the legalities of common citizenship status and passport-holding, within the larger web of nations with airports. These people are internationalists.

Second, if you do want to be a nationalist, are you past- or future-oriented? Do you fundamentally want and believe we can return to the past? This is not about whether you are religious and inspired by your spiritual and historical legacy; it’s about whether you look to that past and see the shape and details of the future. Zionist nationalism avoided some of Europe’s challenges simply by coming very late to the party. But maybe more important, its idealism enabled it to take enormous risks without which it would never have become a reality.

The reason I find the rabid Jew haters on social media so offensive is not their primitive, unbalanced, ignorant recycling of libels. You cannot use logic with them. It’s that it bothers me as an American. Because so many have chosen to reject national strength and pride. Whereas Israel is one of the primary mechanisms by which America projects power.

For 2,000 years, Jews dreamed of returning to their homeland without being able to successfully reconstitute their national existence. The world is a very big place, and shifting powers and empires controlled the land on which other people were living. The Jews themselves were scattered, weak, and politically powerless. Which is why the magnitude of what the Zionist movement accomplished is so unlikely and astonishing that it is natural for many people to imagine Zionism as some black arts movement backed by a nameless empire with extraordinary wealth and power at its disposal—whether that empire was secretly the British or the Americans or the Elders of Zion.

In reality, no such outside power existed. Rather, it was the determined pragmatism and wild hope of a few thousand men and women, itself the heritage of a national aspiration kept alive for thousands of years in daily prayers, that birthed a modern state. That state started with many fewer resources than its neighbors, who were backed by the British Empire, but would soon exceed them all in military and economic power. It is no accident that Theodor Herzl’s famous phrase— “If you will it, it is no dream”—has two parts: the will, but also the dream.

This is the key to facing the digital future, which will be driven not by the people with the most Harvard degrees or congressional internships or Instagram followers—but by the highest-energy risk-takers. Struggling is something humans do that robots do not. You don’t even have to succeed at the hard thing right away, you can fail. It doesn’t matter. You will still feel good. And the more you do it, the better you’ll feel. Once you realise that you’re capable, you’ll cringe at your past self who flailed about in helplessness.”

Now all we need is to find them some leaders who understand this, who get that struggle does not mean sadism or self-abuse, both of which are fundamentally weak and defeatist attitudes. Leaders who understand that successful nationalism is not jingoism or ethnic chauvinism. It’s about understanding and embracing the reality that we all approach the world with our own distinct history and point of view—and that without this, we are not liberated, but bereft.

Too many people have spent too many generations disconnected from their own cultural tethers to be able to recognise them, let alone articulate them anew. Find your poets, artists, and historians! Find people unafraid to admire Zionism for modeling that it is only through the particular that we can truly reach the universal—because it is our particularities that make us real.

As we enter an era dominated by technologies and political ideologies designed to flatten the differences between humans, attach yourself to family, friends, and others who understand that erasing our differences doesn’t bring us closer to other people; it just makes us more like the machines. Together, aim to make your collective success so outlandish and so implausible that enemies and strangers can’t help but conjure up conspiracy theories about how you could have possibly achieved it.

In antiquity, the Jews bequeathed to the world the concept of the nation, as distinct from tribe and empire, which in turn gave rise to modern national identity. Now, with Zionism, Israel has again provided the world with a framework for the future, this time to avoid and transcend the twin impulses toward digital disintegration of identity and self-worship. Don’t be so afraid of the gift or so pointlessly resentful of the giver that you deprive yourself and those around you of what you deserve.

PS
I would like to add my own postscript. If one has no upbringing or experience of an ethnic society, how can one expect anyone, simply through an accident of birth, to feel any loyalty or empathy with a minority ethnicity? Only through experience, which can come either by absorbing a religious way of life associated with that ethnicity (to whatever degree) or by living and experiencing an ethnic country with its own powerful history and sense of particular identity and pride. Otherwise, would not most people want rather to throw their lot in with a larger or more popular alternative? Especially if it gives one a feeling of being part of a majority rather than a minority. Loyalty to family, or ethnicity try is either bred or experienced, not acquired by a blog or a clip. Except, of course, those wonderful exceptions who, for one personal reason or another, have chosen to identify with us.

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.