More on Kuhn, Kant, and the Nation-State

I enjoyed your recent Jerusalem Letters commentary on More on Kuhn, Kant and the Nation-State. Your case for a Euopean paradigm which discriminates among developed, primitive, and barbaric states was certainly effective and your thesis that the more a state is seen as relatively European, the more it is likely to be held to an almost impossibly high standard of behavior. Except in the case of Israel where the standard is not impossibly high, the standard is actually perfection. I feel this is because the idea of the Jew in Europe is what informs what Europeans believe is their true narrative regarding Jews, and this is not a very nice idea. For literally centuries most Christian Europeans, even the more progressive ones, held that Jews were at best malicious, untrustworthy, and deleterious to the non Jewish societies they lived in and for far more Europeans, we were at worst murderers, well poisoners, and the fomenters of conflict not even worthy of life. The second idea is what actually led to the Holocaust of European Jewry and while Europeans regretted the slaughter after the War, many did not. But because of the strength, longevity, and power of this idea in shaping European history,that is the idea of Jewish maliciousness, untrustworthine ss, and our believed propensity to manipulating others into conflict, the annihilation of Israel is even now being publicly espouse by a significant portion of Europe's elite and chattering classes. This was never the case regarding America, Serbia, or South Africa. The European elite and the chattering classes did indeed treat these states with disdain or as pariahs but I cannot recall any of them demanding that America, Serbia, or South Africa be dismantled and their citizens either dispersed back where they came from or simply annihilated. No Mr. Hazony Israel stands in a class by herself. Israel is expected by the entire world to behave perfectly at all times and under all circumstances, and when as expected Israel fails, we are not only chastised for our failure, we are routinely told that our failures are so egregious that we do not deserve to even have a state, or even our lives.

IF support for the State of Israel's existence depends largely on understanding and upholding the paradigms held and enshrined by people like Eleanor Roosevelt and the founders of the U.N. in 1948, then that source of support, that prop, has been withdrawn. Why? Because of the double-standards you describe. Reasonable people cannot accept the application of double-standards to members of the same international body.

Those structures were long ago abandoned by the foes of the State of Israel and its supporters repudiated them when the General Assembly ratified the Zionism=Racism resolution in the 1980s.
Support must come from a new paradigm which, as I wrote you previously, must be founded on a Torah foundation.

Otherwise you have a house built on sand.

I have a very long response to your two essays -- which I think are extremely perceptive, and do a lot to explain differing political views, even though I disagree with you in some key respects -- in my head, percolating, waiting to be written. But I have two books to write, courses to teach, a son to raise: I'm sort of doubtful I'll get around to it. So herewith are three brief responses to three specific points.
If they're somewhat weaker, as thinking & writing, than I'd like, I hope you'll try to see beyond them to the hazy fuller text which I may or may not ever get around to pulling out of the Library of Babel (in one of its myriad versions).

So:

Most recent letter: "Münkler blaims the fall of the nation-state system on the misbehavior of the United States, which he sees as abandoning its status as a nation-state and becoming an empire. I can’t make any sense of this claim. The principal hallmark of empire—the possession of a rationale for permanently ruling over an ever-expanding roster of nations—is entirely absent in the United States. No American I’ve ever met is interested in taking over Canada, although the United States could easily do it. No American I’ve ever met is interested in maintaining long-term control over Iraq or Afghanistan."

This only makes no sense if you think of "empire" purely in terms of a military empire, a la Rome. Now, we've had a little bit of that -- e.g.
the Philippines, and of course the southwest was won in a war of conquest (which some, including Lincoln in his sole congressional term, decried as a war of aggression) -- but it's not been our main thing. But there are other models of empire, in which economic empire, dominating and economically exploiting areas without directly governing them -- economics backed up with military force which is more threatened than used -- is one. IMS, the Athenian Empire was basically of this sort. And so is the American Empire. Some of our wars can be seen as attempts to keep economically pliable client states in place (e.g. Vietnam). And of course we've knocked over a fair number of unfriendly governments more easily than that (Iran in '53, Guatamala in '54, Chile in '73, etc.) And while no one wants America to directly rule Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, I think some influential people (largely conservatives but also some
neoliberals) want to establish friendly regimes, regimes friendly enough to keep bases on indefinitely -- as we are doing in Germany and Japan, say -- for the future projection of military force. So that fits too.
Now, you may not buy this as a description of America's last sixty-five years of foreign policy -- I wouldn't buy it in quite this form myself, although I would buy it in a rather more nuanced & carefully articulated version -- but it's a perfectly coherent notion of empire, and one with an ancient lineage as a usage.

Earlier letter: "...we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed."
I read Kuhn a decade ago, early in grad school -- so not in college, but not recently either. Still, my memory is that he never discusses or describes any notion of *rebuilding* a paradigm. Once a paradigm is gone, it's gone. Part of this is related to Kuhn's repeated (and complicated to interpret) insistence that his theory includes, indeed accounts for, scientific *progress* and not just change in world views (so perhaps this is simply not part of the analogy between scientific and non-scientific paradigms which would hold). But in considering what you want to do, it's worth thinking about.

Incidentally, if you think (and based on my memory of Kuhn it sounds correct to me) that paradigms collapse in the face of anomalous facts, what do you think are the anomalous facts which the current European paradigm can't explain or account for? (This is a genuine, not a rhetorical, question -- perhaps a good one for a future letter.)

Finally, point three, generally on both letters: your description of the European paradigm may or may not be accurate -- I don't feel qualified to say. But I don't think it's accurate for America -- and, for liberal America at least, the *other* paradigm you present (of the nation state) doesn't fit either. There's a third paradigm that most of liberal America holds in some view or another, which you don't discuss -- but which is, I would claim, a driving force behind much of the criticism of Israel in the U.S. these days.

Very briefly, this paradigm holds that *nation states* are fine, but that any ethnic distinctions made by those states (or, really, anyone
else) are abhorrent. Thus the U.S. acting as a nation state is fine, because it's an ideological, not an ethnic-based, nation state. (At least that's how liberals who hold by this paradigm would define it.) Similarly France, *to the degree* that it accords itself as an ideological nation state (liberte, egalite, fraternite) and not simply as an ethnic state of the French, fits too. In this instance what makes Israel a particular offender is not that it is a *nation state*, but that it is a nation state built on and by an ethnicity. (Think of your colleagues Daniel Gordis's column upon Obama's victory, about how a Palestinian prime minister of Israel would violate its purpose: from the point of view of this paradigm, that purpose is illegitimate because (although not only because) it rules out such a change in Israeli society).

In this view, what distinguished the Nazis was *not* that they were a nation state, *nor* that they were an empire, but rather that they were a nation-state built upon an ethnic definition (Ariyans good, Slavs bad, Jews the worst of all). Auschwitz occurred not because Jews couldn't defend themselves, nor because Germans were trying to create an empire, bur because the Germans distinguished between Germans and Jews rather than treating all of its citizens equally. - But all this is also rather
separate: in the American view the reigning example of national wrongdoing (of which Nazism is considered an even more extreme example, but not the classic example, if you follow me) is Jim Crow: a nation (or a region of a nation) discriminating on the basis of ethnicity (in this case color). South Africa lost the U.S. when we looked and said not, "this is Auschwitz", but rather "this is Mississippi circa 1950". In the U.S., we're not post-WW2, we're post-Civil Rights Movement, at least in what our focus is in these areas.

And it's obvious, I trust, why Israel does not qualify as good under this paradigm.

People operating under this paradigm tend to focus -- too much, in my view, but legitimately -- on racism and other forms of discrimination as the *worst* types of evil. (I think that liberals would do good to take other evils more seriously -- I personally would make violence, particularly state violence, more central. But that's me.) So since North Korea oppresses *all* of its population, while Israel (arguendo) oppresses only part of it, that makes Israel more noteworthy. (Although in fairness, nearly everyone who operates under this paradigm (and here I include myself) would point out another, far more salient reason for people in the U.S. to treat them differently: the U.S. is complicit in any crimes Israel commits, through financial, diplomatic and other aid, but not in the crimes of North Korea; it is also correspondingly easier for us to help end them if we should so choose.)

This paradigm also explains why there is a divide among liberal Jews on Israel. Some think that Israel could withdraw from the territories and thereby rejoin the family of non-discriminatory nations (i.e. don't see what happens in Israel proper as Mississippi circa 1960, but only in the occupied territories), and thus support a two-state solution -- but find Israel, until then, to be an extreme offender on the "distinguish-by-ethnicity" count. Others think that the very definition of Israel as a Jewish state is the equivalent to South Africa (or
Mississippi) defining themselves as a white state, and that the in-practice quality of life for Palestinian-Israelis isn't as important as the very act of defining and treating differently citizens by ethnicity -- and thereby the only real solution is a single-state solution in all of Israel/Palestine. (Still others would be in camp 1, but think it's now impossible, so are edging into camp 2).

-- I think that this paradigm more accurately captures *American* -- at least liberal American -- problems with Israel. I think it's a very different beast than the EU paradigm. And if you want to defend Israel, you're going to have to tackle it as well as the EU one.

...Yeah, that was the short version. Long version can be found c/o J. L.
Borges, the Library of Babel.

I get a lot out of your letters. I look forward to the next.

Thanks for the latest Letter from Jerusalem. It is canny, correct, and also a sly manifesto for your new college. Good job. I did some preliminary research on theater in Israel (I was at the Brooklyn Public Library anyway to renew "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions") and was disturbed by what I found. My initial survey would seem to indicate that the theater in Israel has largely been taken over by propagandists for a particular political spectrum, and that those opposed to that spectrum have wasted their energy trying to block that instead of making their own wonderful pieces of theater. Ah, well. You can't have a culture without art. Replacing art, or in your words I think something like the "search for truth and good," with political bickering can't be good. And no matter how much fur is flying, propaganda isn't art. You describe the limits of preaching to the choir well in your latest letter. Great art reaches sublime heights in the search for good and truth and, from those heights, it's true that new ideas can fly. The righteous should have no fear of the search for the truth and good. I'd argue it would help get theory sessions going in the university set, too, but you're not in my choir on that I know. Anyway, my concerns are also clearly not in the majority. Over time, your college will, I hope, make good on its rhetoric about including the arts. Their influence is pervasive, and good. They shouldn't be PR any more than they should be window-dressing or propaganda.

The situation of the Kurds is intra-Muslim. The West is not permitted, has no right to extend judgement to lands of Islam. This is imperialism and racism. The lands of Islam have every right to judge whether the lands of Christendom, even as Christianity is in retreat in the European West,are oppressing their fellow Muslims. In Kosovo, the right of a second Islamic majority nation in Europe is unassailable.(Even here, for political reasons, not all Muslim nations have recognized it.) As for Chechniya or the Uiigar lands of Imperial China, this is the internal affair of Russia and China solely. 35 million Kurds do no require a separate nation state as they HAVE their nation states as citizens of overwhelmingly Muslim lands and Muslims do no,can not oppress fellow Muslims. (In the eyes of the Muslim world) 5 -6 million Palestine Arabs suffer daily from oppression and dispossession by an illigitimate, racist entity that arttificially creates a "Jewish. state." And as Abbas mockingly says, he has no idea what is a "Jewish state." and will never recognize such a thing.(Never mind that the European and American left believes he will sit down and negotiate the formation of the Palestine state...not recognition of the Jewish one. )The (formally)Chris tian West is largely to blame for the existence of the Israeli state as a "Jewish" state and now they realize it and disassociate themselves from Israel in world forums. Europeans have the right to judge Israel's perceived crimes. The formally Christian European left/radical left believes in the superiority of Islam and its civilization, not its supposed " "brutishness." As US textbooks now teach (recent NY Post article) brutishness, racism, lack of morality is reserved for European/American civilization. Islam brings peace, tolerance and love of art and science where ever it extends its domination. Presumably it will bring this to reclaimed "Filistan," Afghanistan and lower Manhattan-Ground Zero. However, beyond reason, beyond simply observed reality this may be, this is how I have come to understand the behavior of Europeans vis a vis their continuing disdain/hate of Israel and their positioning on the side of the Muslim Mid-East. Yes, I'm being sardonic in presenting Muslim rationale and its support from the Western left and radical left.

Theory of Nation-States evolution vis--vis antagonism towards Israel, based on Kuhns Paradigmatic shifts. The nation-states of Europe are indeed weakening and becoming less relevant as sovereign entities. They will fall prey to the growing power of pan-national religious fundamentalism spearheaded by the Islamic movement. It is possible, that as a response to the rapid and frightening numbers and power of Muslims in formerly Christian strongholds, there will be a backlash of militant fundamentalist Christianity (think Crusaders they may even take on that banner again) aimed at repelling what they would consider these foreign elements and reestablish Christian supremacy in these regions. There are initial signs of this in European countries enforcing what they see as National culture on all its legal citizens and residents. Israel and the Jewish people do not fit into either of these antagonistic movements and will continue to be seen as a pariah state and enemy residents and an even greater source of anger and conflict. Israel and Jews cannot and will not be accepted into either camp. However, as Islam and Christianity spend their energy, efforts and resources battling each other across the globe (most conflicts around the planet can already be traced to this religious divide), Israel will stand as an independent religious-political entity, though battered from both sides whether militarily, economically or politically. Though simplified and filled with generalizations , the above view should reinforce Israels need to stand strong in its independent existence. It cannot give in to Muslim attacks or the corrosive effects of post-Nation-State diatribes or the Christian militants that may follow them. If Israel succeeds in remaining strongly independent and surviving the storms all around it, it can come out of this era as a beacon of healthy religious-political existence and become a light unto the nations as was prophesied long ago.

החלק החשוב במאמרך, הוא לדעתי הצורך בתיאוריה. וצריך להראות באופן תיאורטי היכן טועה קאנט בתיאוריה שלו על ממשלה עולמית. אגב, אחמדינג'ד דורש זה מכבר מן האו"ם לשנות את הסדר העולמי, להפוך אותו לשוויוני, ולבטל את הווטו של ארה"ב והמעצמות. מה שיקרה בממשלה עולמית לפי קאנט קורה כבר היום במועצות השונות של האו"ם, שגם הביאו לעולם את דו"ח גולדסטון. אגב באופן פרדוקסלי אפשר לומר שלוא הייתה ממשלה עולמית, אפשר היה לפנות אליה שתשפוט בצדק בינינו לבין הערבים, הרי גם לנו מגיע פיסת מקום בעולם הזה, כפי שהחליטה בהחלטת החלוקה, ושתדאג גם ליישם את פסק הדין. העדרה של ממשלה כזאת, היא הגורמת לנו לפעול באופן עצמאי להגן על האינטרסים שלנו. הטעות של ישראל עד היום הייתה, לגעתי, שאמרו אצלנו בעקבות בן גוריון "או"ם שמום", עד שהאו"ם ומוסדותיו קמו עלינו. ייתכן שצריך לשנות אתהמדיניות לנקוט פרדיגמה חדשה כלפי גוף זה. דווקא פנייה לאו"ם לבקש ממנו הגנה, תנטרל, לפחות תיאורטית, חלק מהאיבה כלפינו כמי שפועל מתוך התעלמות מדעת הקהל הבינלאומית.

Thank you for your fascinating and thoughtful material.

In terms of your approach, the current stresses in the Euro may provide a critical challenge to the ruling anti-nation state paradigm. Part of the drive for founding the Euro was to overcome the dominance of the German mark and, through that, the German central bank driving other European central banks' policies. So, the Kantian paradigm joined up with national interest to form the European Central Bank (ECB) and European Monetary Union (EMU).

But the diverse national situations and interersts remained under this cloak and have now burst out into the open. It is not evident that they can be reconciled within the current framework. The Northern nations, especially Germany, want austerity from the Club Med countries, to avoid having to bail them out or, if sovereign default on debt occurs, having to deal with the consequences for their own banks who hold the debt. Club Med would prefer less austerity and to be bailed out and/or stage a partial default. European are discovering the facile nature of their economic unity. Reality intrudes.

So, the Kantian paradigm may stutter or perhaps will reassert itself as a higher form of union. Given the widespead nature of soverign debt issues in the medium to long term and the near inevitability of some form of defalt by many nations (including the US) eventually, a move toward a global currency may eventuate. In the meantime, the Europeans will struggle anew with the role of the nation state.

That does bring me, though, to an objection to your grand thesis. The UK (along with Sweden etc) has not joined EMU and has remained suspicious of the European project pursued on the Continent. One should, therefore, expect it to be less anti-Israel, but this is scarcely the case. Does one blame Kantians at the BBC, or some kind of post-colonial rage or guilt?

Thank you for your latest reflections. I have a few comments. 1. Your footnote fifteen is a plain misreading of what Kuhn wrote in his Postscript. You say "The definition of a paradigm in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is notoriously vague, and Kuhn ended up, after the initial publication of the book, favoring a more technical definition that focused on the paradigm as an “exemplar” of a particular way of conducting scientific research..." The Postscript in fact says, at the beginning of section 2, that he had used the term in TWO distinct manners in his book, BOTH of which he proposed to continue using. One is "Paradigms as the Constellation of Group Commitments," the title of that section 2 and its main subject. He suggests "disciplinary matrix" as an alternative term for paradigms in this sense and distinguishes four "components" or "elements" of such a matrix. The other is "Paradigms as Shared Examples," the title of section 3. But this second sense of "paradigm" is precisely the fourth element of a disciplinary matrix, as he states at the end of section 2. 2. Moreover, your own analysis could have been stated more clearly if you had used both senses in conjunction. What troubles you is a "constellation of group commitments" in which Israel currently features not as a shared example but rather as a shared counter-example. Having made that clear, the issue becomes how to turn Israel into a shared example. And that can be done only by change(s) in the broader matrix. My suggestion is to point out an omission in the Kantian program, namely, that it has nothing to say about how a small advanced society is supposed to behave if it is located in the midst of larger much less advanced societies. This is exactly the situation of Israel, and this is what distinguishes it from Serbia. However, the distinction is one of degree, since some of Serbia's neighbors are hardly more advanced (in the Kantian sense) than Serbia. From this one can learn two lessons. First, one has to REPOSITION Israel as a challenge NOT to the matrix as a whole but to a DEFECT in it. That is, one should demand to study Israel from the perspective of: What rules can one propose for a small advanced society (in the Kantian sense) situated in the midst of a much larger mass of hostile less advanced societies? This is a legitimate question and every effort should be made to show that it is also not an easy question to answer, i.e., that nobody should be allowed to make facile judgments about what Israel must do. But part of the answer is that advanced societies elsewhere should show commitment both to Israel's survival and to its further advancement along the scale. Consequently, for instance, it was a serious mistake of the EU to freeze the agreed upgrade of relations with Israel. The other lesson, a more specific one, is that Israel can discern, from what happened to Serbia, what it can and cannot get away with. It cannot get away with a mass expulsion of Palestinians as Serbia tried to do to the Muslim Kosovars. But it can get away with lesser harsh measures, such as Operation Defensive Shield, Operation Cast Lead and the takeover of the Gaza flotilla. In all these cases, there was an initial international uproar, but Israel survived it and governments of other advanced societies continued to work with Israel as before. Essential to this, however, was that Israel should continually keep presenting itself as a progressive peaceloving nation, regardless of all accusations to the contrary. This leads to my third and last comment. 3. Your discussion operates exclusively on the level of intellectual discourse. But there is a permanent gap between what intellectuals think and what governments do. In most advanced societies today, academia and the media are dominated by the left, but governments (of whatever party) in the main follow policies that historically belonged to the right. Two factors are involved in this dichotomy: governments are confronted by reality and politicians use hypocrisy to clothe their embarrassing U-turns in the vocabulary of their professed ideology. For example, they will state that stricter curbs on immigration are necessary to protect immigrants against prejudice (which means: the public doesn't want immigrants and we cannot afford to disregard what the public so strongly wants). And every EU government eagerly pursues its own national interest within the EU, only it pretends to be doing so in the common interest. Thus, in governmental practice, your paradigm is constantly honored in the breach. This explains why governments continue to do business with Israel despite routinely deploring settlements, etc. Doing business with Israel is desired because Israel and other countries have enormous mutual investments of capital and exchanges of goods. It also explains the aversion to Avigdor Lieberman: the problem is not his ideas but his "in your face" style. The right style for any Israeli politician is to emphasize "the sacrifices that we will make for peace." He should have dwelt, with all due pathos, on the immense sacrifice involved in giving up part of Israel's sovereign territory in order for Umm Al-Fahim to achieve its understandable aspiration to end its minority status and subjection to foreign rule. Recently, the German president felt obliged to resign amid the uproar that followed his remark that German troops in Afghanistan were defending German national interests. His mistake, not being trained in political hypocrisy, was to say aloud what others merely think quietly as to obvious to need to be said. Thus Germany continues to trade massively with Iran, but no German politician is so foolish as to claim that this is in Germany's national interest. Rather, they might talk about the need for a constructive dialogue in the relations between the two countries.

If one reads books critical of Israel, almost invariably a key matter in the authors viewpoint, is the fact that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land, and the Jews were European colonial settlers. Currently the Jews can't defend against this charge, because it is basic Zionist doctrine that the Jews were exiled from their land and stayed away 2000 years praying and hoping. People often interpret this as the Jews abandoning their land, and the Palestinians taking it over. In fact, there were always Jews in the Land of Israel. In fact they were often returning, and often being exiled. In fact one can make the case that the Jews suffered 2000 years of foreign occupation, with constant exile and return. In that case, one can make the further case that since the Jews never abandoned or surrendered their land, it remained a Jewish possession for 2000 years. Since we want to make the case that the Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, we should make the parallel case that the Jews were never transformed into Europeans, and so whatever beef the EU and others have with Europeans, it does not apply to Jews, since the Jews are not Europeans, but the indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel. In fact, the UN has declared rights for indigenous peoples on September 13 2007, and if one looks at the definition of indigenous peoples at the UN web-site for indigenous peoples, it appears to me Jews can make the claim that they are the indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel, entitled to all the rights contained in the Declaration. So the further case the Jews should make is that the Arabs/Muslims/Palestinians currently in the Land of Israel, being descendants of colonial invaders, have an inferior position to the Jews, and that it was never Muslim territory, since the Jews never gave up their rights. And it is interesting that all of Israel's neighbours and the principal Muslim countries have voted in favour of that indigenous declaration. Now if we could convince the non-Muslim world that because the Jews never abandoned or surrendered their land, and because of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that the Land of Israel has remained totally Jewish these 2000 years, perhaps that would remove a lot of the motivation for the Muslims to continue their fight. In any case we should retire the notion that somehow for 2000 years the Jews had abandoned their country. In fact the brief story of that continuity is given on the web-site of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the heading HISTORY: Foreign Domination. One modest proposal to advance this new paradigm in the world, is that the Israeli government instead of taking foreign visitors to Yad Vashem, should instead take them to a new museum, demonstrating the continuity of the Jews in the Land of Israel these last 2000 years.

I read your cogent analysis eagerly. Kuhn's "paradigm" can be substituted by the word "discourse" in Foucault's terminology. In fact, as a post-modern psychologist, this is a clear call to find an alternative discourse, based on revealing the hidden assumptions of the society we live in and on "anomalous facts" ("unique outcomes"; viz: Michael White, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends). It is not easy to do this, because of the marginalization of alternative discourses, but it is feasible.

I am convinced by your new letter. I guess there is no hatred so great as the one that true believers have for the apostate.

I agree with your criticism of Jewish public life and its lack of paradigms of thought on subjects critical to the existence of Israel such as political Philosophy,inte rnational relations and law,etc. This being the case,the Shalem Center either working directly or through a related unit,should take upon itself to act as a proactive think tank seeking to rectify the aforesaid lacking in the public realm. A liberal arts college cannot accomplish this.

Your thoughtfulness is greatly appreciated for its insights per se and for the concern and compassion it bespeaks for the Jewish People and the Jewish Nation. I would refer you to Pascal Bruckner’s “The Tyranny of Guilt: Essays on the Masochism of Europe.” Bruckner adds the dimension of self-loathing to your implicit attribution of superiority and the kind of, what – racist, racialist, narcissistic perspective that Europe has made its trademark for centuries. The idea of this self-loathing, which is of course a variation on the theme of self-absorption, indeed a bizarre variation of superiority, perhaps helps to explain the somewhat craven attitude towards the Muslims of Europe and the imperial aspirations of Islam globally. There is to my mind more than just dismissiveness of the cultural capabilities of the non-European world. There is also an admiration for their self-belief and sense of mission. Having no reference points to find much in common to compare themselves to, the Muslims become the noble savages (not just the savages you have the Europeans tagging them as). Now of course, this does not explain the contempt for the sense of mission of both the US and Israel. But here too, self loathing becomes important. These two countries have no business eclipsing Europe, yet each in its own way has. This makes them insufferable, as we see all too often when the Left gets threatened, the opponents become merely contemptible. As you point out, there is no silver bullet explanation here. And good old fashioned anti-Semitism plays a big, big role, since anti-Semitism is infinitely accommodating of any fact pattern or any state of affairs. By the way, there is a column in today’s Washington Post by Charles Kupchan entitled The European Union is Dying. Europe is renationalizing ! But seriously, the real takeaway from your pieces is the need to look afresh at our own narrative, to remind ourselves, to relearn or to learn about who we are and why we needed to be here. While I enjoyed Shalem’s New Essays on Zionism, I was blown away by Arthur Hertzberg’s compilation of formative Zionist writings, which in turn led me to some of the full texts. Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem was particularly stirring, particularly his great awareness of the disaster that the Haskala was for the Jews of Europe (a sentiment that Ahad HaAm echoed). Anyhow there is much to be done, but the reason I became involved as a Manhattan fellow with Shalem some years ago was for just the reasons you cited: there needs to be the theory, the underpinning for the action plan.

In your response to your critics, you fail to deal with the real problem with your claims, which is that people aren't vilifying Israel for defending itself but for being an aggressor. So that no new paradigm of a desire for the dissolution of the nation-state underlies recent vilification of Israel. It is true that Kant wanted to see the end of the nation-state; his ideas match your "new paradigm" precisely. In fact, the match is so precise that it makes one think that you reached your conclusions not on the basis of a reading of European public opinion (oh, maybe you think only the opinions of intellectuals matter at all, as if nations aren't influenced by the thoughts of their own polity), but on the basis of a priori thinking. It is easy to see how one could slide from thinking that Europeans are attacking Israel for defending itself to thinking that it must be because Europeans don't think nation-states should defend themselves, especially when one is aware of Kant's ideas about history. It is true that if someone thought that nation-states should not defend themselves, they would look down on Israel's attempt to do so, but the converse doesn't necessarily hold. However, it isn't even a question of why do Europeans think that Israel shouldn't defend itself as they don't view Israel as doing that. Israel is seen as an aggressor against a defenseless people. Israel is the one who kills. Israel is the one who takes land. This is the way that those who vilify Israel see Israel. I find it telling that you have never once pointed out a single vilification of Israel that indicates the motives of such people. My point, if true, shows that your claims are completely false. There are no new paradigmers (that is, holders of the view that the nation-state should be dissolved) behind the vilification of Israel - even if there are new paradigmers somewhere in the world. However, I have pointed out in my earlier response why even that is doubtful, or, at least, that there is no serious constituency behind such an idea. The idea that a Dutchman would contemplate the end of his own country for the greater good of the world is hilarious, really a reductio ad absurdum of your views. You go on to use the words of Herfried Münkler to buttress your position, showing him as arguing against the use of American power on the grounds that it is not right for a nation-state to act unilaterally, especially not that it act in accordance with its own interests. However, you continue in the very next paragraph to note, "As with Israel, the disgust and anger always fix themselves on a particular decision of the United States: The Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, the invasion of Iraq." What does this have to do with Munkler's argument? It is obvious to anyone who has paid attention to the issues you mention that the disgust at the US around these issues is about the wrongness of the US position, and not its right to its own opinion. Failure to agree to the Kyoto protocol is seen, rightly or wrongly, as putting the survival of the world at jeopardy. Failure to agree to the International Criminal Court is seen as the US's desire to not be held accountable for what have been seen as criminal actions. And the invasion of Iraq is seen as such a criminal action, as mass murder, all being done just to expropriate Iraq's oil (that is, for selfish ends). And, of course, once an agent is seen as acting in an evil way, people will distrust its desire to act in a unilateral way. But it is the first that is driving these opinions; the latter is just an effect of the former. I have no problem with your use of Kuhn's idea of a paradigm. I think, however, that your writing is just part of an old paradigm which sees Israel through the lens of the Holocaust, where the Arabs have replaced the Germans. The vilification of Israel has been growing stronger because increasingly people no longer see Israel through that lens. They see it not as a defender of its land but as a land-hungry aggressor with no respect for the people already living on that land. Seeing things this way has led increasing numbers of people to question whether the original creation of Israel was just the same thing, thus questioning the legitimacy of Israel. The new paradigm that has been trying to create itself is of a desire by the majority of Palestinians to make peace with Israel so they can get on with their lives. However, they are not willing to do so at any cost. They want a sense of dignity. Will Israelis find a path to meet the Palestinians on this journey to a new paradigm of relations between Israel and the Arab world? Given the anger and contempt that I hear from israelis for Palestinians, that seems unlikely. And that will just fan the flames of those who vilify Israel, proving to them not that Israel acts unilaterally, but that it is evil. Just to avoid misunderstandin g, I believe in Israel's right to exist. I think there is often a double-standard applied to Israel. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic with many criticisms of Israel. It is taking land from Palestinians illegitimately at times. Israel does at times treat Palestinians with contempt. And, increasingly, this is the character of Israel's actions against the Palestinians.

If you are in fact correct then the downside is that we need to find some kind of paradigm-breaking arguments, or “work the paradigm” to our own advantage. As an example of the latter, how about our leaders proposing an “MEU” – Middle East Union – where all the surrounding countries have free trade and no tariffs as a first step. In the meantime all countries continue to exist formally, while bureaucrats from all the countries (including Israel) sit in a central location (say Saudi Arabia) and discuss the details of the extra-national framework. Let’s see if the Saudis go for that one! At least we would be on the side of the European paradigm, while the Arabs are against.

Thank you for writing your thoughts on this issue. They are the first I've read in my 22 years in Israel that consider patterns and processes with respect to Israel in a way I can relate to.

In science, theories progressively "drill down" to study the species, the cell, the atom, so, in geopolitics, why not progressively consider the empire, the nation-state or tribe, finally getting down to the individual and his power to defend himself for survival? [Note: applied to technology, this progressive drilling down has changed the Western World's tools from mechanical to electronic. I personally participated in the similar transition from analog to digital in the field of data processing.)

European countries are high on the individualism-collectivism spectrum, the Third World is high on the tribal, and Israel is in the middle. In an individualized culture, the only really serious collective concept (beyond the nation-state, which as you point out is now considered a stepping-stone by Europe) is Humanity. Consequently, human rights becomes a supreme value to individuals, and defending them takes priority. For a tribal culture, the largest meaningful collective concept is the Tribe, and defending the Other is not important. (Having made aliyah 22 years ago, I find the most difficult adjustment has been to recognize, let alone attempt to reconcile, the tribal and individualist aspects of myself.)

European history is riddled with the rulers battling tribal allegiances by force, and subsequently imposng Christian religious theologies on their colonies, which finally resulted in colonial independence movements. It's no accident that American individualism emerged from a religious rebellion against imperial power, succeeding thanks to - depending on your own belief system - phenomenal local natural resources, skill, luck, Divine Intervention, or moral superiority. It's odd to consider that America's relatively recent history as a colony could give it more in common with today's third world nations than with Europe, but that could explain its current insistence on the behaving like nation-state rather than a member of a world federation.

While searching for a new paradigm, the best alternative could be a metaphor:

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link

In the case of Humanity, strengthening the weakest at the individual level, through improved life-expectancy and education, not to mention self-knowledge, seems to be the best way to strengthen collective humanity. The trouble with the tribal view is that the chain does not include anyone outside the tribe; or, more accurately, links are families or clans rather than individuals. Not by accident do "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" follow "life," in America's Declaration of Independence, and improved world-wide life-expectancy is indeed happening.

As for paradigm shifts, how about a focus on the in-depth study of Fear and Trust. If someone saved my life and I knew it, even if it was through a discovery or an invention rather than through personal contact, I would trust him/her more than my leaders, whether I had elected them or inherited them. But that would be as an individual, not as a member of a tribe, although in this case, luckily for me, the two are pretty well aligned.

Re "More on Kuhn, Kant and the Nation-State": Great piece, and I'm probably not the first to point it out, but James Taranto recently posted "Oikophobia" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704147804575455523068802824.html) together with a link to the original Roger Scruton essay (http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs49-8.pdf). It seems to me your New Paradigmers and Scruton's oikophobes are one and the same, and oikophobes is a more colorful and specific term that might even find traction.

In your follow-up to “Israel Through European Eyes”, you continue with the theme that the New Paradigmers who oppose the concept of the nation-state, view Israel negatively because it adheres to the old model and defies the march toward a world government. You write that the Europeans view Israel as being among the nations that are on a higher level of moral maturity, as opposed to their Mid-East neighbors who have not progressed beyond the immature stage of barbarism and brutishness, and yet acts in ways the Europeans consider immoral. This engenders a negative response by those in the European Union who view themselves on the higher plane and expect all others who are on this level to adopt this New Paradigm. You then present three other examples of nation-states, the Unites States, apartheid South Africa and Serbia who are also despised because they are considered to be “European” nations yet act independently and seemingly fail to abide by the rules of a “morally mature” nation. This thought process of the so-called “progressive”, is similar to two other examples of how certain groups are treated when they don’t stick to the script of the progressive playbook. In the United States, women and minorities are viewed as having been the subject of discrimination and therefore are a “protected” segment of the population. Their members because they are given extra consideration by the left, are naturally expected to be in the progressive camp. So when an African American like Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, or a woman like Sarah Palin adopts a conservative philosophy, they are despised and viewed with disgust. This New Paradigm theory seems to carry some weight until you cast the net somewhat further, and identify those who should be in this higher “European” moral plane but yet defy those expectations, and yet are not subject to the deprecations of the New Paradigmers. Russia is certainly classed as an advanced nation. Yet when they act in a brutish manner when they destroy and pillage Chechnya, or when they occupy parts of Georgia, very little is heard from the European elitists or from the progressives in general. Russia is a respected and feared nation-state that acts in its own interests at all times, yet is given a pass by the mature moralists. Another “European” nation-state as you have defined it, albeit from a totally different continent and culture, is China. In many ways China is a fully developed country, and highly advanced in so many areas, surpassing many of the members of the European Union. Yet their savagery and disregard for human rights is not given the attention it deserves by the European moralists. These two examples, and there are others, I believe weakens the theory that you have proposed. I had suggested the primary reason in my previous response to your first letter, Jew hatred, as to why Israel is viewed as it is by the progressive Europeans. Now to address your final point that Israel has been flying without a theory and “you can’t beat a theory with no theory”. The Jewish people do not need a theory for their claim to the land of Israel. They have a Covenant with the Creator of the universe and their documentation for this claim is the Torah. Those who believe that the Torah is Divine (Jews and non-Jews alike) will accept this proof. Those who do not share this belief will call the Jews interlopers and occupiers regardless of any theories they will present, because of their underlying bias. As for the European Union, the internal pressures are building to make this entity short-lived. The Germans and the Greeks, the Scandinavians and the residents of the Iberian Peninsula, have opposing economic and cultural forces that will ultimately tear them apart, ending the journey towards a political consolidation in a world order. The Kantian view of human progress leading to the triumph of morality and reason may be correct. But the political end point of a single world government I believe is mistaken because the human being is by nature a tribal animal, and therefore the nation-state is here to stay till the End of Days.

I have very much appreciated your article regarding paradigms, Europe and the State of Israel. I can only agree with your thesis regarding the new paradigm affecting the perception of Israel in Europe and I must say it particularly applies to Spain.

The similarity between some of your ideas about nation-states and Tolstoy's is really remarkable. He very nearly quotes you, though he's talking about Napoleon of course. And you could almost make a graph of the paradigm shifts by page number.

These translators are rightly famous - including the original French parts and declining to "correct" Tolstoy's crazy form makes for better reading I found (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky, 2007).

Your follow-up piece is very convincing & I think begins to provide a solution to the riddle of Israel's unique & consistent negative image. Interestingly in the Septermber 13 issue of The Jerusalem Report (p.9) Professor Dan Avnon provides (much more briefly & in very different words) an argument consistent with yours in his review of current international scholarship. As a layman in these issues, however, I wonder if any of the following provide contrary evidence for your/his arguments that the modern nation state is outdated: 1. The break up of the Soviet Union into 15 republics. Are these all considered 'primitive'? 2. The recent establishment of a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly in 1999 - in other words, moves by local ethnic groups to claim more rights of self-government, even within a modern European state. 3. The widespread relief (& self-patting on the back) in the UK that, in the current financial crisis, it never joined the euro. 4. The new 2004 pledge of loyalty introduced for prospective British citizens. 5. The fact that the tightening of immigration rules is high on the agenda of many European countries. I look forward to your next contribvution in this on-going debate.

I believe that the 20th century presented liberal educated people with evidence that violence leads to unlimited destruction and the inability to protect the weaker from the stronger military industrial concentration of power and wealth. A liberally educated person will not justify the pre-eminence of any people by an appeal to divine authority, a promise or covenant, be it a king or 'we the people'. The rule of law must be rooted in non-violence or it will never seek justice for humanity, but interests. I agree with your idea of a paradigm shift needed to recognize violence for what it is...a god of power and wealth, justifying chosen folks, those with military might and the wealth to afford it, especially nuclear weapons. England, France, the US, must dedicate their politics to non-violence or global warming will make the demands for air and water into a final holocaust...not an Armenian, or Romy or Jewish or Thai ethnic cleansing. Training young people to kill and injure the 'bad guys' prevents liberal education, openness to non-violence as a basis for justice...a rule of just law, not one coerced by military threat

Excellent original and follow-up. In a postscript in my 1970 edition, Kuhn himself acknowledges that his theory has application beyond science, and treats this as a truism predating his work:

To one last reaction to this book, my answer must be of a different sort. A number of those who have taken pleasure from it have done so less because it illuminates science than because they read its main theses as applicable to many other fields as well. I see what they mean and would not like to discourage their attempts to extend the position, but their reaction has nevertheless puzzled me. To the extent that the book portrays scientific development as a succession of tradition-bounds periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability. But they should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure have been among their standard tools. If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely thought to develop in a different way.

I have a couple of thoughts on the topic of Israel and Europe. I am not surprised by your analysis that the intellectuals, and other members of the European chattering classes, view the non-European as “inferior” to themselves, and thus excusing their bad behaviour. This was the attitude Europeans took when they conquered and colonized the Americas and the Far East. My fore fathers believed that indigenous peoples were “savages” and needed to be “civilized”. In Canada, we are still dealing with the after effects of the British colonial policy, of the 19th century, related to Residential Schools. Native children were taken from their families and communities, and put into church run schools where vestiges of their “nativeness” were forbidden. In some schools the children were physically punished for speaking their native language. This policy has left a legacy of social problems. So, over these many years, the European attitude has not changed one iota - it has just reinvented itself. It is also unfortunate that these folks on the left live in “la la” land. It’s easy for an intellectual, in say Belgium, to have these beliefs; he’s not threatened by Holland, or another one of his neighbours. What they would think if we turned the clock back and had the Muslim armies at the gates of Vienna. And, finally, I wonder, if part of the reason Israel is such a handy target is that it is easy to attack.

Thank you for your thoughtful and suggestive essays on the change of political paradigms and the subsequent reaction to "deviants." Of course I was aware of the shift in European thought, but never thought to connect it with European views of Israel, the U.S., S. Africa, etc. However, I do have two thoughts I would share: One is that anthropologists would (or at least would have, before political correctness silenced them) label the discussion of basic frameworks as "cultures," e.g. in the work of Clifford Geertz, such as The Interpretation of Cultures. The idea of the incommensurabil ity of cultural frames has long been an assumption in cultural anthropology, e.g. Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. I have tried, in my book Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, to make the case that Arab and Islamic culture, built on Bedouin culture, incorporates assumptions, values, and organizational forms of tribal society, and that much in the Middle East is understandable on this basis. The other is that, in the political world, paradigms can change fairly quickly. An obvious example is that Marxism was one of the two dominant world paradigms for at least 50 years, but disappeared almost instantaneously with the fall of the Soviet Union. Even its latest adherents, American academics, the last people in the world to believe in Marxism, gave up Marxism, and made up new theories with new names, e.g. postcolonialism . Another case is the shift in the Middle East from nationalism, Arabism, modernization, and socialism back to Islam. This of course is an old story, repeated in purification movements throughout the history of the Middle East and Islamic world, showing an alternation between paradigms and cyclical rather than unilineal movement. It also suggests that the hold of paradigms is not absolute, and that other paradigms are likely floating around and available for activation (another subject on which I have written). The repeated public rejections of various EU initiatives would seem to support this argument.

Read your article about the "new paradigm" of the Kantian post-nationalist worldview, and how this impacts perceptions of Israel. I could not disagree more with your analysis.

I'm sure there are some for whom the train of logic you describe prevails. But this does not really explain the principle sources of growing antipathy towards Israel in Europe, or the world stage generally.

First, as to Europe:

The EU is really not such a successful enterprise. Some observers say it is failing; there has been open talk of abandoning it's centerpiece, the Euro, after all, and returning to national currencies. The Europeans may not spend all that much on defense and, after being beaten bloody by two horrific wars in the past century, certainly don't have much of a taste for more, but they do nonetheless maintain defense establishments of some note. They still have a vibrant arms industry, and some European countries, particularly France, maintain a fairly robust defense apparatus. All of this indicates to me that the Kantian "post nationalist" paradigm has not really taken with the bulk of the European populations or their leaders.

No, what is to blame, in my view, is a very successful effort by the Arab/Moslem world to control the "message" concerning Israel that is disseminated throughout the world by what are, in any society, the "organs of thought control". That is to say, the academic and journalistic instititutions, which are rife with petrodollar investment of a very targeted nature.

Before going further here, a couple of salient ideas must be borne in mind:

- The Arab/Moslem civilization of SW Asia is doctrinally incapable of accepting the Jewish state Israel for the foreseeable future in any form. For this reason - far beyond any objective consideration of rational interests as we understand this term in the developed world - they place the destruction of Israel as a very high national priority. Secular rulers who might feel otherwise are prevented from acting upon such rational impulses by the dominant de facto ruling class in this part of the world, namely the clerics. Leaders who have attempted to buck this trend wind up dead or in exile (e.g., the Shah of Iran, Anwar Sadat).

The Arabs first tried to destroy Israel by conventional military and economic means. Israel defeated the latter through high-tech internal development along with trade with the developed world. They defeated the former in a series of wars. In 1982, Israel demonstrated virtual invincibility in this arena; I believe this war lead to a permanent change of focus for the Arab effort to destroy Israel.

Sun Tzu, the great Chinse theorist, posited that the best way to adversary was not through force of arms in a direct confrontation, but rather through isolation. He considered it paramount to deprive an adversary of any allies.

Napolean Bonaparte once famously said that in war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. In other words, motivation to fight is of primary importance in warfare. Take away an adversary's will to fight, and no amount of material wealth or technical military power can bring them victory.

The Arabs of today have followed the advice of the military minds noted above with great faithfulness. They have had to, as they are greatly lacking in more conventional means of defeating Israel.

Take a moment and consider the Vietnam war. This was the first war in history in which the losing side won every pitched battle they fought against the ultimate victor. The North Vietnamese communists won because their military leaders brilliantly perceived that they could defeat the U.S. by manipulating our will to fight through the mass media and academic institutions. While we concentrated on a clash of arms in two demensions, our enemies were fighting us in a third dimension in which we offered no serious resistance, because we barely perceived what they were doing to us until long after we could effectively counter it.

Yasser Arafat visited North Vietnam in the late 1960s, seeking advice on how to defeat a more materially powerful adversary. He got what he came for. They told him to stop talking about "annihilating Israel" - this made him sound too much like a Nazi, and would win him no sympathy where he needed it - but to instead frame his movement as a "national liberation movement" for an "oppressed people". This would gain him sympathetic ears on college campuses, and in the media.

Everything that the Vietnamese did to the U.S., is being done to Israel today by her Arab adversaries such as the PA, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. Child warriors, hiding behind civilians in order to deliberately provoke casaulties of the same for PR purposes, terrorism against civilian targets, etc., these tactics were all pioneered by the Vietnamese communists.

Using such tactics as a starting point, the Arabs have had decades and billions in petrodollars in order to refine these tactics in ways the Vietnamese could never have dreamt of, both in scope and depth.

Throughout the Western world, the Arabs have poured billions into universities, endowing countless "chairs of Middle Eastern studies" (there are three chairs of various types endowed by the Saudis at Harvard alone) and the like, to ensure that the college educated who later become the elites get their message. They have bought large stakes in media organizations whose staffs receive these college grads, who are primed to receive and regurgitate their narrative. They publicly admit - the Saudis alone - to owning 5% of FOX, and some estimate this to be as high as 30%. And that is FOX, the least hostile major media enterprise with respect to Israel. Most others are far worse.

Indeed, today, consider virtually every major national or international level print or broadcast media venue - from CNN to the New York Times to the BBC to Agence France Presse to the LA Times to USA Today, to Reuters to AP, and on and on - and one finds that straight news reportage on Israel-related issues is practically indistinguishab le from Al Jazeera. The only exceptions are the editorial content - versus straight news reportage - of NewsCorp products (FOX cable news in terms of "opinion" shows like Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity), and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. That is it. Everywhere else, one gets the Arab point of view, period. And even pro-Israel commentators such as the ones I just noted here rarely talk about Israel at all, as if they are under orders from their management to the effect of, "If you can't say anything bad about Israel, don't say anything at all!"

If you want to see anything like objective reportage on the Middle East outside of Israel, the last place left is the Christian Broadcasting Network. Seriously.

This has nothing to do with Kant, post-nationalism, or any such esoteric concepts. This has everything to do with medieval intolerance promoted by petrodollars, fed into corrupt Western establishments so as to ensure that on this issue, all the public hears is that 2+2=5, and if that is all one ever hears, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember that actually, 2+2=4.

And, by the way, the above is reinforced by a very well-funded traditional lobbying effort that has countless PR firms, former high government officials, etc., on their "dole" (e.g., Jimmy Carter, the Clintons, James Baker III, etc.). To quote a Saudi democracy activist I once met in D.C., "...the Saudis own this town." I'm sure in Europe, this campaign is far more effective, especially when one considers that by default - thanks to the comparatively Judenfrei nature of Europe vis-a-vis the U.S. - there is no comparable Israel lobby to help mitigate the effects of this same effort there.

There is no easy answer to this. Israel and her supporters need a lot more than merely a "good PR campaign", but the battle is not so uneven as it may seem at first glance. What we have in our favor:

- The Arab/Moslem civilization, taken as a whole, represents a horrific political/cultural spectacle by every standard or value of importance to modern Western polities. This must be highlighted and contrasted to Israel at every opportunity. Those who would align themselves with the Arabs against Israel must be confronted by asking them if the societies they are defending really represent what they themselves stand for in terms of human rights, religious tolerance, etc.

- The Arab task is to convince people that 2+2=5, whereas we must only remind people that 2+2=4, which is inherently an easier intellectual undertaking. Israel has many supporters who must only have the courage of their convictions reinforced by our reminding them of objective facts and history, and our demonstrated resolve to defend ourselves.

- Israel has much to offer the world in terms of science, technology, etc. The Arabs have nothing except oil. We need to work to reduce the value of this, and again, highlight Arab bankruptcy and backwardness in contrast to a vibrant, dynamic Israel at every opportunity.

On the European new political paradigm Maybe the Europeans are convinced (cognitively/paradigmaticall y?) that the EU is the one place in the world, as you write it, that has finally reached Kant’s moral maturity stage. But do really its member states and their citizens abandon all their nationally egoistic penchants and interests for full cooperation and the acceptance of “common policies” in all realms of affairs? Very far from it! The very contrary is more the rule than the exception; look at the in fights between them recently over economic policies for getting out of the crisis, over the “salvage of Greece”, over the “enlargement with Turkey” and the absence of common policy in fiscal, energy, transport (particularly railroads), constitutional and institutional, defense and security matters. The truth is that in the past 10 years the process of “unification” has stopped for almost all practical purposes and certainly its acceptance by European citizens does not exist anymore– in great measure because of the imposition on European citizens of the latest round of enlargement with Rumania, Bulgaria and others, not to speak of the realization by many that even former rounds of enlargement end up in catastrophes (Greece, Spain, Ireland). Thus the European propensity to dictate “morality rules” to others, be they Israel, the US, Serbia or ex-South Africa is pure hypocrisy. When you add to that the anti-Semitic dimension, it just starts to stink. Not only should we, as you write, invest theoretical capital in legitimizing the national enterprise in general and the Zionist one in particular, but we need to keep denouncing the failure of the European “universal” discourse as applied in Europe itself and the sheer hypocrisy of European sermons and behavior. The creation of a Network with intellectuals in the USA, White South Africans, Serbia, China, India, Russia, etc could be helpful.

I have read many of your essays and articles with interest and overall, I agree wholeheartedly. Your analysis of the new European parading of illusion and simplicity in its profound distaste for the nation-state and its attendant real politics is immensely accurate. Woe to Israel, the USA and other freedom loving peoples who embrace their national identity and sovereignty to adherer to this suicidal " value added veneer of civility.