On the State of Mourning: Anti-Statism and Anti-Zionism

From the interruptions of polyphonic concerts in the small Italian-speaking part of Switzerland to the illegal occupations of university campuses throughout the Western world, the war between Israel and Hamas, which broke out on October 7, 2023, has once again brought to light — stronger than ever — the specter of anti-Zionism from Europe’s numbed conscience. By employing more or less aggressive tactics, it has challenged the ethics of the slogans most commonly used by Western media and governments to defend Israel, exposing a profound ideological fracture that separates the people from their State — a fracture that cannot fail to concern, if not primarily, libertarianism.

What role has libertarian ideology played on the geopolitical chessboard of globalization on the occasion of this war? Whereas other conflicts (such as the ongoing one between Russia and Ukraine) have sparked debate, in the face of anti-Zionist demands, even the most moderate libertarian student organizations — those tied to the lukewarm rationality of the Enlightenment that underpins European liberal democracies — have preferred to abstain. (Not to mention the anarcho-capitalist and agorist fringes, which have openly taken a stand against Israel.)

Beyond any judgment one might have on the war in Gaza, this brief essay will rather investigate the structural motives that have made possible such an easy link between anti-Zionism and libertarianism. It will conclude by suggesting a critical evaluation of this phenomenon, in the hope that it may provide useful reflections for the most authentic realization of the libertarian community itself.

State, Terrorism, Revolution

After October 7, 2023, the usual liberal rhetoric about how, in the case of terrorist attacks, Israel has the “right to defend itself” gradually lost its persuasive power everywhere, including among libertarian circles, especially because, with a tacitly mocking attitude, much of the public sphere began to question the very terrorist nature of such attacks. This skepticism is undoubtedly attributable to the tragic foreign policy of neoconservative and neoliberal origin implemented in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., and therefore to the interventionism which, in the United States, has had as its key figures as varied as Nixon and the Bush family, as well as Clinton and Obama. Beyond the young anarcho-capitalists of that era, such as the American philosopher Murray Rothbard, it was the radical left that first recognized the disaster; faced with it, the social right could not but agree, albeit years later. Thus, oscillating between two main (and not necessarily truthful) interpretations, a common doubt began to spread: behind the pretense of exporting the democratic model to liberate Arab peoples subjugated by Islamist terrorist regimes, the Western State, to increase its own power, has always sought to do two things — on the one hand, to repress and oppress what is ethnically different from us; and on the other, to favor the obscure interests of transnational corporations.

In light of the increasingly evident deceptions inherent to the various wars (cf. Bush’s infamous refrain on “weapons of mass destruction”), Islamic terrorism, in a paroxysmal inversion of roles, has been exonerated from many accusations and, in some cases (cf. Hamas today), has even been elevated by certain sectors of the public sphere to a proto-state, an uncontaminated and anarchic revolution. Meanwhile, the most terrible heir of the post-state bond — that which, according to the neo-Marxist interpretation of the Frankfurt School, united racism and capitalism, giving rise in the twentieth century to Nazi Germany — has now become Israel.

The (Il)legitimate State: The Fraud of Race

But why? What connects Israel to the Third Reich? Although Zionism was born long before even Hitler’s rise to power in Europe, its concrete realization took place only after the defeat of the German dictatorship, in 1948. This chronological reconstruction has led much of the population to view the founding of Israel as an artificial reparation granted by the West to the Jewish people for the extermination they suffered; and conversely, to see the Holocaust as having served the ultimate purpose of obtaining a State.

Echoing the most scandalous considerations expressed in the Black Notebooks by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, radical anti-Zionism ends up blaming the Jews — albeit sometimes unconsciously — for their «self-annihilation» (Selbstvernichtung),¹ for having allowed themselves to be annihilated, in light of the nefarious benefit that was drawn from it. This reasoning, already unacceptable in itself, when carried to its extreme consequences, opens up the dangerous possibility of denialism. Indeed, if the Jews allowed themselves to be annihilated, this means that in their self-annihilation there was a macabre intention to stage an event by design, an event as artificial as the State they aimed to establish.

On the other hand, their amnesia seems suspicious. How is it possible that, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has ended up behaving exactly like Nazi Germany? Did the Jews really learn nothing from Auschwitz? And if they learned nothing from Auschwitz, perhaps it is because Auschwitz, the emblem of their eternal status as victims, never existed.

In this way, radical anti-Zionism reveals its possible and problematic affinity with anti-Semitism and — on closer inspection, as we suspected before — with libertarianism itself, due to its ideological aversion to Israel as an artificial State. It’s almost as if a specific falsehood — the one said to define the State of Israel (the ‘myth’ of the Holocaust) — came to represent a larger falsehood: the State system itself, a human-made construct set against the state of nature. Indeed, the arguments for which Israel should be considered illegitimate in the eyes of anti-Zionists could also be used by libertarians to delegitimize the existence of all other States in the world (Israel is delegitimized by accusing it, for example, of being born from conquests, plundering, colonialisms, religious nationalisms, etc., as if, in relation to the political history of humankind, we were dealing with anomalies).

Drawing on Max Weber’s notion of the «ideal type» (Idealtypus),² we can say that Israel — brought to its most radical abstraction as State, to its most radical abstraction of abstraction itself — is identified, from this perspective, with the ideal type of bureaucratic control, which in the public imagination has always been embodied by the totalitarian monster of Nazi Germany. And what was the most heinous crime of Hitler’s Germany? The public sphere responds: the unjustified aggression against a defenseless people. Implicitly, however, this answer points to another answer: the feeling of having been victims of an imaginary persecution, and having consequently responded with an undue use of physical force.

Similarly to what we said earlier about Israel’s relation to the Shoah, then, the real crime of Nazism, according to the public sphere, lies in its victimism, from whose defensive exacerbation there emerged — up to genocide — the idea of belonging to a special group, indeed one superior to others: a group whose preservation justifies resorting to violent means. The parallel becomes even more disturbing if we recall what is still said today about Israel’s defensive operation in the Gaza Strip, often automatically equated with the crime of genocide by much of the public sphere.

Thus, anti-Zionist reasoning takes on paradoxical contours: on the one hand, by opening up the possibility of Holocaust denial, it can play into the hands of (neo-)Nazism; on the other, it “Nazifies” Israel, conflating the divine election of the Jewish people with the idea of Hitlerian racial superiority, and thus renewing against Jews the accusation — already made in Luther’s time — of having introduced, through their pride in «being born of the highest lineage on Earth», the principle of race.³

To the racial invention, by virtue of the shared semantic field — that of artificiality, which feeds the rationalization of the State — anti-Zionism, as anticipated earlier, adds the theme of profit in Western capitalist societies. Beyond (but also because of) the bombings, Israel is accused of having declared a silent war against the rest of humanity, namely an economic, financial, artificial war, through which capital flows are concentrated in the hands of a small elite. Yet in this way, although sometimes without realizing it, arguments are revived that resemble those used by Hitler in Mein Kampf: for the Führer, behind a compassionate ideological facade of Marxist inspiration, the Jew figured as the racial embodiment of the «egoist»,⁴ and thus as the incarnation of the capitalist par excellence, ready to do anything to increase his own power. The «psychological genocide»⁵ feared in Mein Kampf — the replacement of the Aryan people through racial mixing orchestrated by the Jews — took place, indeed, spontaneously, without recourse to physical violence, as if guided by the same invisible hand that drives laissez-faire capitalism, which Hitler seems to have unconsciously associated with the dark Jewish God and his creative power of letting-beings-be by withdrawing, contracting and retracting himself (cf. the tzimtzum in Luria’s Cabala).

Mourning and Resentment

In the demographic shift feared by Hitler — a shift determined by the same spontaneity that governs the developments of capitalism — there emerges in all its disturbing clarity the sense of human finitude. The possibility of no longer being-in-the-world, or — according to Heidegger in Being and Time — the most extreme of possibilities, the possibility of extinction, throws the individual into «angst»⁶. If in everyday life the Dasein — that is, the human being — necessarily identifies with that which it takes «care»⁷ of, with that which it is always-already-thrown into, once faced with the possibility of its loss, it falls into despair. The thing is annulled, it becomes a non-thing, nothing.

In this annihilation, caused by immigration and international capitalism, the Dasein feels implicated: if everything eventually comes to an end, then I too will eventually cease to exist, it tells itself. Yet instead of seeing in anxiety the opportunity to grasp the authentic sense of its existence (ek-sistentia), that is, its having-always-to-be-itself, its always being a «project»⁸ the Dasein more often chooses to cling to another intramundane being, once again reducing the sense of its existence to just one among the possibilities proper to it, thereby precluding itself from all the other possibilities that remain to it until its most extreme possibility, namely, death.

In this evasion from the anguishing nothingness of death, the Dasein cultivates mourning, which, poisoned over time, becomes «ressentiment»⁹ toward those who, in one way or another, have managed to coexist with the most extreme possibility of the Dasein. Israel (the Jewish people, that is — according to the anti-Semitic reasoning — the people of foreigners and capitalists), as Nietzsche reminds us in The Antichrist, still lives «against all conditionings»¹⁰: and not only lives but thrives, having found in its being a Nation of foreigners and capitalists the source of its power. We might say, therefore, that the evasion driven by this resentment, that is, the reduction of the Dasein to an intramundane being, politically manifests itself as a tendency toward re-territorialization, aimed at exorcizing the threat of the eternal nothingness which, advancing, dissolves the borders of things. And it is here that the greatest danger for libertarianism lies.

The resentful mourning of radical anti-Zionism ultimately ends up invoking the artificial device of state re-territorialization, which libertarianism instead ought to want to destroy. By embracing radical anti-Zionism, and thus its aversion to Israel as an artificial State on the grounds of racism and capitalism, libertarianism, without realizing it, paradoxically ends up negating itself: seduced by a pseudo-anarchic framing, which, to appear even more convincing, incorporates anti-racist discourse, libertarianism fails to recognize that it has been driven to take a stand even against itself, that is, against capitalism.

This is because the pseudo-anarchic framing of anti-Zionism erroneously sees racism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin, both serving a unified characterization of the State as artifice: consequently, in attempting to destroy the artificiality of the State, archetypically embodied by Israel, and thus in attempting to destroy the racism on which it rests, anti-Zionism also aims to destroy capitalism at the same time. In the face of the radical possibility of its own suicide, then, libertarianism would do well to consider anti-Zionism in a different light: its anti-racism could in fact flip into nativism (Palestinian, German, etc.), at times even anti-Semitic; while its anarchism could collapse into authoritarian statism of a theocratic kind (cf. Iran, Nazi Germany, etc.).

This is not to suggest that every criticism of Israel is a priori illegitimate. The purpose of the argument presented here is simply to reflect on the particularistic nature that anti-Zionist critique (both radical and moderate) takes toward the Jewish State. As we said, this particularism turns Israel into: the State-artifice par excellence (but thus, due to reasons rooted in Jewish history, opening the danger of Holocaust denialism); the symbol of racism par excellence (thereby sometimes unwittingly reviving the anti-Semitic theological trope of the racist Jew); and the archetype of capitalism (unconsciously approaching the accusation that Hitler directed against the Jewish people, viewed in his worldview as the people of egoists).

We have reason to believe that, paradoxically, it is precisely Hitler’s accusation, which essentially ties the destiny of the Jews to that of capitalism, that allows libertarianism to recognize the resentful roots of anti-Zionist particularism, and thus its deeply anti-libertarian nature. Just as the anti-statism and anti-racism of anti-Zionism collapse into authoritarianism and nativism, from this perspective, Israel, precisely by virtue of its capitalist character, assumes not only the aspect of a multiethnic nation but also that of a voluntary, anarchic community, and thus one that is anything but artificial — rather, organic, alive. In short, the possibility opens up of thinking about Zionism differently, particularly by recovering the so-called cultural Zionism (Kulturzionismus), whose greatest exponents were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber.

In opposition to the secular Zionism of Theodor Herzl, cultural Zionism reinterpreted the theme of the Land and of Jewish return in a radically new and original way. Starting from the Sacred Scriptures, indeed, the Promised Land, precisely because of its peculiar designation (“promised”), is no longer conceived as a motherland, to whose empty womb the Jews should return as indigenous children; rather, it is conceived as a bride-land (promised in the sense of a promised bride), that is, as a Land already alive, inhabited by the other, the non-Jew, the Palestinian (the goy), with whom the «holy people»¹¹, through migration, must unite in a «marriage»¹², giving birth to new political forms based on voluntary cohabitation (cf. the model of the Willensnation, of which Switzerland is the most representative example) and on the rejection of the collectivist principle of autochthony (cf. the model of the Kulturnation).

While allowing it to maintain its (legitimate) criticisms of the State of Israel, this interpretation opens up for libertarianism the opportunity to establish a dialogue with Zionism that is no longer exclusively negative, indeed recognizing within it genuine ideological affinities, useful to its own philosophical and political realization.

Bibliography:

1.  Heidegger Martin, Überlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941), GA 96, Klostermann, Frankfurt 2014, p. 120. (Translated from German).
2. Weber Max, Il metodo delle scienze storico-sociali, 1958, Einaudi, Torino, p. 112. (Translated from Italian).
3. Lutero Martin, Degli ebrei e delle loro menzogne, Milano, Einaudi, 2018, p. 10. (Translated from Italian).
4.  Ceresa Alice, Traduzione di Hitler, Adolf Mein Kampf, Swiss Archive of Literature, signature ASL-Ceresa-A-6-b/2, p. 335. (Translated from Italian).
5.  Id., ivi, p. 204. (Translated from Italian).
6.  Heidegger Martin, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996, p. 171.
7.  Id., ivi, p. 53.
8.  Id., ivi, p. 136.
9.  Nietzsche Friedrich, Genealogia della morale, Milano, Adelphi, 2017, p. 25. (Translated from Italian).
10.  Id., ivi, p. 42.
11.  Buber Martin, Sion. Storia di un’idea, Marietti, Genova 1987, p. 8. (Translated from Italian).
12.  Ibidem.