Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In March of this year, the Jewish state was like a single organism whose arteries were straining to strangle one another. I visit the country regularly, but this spring I found it in the throes of a fever which has by now launched a new era of Israeli history. Liberal Zionists, freighted with the responsibility to cleanse and heal the country which Netanyahu and his brutish government every day besmirch, have taken to the streets of many cities and towns each Saturday evening since the seventh of January. Politics is the content of their struggle, but pain preceded politics. It was an intensely uneasy time. The country felt as if it had been violated from within. The mutual hostility and horror with which Israelis considered members of their own society, their own historical family, was staggering. A sort of primal shock seemed to permeate the country. And this time the state’s wounds were entirely self-inflicted. One Saturday afternoon of that inflamed month, my father came home from synagogue and even before taking off his coat reported in a low, unfamiliar voice that the congregational leader whose responsibility it had been to offer the weekly prayer for the welfare of the state of Israel had broken into sobs mid-verse. I was staying in Jerusalem; it is at once fortifying and discomfiting to run oneself over the grooves carved by history into the topography of that city. I waited for the Sabbath to set with the sun and then joined the protest which that evening, like the eleven preceding Saturday evenings (as I write the nineteenth weekly outpouring has just occurred), surged by hundreds and even thousands to the residential square in front of the President’s House to protest the disgraceful fascistic devolution that Benjamin Netanyahu’s new coalition government was perpetrating. When night fell and three stars appeared in the sky, I made the trek across the capital. As I climbed up Jabotinsky Street the sidewalks were clotting with people wrapped in or raising Israeli flags. I recognized some prominent Likudniks in the throng — Netanyahu had alienated some of his own. At the entry into the demonstration a group chanted slogans in support of the Palestinians and handed out stickers which read “there is no democracy with occupation,” which a smattering of protestors stuck onto their flags; but deeper into the crush it was clear that this was a centrist, unmistakably liberal crowd. It represented the vast Israeli center-left, that silent, mysterious mass which at long last had made itself seen in response to an emergency. I was witnessing a rare phenomenon in politics: an enraged centrist throng of liberal patriots. These Israelis had come to reclaim their flag from the bigots and the thugs who were desecrating it. The import of that reclamation is immense. I had been told by Americans again and again that these protests concerned only or mostly the “judicial overhaul” that Netanyahu was trying to force through the Knesset. Even before I arrived I knew that this was an incomplete analysis, that the controversy about the Supreme Court was only the beginning of a Kulturkampf that Netanyahu and his government had ignited. To keep himself in power, he and his allies are forcing Israel into the sordid ranks of post-liberal autocracies around the world. The crowd in which I stood that evening was in distinguished company: like dissident liberals in other countries, Israelis have joined the struggle for the resuscitation of liberal nationalism, which may be the most urgent political cause of our time.  I say resuscitation, because Israel — like the United States — was founded on liberal nationalism. The country’s Declaration of Independence is a liberal document. The founders, despite being avowed socialists, enshrined individual rights and minority rights — classical liberal values. Indeed, the nationalism that flowered in the first half of the nineteenth century and which precipitated the establishment of many nation-states was largely conceived as an ally of liberalism (though there were, of course, notorious illiberal strains). Today, however, nationalist movements everywhere are dominated by ethnonationalists, who cast themselves in opposition to globalists. The contemporary choice is increasingly between a vapid cosmopolitanism which has no respect for tradition or community and a blood-and-soil tribalism as grotesque as it is dangerous. But there is another option — a patriotism enriched by an abiding respect for individual liberty and minority rights. A liberal nationalism. That is the philosophy that guided Israel’s founders. A woman in the crowd in Jerusalem that evening clutched a poster of David Ben-Gurion with tears pasted onto his cheeks. Right now the integrity of the project that he established is largely in the hands of the protestors. Will they make a new politics out of it? Ben-Gurion was the founding prime minister of Israel and the patriarch who loomed over the two decades preceding the advent of the state and the first sixteen years of Mapai (the Labor party) rule after its establishment. He and his heroic comrades toiled to realize Theodore Herzl’s dream: to found a state in which Jews could achieve what they called the normalization of the Jewish people, a Jewish homeland that was free and strong and open but also heterogeneous and multiethnic, and that therefore enshrined the rights of minorities — ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual — explicitly in its Declaration of Independence. A regime of perfect homogeneity is not only impossible, as an ideal it breeds bigotry. Liberalism, which is in the business of defending rights, must defend also the right to national self-determination; and if a nation-state is to be morally defensible, in terms of its treatment of its own citizens, then it must strive towards liberalism.  Yet the push towards a liberal nation-state is always aspirational, always asymptotic. It is an ideal that no state has perfectly realized. The integrity of the Zionist project is dependent not so much on the realization of that ideal as on the incessant dissatisfaction with the failure to realize it, and with the state’s diligence