The Search for Jewish Nationalism

The following article of mine, "The Search for Jewish Nationalism", was kindly published by Troy Southgate in the latest issue of his Synthesis webzine. This choice of publisher was dictated by the plain fact that no Jewish website, whatever its political affiliation, would have accepted it. The article is a brief outline of the principles of Jewish Nationalism (JN); its aim is at least to provoke debate and hopefully bring together fellow-minded Jews. Please leave your comments, questions and suggestions below.

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One must admit that Jewish politics on the web are nothing short of a freak circus. Anarchist splinter-groups accusing each other of high treason, weedy Trotskyist shepherds quarrelling over a non-existent flock, orthodox Jews hurling Anti-Semitic slurs at the Reformists. Hyper-Zionists, rabid Anti-Zionists, Jews for Jesus, Jews in Neo-Nazi organisations: every aberration, every oddity has a niche of its own in this cacophonous bazaar of political superstition. And with all the wild juggling of political terminology going on, it is only natural to ask, “What about Jewish nationalism?”

Incredibly, no such thing exists. The most straightforward, healthy and innate political idea, that of nationalism, is simply missing from the spectrum of Jewish thought. The term itself does pop up every now and then, but is erroneously used interchangeably with “Zionism” and “Israeli patriotism”, though the former is not necessarily nationalist, and the latter not necessarily Jewish.

Nationalism holds that a nation, i.e. a distinct group of people of common descent, is the basic unit for human social life, and thus takes precedence over any other social and political principles.

Traditional Zionism, therefore, is not the same as Jewish nationalism, as it equates a nation looking back on two millennia of dispersion with a territory it came to inhabit only half a century ago, and asserts that territory’s sacral precedence over the nation. Whether secular or religious, Zionism, by claiming that all Jews should “repatriate”, subdues the Jewish nation to external forces – to history, geopolitics, and religion. But to do this means to place ideology before biology, for it is the concrete genetic code that determines one’s Jewishness, not, as many would have us believe, the vague abstractions of “culture” and “religion”. Contrary to wild speculations such as Koestler’s ‘Khazar theory’, genetic evidence (e.g. Hammer’s recent haplotype study) indicates that despite considerable exogamy, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews are still fairly homogenous genetically and of a clear Middle-Eastern origin. A Jew is simply a person descended (fully or partly) from a particular Semitic ethnic group. Zionists may agree, but their approach puts that which is primary (blood kinship) after that which is secondary (geopolitics). Such a confusion of priorities is the exact opposite to what Jewish nationalism asserts: blood first, soil second; blood first, politics second. Zionism is not Jewish nationalism.

Nor is Israeli patriotism the same as Jewish nationalism; in fact, it is not even the same as Jewish etatism, for a Jewish state could have technically be founded anywhere, not necessarily Palestine (Argentine, Uganda and the Russian Far East have all been considered at some point, and the early 20th century Jewish Territorialist Organisation actively advocated establishing Jewish homelands wherever possible). Let us imagine for a second that Palestinians would, by means of a slow demographic takeover, become the majority population in Israel – a scenario not that improbable, considering that almost 1.5 million Arabs are now citizens of what was designed as a racialist Jewish state. In that case, Israelis of Arabic descent taking pride in their mostly Arabic state could be rightly called Israeli patriots. So to be an Israeli patriot, one does not even have to be a Jew – and yet under no circumstances could an Arab be a Jewish nationalist. Clearly, Jewish nationalism is not Israeli patriotism. So what is it then?

The answer is simple. Jewish nationalism (JN) holds that the optimal structure of the Jewish nation around the world is a decentralised network of democratically run, armed, secular communities of kinsmen. Thus it is based on four principles:

1. Kinship: To be a Jew is to have Jewish blood. Kinship ties come first, everything else second. 2. Democracy: To be among one’s kin is to be among equals. One Jew, one vote. 3. Defence: Kinship holds if kinsmen are strong. Democracy works if voters are armed. 4. Secularism: A Jew must be his own Lord, or else a slave.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

KINSHIP. We are not concerned with hierarchies based on the purity of Jewish blood, or with supposedly traditional matrilineality: whatever the intermarriage rate, Jewish blood prevails, for it is always the more distinct one. What we are concerned with is the nation as the totality of all those fully or partly of Jewish descent. Religion, ideology, acceptance or rejection of one’s ethnicity, the presence or absence of foreskin, one’s views on Israel – none of these external factors can make a person more or less Jewish. The degree of one’s Jewishness is invariable, fixed at the moment of conception. Genes do not simply vanish because a belief system requires them to; ideas, on the contrary, are man-made and variable. History teaches us that you either shed ideology in favour of your blood or shed your blood for an ideology. We therefore consider Jewish blood to be of primary worth: this is the sole source of our politics.

DEMOCRACY. So far, Jews attacked Zionism from the Left for its supposed imperialism, disregard for human rights and close ties with America (e.g. Chomsky), or else from the Ultra-Orthodox viewpoint for establishing a Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah (e.g. Neturei Karta). We could not care less about “rights” or “religion”, but we care about our people. Jewish nationalism therefore criticizes Zionism from a Right-wing, secular point of view: for us, Zionism is simply not Right-wing enough. The violent evacuation of near-autonomous outposts like Amona has shown that the puppet-state of Israel can neither protect its own people nor enforce far-right values (individual liberty, armed democracy, private property) as successfully as a community of free and equal individuals bound by kinship ties. The furthest a state can go to the Right is Fascism, the unsavoury union of industrialists, clericalists and conservative bureaucrats, and the best democracy a state can offer is (mis)representative and plutocratic. It is the State and not the Left which is the true enemy of the Right. Rather than needing a state of its own, Jewish nationalism requires horizontal power structures existing parallel to the states where Jews now live – a world-wide network of private contacts, extended families, local communities, and trained militias. Jewish nationalism is by definition national-anarchist: no other approach will give us direct grassroots democracy which is essential for a nation’s self-sufficiency and self-esteem.

DEFENSE. In a globalised world, the traditional state is passing away as networks and communities flourish, and the very fact that today the state is struggling to tighten its grip on the individual is a sign of its decay. From blogging to hooligan firms, networks of all kinds are taking over the traditional functions of the state: information, defence, etc. The explosive issue of race relations, however, has not been extinguished by multiculturalism as predicted, and remains the crucial factor in uniting individuals into groups. New power structures are evolving, both internationally and locally, and, judging by demographics, it is only a question of time before large areas of Western cities will be patrolled by ethnic minority militias or subjected to Sharia law. All indicates that we have entered a century of unprecedented ethnic conflict in which communities bound by kinship will wage war against each other as well as the decaying State, and where tightly knit horizontal networks will successfully resist regular armies. With the temporal protection of the State gone, ordinary Jews will once again become victims of various ethnic, religious and political groups, and, judging by the vast problems Israel is experiencing today, it will not be able to provide the Diaspora with a safe haven. What we therefore need are our own horizontal security mechanisms, starting with individual physical fitness and including combat training, survivalism, firearms and militias. For inspiration, we must look to all historical precedents of Jewish grassroots defence structures, such as the early paramilitary defence groups in Europe and the British Mandate, or the Jewish mafia in American cities. From a fatally Holocaust-fixated, spineless tribe with a vague identity, depending on Gentile states for protection, Jews must evolve into a clearly defined nation of free, armed kinsmen, self-sufficient but ready to respond symmetrically to any aggression.

SECULARISM. The nationalism we envisage is enlightened and Western in character, putting the individual before the community, the community before the nation and the nation before everything else. Secularism is inseparable from this ideal: we are concerned with what is concrete and of immediate importance, such as biological identity and physical survival, not with metaphysical abstractions mutated into dogmas. However, our secularism is not merely anti-clerical, though we do, of course, firmly believe in the separation of religion and politics. Leaving the question of private faith for the individual to decide, and accepting a ‘private’ Judaism that is non-prescriptive, we nevertheless tend to go further. The religious view going hand in hand with Jewish nationalism is not lukewarm agnosticism but National-Atheism (the refusal to grant YHWH or any other being, even hypothetically, sovereignty over the Jewish nation) which in its extreme forms becomes National-Gnosticism, an open conflict with the “Jewish god”. It is irrelevant whether such a being exists or not, or whether it is a Demiurge or simply a national deity: what matters is the destructive influence its cult has on the Jewry, propagating the serf morality of Judaism and the fatal “chosen people” meme. If YHWH is dead, demented, displaced or if he simply never existed, then his cult must be opposed on the grounds of it being a waste of resources. If, however, he is the actual ruler of the Jews, then the Holocaust alone suffices to consider him an enemy and a usurper, and his cult an enemy force: “If God loves all that is anti-Jewish, the Jew must love all that is anti-God” (Ioan-Isidor Goldstein). Atheists tend to follow the former line, Gnostics the latter. Beside these two, no attractive alternatives exist as the search for non-Yahweist Jewish spirituality is still young, usually producing New Age mumbo-jumbo incompatible with nationalism, such as Jewicca. One appealing line of Jewish spirituality, however, which may be worth exploring because of its sound biological basis, is ancestor veneration. Yet whatever the options, our approach to spiritual matters is strictly non-dogmatic, the common denominator being secularism.

The search for Jewish nationalism is only about to begin. The basic principles have been formulated, the direction indicated; now is the time for all those who want to participate in shaping it. As a starting point, the LiveJournal community "Nationalist Jews"(rus) has been set up to stockpile ideas, discussions and contacts; please feel free to join, whatever your views.

Kinship, Democracy, Defence, Secularism. May we succeed.

- by Miron Fyodorov

The Search for Jewish Nationalism