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How do people change?
Some change involves things that happen to us, which isn’t what interests me. I’m curious about what happens, individually and to societies, when people face an unhappy reality—however it came to be—and decide to change what looks, at least at that moment, to be their fate.
In his 2015 novel, Submission, Michel Houellebecq sketches a portrait of a near-future France, in which an Islamic party allies with the Socialists to take over the country. The story follows a literature professor faced with a decision to convert to Islam for career advancement, as the country’s social and political landscape is transformed by Sharia law. His own disillusionment is heightened by his Jewish girlfriend’s decision to escape the Islamization of France by moving to the Jewish state. He almost goes with her but then doesn’t, uttering the book’s now-famous line: “There is no Israel for me.”
I remember snagging on that sentiment the first time I read it. I could see why a disgruntled non-Jewish academic might hesitate to make aliyah, but to the extent that Houellebecq’s fictional portrayal contained a commentary on the real world, the conclusion felt wrong. There quite clearly is, or could be, an Israel for this person. It’s France, if it could just get off the course it’s on.
This is hardly impossible. In fact, throughout history, humans have changed the way they organized or conceived of themselves in order to take advantage of new opportunities or to address new challenges or threats. Such moments of inflection are often brought about by advances in technology, from the invention of the wheel, to the building of roads, to the invention of the printing press, to time- and space-shrinking inventions like the telegraph and the radio, which in turn bring about large changes in the way human beings see themselves and envision their relationship to some large community—and which also introduce new dangers.
We are in one such moment.
The robots are coming, people. There are artificial wombs. We are genetically editing out diseases that have terrorized humanity throughout recorded history, heading to Mars, fighting wars with drones, rewilding parts of nature, and raising extinct animals from the dead (or something).
Are these developments good or bad? Who knows! That’s the thing about new inventions; their effects are—always, entirely—dictated by how humans interact with them.
In our case, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. The digital technologies emerging today are incredibly powerful; like unbacked stallions, they’ll be able to be used, for pleasure and profit, by secure, skilled, intentional humans. But they will also require weak ones to run on. (“This is definitely not a technology where everyone wins,” in the words of Palantir’s Alex Karp.) Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we’re all facing a future in which some people will enjoy the possibility of safe, ambitious, beautiful human lives, and others will become robot fuel and zombie food. It’s scary and confusing, and every day gets more so.
At just this wild moment, filled with questions so incredible they’re effectively spiritual—at what point does a genetically edited person become equivalent to a machine? are rocks animate?!—the world suddenly entered a vortex where, instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is … Zionism.
Zionism, critics say, is a toxic ideology. It underpins a criminal ethnostate. It incites and justifies genocide. Do you have good or neutral feelings about this tiny country the size of New Jersey thousands of miles away? Do you have no feelings about it at all? That just shows how venal you are, or how stupid about the world. Israel’s actions, alone among the many countries your tax dollars are enmeshed with, are on your personal moral ledger. That small nation, driven by a dangerous doctrine, is controlling the most powerful empire in history—a nation with 50 times its GDP, 34 times the number of people, 25 times the defense budget. It’s the reason you don’t have health care.
In response, Jews and their allies pathetically try to argue with this lunacy. The Jews are history’s most deserving victims, they say. Zionism isn’t a threat! It’s just a movement advocating for the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and the establishment of a state in their ancestral homeland—a privilege enjoyed by everyone else in the West. Who could argue with that? Smarter people are mystified, even annoyed, that we’re talking about this at all.
What few on either side focus on is that almost everyone else in the West is losing, or giving up, their own privileges of self-determination—which is what’s making it possible to imagine that Israel is somehow getting away with what no one else can. If it’s a truism of today’s politics that, especially for bad actors, every accusation is a confession, a corollary has also emerged: Expressions of disgust are often evidence of envy.
Years from now, it will be obvious why, in this specific moment in human history, as we faced high-powered technologies and political ideologies aimed at paving the way for their dominance over humans, what emerged—what had to emerge—was an intense, global debate about, of all things, Zionism. Israel is no longer an outlier in the pantheon of free societies and people; it’s a blueprint for human defense and flourishing in the coming century.
The earliest form of human organization was small, nomadic bands that shared resources, with simple egalitarian structures. These grew into tribes, which were larger, settled groups linked by kinship, with more complex leadership but still lacking centralized power. Then came a truly radical development, when the domestication of plants and animals removed the need to constantly move for sustenance. But permanent settlements also created the need for defense and resource allocation—which begat the early villages and cities.
The possibility of rootedness led to such dramatic changes that it’s almost hard to conceptualize—because it offered people, for the first time, a tangible place around which to organize their existence. Tribal connections, mores, language, music, and so on became linked with the defense and the enrichment of a place where one’s children and compatriots could be safe and thrive. When societies were successful, it was because the humans and their personal differences interacted with the natural differences of their environments to create something specific, distinct, recognizably singular. Something people felt connected to, that inspired them, that they wanted to protect.
Eventually, major European states like Great Britain, France, and Russia began to take root, and over time were developed by a long process of historical slow-cooking involving internal conquest and civil and religious wars. In the mid-17th century, the Peace of Westphalia gave Europe a concrete map, codifying some territories as Catholic and others as Protestant. In succeeding centuries, the European order of states—each corresponding to a specific religious identification and dominant language—expanded through waves of conquest and treaty-making. After World War I, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires established a multitude of new states across the territories of these former empires, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. Few of these existed before as separate nations, at least not in any modern form.
Although the term had not yet been coined, all of these were ethnostates, a word derived from the Greek ethnos—variously defined as “nation,” “tribe,” “people,” or “class.” It’s since been bastardized to mean a government where citizenship and residence are restricted to members of a specific ethnicity, or people who belong to the same broad bloodline. But the word ethnos in fact only connotes any group of humans who see themselves as sharing a potentially diverse set of cultural characteristics that ultimately distinguishes them from other groups.
People were not invented in the 1800s. What did emerge at that moment, and what dramatically influenced the creation of countries, was the conceptual framework of “peoples” or “peoplehoods.” This idea derived from 19th-century German Romantic philosophy and in particular the work of Johann Gottfried Herder. In tracing the development of human civilization, Herder noted that shared language, literature, traditions, and history forge a unique spirit, or Volksgeist, that he argued should serve as the basis for nation-states.
When Herder went looking for an example of a group of people whose attributes—common language, history, religion—he could use as a foundation for this theory, he chose the ancient Jews, who, he argued, were the supreme example of the authentic folk expression of a people. If modern Jews had a problem, Herder continued, it was that they had been flung from their land, turning them into a “nation within a nation.” Still, that only added to their mystique: Their specific set of characteristics enabled them to maintain a unique culture—fitting in while keeping apart—and successfully adapt to successive waves of modernity, from the Roman Empire to the great religious empires of the Catholic Church and various Islamic caliphates, to the multiethnic empires of the Habsburgs and Ottomans, to the Westphalian state order born in 17th-century Europe.
Unlike, say, Bulgarians or Slovenes, who had to appeal to scraps of philology and history to prove that they had existed as separate peoples, Jews had provably existed as a nation since the beginnings of the West. Jewish particularity was a fact known to the entire world; their language, customs, and geographical attachments were attested to by a wealth of ancient Greek and Roman sources, in addition to the records left behind by Assyrians, Moabites, and other vanished kingdoms.
But there was another reason that Herder was drawn to the Jews. He believed in a “genetic method” of history, which dictated that a people’s culture is rooted in their origin, similar to how a plant grows from a seed. Except, in his conception, the “bloodline” is not simply biological; it’s a spiritual and cultural unity formed over time, often expressed through language, folklore, and poetry. While Jews to some extent preserved their origins and functioning as a tribe—or a union of 12 tribes—their origin story was always, from the beginning, unusually inclusive. Modern DNA evidence suggests that only the paternal line of Ashkenazi Jews goes back to the Middle East, suggesting a group of Jewish men who migrated to the Roman Empire and then took wives from among the native European population. In doing so, they had no shortage of precedent in Jewish tradition, even though Judaism is passed on through the maternal line: The matriarchs of the Jewish people were all converts from other nations, as was the founder of the Davidic kingly line, Ruth.
Even further back, the Book of Exodus makes clear that the Jewish slaves whom Moses led out from Egypt (himself a person of apparent royal Egyptian origin) were joined by the erev rav, or “mixed multitude”—a large number of people without any genetic link to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but who nevertheless left Egypt with Moses. While the term erev rav survives in Jewish tradition as a derogatory term meaning “rabble,” it is also clear that the erev rav were a founding component of the Israelite nation before it even reached Israel. No further mention is made in the scriptures of anyone’s origins in the erev rav.
If you squint, you can see how this complexity worked its way into the development of Herder’s concept of “peoplehood” as it could apply to others. The only truism across cultures, or peoples as he articulated it, is that they are, by definition, different from one another.
I’ll show you how with contemporary examples. The nation-states of Japan and France may each be described as representing an ethnos, but that doesn’t mean that the definitions of each ethnos are the same. Being Japanese, or “Japanese-ness,” is strongly tied to the Japanese language and to blood. It is also a delicate web of manners and attitudes toward everything from family to food. However, a person of Japanese descent who didn’t speak Japanese would still be recognized by most—if not all—Japanese people as Japanese, whether or not they had been raised in Japan or in Peru. The question of one’s religion, which is often key to national identity in Europe, would be unlikely to affect any Japanese person’s evaluation of another’s Japanese-ness. Conversely, a fluent Japanese speaker from England, with white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, would be unlikely to be recognized by Japanese people as Japanese, even if he or she made regular visits to a Shinto temple. My husband, who is a great fan of everything Japanese, once lived in Tokyo. When I asked him how people there responded to him when he spoke to them in Japanese, he said, “Like a talking dog.”
Now imagine the same questions asked of a French person. Would someone who grew up in Peru and didn’t speak French be recognized as French by other French people? The answer is no, regardless of how long their ancestors might have previously lived on French soil. What if they spoke fluent French? Ask French Canadians this question, and the answer is also clearly no. For the French, then, blood is less important than language and current political geography in determining French-ness.
What I’m trying to underscore is that you can think of ethnos or culture as a giant mixing board where land, race, language, religion, creed, and other defining characteristics act as tracks, like drums, bass, guitars, horns, vocals—which can be raised up or taken down in the mix. Some cultures may prefer bass or double up on drums. Others might avoid horns entirely. The sound and textures that result in each case will be different. But what makes the result a song or not is whether there is a unique logic that is discernible both to participants and to a sympathetic outside listener with a good-enough general knowledge of music. In other words, what was important to a nation was never one single feature but rather the combination that created a singular ethnos—one that was recognizable to both its own citizens as well as others.
To this day, two kinds of places on earth can plausibly claim not to be ethnostates. First, the postcolonial states established after WWII in Africa and the Middle East along lines drawn by colonial mapmakers precisely to keep the new possessions divided and easier to govern. In these cases, the fact that they were not constructed as ethnostates is generally cited as a reason for their subsequent weakness and failure.
The second case of countries that did not qualify as ethnostates, at least not at their start, are the “settler” nations formed by large-scale immigration from Europe. The most successful of these countries were overseas colonies of the British Empire. Others were Latin American colonies of European nations like Spain and Portugal. In none of these cases did the settlers have any ties of language, religion, myth, or ancestry to the lands that they settled or backing from international institutions or courts. They simply settled there and took the land in the name of their king or queen, whose rule was said to rest on heavenly authority.
The most unusual of these was the future United States, a country so unlike any other that it’s hard to call it “the most successful” or really “the most” anything—since so many of the things it would go on to achieve were singular. In no small part, this is because from its founding, America was animated by two unusual, and surprisingly durable, cultural characteristics: covenant and capital.
If you know me even a little, there’s a good chance I’ve tried, at one Thanksgiving or another, to make you watch the HBO series Saints & Strangers. The reason I love it is because it centers the story of the nation’s origins in the division among the original settlers between the devout Protestant pilgrims, driven by the belief that they were fulfilling a covenant to found an exceptional new nation blessed by God, and the secular adventurers seeking the kind of life-changing economic opportunity that did not exist for nonroyals anywhere else.
In fact, these two motivations, both present at the birth of the country, turned out to be so strong that they compensated for America’s lack of other cultural tethers and enabled it to generate a distinct ethnos of its own. This was especially important after the revolution, when the country took an approach to national identity that consciously downplayed common ties of blood or geography in favor of criteria that reflected a sense of common purpose and into which new immigrants could be speedily integrated.
Can countries whose populations are a mix of peoples belonging to multiple ethnoses themselves constitute or become an ethnos? Sure. Having the same skin color or physical features is an element of collective identity that is important to the Japanese but not, for example, to Israelis—whose population includes immigrants from Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Mexico. And of course, America tied people of different races, languages, religions, and more together by demanding allegiance to two common purposes that turned out to be strong and unique enough to become effective cultural tethers.
For centuries, regardless of what specific music it made, nations’ values—both for individuals and as collectives—lay in their distinctiveness. Sovereignty and citizenship were understood to be hard-won privileges that could easily be lost. Giving up either one would only happen—until recently, at least—at the wrong end of a gun.
It is hard to process the human effort, time, blood, creativity, capital of all kinds that went into developing the identity of Western nations. Every one was its own collective work of aesthetics and human engineering, as impressive as any physical structure built by the great empires of the past. Now, in 2026, they are experiencing massive and, in some cases, crippling identity crises—as though they’d all been struck by some force of nature, like an ice age or the impact of a comet.
In fact, it was more like a social contagion—man-made, unstoppable, and maddening to witness if you understood what you were looking at. It began 80 years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust. “As the rebuilding efforts began, alongside them came an ideological and philosophical reckoning,” explains the Swedish writer Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, who succinctly laid out the narrative in a recent essay. Rather than accepting “that seemingly normal people under extraordinary circumstances can do terrible things,” she writes:
Europe decided that the villain was ideology itself. Ideology, built on religious belief and defined identity, led to the formation of nation-states, borders, and divisions between places, people, and beliefs. This, the postwar idea went, was what caused conflict. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault described nationalism and the nation-state as moral and political dangers, advocating for global humanism while questioning the very idea of basing a shared identity on religious belief and nationalist sentiment. … And so a war-damaged continent, having just come out of a global conflict over borders and identity, decided to do away with borders and identity altogether, assuming this would be the road to lasting peace.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. Instead of inoculating Europe against further strife, the post-nationalist ideology that developed as a response to World War II would end up destabilizing Europe, and the whole West, arguably in more lasting ways.
With the heavy-handed encouragement of the Soviet Union, the confected global community began treating all Western nationalisms, and especially American nationalism, as criminal, whereas the nationalisms of postcolonial states were virtuous. These illogical rules became codified in the supposedly moral divide between oppressors, to whom everything was forbidden, and oppressed, to whom everything was to be permitted—an ideology that then infected international organizations, including the United Nations, which were now used by totalitarian and collectivist countries to check the power of Western countries (which, ironically, they had acquired by not being totalitarian or collectivist).
That tension might have been manageable if not for what happened next. After the end of the Cold War, the anti-nationalist ideology got another powerful boost, but from the opposite direction: the forces of global capitalism, and emerging new technologies that sought to eliminate national differences in order to optimize their own operating systems.
All cultures and religions had to be considered functionally the same because they were seen that way by technologies that were designed for universal access; for everyone to use the same internet, the systems had to be built with the assumption of sameness. People were turned into equivalent functional units in one global system that bypassed the walls previously set up by governments, media, languages—meaning the parts of life that made up cultures that were different from one another. Instead, a new boundaryless world was said to be dawning, where distinctions would be erased, and goods and people would move around the world at will, making markets and ideas more powerful. With greater circulation of capital would come greater rewards, which would inevitably be shared by all humanity.
Politicians throughout the West, from both the left and the right, began to see themselves as members of a larger transnational “global community” that had moved beyond the crude realities of national identity to larger questions, like the composition of a global monoculture shaped by free markets and international law, with special carve-outs to help the “oppressed” catch up and join the global system.
Western countries pushed toward seeing themselves in strictly legalistic terms, embracing national identities encumbered by as little baggage as possible. The less binding your identity was, the more open you could be to people, ideas, and goods from the rest of the world. Take a ticket and you’re in. (Or just come anyway.)
Great Britain adopted a version of this ideal under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Tory predecessors, as did the United States with its “open borders” policy under President Joe Biden. France adopted a similar if less openly enthusiastic policy toward the inhabitants of its former colonial possessions in Africa. Germany did the same by opening its doors to immigrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East under former Chancellor Angela Merkel. Many of the Nordic states followed this global trend, particularly Sweden. In every case, the impulse to let in millions of immigrants from disparate cultures was accentuated by a combination of humanitarian and libertarian economic impulses. These included the corporate desire for cheap labor, detached from any evaluation of the impact of mass migration on national cultures and prior definitions of citizenship—which were now held to be of fading importance.
Country by country, elites would then be shocked to discover how unpopular these bipartisan-supported universalist policies were. As it turned out, most citizens of Western countries did not want to inhabit a post-local, post-historical world. Britons were furious to find Pakistani Muslim rape gangs have been molesting their children under the de facto protection of the law; Swedes were aghast to find large areas of their major cities have become no-go zones ruled by foreign gangs; French were repulsed by the newcomers’ rejection of laïcité. Leftists and their newfound Islamist and third-worldist allies struggled to explain why, say, French nationalism was inherently wrong, but Palestinian nationalism was right—or why it was better for goods to be made in China by state factories using slave labor than to enact tariffs on foreign goods. Americans angered by low wages and feelings of cultural displacement elected Donald Trump twice, and Germans embraced far-right movements that had been frozen out of that country’s politics since the rise of Adolf Hitler. Some 70 years after the post-national ideology took root, it was being rejected en masse by voters on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ordinary citizens of Western nations are right to feel that they were the victims of a bait and switch, which various actors, who are either dumb or nefarious or both, now routinely attribute to a Jewish plot. But the trick that was played had nothing to do with the Jews. Nor was it intended to be a trick at all.
Instead, it is a consequence of the failure of Western elites to understand that the nation, like the wheel, is one of those inventions whose usefulness to humans only grows over time. As a result, they further failed to understand what living in a global society might mean for ordinary people, for whom citizenship represented their most valuable form of personal and family capital—symbols of belonging that their parents and grandparents had suffered, fought, and died for and that gave them hard-won access to opportunity, jobs, and a social safety net that was now unraveling under the pressures of mass immigration.
In response, people on both the left and the right sought comfort in the past. Leftists in Europe insisted on an even closer embrace of the postcolonial fetishization of “the oppressed”—in the name of justice and on the grounds that the alternative would be even worse. Besides, as college students have been saying for generations, true communism has never really been tried.
For their part, conservatives proclaimed their desire to return to foundations that had been rejected as rank bigotry since the end of WWII—from the open embrace of racism and antisemitism and appeals to the authority of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches (and sometimes the two of them together), to the emergence of national conservatism, embodied by leaders like Viktor Orban, Alice Weidel, and she of the greatest resting bitch face in history, Giorgia Meloni. These people got branded as “far-right,” which they embraced as badges of honor, imagining it meant that prissy people couldn’t handle their necessary appeals to nationalism.
That was true for some voters. But for many others—whether or not they could articulate it—it wasn’t that they were too soft for jingoism; it was that they knew it wouldn’t work. Frustration and anger are effective instruments if what one wants to do is inspire people to tear things down. But in Europe’s case, the demolition already happened. Getting out from under rubble, to say nothing of building anything new, requires pivoting to an idealism, a forward-moving energy, that all of these leaders seemed to lack.
In America, things were no better. In fact, they were worse, on account of us being the richest and most powerful country on the planet. This began with George W. Bush’s use of our military for what turned out to be a drawn-out scheme to enrich lobbyists and defense companies. As disastrous as the results of the Global War on Terror were on their own, they acquired metastatic potency by becoming the excuse for Barack Obama’s attempt to gut American power, both abroad and at home.
Most dramatically, the Obama years saw outright attacks aimed at severing the two special tethers in the American ethnos: capitalism and the covenant. From Obamacare to multibillion-dollar deals with tech companies like Microsoft, the administration consistently used its power to boost massive corporations over the heads of the marketplace. The administration used “social justice” to turn the Democratic Party (and then the whole federal government) into a laundering machine for corporations and billionaire NGOs—which was so effective at breaking people’s trust in the capitalist system that it’s hard not to see it as intentional. Two years into his term, Occupy Wall Street emerged, and the popularity of socialism has been growing year over year since.
Obama also personally went out of his way to cut America’s tie to its other foundational tether, asserting that he believed in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As if exceptionalism were a matter of liking one’s country. In fact, as Obama must have known, the American sense of being an exception was a unique and inventive cord in the nation’s identity, one designed not for chauvinism, but to hold together disparate and divergent parts.
As America’s two unique characteristics were eroded, the weakness of the country’s cultural identity was exposed, leading to a series of miserable (and ongoing) debates about whether America could be singularly defined as white or Christian or creedal or whatever. By repudiating our roles as either saints or strangers, we became ghosts.
“Trad” became a thing here too. JD Vance emerged as an American standard-bearer for nostalgia-tinged national conservatism, which he then brought into the White House, wafting a dark funk along the way, courtesy of his own private Torquemada. Eventually, the right-coded independent media space—which emerged during Covid as an answer to the failures of America’s left-coded legacy media—figured out what the legacy press had long before: Financial success on digital platforms comes from broad and shallow audiences, not narrow and deep ones. To appeal to internationalist audiences, including the big ones in the rest of the world, nearly all the so-called dissident voices (from the groypers to the “heterodox” figures) went anti-American.
On the traditional left, the people-are-just-zombie-food movement gathered steam. Bernie Sanders’ endless Vegas act took on secondary headliners in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani and started attracting bigger audiences—almost none of whom were smart enough to notice that the solutions being offered were literally from the 19th century. (Industrial unions? Made up of whom, exactly? The robots?)
Fortunately for the left, their ranks were big enough, and enmeshed enough with Silicon Valley, that someone somewhere finally realized they’d do well to at least cloak their anti-American, internationalist aspirations in future-y garb. An idea was born: Let’s use technology and surveillance to build our version of utopia!
Donors paid their tabs; frontmen were found. They even stood up their own cool social movement, known as effective altruism. What’s fascinating about EA is how clear it is about being anti-culture—indeed, anti anything that respects or even admits differences between humans, let alone nations. “The implicit model [of EA] is that moral weight is fungible and location-independent. A life saved is a life saved, regardless of relational distance,” noted one critic on X, who explained that, in rooting its principles in boundarylessness and math as opposed to one’s high-touch relationships with real humans whose lives and fates are directly tied to your own, EA becomes a system not for tackling the hardest questions of life, but for avoiding them. “Morality isn’t just an allocation problem. You have moral obligations *because* you’re situated. Because you’re a parent, a neighbor, a member of a community, a participant in a local web of mutual dependency.” If, however, you are none of those pesky human things, you create less friction for global, digital systems—which is the point.
What almost no politician seemed able to offer is a type of politics that could appeal to a sense of collective purpose that would inspire and mobilize a majority of citizens. In the absence of such an appeal, the result across the West has been a series of fractured coalition governments riven by street politics that increasingly resemble outright warfare.
Almost out of nowhere, the one thing that seemingly everyone—elites, normies, old, young, right, left—suddenly agreed on was that their problem was … Zionism. Israel is uniquely evil, they claimed, because it is an “ethnostate.”
At first, this seemed like an odd answer to the most important challenge of the moment—which was the dangerously rapid decline of their own “melting pot” states. But when seen in this light, it becomes obvious that the attacks on Israel were in fact attacks on everyone else’s national identities. If Zionism, as a nationalist movement, is held to be somehow lacking in legitimacy, it’s in order to make sure that France and Germany—much younger nations, with long histories of starting wars with their neighbors and conquering other peoples and territory—are also illegitimate. If Zionist settlers have no place living in Palestine, a land in which no previous sovereign nation-state had ever existed over the previous millennia, that was established as the national homeland of the Jewish people under international law, and where Jews continue to practice the same religion and speak the language of their ancestors from 3,500 years ago, then by what possible right can citizens of settler nations like the United States or Australia claim to inhabit their own countries and to own their homes?
Please stop being dumb. Zionism did not become a target because of the supposed “crimes” of the Israeli government, which ordered the invasion of Gaza in response to a massive attack on its own country in which Islamist terrorists raped women, murdered elderly Holocaust survivors, massacred leftist kibbutzniks, and mowed down hundreds of partygoers at a rave. Zionism became a target because it represented what Westerners on the right claim to desperately want but are unable to attain, and what Westerners on the left wish to define as impossible: a form of nationalism that is oriented toward the future rather than the past and that is able to defend its own particularism while protecting individual and social freedoms.
Here are four survival tests for free societies that, as of today, only Israel passes:
Can you maintain your demographics? Israelis have kids above the replacement level, which makes them unique among Western states. Israelis are voting in the most unmistakable and important way for their own future.
Can you defend yourself? Israelis are willing to fight and die to defend their country and each other in a way that citizens of other Western countries simply are not. (In this month’s attack on Iran, the head of the Israeli Air Force wasn’t in a control tower or office; he was in the skies with his pilots, flying one of the planes.) People who are unwilling to fight for their own survival tend not to survive.
Are you happy? Israel is reliably among the happiest nations on earth, despite being involved in frequent violent wars. Is it a placid society with no civil conflict? Nothing could be further from the truth. What they are is a people close to the land, who are also tech innovators; who travel the world but, when they’re in the country, spend every Friday night with their family; who are secular enough to live in one of the sexiest cities in the world as well as a different city so steeped in the history of religious longing that it has its own syndrome; where people sip lattes near sites containing artifacts dating back to 125 B.C.E., and boys go up to talk to girls in real life.
Final test: In a world of ultrapowerful information tools that allow small numbers of people unprecedented leverage over real-world challenges, national success is no longer a question of who can field the largest army or the biggest workforce. Instead, success goes to whoever can field the smartest and most cohesive teams. If I told you, at the dawn of an AI revolution likely to redefine everything about humans and their output, that you had to be president of one of two countries—either a nation of 70 million people struggling with drugs, obesity, and millions of people who either do not wish to accommodate or openly hate their neighbors and the wider culture, or a country of 10 million people, half of whom (both men and women) have been trained and have served in an army, and another whole swath of whom learn an obscure and intense legalistic document all day—which one would you choose?
This alchemy of old and new, of taking control of one’s own fate and changing the stream of history in mid-course, is characteristic of Zionism. It is also how Zionism, having fulfilled its promise for the Jews, becomes a technology for national renewal that could, conceivably, be used by anyone.
To see what I mean, contrast what’s happening throughout the West with Javier Milei’s presidency in Argentina. In answer to a country whose economy was collapsing and whose national culture had become mired in anxiety and depression, Milei presented Argentines with the prospect of being part of a new and hopeful experiment in which they could define their country as something other than a scenic economic basket case. Instead of the usual choice between the fashionable but corrupt oligarchy of the left with their cozy deals with trade unions driving the country into bankruptcy, or the right’s more traditional Latin American oligarchy of hereditary landholders backed by the institutions of the Catholic Church and the military generals who had misgoverned the country through a nightmarish era of military rule. Instead, Milei offered a new solution, one that was both wildly idealistic and at the same time entirely pragmatic: a radical market-based “shock therapy” that every smart person in Argentina knew the country needed but no politician ever had the wherewithal to enact.
Milei is a zany but intelligent and very energetic performer. He is highly focused and aggressive (some say nuts), but he also openly flaunts the unbridled joy he feels about the country, its culture, music, and more. And his pushy physicality mirrors how he governs: One month into his term, he cut the budget by 30% and instituted a monetary policy that, in 12 months, reduced inflation from 25% a month to 2.2%. This strategy is appealing to a generation of younger professionals who’ve learned Chicago School economics at American universities, as well as to shopkeepers and hairdressers sick of broken promises and perennial stagnation. It’s an entirely new social compact, one that allows Argentines to feel rooted in their culture and past but free of its worst burdens and—inspired by Milei’s own seeming inability to sit still—energized to work toward his vision of a dramatically different, optimistic future.
In other words, what Milei is manifesting is Zionism for Argentines. Lee Kuan Yew conceptualized Zionism for Singaporeans. Narendra Modi is practicing Zionism for Indians. What connects these men is not only that they chose nationalism over internationalism—that they rooted their ideologies in the specificities of their unique cultures, which they insisted must remain separate and apart from others—but also that they are future-oriented, high-octane idealists. This balance of cultural particularism with tough-minded pragmatism and inspiring, almost unfathomable idealism? That’s Zionism.
For anyone looking to reanimate or build free societies driven by and for the advancement of human beings in all their mess and glory, the question facing you is twofold.
First, are you willing to see yourselves as part of an ethnos, a nation somehow different and apart from others? Or do you see national identities as relics of the past? This isn’t coy. Many good people today view countries as assortments of individuals bound together by the legalities of common citizenship status and passport-holding, within the larger web of nations with airports. These people are internationalists.
Second, if you do want to be a nationalist, are you past- or future-oriented? Do you fundamentally want and believe we can return to the past? This is not about whether you are religious and inspired by your spiritual and historical legacy; it’s about whether you look to that past and see the shape and details of the future.
The reason I find JD Vance off-putting is not because he’s friends with Tucker Carlson. It’s not even really that Vance’s hostility to Israel bothers me as a Jew. It’s that it bothers me as an American—because Israel is one of the primary mechanisms by which America projects power. At this point I understand why Carlson doesn’t want this; he is appealing to an international audience that does not want it. Is the same true of Vance? I don’t know. But his Obama-like refusal to appreciate and confidently assert American exceptionalism, the isolationism that feels not like protection but insecurity, the resentment of other countries and shortsighted miserliness, the VC background—it all just reeks of digitally-driven flattening, and the stagnation on the ground it inevitably produces.
It is also fundamentally risk-averse, in a very millennial way. Zionist nationalism avoided some of Europe’s challenges simply by coming very late to the party. But maybe more important, its idealism enabled it to take enormous risks without which it would never have become a reality.
For 2,000 years, Jews dreamed of returning to their homeland without being able to successfully reconstitute their national existence. The world is a very big place, and shifting powers and empires controlled the land on which other people were living. The Jews themselves were scattered, weak, and politically powerless. Which is why the magnitude of what the Zionist movement accomplished is so unlikely and so astonishing that it is natural for many people to imagine Zionism as some black arts movement backed by a nameless empire with extraordinary wealth and power at its disposal—whether that empire was secretly the British or the Americans or the Elders of Zion.
In reality, no such outside power existed. Rather, it was the determined pragmatism and wild hope of a few thousand men and women, itself the heritage of a national aspiration kept alive for thousands of years in daily prayers, that birthed a modern state. That state started with many fewer resources than its neighbors, who were backed by the British Empire, but would soon exceed them all in military and economic power. It is no accident that Herzl’s famous phrase—“If you will it, it is no dream”—has two parts: the will, but also the dream.
This is the key to facing the digital future, which will be driven not by the people with the most Harvard degrees or congressional internships or Instagram followers—but by the highest-energy risk-takers. “I love struggling, actually,” said Olympic skater Alysa Liu in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Sharyn Alfonsi, who appeared both confused and offended by the concept. “It makes me feel alive.” Liu was being perfectly descriptive and insightful about this moment. Struggling is something humans do that robots do not.
Watching a new generation grok this, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been one of the rare bright spots of the past year: “It will feel so good to do the hard thing. It will feel so, so good. You don’t even have to succeed at the hard thing right away, you can fail. It doesn’t matter. You will still feel good. And the more you do it the better you’ll feel. Once you realize that you’re capable, you’ll cringe at your past self who flailed about in helplessness.”
Now all we need is to find them some leaders who understand this, who get that struggle does not mean sadism or self-abuse, both of which are fundamentally weak and defeatist attitudes. Leaders who understand that successful nationalism is not jingoism or ethnic chauvinism. It’s about understanding and embracing the reality that we all approach the world with our own distinct history and point of view—and that without this we are not liberated, but bereft.
I get the challenge here: Too many people have spent too many generations disconnected from their own cultural tethers to be able to recognize them, let alone articulate them anew. Find your poets, artists, and historians! (Trust me: They can use the work.) Find people unafraid to admire Zionism for modeling that it is only through the particular that we can truly reach the universal—because it is our particularities that make us real.
And not only leaders. As we enter an era dominated by technologies and political ideologies designed to flatten the differences between humans, attach yourself to family, friends, and others who understand that erasing our differences doesn’t bring us closer to other people; it just makes us more like the machines. Together, aim to make your collective success so outlandish and so implausible that enemies and strangers can’t help but conjure up conspiracy theories about how you could have possibly achieved it.
In antiquity, the Jews bequeathed to the world the concept of the nation, as distinct from tribe and empire—which in turn gave rise to modern national identity. Now, with Zionism, Israel has again provided the world with a framework for the future, this time to avoid and transcend the twin impulses toward digital disintegration of identity and self-worship. Don’t be so afraid of the gift or so pointlessly resentful of the giver that you deprive yourself and those around you of what you deserve. As we say in Yiddish, nutz gezunterheit: Use it in good health.
And you’re welcome.
How do people change?
Some change involves things that happen to us, which isn’t what interests me. I’m curious about what happens, individually and to societies, when people face an unhappy reality—however it came to be—and decide to change what looks, at least at that moment, to be their fate.
In his 2015 novel, Submission, Michel Houellebecq sketches a portrait of a near-future France, in which an Islamic party allies with the Socialists to take over the country. The story follows a literature professor faced with a decision to convert to Islam for career advancement, as the country’s social and political landscape is transformed by Sharia law. His own disillusionment is heightened by his Jewish girlfriend’s decision to escape the Islamization of France by moving to the Jewish state. He almost goes with her but then doesn’t, uttering the book’s now-famous line: “There is no Israel for me.”
I remember snagging on that sentiment the first time I read it. I could see why a disgruntled non-Jewish academic might hesitate to make aliyah, but to the extent that Houellebecq’s fictional portrayal contained a commentary on the real world, the conclusion felt wrong. There quite clearly is, or could be, an Israel for this person. It’s France, if it could just get off the course it’s on.
This is hardly impossible. In fact, throughout history, humans have changed the way they organized or conceived of themselves in order to take advantage of new opportunities or to address new challenges or threats. Such moments of inflection are often brought about by advances in technology, from the invention of the wheel, to the building of roads, to the invention of the printing press, to time- and space-shrinking inventions like the telegraph and the radio, which in turn bring about large changes in the way human beings see themselves and envision their relationship to some large community—and which also introduce new dangers.
We are in one such moment.
The robots are coming, people. There are artificial wombs. We are genetically editing out diseases that have terrorized humanity throughout recorded history, heading to Mars, fighting wars with drones, rewilding parts of nature, and raising extinct animals from the dead (or something).
Are these developments good or bad? Who knows! That’s the thing about new inventions; their effects are—always, entirely—dictated by how humans interact with them.
In our case, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. The digital technologies emerging today are incredibly powerful; like unbacked stallions, they’ll be able to be used, for pleasure and profit, by secure, skilled, intentional humans. But they will also require weak ones to run on. (“This is definitely not a technology where everyone wins,” in the words of Palantir’s Alex Karp.) Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we’re all facing a future in which some people will enjoy the possibility of safe, ambitious, beautiful human lives, and others will become robot fuel and zombie food. It’s scary and confusing, and every day gets more so.
At just this wild moment, filled with questions so incredible they’re effectively spiritual—at what point does a genetically edited person become equivalent to a machine? are rocks animate?!—the world suddenly entered a vortex where, instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is … Zionism.
Zionism, critics say, is a toxic ideology. It underpins a criminal ethnostate. It incites and justifies genocide. Do you have good or neutral feelings about this tiny country the size of New Jersey thousands of miles away? Do you have no feelings about it at all? That just shows how venal you are, or how stupid about the world. Israel’s actions, alone among the many countries your tax dollars are enmeshed with, are on your personal moral ledger. That small nation, driven by a dangerous doctrine, is controlling the most powerful empire in history—a nation with 50 times its GDP, 34 times the number of people, 25 times the defense budget. It’s the reason you don’t have health care.
In response, Jews and their allies pathetically try to argue with this lunacy. The Jews are history’s most deserving victims, they say. Zionism isn’t a threat! It’s just a movement advocating for the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and the establishment of a state in their ancestral homeland—a privilege enjoyed by everyone else in the West. Who could argue with that? Smarter people are mystified, even annoyed, that we’re talking about this at all.
What few on either side focus on is that almost everyone else in the West is losing, or giving up, their own privileges of self-determination—which is what’s making it possible to imagine that Israel is somehow getting away with what no one else can. If it’s a truism of today’s politics that, especially for bad actors, every accusation is a confession, a corollary has also emerged: Expressions of disgust are often evidence of envy.
Years from now, it will be obvious why, in this specific moment in human history, as we faced high-powered technologies and political ideologies aimed at paving the way for their dominance over humans, what emerged—what had to emerge—was an intense, global debate about, of all things, Zionism. Israel is no longer an outlier in the pantheon of free societies and people; it’s a blueprint for human defense and flourishing in the coming century.
The earliest form of human organization was small, nomadic bands that shared resources, with simple egalitarian structures. These grew into tribes, which were larger, settled groups linked by kinship, with more complex leadership but still lacking centralized power. Then came a truly radical development, when the domestication of plants and animals removed the need to constantly move for sustenance. But permanent settlements also created the need for defense and resource allocation—which begat the early villages and cities.
The possibility of rootedness led to such dramatic changes that it’s almost hard to conceptualize—because it offered people, for the first time, a tangible place around which to organize their existence. Tribal connections, mores, language, music, and so on became linked with the defense and the enrichment of a place where one’s children and compatriots could be safe and thrive. When societies were successful, it was because the humans and their personal differences interacted with the natural differences of their environments to create something specific, distinct, recognizably singular. Something people felt connected to, that inspired them, that they wanted to protect.
Eventually, major European states like Great Britain, France, and Russia began to take root, and over time were developed by a long process of historical slow-cooking involving internal conquest and civil and religious wars. In the mid-17th century, the Peace of Westphalia gave Europe a concrete map, codifying some territories as Catholic and others as Protestant. In succeeding centuries, the European order of states—each corresponding to a specific religious identification and dominant language—expanded through waves of conquest and treaty-making. After World War I, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires established a multitude of new states across the territories of these former empires, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. Few of these existed before as separate nations, at least not in any modern form.
Although the term had not yet been coined, all of these were ethnostates, a word derived from the Greek ethnos—variously defined as “nation,” “tribe,” “people,” or “class.” It’s since been bastardized to mean a government where citizenship and residence are restricted to members of a specific ethnicity, or people who belong to the same broad bloodline. But the word ethnos in fact only connotes any group of humans who see themselves as sharing a potentially diverse set of cultural characteristics that ultimately distinguishes them from other groups.
People were not invented in the 1800s. What did emerge at that moment, and what dramatically influenced the creation of countries, was the conceptual framework of “peoples” or “peoplehoods.” This idea derived from 19th-century German Romantic philosophy and in particular the work of Johann Gottfried Herder. In tracing the development of human civilization, Herder noted that shared language, literature, traditions, and history forge a unique spirit, or Volksgeist, that he argued should serve as the basis for nation-states.
When Herder went looking for an example of a group of people whose attributes—common language, history, religion—he could use as a foundation for this theory, he chose the ancient Jews, who, he argued, were the supreme example of the authentic folk expression of a people. If modern Jews had a problem, Herder continued, it was that they had been flung from their land, turning them into a “nation within a nation.” Still, that only added to their mystique: Their specific set of characteristics enabled them to maintain a unique culture—fitting in while keeping apart—and successfully adapt to successive waves of modernity, from the Roman Empire to the great religious empires of the Catholic Church and various Islamic caliphates, to the multiethnic empires of the Habsburgs and Ottomans, to the Westphalian state order born in 17th-century Europe.
Unlike, say, Bulgarians or Slovenes, who had to appeal to scraps of philology and history to prove that they had existed as separate peoples, Jews had provably existed as a nation since the beginnings of the West. Jewish particularity was a fact known to the entire world; their language, customs, and geographical attachments were attested to by a wealth of ancient Greek and Roman sources, in addition to the records left behind by Assyrians, Moabites, and other vanished kingdoms.
But there was another reason that Herder was drawn to the Jews. He believed in a “genetic method” of history, which dictated that a people’s culture is rooted in their origin, similar to how a plant grows from a seed. Except, in his conception, the “bloodline” is not simply biological; it’s a spiritual and cultural unity formed over time, often expressed through language, folklore, and poetry. While Jews to some extent preserved their origins and functioning as a tribe—or a union of 12 tribes—their origin story was always, from the beginning, unusually inclusive. Modern DNA evidence suggests that only the paternal line of Ashkenazi Jews goes back to the Middle East, suggesting a group of Jewish men who migrated to the Roman Empire and then took wives from among the native European population. In doing so, they had no shortage of precedent in Jewish tradition, even though Judaism is passed on through the maternal line: The matriarchs of the Jewish people were all converts from other nations, as was the founder of the Davidic kingly line, Ruth.
Even further back, the Book of Exodus makes clear that the Jewish slaves whom Moses led out from Egypt (himself a person of apparent royal Egyptian origin) were joined by the erev rav, or “mixed multitude”—a large number of people without any genetic link to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but who nevertheless left Egypt with Moses. While the term erev rav survives in Jewish tradition as a derogatory term meaning “rabble,” it is also clear that the erev rav were a founding component of the Israelite nation before it even reached Israel. No further mention is made in the scriptures of anyone’s origins in the erev rav.
If you squint, you can see how this complexity worked its way into the development of Herder’s concept of “peoplehood” as it could apply to others. The only truism across cultures, or peoples as he articulated it, is that they are, by definition, different from one another.
I’ll show you how with contemporary examples. The nation-states of Japan and France may each be described as representing an ethnos, but that doesn’t mean that the definitions of each ethnos are the same. Being Japanese, or “Japanese-ness,” is strongly tied to the Japanese language and to blood. It is also a delicate web of manners and attitudes toward everything from family to food. However, a person of Japanese descent who didn’t speak Japanese would still be recognized by most—if not all—Japanese people as Japanese, whether or not they had been raised in Japan or in Peru. The question of one’s religion, which is often key to national identity in Europe, would be unlikely to affect any Japanese person’s evaluation of another’s Japanese-ness. Conversely, a fluent Japanese speaker from England, with white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, would be unlikely to be recognized by Japanese people as Japanese, even if he or she made regular visits to a Shinto temple. My husband, who is a great fan of everything Japanese, once lived in Tokyo. When I asked him how people there responded to him when he spoke to them in Japanese, he said, “Like a talking dog.”
Now imagine the same questions asked of a French person. Would someone who grew up in Peru and didn’t speak French be recognized as French by other French people? The answer is no, regardless of how long their ancestors might have previously lived on French soil. What if they spoke fluent French? Ask French Canadians this question, and the answer is also clearly no. For the French, then, blood is less important than language and current political geography in determining French-ness.
What I’m trying to underscore is that you can think of ethnos or culture as a giant mixing board where land, race, language, religion, creed, and other defining characteristics act as tracks, like drums, bass, guitars, horns, vocals—which can be raised up or taken down in the mix. Some cultures may prefer bass or double up on drums. Others might avoid horns entirely. The sound and textures that result in each case will be different. But what makes the result a song or not is whether there is a unique logic that is discernible both to participants and to a sympathetic outside listener with a good-enough general knowledge of music. In other words, what was important to a nation was never one single feature but rather the combination that created a singular ethnos—one that was recognizable to both its own citizens as well as others.
To this day, two kinds of places on earth can plausibly claim not to be ethnostates. First, the postcolonial states established after WWII in Africa and the Middle East along lines drawn by colonial mapmakers precisely to keep the new possessions divided and easier to govern. In these cases, the fact that they were not constructed as ethnostates is generally cited as a reason for their subsequent weakness and failure.
The second case of countries that did not qualify as ethnostates, at least not at their start, are the “settler” nations formed by large-scale immigration from Europe. The most successful of these countries were overseas colonies of the British Empire. Others were Latin American colonies of European nations like Spain and Portugal. In none of these cases did the settlers have any ties of language, religion, myth, or ancestry to the lands that they settled or backing from international institutions or courts. They simply settled there and took the land in the name of their king or queen, whose rule was said to rest on heavenly authority.
The most unusual of these was the future United States, a country so unlike any other that it’s hard to call it “the most successful” or really “the most” anything—since so many of the things it would go on to achieve were singular. In no small part, this is because from its founding, America was animated by two unusual, and surprisingly durable, cultural characteristics: covenant and capital.
If you know me even a little, there’s a good chance I’ve tried, at one Thanksgiving or another, to make you watch the HBO series Saints & Strangers. The reason I love it is because it centers the story of the nation’s origins in the division among the original settlers between the devout Protestant pilgrims, driven by the belief that they were fulfilling a covenant to found an exceptional new nation blessed by God, and the secular adventurers seeking the kind of life-changing economic opportunity that did not exist for nonroyals anywhere else.
In fact, these two motivations, both present at the birth of the country, turned out to be so strong that they compensated for America’s lack of other cultural tethers and enabled it to generate a distinct ethnos of its own. This was especially important after the revolution, when the country took an approach to national identity that consciously downplayed common ties of blood or geography in favor of criteria that reflected a sense of common purpose and into which new immigrants could be speedily integrated.
Can countries whose populations are a mix of peoples belonging to multiple ethnoses themselves constitute or become an ethnos? Sure. Having the same skin color or physical features is an element of collective identity that is important to the Japanese but not, for example, to Israelis—whose population includes immigrants from Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Mexico. And of course, America tied people of different races, languages, religions, and more together by demanding allegiance to two common purposes that turned out to be strong and unique enough to become effective cultural tethers.
For centuries, regardless of what specific music it made, nations’ values—both for individuals and as collectives—lay in their distinctiveness. Sovereignty and citizenship were understood to be hard-won privileges that could easily be lost. Giving up either one would only happen—until recently, at least—at the wrong end of a gun.
It is hard to process the human effort, time, blood, creativity, capital of all kinds that went into developing the identity of Western nations. Every one was its own collective work of aesthetics and human engineering, as impressive as any physical structure built by the great empires of the past. Now, in 2026, they are experiencing massive and, in some cases, crippling identity crises—as though they’d all been struck by some force of nature, like an ice age or the impact of a comet.
In fact, it was more like a social contagion—man-made, unstoppable, and maddening to witness if you understood what you were looking at. It began 80 years ago, in the wake of the Holocaust. “As the rebuilding efforts began, alongside them came an ideological and philosophical reckoning,” explains the Swedish writer Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, who succinctly laid out the narrative in a recent essay. Rather than accepting “that seemingly normal people under extraordinary circumstances can do terrible things,” she writes:
Europe decided that the villain was ideology itself. Ideology, built on religious belief and defined identity, led to the formation of nation-states, borders, and divisions between places, people, and beliefs. This, the postwar idea went, was what caused conflict. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault described nationalism and the nation-state as moral and political dangers, advocating for global humanism while questioning the very idea of basing a shared identity on religious belief and nationalist sentiment. … And so a war-damaged continent, having just come out of a global conflict over borders and identity, decided to do away with borders and identity altogether, assuming this would be the road to lasting peace.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. Instead of inoculating Europe against further strife, the post-nationalist ideology that developed as a response to World War II would end up destabilizing Europe, and the whole West, arguably in more lasting ways.
With the heavy-handed encouragement of the Soviet Union, the confected global community began treating all Western nationalisms, and especially American nationalism, as criminal, whereas the nationalisms of postcolonial states were virtuous. These illogical rules became codified in the supposedly moral divide between oppressors, to whom everything was forbidden, and oppressed, to whom everything was to be permitted—an ideology that then infected international organizations, including the United Nations, which were now used by totalitarian and collectivist countries to check the power of Western countries (which, ironically, they had acquired by not being totalitarian or collectivist).
That tension might have been manageable if not for what happened next. After the end of the Cold War, the anti-nationalist ideology got another powerful boost, but from the opposite direction: the forces of global capitalism, and emerging new technologies that sought to eliminate national differences in order to optimize their own operating systems.
All cultures and religions had to be considered functionally the same because they were seen that way by technologies that were designed for universal access; for everyone to use the same internet, the systems had to be built with the assumption of sameness. People were turned into equivalent functional units in one global system that bypassed the walls previously set up by governments, media, languages—meaning the parts of life that made up cultures that were different from one another. Instead, a new boundaryless world was said to be dawning, where distinctions would be erased, and goods and people would move around the world at will, making markets and ideas more powerful. With greater circulation of capital would come greater rewards, which would inevitably be shared by all humanity.
Politicians throughout the West, from both the left and the right, began to see themselves as members of a larger transnational “global community” that had moved beyond the crude realities of national identity to larger questions, like the composition of a global monoculture shaped by free markets and international law, with special carve-outs to help the “oppressed” catch up and join the global system.
Western countries pushed toward seeing themselves in strictly legalistic terms, embracing national identities encumbered by as little baggage as possible. The less binding your identity was, the more open you could be to people, ideas, and goods from the rest of the world. Take a ticket and you’re in. (Or just come anyway.)
Great Britain adopted a version of this ideal under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Tory predecessors, as did the United States with its “open borders” policy under President Joe Biden. France adopted a similar if less openly enthusiastic policy toward the inhabitants of its former colonial possessions in Africa. Germany did the same by opening its doors to immigrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East under former Chancellor Angela Merkel. Many of the Nordic states followed this global trend, particularly Sweden. In every case, the impulse to let in millions of immigrants from disparate cultures was accentuated by a combination of humanitarian and libertarian economic impulses. These included the corporate desire for cheap labor, detached from any evaluation of the impact of mass migration on national cultures and prior definitions of citizenship—which were now held to be of fading importance.
Country by country, elites would then be shocked to discover how unpopular these bipartisan-supported universalist policies were. As it turned out, most citizens of Western countries did not want to inhabit a post-local, post-historical world. Britons were furious to find Pakistani Muslim rape gangs have been molesting their children under the de facto protection of the law; Swedes were aghast to find large areas of their major cities have become no-go zones ruled by foreign gangs; French were repulsed by the newcomers’ rejection of laïcité. Leftists and their newfound Islamist and third-worldist allies struggled to explain why, say, French nationalism was inherently wrong, but Palestinian nationalism was right—or why it was better for goods to be made in China by state factories using slave labor than to enact tariffs on foreign goods. Americans angered by low wages and feelings of cultural displacement elected Donald Trump twice, and Germans embraced far-right movements that had been frozen out of that country’s politics since the rise of Adolf Hitler. Some 70 years after the post-national ideology took root, it was being rejected en masse by voters on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ordinary citizens of Western nations are right to feel that they were the victims of a bait and switch, which various actors, who are either dumb or nefarious or both, now routinely attribute to a Jewish plot. But the trick that was played had nothing to do with the Jews. Nor was it intended to be a trick at all.
Instead, it is a consequence of the failure of Western elites to understand that the nation, like the wheel, is one of those inventions whose usefulness to humans only grows over time. As a result, they further failed to understand what living in a global society might mean for ordinary people, for whom citizenship represented their most valuable form of personal and family capital—symbols of belonging that their parents and grandparents had suffered, fought, and died for and that gave them hard-won access to opportunity, jobs, and a social safety net that was now unraveling under the pressures of mass immigration.
In response, people on both the left and the right sought comfort in the past. Leftists in Europe insisted on an even closer embrace of the postcolonial fetishization of “the oppressed”—in the name of justice and on the grounds that the alternative would be even worse. Besides, as college students have been saying for generations, true communism has never really been tried.
For their part, conservatives proclaimed their desire to return to foundations that had been rejected as rank bigotry since the end of WWII—from the open embrace of racism and antisemitism and appeals to the authority of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches (and sometimes the two of them together), to the emergence of national conservatism, embodied by leaders like Viktor Orban, Alice Weidel, and she of the greatest resting bitch face in history, Giorgia Meloni. These people got branded as “far-right,” which they embraced as badges of honor, imagining it meant that prissy people couldn’t handle their necessary appeals to nationalism.
That was true for some voters. But for many others—whether or not they could articulate it—it wasn’t that they were too soft for jingoism; it was that they knew it wouldn’t work. Frustration and anger are effective instruments if what one wants to do is inspire people to tear things down. But in Europe’s case, the demolition already happened. Getting out from under rubble, to say nothing of building anything new, requires pivoting to an idealism, a forward-moving energy, that all of these leaders seemed to lack.
In America, things were no better. In fact, they were worse, on account of us being the richest and most powerful country on the planet. This began with George W. Bush’s use of our military for what turned out to be a drawn-out scheme to enrich lobbyists and defense companies. As disastrous as the results of the Global War on Terror were on their own, they acquired metastatic potency by becoming the excuse for Barack Obama’s attempt to gut American power, both abroad and at home.
Most dramatically, the Obama years saw outright attacks aimed at severing the two special tethers in the American ethnos: capitalism and the covenant. From Obamacare to multibillion-dollar deals with tech companies like Microsoft, the administration consistently used its power to boost massive corporations over the heads of the marketplace. The administration used “social justice” to turn the Democratic Party (and then the whole federal government) into a laundering machine for corporations and billionaire NGOs—which was so effective at breaking people’s trust in the capitalist system that it’s hard not to see it as intentional. Two years into his term, Occupy Wall Street emerged, and the popularity of socialism has been growing year over year since.
Obama also personally went out of his way to cut America’s tie to its other foundational tether, asserting that he believed in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As if exceptionalism were a matter of liking one’s country. In fact, as Obama must have known, the American sense of being an exception was a unique and inventive cord in the nation’s identity, one designed not for chauvinism, but to hold together disparate and divergent parts.
As America’s two unique characteristics were eroded, the weakness of the country’s cultural identity was exposed, leading to a series of miserable (and ongoing) debates about whether America could be singularly defined as white or Christian or creedal or whatever. By repudiating our roles as either saints or strangers, we became ghosts.
“Trad” became a thing here too. JD Vance emerged as an American standard-bearer for nostalgia-tinged national conservatism, which he then brought into the White House, wafting a dark funk along the way, courtesy of his own private Torquemada. Eventually, the right-coded independent media space—which emerged during Covid as an answer to the failures of America’s left-coded legacy media—figured out what the legacy press had long before: Financial success on digital platforms comes from broad and shallow audiences, not narrow and deep ones. To appeal to internationalist audiences, including the big ones in the rest of the world, nearly all the so-called dissident voices (from the groypers to the “heterodox” figures) went anti-American.
On the traditional left, the people-are-just-zombie-food movement gathered steam. Bernie Sanders’ endless Vegas act took on secondary headliners in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani and started attracting bigger audiences—almost none of whom were smart enough to notice that the solutions being offered were literally from the 19th century. (Industrial unions? Made up of whom, exactly? The robots?)
Fortunately for the left, their ranks were big enough, and enmeshed enough with Silicon Valley, that someone somewhere finally realized they’d do well to at least cloak their anti-American, internationalist aspirations in future-y garb. An idea was born: Let’s use technology and surveillance to build our version of utopia!
Donors paid their tabs; frontmen were found. They even stood up their own cool social movement, known as effective altruism. What’s fascinating about EA is how clear it is about being anti-culture—indeed, anti anything that respects or even admits differences between humans, let alone nations. “The implicit model [of EA] is that moral weight is fungible and location-independent. A life saved is a life saved, regardless of relational distance,” noted one critic on X, who explained that, in rooting its principles in boundarylessness and math as opposed to one’s high-touch relationships with real humans whose lives and fates are directly tied to your own, EA becomes a system not for tackling the hardest questions of life, but for avoiding them. “Morality isn’t just an allocation problem. You have moral obligations *because* you’re situated. Because you’re a parent, a neighbor, a member of a community, a participant in a local web of mutual dependency.” If, however, you are none of those pesky human things, you create less friction for global, digital systems—which is the point.
What almost no politician seemed able to offer is a type of politics that could appeal to a sense of collective purpose that would inspire and mobilize a majority of citizens. In the absence of such an appeal, the result across the West has been a series of fractured coalition governments riven by street politics that increasingly resemble outright warfare.
Almost out of nowhere, the one thing that seemingly everyone—elites, normies, old, young, right, left—suddenly agreed on was that their problem was … Zionism. Israel is uniquely evil, they claimed, because it is an “ethnostate.”
At first, this seemed like an odd answer to the most important challenge of the moment—which was the dangerously rapid decline of their own “melting pot” states. But when seen in this light, it becomes obvious that the attacks on Israel were in fact attacks on everyone else’s national identities. If Zionism, as a nationalist movement, is held to be somehow lacking in legitimacy, it’s in order to make sure that France and Germany—much younger nations, with long histories of starting wars with their neighbors and conquering other peoples and territory—are also illegitimate. If Zionist settlers have no place living in Palestine, a land in which no previous sovereign nation-state had ever existed over the previous millennia, that was established as the national homeland of the Jewish people under international law, and where Jews continue to practice the same religion and speak the language of their ancestors from 3,500 years ago, then by what possible right can citizens of settler nations like the United States or Australia claim to inhabit their own countries and to own their homes?
Please stop being dumb. Zionism did not become a target because of the supposed “crimes” of the Israeli government, which ordered the invasion of Gaza in response to a massive attack on its own country in which Islamist terrorists raped women, murdered elderly Holocaust survivors, massacred leftist kibbutzniks, and mowed down hundreds of partygoers at a rave. Zionism became a target because it represented what Westerners on the right claim to desperately want but are unable to attain, and what Westerners on the left wish to define as impossible: a form of nationalism that is oriented toward the future rather than the past and that is able to defend its own particularism while protecting individual and social freedoms.
Here are four survival tests for free societies that, as of today, only Israel passes:
Can you maintain your demographics? Israelis have kids above the replacement level, which makes them unique among Western states. Israelis are voting in the most unmistakable and important way for their own future.
Can you defend yourself? Israelis are willing to fight and die to defend their country and each other in a way that citizens of other Western countries simply are not. (In this month’s attack on Iran, the head of the Israeli Air Force wasn’t in a control tower or office; he was in the skies with his pilots, flying one of the planes.) People who are unwilling to fight for their own survival tend not to survive.
Are you happy? Israel is reliably among the happiest nations on earth, despite being involved in frequent violent wars. Is it a placid society with no civil conflict? Nothing could be further from the truth. What they are is a people close to the land, who are also tech innovators; who travel the world but, when they’re in the country, spend every Friday night with their family; who are secular enough to live in one of the sexiest cities in the world as well as a different city so steeped in the history of religious longing that it has its own syndrome; where people sip lattes near sites containing artifacts dating back to 125 B.C.E., and boys go up to talk to girls in real life.
Final test: In a world of ultrapowerful information tools that allow small numbers of people unprecedented leverage over real-world challenges, national success is no longer a question of who can field the largest army or the biggest workforce. Instead, success goes to whoever can field the smartest and most cohesive teams. If I told you, at the dawn of an AI revolution likely to redefine everything about humans and their output, that you had to be president of one of two countries—either a nation of 70 million people struggling with drugs, obesity, and millions of people who either do not wish to accommodate or openly hate their neighbors and the wider culture, or a country of 10 million people, half of whom (both men and women) have been trained and have served in an army, and another whole swath of whom learn an obscure and intense legalistic document all day—which one would you choose?
This alchemy of old and new, of taking control of one’s own fate and changing the stream of history in mid-course, is characteristic of Zionism. It is also how Zionism, having fulfilled its promise for the Jews, becomes a technology for national renewal that could, conceivably, be used by anyone.
To see what I mean, contrast what’s happening throughout the West with Javier Milei’s presidency in Argentina. In answer to a country whose economy was collapsing and whose national culture had become mired in anxiety and depression, Milei presented Argentines with the prospect of being part of a new and hopeful experiment in which they could define their country as something other than a scenic economic basket case. Instead of the usual choice between the fashionable but corrupt oligarchy of the left with their cozy deals with trade unions driving the country into bankruptcy, or the right’s more traditional Latin American oligarchy of hereditary landholders backed by the institutions of the Catholic Church and the military generals who had misgoverned the country through a nightmarish era of military rule. Instead, Milei offered a new solution, one that was both wildly idealistic and at the same time entirely pragmatic: a radical market-based “shock therapy” that every smart person in Argentina knew the country needed but no politician ever had the wherewithal to enact.
Milei is a zany but intelligent and very energetic performer. He is highly focused and aggressive (some say nuts), but he also openly flaunts the unbridled joy he feels about the country, its culture, music, and more. And his pushy physicality mirrors how he governs: One month into his term, he cut the budget by 30% and instituted a monetary policy that, in 12 months, reduced inflation from 25% a month to 2.2%. This strategy is appealing to a generation of younger professionals who’ve learned Chicago School economics at American universities, as well as to shopkeepers and hairdressers sick of broken promises and perennial stagnation. It’s an entirely new social compact, one that allows Argentines to feel rooted in their culture and past but free of its worst burdens and—inspired by Milei’s own seeming inability to sit still—energized to work toward his vision of a dramatically different, optimistic future.
In other words, what Milei is manifesting is Zionism for Argentines. Lee Kuan Yew conceptualized Zionism for Singaporeans. Narendra Modi is practicing Zionism for Indians. What connects these men is not only that they chose nationalism over internationalism—that they rooted their ideologies in the specificities of their unique cultures, which they insisted must remain separate and apart from others—but also that they are future-oriented, high-octane idealists. This balance of cultural particularism with tough-minded pragmatism and inspiring, almost unfathomable idealism? That’s Zionism.
For anyone looking to reanimate or build free societies driven by and for the advancement of human beings in all their mess and glory, the question facing you is twofold.
First, are you willing to see yourselves as part of an ethnos, a nation somehow different and apart from others? Or do you see national identities as relics of the past? This isn’t coy. Many good people today view countries as assortments of individuals bound together by the legalities of common citizenship status and passport-holding, within the larger web of nations with airports. These people are internationalists.
Second, if you do want to be a nationalist, are you past- or future-oriented? Do you fundamentally want and believe we can return to the past? This is not about whether you are religious and inspired by your spiritual and historical legacy; it’s about whether you look to that past and see the shape and details of the future.
The reason I find JD Vance off-putting is not because he’s friends with Tucker Carlson. It’s not even really that Vance’s hostility to Israel bothers me as a Jew. It’s that it bothers me as an American—because Israel is one of the primary mechanisms by which America projects power. At this point I understand why Carlson doesn’t want this; he is appealing to an international audience that does not want it. Is the same true of Vance? I don’t know. But his Obama-like refusal to appreciate and confidently assert American exceptionalism, the isolationism that feels not like protection but insecurity, the resentment of other countries and shortsighted miserliness, the VC background—it all just reeks of digitally-driven flattening, and the stagnation on the ground it inevitably produces.
It is also fundamentally risk-averse, in a very millennial way. Zionist nationalism avoided some of Europe’s challenges simply by coming very late to the party. But maybe more important, its idealism enabled it to take enormous risks without which it would never have become a reality.
For 2,000 years, Jews dreamed of returning to their homeland without being able to successfully reconstitute their national existence. The world is a very big place, and shifting powers and empires controlled the land on which other people were living. The Jews themselves were scattered, weak, and politically powerless. Which is why the magnitude of what the Zionist movement accomplished is so unlikely and so astonishing that it is natural for many people to imagine Zionism as some black arts movement backed by a nameless empire with extraordinary wealth and power at its disposal—whether that empire was secretly the British or the Americans or the Elders of Zion.
In reality, no such outside power existed. Rather, it was the determined pragmatism and wild hope of a few thousand men and women, itself the heritage of a national aspiration kept alive for thousands of years in daily prayers, that birthed a modern state. That state started with many fewer resources than its neighbors, who were backed by the British Empire, but would soon exceed them all in military and economic power. It is no accident that Herzl’s famous phrase—“If you will it, it is no dream”—has two parts: the will, but also the dream.
This is the key to facing the digital future, which will be driven not by the people with the most Harvard degrees or congressional internships or Instagram followers—but by the highest-energy risk-takers. “I love struggling, actually,” said Olympic skater Alysa Liu in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Sharyn Alfonsi, who appeared both confused and offended by the concept. “It makes me feel alive.” Liu was being perfectly descriptive and insightful about this moment. Struggling is something humans do that robots do not.
Watching a new generation grok this, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been one of the rare bright spots of the past year: “It will feel so good to do the hard thing. It will feel so, so good. You don’t even have to succeed at the hard thing right away, you can fail. It doesn’t matter. You will still feel good. And the more you do it the better you’ll feel. Once you realize that you’re capable, you’ll cringe at your past self who flailed about in helplessness.”
Now all we need is to find them some leaders who understand this, who get that struggle does not mean sadism or self-abuse, both of which are fundamentally weak and defeatist attitudes. Leaders who understand that successful nationalism is not jingoism or ethnic chauvinism. It’s about understanding and embracing the reality that we all approach the world with our own distinct history and point of view—and that without this we are not liberated, but bereft.
I get the challenge here: Too many people have spent too many generations disconnected from their own cultural tethers to be able to recognize them, let alone articulate them anew. Find your poets, artists, and historians! (Trust me: They can use the work.) Find people unafraid to admire Zionism for modeling that it is only through the particular that we can truly reach the universal—because it is our particularities that make us real.
And not only leaders. As we enter an era dominated by technologies and political ideologies designed to flatten the differences between humans, attach yourself to family, friends, and others who understand that erasing our differences doesn’t bring us closer to other people; it just makes us more like the machines. Together, aim to make your collective success so outlandish and so implausible that enemies and strangers can’t help but conjure up conspiracy theories about how you could have possibly achieved it.
In antiquity, the Jews bequeathed to the world the concept of the nation, as distinct from tribe and empire—which in turn gave rise to modern national identity. Now, with Zionism, Israel has again provided the world with a framework for the future, this time to avoid and transcend the twin impulses toward digital disintegration of identity and self-worship. Don’t be so afraid of the gift or so pointlessly resentful of the giver that you deprive yourself and those around you of what you deserve. As we say in Yiddish, nutz gezunterheit: Use it in good health.
And you’re welcome.
