Sorta Contra Zionists

Not really, unless...

I’ve garnered a bunch of Zionist subscribers (for some reason…) and in an effort to preemptively stave off the neo-scourge of audience capture, I take this opportunity to tell everyone to fuck off politely express my limited disagreements.

I’m exaggerating. Practically speaking, under present circumstances, there is virtually no daylight between my positions and those of secular, libertarian-ish Zionists such as Haviv Rettig Gur or Einat Wilf (Those links are long but highly recommended). Nevertheless, I don’t want there to be any surprises. More importantly, I want to show how a consistent application of my long-held principles — as an atheist, anarchist libertarian — ended up aligning me so closely with what is nominally an ethno-religious state.

Society is Fake and…

Some of you already know but I fully own up to being an extremist on the topic of individualism. You know that Margaret Thatcher quote about there being no such thing as society? That’s me! In a 1987 interview, she was bemoaning people who blame abstract “society” for their problems, slightly paraphrased as: “Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women.”

Her point was pretty banal: There is no corporeal manifestation of society at large, no singular entity with blossoming appendages wriggling out. Society is a fiction, a construct — a simple story we tell to summarize a complex and alienating world. When we say an orchestra performed beautifully, we’re simplifying a hundred distinct musicians — violinists, cellists, flautists, percussionists, even that one enthusiastic cowbell player — each making precise, individual contributions into one cohesive sound. We talk about the ensemble as a tangible unit because it’s easier, but in reality only individuals act.

So groups are fictions, albeit very useful fictions! Unavoidably, whenever we discuss any group’s actions, we are always glossing over the discrete actions of individual men and women. And that makes sense, because only individuals can make decisions, and only individuals can hold culpability for those decisions.

I’m still embarrassed to admit this as a putative anarchist, but I’ve grown much more appreciative of certain kinds of nationalism and patriotism — but only as vehicles for ideas and values to manifest, not as tribal blood rites. I used to scoff at the “value” of the American Revolution for example (So many dead, and for what?), but I now much better appreciate that many liberalism ideals I cherish might never have spawned out into the world otherwise.

As exemplified by America, liberalism took over the world (at least, it did for a while…) precisely because of its open membership policy.¹ Ronald Reagan captured this cosmopolitan advantage in his farewell address, noting: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

If you’re seeking a supporting entourage to help you through life, screening cohesion on having the “right” melanin or hereditary lineage is a losing gamble, inevitably shrinking your talent pool. By contrast, screening cohesion on shared ideals rather than shared blood gives a huge competitive advantage because it lets anyone jump on board. There was no better illustration of the strength of this dynamic than this viral video of a bunch of Noo Yawk Ciddy construction workers vehemently scolding someone for shredding posters of kidnapped Israeli children. One of them squared up, declaring: “I’m not Jewish, he’s not Jewish, but this is Noo Yawk Ciddy, you don’t have a fucking right to touch that shit. This is a free country. You can wave your Palestine flag and say ‘death to the Jews and America’ or whenever you want, but we can put up fucking signs!”

Their solidarity in that moment was about defending a principle, not protecting a tribe. So societies are fake and accidental, but so is all morality. The artificiality does not dilute their utility. Under the hood it’s just individuals making decisions, yet the narratives and values that bind those individuals can be incredibly powerful.

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Individuals are All

Forget what I just said above for a moment — ideally, nobody should ever rally around any collectivist identity. I recognize that my hardcore dedication to individualism makes me an aberration. I know.

I can acknowledge the current practical reality: group identities and affiliations are indeed how most of us make sense of the world. They’re often how we propagate values, build institutions, and foster shared understandings. Totally!

And yet, identity affiliation is a double-edged sword, as cohesion can also be fostered towards unrelenting hatred and unthinkable atrocities. Genocidal massacres become trivially possible when we don narratives capable of excusing whatever violence we mete out, and history’s most consistently compelling narrative has always been US v. THEM.

But sometimes the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a double-edged sword is a good guy with a double-edged sword. So given this unyielding reality, I do support identity-based bulwarks — but only to the extent they’re used to protect against identity-based hostility. Beyond that, I’m indifferent at best, and do not inherently value the existence of any particular identity group. Any value I place on group identity is practical, strictly limited to the extent it helps foster other outcomes I care about (secular humanist and materialist goals, say). Otherwise, no.

I often forget what an outlier I am on this issue, until I get jolted by reactions from both left and right. Plenty has already been written about the inevitable failures of this vision on the left, particularly in the morally confused conclusions this Manichean oppressed/oppressor binary leads to.

From the right, I’m reminded how often loser individuals try to hide their lack of personal achievement behind the skirt of collective glory. My disdain for identitarianism (of any kind, though white identitarianism tends to be the most egregious in this dimension) isn’t borne out by some unattached notion that “racism is bad”— it’s visceral contempt for pathetic individuals desperately masking their own inadequacies behind group pride. Nobody expressed this better than Ayn Rand² of all people in her anti-racism essay:

The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.

In other words, group-based pride or blame is a cheap substitute for actual merit. It’s the barnyard logic of taking credit (or assigning guilt) by association, rather than standing on your own feet. And I have nothing but scorn for it.

For similar reasons, I reject the idea of loyalty — at least in the unconditional sense. The guiding lights of my life (and I’d argue any constructive ethical life) are reciprocity, generosity, and a dash of forgiveness. When a longtime friend asks for a favor, I’ll happily oblige. Calling this “loyalty” seems unnecessary to me but, whatever.

Group loyalty, however, is hopelessly incoherent. It is antithetical to everything I stand for to treat any individual better or worse because of what some other member of their group did or did not do.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not some unfeeling robot. Group affiliations can matter to me, but only when they emerge from shared individual experiences or values. I wrote how the television show Ramy, about a millennial Muslim grappling with living in the US, made me understand on a deep visceral level what it meant to see myself “represented” in media. I don’t mean the superficial gesture of matching Pantone color swatches, but rather a fundamental appreciation of experiences only a few of us shared:

I loved the dichotomy portrayed of trying to date as a Muslim and justifying all the rule breaking you engage in when you have sex. The scene where Ramy's sister hooks up with a white guy is hands down my favorite 90 seconds of television ever. When Ramy's uncle accuses the jews of being tipped off on 9/11, I laughed because my uncle said the same thing. When he travels to his home country of Egypt and fills entire suitcases full of Bengay to dole out as gifts to his family, I remembered the hours of suitcase Tetris my mom played before any trip trying to cram as many banal pedestrian "gifts" as possible.

The only reason these moments resonated with me was because of my shared cultural background with the protagonist. But notice: the appreciation is grounded in concrete experiences between individuals, not in some abstract obligation to “our group.”

It should be no surprise that I reject any and all criticism lobbed at anti-Zionist Jews because they are Jews. I find it repugnant when pro-Israel Jews deride anti-Zionist Jews as self-hating or as tokenizing themselves, as if individuals owe fealty to a birth tribe. Sure, there are always a few opportunists who drain their identity of color just to curry favor in certain circles, and that can be criticized for the performative identitarianism that it is.

But through my intensely individualistic prism, I cannot find anything inherently wrong or contradictory with a Jew — as a Jew — who advocates for the end of Israel. I understand why some Jews feel betrayed by that stance; but it’s just not a feeling or value I share or ever want to endorse. A person’s ethnic or religious identity should have no bearing on the merits of their arguments. If someone is against Israel, I’ll evaluate their reasons as reasons. I’m not deducting points because of their last name or DNA.

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Accidental Support

Combine all the above principles, and you might ask: why on earth would I support an ethno-state? Ultimately, it’s accidental and practical.

Look, I think all religions are delusions — but we already established that some delusions are more useful than others. Ironically, most of what I appreciate about Israel writ-large are explicitly the aspects that least center on its specifically Jewish character. I love that Israel has a large Muslim (and Druze, and Christian) population living in peace and prosperity as full citizens. Had Israel actually been an apartheid state that treated its Arab citizens as inferiors for being Arabs (like the caricature imagined by those who huff Instagram slideshows for knowledge), I’d part ways without hesitation. Same if Israeli law or culture were to enshrine Orthodox religious rules — say, enforcing strict Sabbath observance or anti-LGBT measures, or other bits of outdated rabbinical law. In a parallel universe, Israel could have ended up a destitute backwater theocracy. In this universe, thankfully, it did not.

So this moment is a sort of happy accident. My support for Israel is 0% based on its Jewish ethnonational character. I do not care about ethnicity, “historic homeland” narratives, language, religion, or any of that primordial soup.

Freddie deBoer wrote This is Zion, arguing that instead of Israel, it’s the United States that should serve as the safe haven for Jews. Fundamentally, I don’t disagree! However, the fatal problem with his essay is that he treats contemporary American tolerance of Jews as a fait-accompli inevitability. deBoer doesn’t even try to grapple with the fact that many Jews who survived the Holocaust were forced by the Allies to continue living for years in the same concentration camps they were supposedly liberated from. They were no longer being starved or exterminated, but they still had nowhere else to go. The severe quotas imposed on Jewish immigration to America were not lifted until 1948…not until one month after the founding of Israel. What a coincidence!

So there is very little I agree with him on this topic, but deBoer is nevertheless correct to dismiss “The Jewish people need the Jewish homeland because they are Jewish and because it is their homeland.” as nothing more than tribal mysticism and blood & soil nationalism. I made a similar point in my piece Who Controls The Dirt?:

I absolutely do not care what ethnicity occupied the place 2,000 years ago, nor do I care to tally up the lengthy list of historical grievances. There’s ardent nationalists on both sides of the conflict who strenuously disagree with me, tant pis. The only aspect that matters to me regarding which sovereign should hold dominion is based on which government is the superior steward.

I can understand the historical desperation that gave Zionism its emotional force. I get why the idea of a Jewish homeland felt like do-or-die to many, because it absolutely was! But empathizing with that context does not mean I buy into the “this land is ours because our ancestors lived here” logic. I roll my eyes at those who insist on calling the West Bank by biblical-era names like Judea and Samaria, or fanatical settlers who believe they are fulfilling a divine purpose with their bulldozers. That whole mindset is as alien to me as any other form of mysticism.

The only things I do care about are 100% material and human. I care about human lives, material well-being, physical safety — along with ethereal ideals to the extent they further material issues. I appreciate Israel only for its tangible qualities and the values it upholds in practice: how wealthy and innovative it is, how cosmopolitan, how democratic, how resilient it has been in defending liberal values under siege. In other words, because I’m a special little snowflake, I appreciate Israel only to the extent that it extends or affirms a value I already subscribe to.

The further Israel would stray from upholding those values — say it became poorer, less democratic, more theocratic or authoritarian or xenophobic — the faster it would lose my support, with zero hesitation or regret on my part.

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Now What?

I’m destined to come back to this point again and again: the reason I ever got interested in learning so much about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the first place was as an attempt for me to make sense of the undeniable and relentless display of jubilant Jewish hatred that was in reaction to a wholesale massacre of Jews. Ironic cannot even begin to describe this.

I’m also destined to repeat this other point. This tepid condemnation, posted on my Instagram just a couple of weeks after October 7th, prompted several real life friends of mine (many of whom I’ve known for at least a decade) to immediately cut off contact:

In case you’re wondering, yes, almost everyone who cut me off because of this was a lefty white woman. Good job, you get points!

The only wording I might revise is that I now struggle to identify Palestinian concerns I’d unhesitatingly label valid, but whatever, pedantic.

First of all, I was totally fucking right about the protest movement signing its own death warrant because it was too enamored with Jihadi simps. Fucking Nostradamus over here! But second of all, if this is your inviolable line in the sand, holy shit good fucking riddance! I’m glad you put effort in outing yourself, because I want nothing to do with you anyways.

While I remain deeply disturbed by the rise of this neo-antisemitism that tries to pretend it’s anything but, I was never its target. And I can only imagine how the unthinkable horrors of Hamas’s massacres were further compounded and stretched out for months on end, needlessly and cruelly, by vindictive psychopaths directly celebrating its depravity from their safety in the West.

True to form, I want to do whatever I can to degrade this poisonous ideology into obsolescence. It’s no surprise that many Jews I met have reacted with effusive gratitude, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with this adoration for two distinct but overlapping reasons.

The first dimension is benign: I shouldn’t be thanked for doing something so banal! There is nothing special — or rather, there shouldn’t be anything special — about identifying tribal hatred and saying “Hey this is really fucked up.” The fact that it’s met with such unyielding gratitude is a deeply depressing reflection of the environment Jews currently navigate. I’m sorry for all the sickening bullshit you people have had to endure, all the garbage that has been shoveled in your direction, simply because you have committed the sin of existing. Reminding you that you are not alone should be the bare minimum expected of any human.

The second dimension is practically inconsequential but nevertheless troublesome: I don’t want anyone to assume my support for Israel means I’m somehow on Team Yahud in a tribal sense. Because let me be totally clear: I don’t like Jews. By which I mean, I don’t automatically like anyone just because they happen to be Jewish. As much as I disdain collectivist identity in principle, I can still appreciate and love individual Jews in my life, and appreciate specific facets of Jewish culture when expressed by individuals.

But I’m not going to like or dislike anyone because of what demographic box they check. I’m happy to be an ally against identity-based hostility directed at any group persecuted for who they are (as opposed to what they do or what they believe). My solidarity is based on principles, not kinship.

The flipside of this discomfort is when I get special praise for my own background. Yes, for the record: I’m an Arab and an ex-Muslim. Despite my wishes otherwise, I’m still an identity boy living in an identity world, and I understand within this context why allyship is extra-meaningful coming from a member of the opposing tribe. So while the thanks undoubtedly comes from a good place, accepting it makes me worry I’m reinforcing a worldview I think we’d all be better off without — the one that marks in-group loyalty as default, and deviations as remarkable. I do not subscribe to that.

On the bright side, highlighting my Arab background can serve a purpose only if it convinces others that they too are not bound by tribal loyalty. Yes, you can be an Arab and wholeheartedly appreciate what Israel stands for. It’s only a contradiction if you have a dim-witted, tribal view of the world.

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This probably all sounded way more ominous than I intended. Basically, I’m firing a warning shot across the bow — letting you know upfront the basis of my conditional solidarity, as well as all the ways I’ll abandon you if those bases erode. I’m just making explicit what should never have been assumed.

I have no interest in fostering the whole tribal-affiliation edifice. My allegiance lies not with any ethno-religious construct but with the principles of secular humanism and extreme individualism. It’s why I believe enterprises founded upon shared ethnicity (or other accidents of birth) are ultimately self-defeating dead-ends.

There is nothing Jewish about me, and yet here I am — standing firmly with Israel’s right to flourish. And you can stand here too, no matter what your background, as long as you share the same values. And I find no message more inspiring.

1. “Open” is comparatively speaking, in case you want to be pedantic.

2. I might expand on this in the future but I think Rand is severely misunderstood as a philosopher, primarily as a result of her insistence on peculiar definitions of common vocabulary. For now, I highly recommend

Richard Hanania

’s recent guide Ayn Rand for Pragmatists.