Failed states: a tale of two walls

The ethnonational state, particularly when organised around ancestry, historical trauma and permanent insecurity, doesn’t cure collective vulnerability. It tends to institutionalise it, giving fear, grievance and supremacy a bureaucracy and an army. Germany and Israel are not ‘failed states’ in the conventional sense: both built formidable institutions and proved exceptionally capable of projecting power. Rather, they reveal how readily the nation-state condition itself is prone to failure, mistaking a people’s legitimate desire for security and collective life for an unrestricted right to possess the state, define its population and dominate and murder those who fall outside the national story.

The grand halls of Versailles are famous for many things. Their golden splendour, for one. Students of history will point to the punitive treaty of surrender imposed on Germany after World War I. As to the boisterous delusion that led Donald Trump to choose the location to sign the memorandum of ‘understanding’ after the disastrous US-Israeli war against Iran — conceding to all of the latter’s demands — one can only marvel. But scratch, and the warren of failure goes a level deeper.

France didn’t choose Versailles to humiliate — and essentially end — the German empire by accident. For it was the Germans who in 1871 marched into its mirrored corridors to proclaim victory over their Gallic arch-nemesis, and their own late arrival into the family of European nation states. German historians of the Romantic era consciously framed this genesis in the trauma of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–1648 — not so much a rabbit hole as an archaeological dig.

The image they saw reflected back at them in Versailles was that of ‘victims’: first of scheming and warring Europeans who cost them a third of their population (a politically motivated exaggeration, later historians assert), and after 1918, of Jews and Bolsheviks — used more or less interchangeably at the time. The new German state rested on the so-called ius sanguinis, or ‘blood right’, linking people to the land by familial — later reinterpreted as genetic — lineage, rather than treating nationality as something that can be joined or earned ‘simply’ by choosing to live in a place and adapting to its mores. France presents itself in the latter light, as does the United States (recent attempts to subvert its founding philosophy notwithstanding). Germany’s history matters here not because Germans are uniquely dangerous, but because it reveals what can happen when collective insecurity acquires borders, institutions and sovereign force.

Victim’s Victim’s Victim

In 1948, fresh from another World War, German ‘victimhood’ spawned yet another European nation state with blood-based membership rules: Israel. This state is in many ways Germany’s mirror image, their geneses more intertwined than a ‘mere’ Holocaust would suggest. The Zionist movement predates Nazism, rooted as it was in Europe’s antisemitic core; but once it got underway in practical terms, it needed anti-Jewish policies to push enough Jews out of Europe and into the Holy Land to make the new state viable. As inelegant as it may sound, up to a point, Nazism’s and Zionism’s interests coincided. Israel’s Law of Return, moreover, resembles Hitler’s Nuremberg system in its bureaucratic reliance on Jewish genealogy, though it functions less as a mirror than as a partial inverse: descent that once triggered exclusion can now trigger privileged admission.

Germany has since come to terms with its past — or so they would have themselves believe. Nazi perpetrators were rounded up and put away, reparations paid, and a culture of remembrance and contrition — Erinnerungskultur — instated. In practical terms, this meant that the Jewish-Israeli state received the German state’s wholehearted support to build out its homeland: not in Saxony-Anhalt, Bavaria, or North Rhine-Westphalia, but in Palestine. In other words, Germany’s victims were free to victimise anyone of their choosing. Germany’s original sin, then, was exported much in the way old cars or mountains of discarded garments are dumped across the developing world.

Staatsräson

In today’s Germany, questioning unconditional diplomatic support for Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinian land, dispossession and daily murder, or the seemingly limitless arms sales that sustain it, is treated as something close to treason. Germans of Palestinian descent are the primary target of this policy, but German Jews are far from immune. For example, Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost, a Berlin-based Jewish anti-Zionist association, has on multiple occasions had its bank accounts frozen. Their bank demanded, among other things, a list of the association’s members before it would restore access. One hundred and fifty-five years after its founding, Germany has failed at the essential task it set itself after World War II: to reckon with its atrocious past. As a consequence, the country that once led Europe in philosophy and science stands politically and culturally diminished. A failure of historic proportions.

While the destruction of the Herero and Nama peoples reflected its white supremacism, German antisemitism — like the entire German national project — was steeped in an inferiority complex. German Jews, among Europe’s most integrated — doctors, lawyers, philosophers, scientists — were seen as competitors. Not as what they actually were: an integral component of Germany’s pre-World War I stature as Europe’s most advanced nation.

Racism born of perceived inferiority — ‘status-anxious majoritarianism’ — is not exclusive to Germany and its Jews. Comparable dynamics appeared in the Russian pogroms against its Jews, and in Ottoman persecution of Armenians and Greeks. In Nigeria, Igbo success in education, administration, and commerce fed fantasies of Igbo domination that contributed to the pogroms of 1966. The Rwandan genocide drew on similar dynamics, with Hutu extremists presenting mass violence as a popular “rising up” against supposedly privileged Tutsis. The minority was stereotyped simultaneously as unusually capable, clannish, exploitative and disloyal. Adding insult to Teutonic injury, it was first German and later Belgian colonial rule that hardened more fluid social distinctions in Rwanda and Burundi into ethnic categories of rulers and ruled, the better to govern both societies from above.

Circumstance, Not Chromosomes

What Zionism has wrought in Palestine is by now well known and disputed by few. It has led to yet another genocide: Israel’s first and, by complicity, Germany’s third. The failure of Germany’s national project has much in common with Israel’s. The demise of both — from admired scions of European Enlightenment to something altogether much reduced — is linked to their physical separation.

It would be difficult to attribute Germany’s former ‘greatness’ primarily to its pre-1933 Jewish minority, and more difficult still to suggest that one group was simply ‘smarter’ than another. In an age still strongly shaped by genetic explanations of human difference, such claims are analytically hazardous and can all too easily reproduce the racial thinking they seek to reject, notwithstanding the disproportionately high per capita share of PhDs and Nobel laureates among Jews, a point repeatedly raised with me by a Jewish friend.

This author roundly rejects the reigning paradigm that places nature far above nurture. Where once respectable scientists explained human destiny, from intelligence to a propensity for violence, through the size and shape of people’s skulls, today all ills and virtues seem to pass through a genetic lens. I am convinced we will look back on this era with wry derision. The heights of astronomy and law achieved under the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid in the early ninth century are not hardwired into Arabs. The rise of British industry does not sit in the ‘English DNA’. Nor does its demise into the pathetic shambles that is post-Brexit Britain. It is circumstance, I believe — opportunities seized upon or foregone, plus a handy dose of purest chance — that makes or breaks people and nations alike.

Portable homeland

The circumstances that, across three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, helped foster Jewish intellectual and cultural achievement often arose from proximity to, at the same time partial separation from, larger societies. This has always been a precarious position to be in: relegated to the socio-economic margins, subjected to repeated pogroms in Tsarist Russia, taxed as a ‘protected’ minority alongside Christians under Muslim caliphates and the Ottoman Empire, and violently expelled from Reconquista Spain. This sense of interdependence without quite belonging, combined with religious traditions of textual study, urban life, multilingualism, trading networks, and exclusion from land or guilds, encouraged investment in portable forms of capital: learning, professional skills, communal networks, and a lattice of tradition, science, and religious scholarship. It also fostered an outward vigilance, a habit of watching for dangers, of which there were many. None of this was universal, nor did persecution itself ‘produce’ Jewish intellectual prowess. Rather, particular institutions and historical constraints repeatedly rewarded knowledge that could survive displacement.

Fish out of Water

All this did not come to an end in 1948, but it acquired a powerful counter-current. The roughly 750,000 Jews then in Palestine, some 7% of the world’s 11 million, became citizens of a sovereign state built explicitly as Jewish refuge and homeland. Today, 45% of the world’s 16 million Jews live in ‘the Jewish state’. This discussion does not concern who among Israel’s Jewish citizens are Zionist or anti-Zionist, nor the growing disenchantment, indeed anti-Zionism, among diaspora Jews. It concerns the different habits rewarded by different historical conditions. Minority existence often rewarded literacy, mobility, multilingual exchange, communal networks and the ability to read the surrounding society. Israel’s dominant institutions increasingly reward territorial possession, military conformity, demographic anxiety and siege thinking. These are not properties of ‘Jews’ or ‘Jewish thought’, but incentives created by a state that has made ethnonational supremacy its organising principle.

The transition from precarious minority to armed sovereign majority has pushed Israel’s dominant political culture towards a moral breaking point. To some, Israel is a launching pad for American militarism in a resource-rich region. To an increasing proportion of Americans, it is bogging the United States down in adventurous and costly policies diametrically opposed to its own interests. There are arguments to be had for both positions; though a certain wing of Trump voters likes to cast their hero and nation in the role of victim to scheming and evil Jews. Which, as strong as AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups may be in Washington, is tantamount to denying the world’s most powerful nation any agency of its own. As if the US needed much additional persuasion to let its post-Cold War absolute power go to its head.

Between the river and the law

Within Israel’s dominant institutions, something has nevertheless been lost: not Jewish intelligence or moral capacity, neither of which was ever a biological inheritance, but some of the intellectual and ethical friction created by proximity, exchange and the need to see oneself through another’s eyes. National enclosure has encouraged an intellectual laziness: criticism can be dismissed as antisemitism, violence as self-defence and every Palestinian claim as proof of an eternal siege. Israel is a failed state as much as it is a state of failure, not because its institutions have collapsed — not yet — but because they work efficiently towards a morally bankrupt purpose.

Consider the mono-state that already exists in all but name. Between the river and the sea, a single power — the Israeli army — controls all of historical Palestine, with Palestinian rights apportioned in carefully calibrated, divide-and-conquer gradations: nominal voting rights inside official Israel; revocable residency in East Jerusalem; military law in the West Bank; and in Gaza, the right to be shot on sight — man, woman, or child. Beyond even these lines, it occupies swaths of Lebanon and Syria. Its prime minister, among other government officials, is a wanted man — indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity while a genocide case grinds on in The Hague. The country has become a pariah on the world stage, not least among a growing number of Jews abroad.

A small part of a larger whole

After the Second World War, there were Allied schemes to keep Germany permanently weak. The American Morgenthau Plan envisaged deindustrialisation and a largely pastoral economy, while the Soviet Union dismantled factories and extracted reparations and labour from its occupation zone, helping to entrench Germany’s division. Western Europe’s leaders went the other way: instead of breaking Germany up into smaller parts, they endeavoured to make it a small part of a larger whole, defanging its dangerous inclinations through coal, steel, and ever-closer union.

This worked, up to a point. The neo-Nazi Alternative Für Deutschland now leads several national polls and stands poised to become the largest political party in several Länder. It is preparing for regional power and dreams openly of federal office. Whether it can breach the remaining political firewall is uncertain. So too is whether the old German reflexes were reformed or merely contained by prosperity, American protection and European institutions.

The Impossible Arithmetic

Germany’s godchild Israel meanwhile looks much weaker, despite standing at its territorial zenith and despite ministers dreaming openly of annexation and conquering Lebensraum from the Nile to the Euphrates. It has committed horrendous genocide in Gaza, still ongoing, yet Jews constitute only about half the population whose lives the state now controls between the river and the sea. Sooner or later, Israel must grant the non-Jewish half a say in how they are governed, meaning an equal vote and the end of Jewish political supremacy, or relinquish the non-Jewish territories it rules.

Traditionally, that ‘two-state solution’ meant withdrawing from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. But the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been so thoroughly fragmented by Jewish settlements, settler roads, military zones and the so-called separation barrier that a viable Palestinian state is increasingly difficult to imagine without unimaginable mass evacuation of settlements or land swaps on an unprecedented scale. Israel therefore faces an arithmetic that no quantity of hasbara can resolve: share the state equally, or retreat from land it cannot govern democratically. Permanent occupation equals apartheid without end, and no system built on racist inequality lasts for ever.

No country for old notions

I, for one, remain optimistic. Not that the status quo will solidify or be ‘pacified’, but that a critical mass will be reached. The wall of shame, like the one that divided Berlin and the two Germanys, and which bites deep into and steals much of the Palestinian West Bank, will come down in our lifetime. Few expected the Berlin Wall to fall when it did. Until it did. All that took was a senescent politician bungling an interview question on live television.

When this wall comes down, I do not believe a democratic settlement need entail sending the Jews packing, seventy years of hasbara notwithstanding. Some Palestinians undoubtedly do; some Jewish Israelis will leave rather than live as equals, just as some white South Africans departed after the fall of the despicable apartheid regime. But revenge is not destiny. The more difficult task will be restitution, constitutional safeguards, shared institutions and the slow replacement of impunity with citizenship.

Near, not apart

Jewish life has often been at its richest in exchange with non-Jewish societies, not sealed off from them. North African countries from Morocco to Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East, became poorer places after their Jewish communities left or were driven out by a combination of nationalist excesses and Mossad false flag attacks. The same is true of Europe. A return of some Jewish communities to Arab countries is imaginable, and would be a splendid reversal of history, though it would require security, political change and invitation rather than nostalgia alone. Conversely, it is hardly difficult to understand why many Jews would feel no desire to return to Europe, a continent whose promises of belonging have so often proved conditional. Would you?

The classical nation state is perhaps not obsolete. Economically and technologically porous, it remains emotionally ferocious: people still want a political home, a story about who ‘we’ are and some control over collective life. Prosperity, globalisation and European integration did not dissolve those desires. They merely made nationalism briefly unfashionable. Nor is multinational government automatically humane. The decisive question is whether power is divided or absolute, citizenship open or hereditary, and rights protected from revocation by a majority. A nation may be entitled to cultural expression. It is not entitled to unrestricted possession of the state. Germany and Israel thus appear not as uniquely wicked among many others with blood on their hands, but as two stages in an experiment: one constrained through shared sovereignty and larger institutions, the other indulged in the belief that collective trauma confers a right to permanent supremacy.

Next year in equality

We cannot go back and repeat the same mistakes with the victims and perpetrators rearranged. Antisemitism cannot be cured by institutionalising anti-Palestinian supremacy. Germany cannot redeem its crimes by underwriting Israel’s. The task is not to send anyone ‘back’, but to move everyone forward: from blood right to equal rights, from fortified separation to complex coexistence. Germany’s best post-war lesson was not that dangerous nations must be indulged, but that sovereignty can and should be diluted, power shared and old enemies bound into common institutions. The different inhabitants of Palestine will need their own version of that imaginative defeat: not two peoples purified of one another, but one land in which neither has to disappear for the other to belong. The wall will fall. The only question is what is built on its ruins.