Yoram Hazony’s Israeli Model (w/ Suzanne Schneider)
Added 2024-07-19 17:27:04 +0000 UTCLast week, as Israel continued to prosecute its eliminationist war against Palestinians in Gaza, an eclectic group of right-wing bigwigs gathered in Washington, DC for the fourth iteration of the National Conservatism conference — convened by Yarom Hazony, an Israeli-born writer, activist, and former speechwriter for Benjamin Netanyahu. As our guest, historian Suzanne Schneider, explains, Hazony aspires to export Israel’s model of illiberal democracy and dispossession to the nations of the world. And if the embrace of NatCon by American conservatives is any indication, he is succeeding.
Nations, for Hazony, derive their legitimacy not from the consent of the governed (which, for Israel, would include disenfranchised Palestinians in the West Bank) but from God, who designated the land of Israel as the home of the Jews. All nations are born of divine covenant, not consent; political community is based on unchosen and inherited obligations extending outward in concentric circles of coercion, from the nuclear family, to the clan, to the tribe, and so on. This slipshod political theology authorizes a world of sovereign, militarized ethno-states, intensely protective of patriarchal prerogatives, and with no obligation to international law, human rights, judicial interference, or constitutional guarantees for religious or racial minorities. If Israel is the God-given home of the Jews, why shouldn't America be the God-given home of white Christians?
It’s not difficult to perceive the appeal of this vision for NatCon’s attendees, including Trumpist senators like Josh Hawley and Mike Lee, Catholic integralists like Gladdin Pappin and Chad Pecknold, racist nativists like Stephen Miller, or Viktor Orbán propagandists like John O’Sullivan. These figures may not all acknowledge or recognize their debt to Israeli Zionism, but they all look with admiration on the impunity with which Israel has treated its Arab subjects, seeing in Israel’s contempt for liberal norms, universal rights, and human dignity an aspirational model for America and the globe.
Further Reading:
Suzanne Schneider, "Light Among the Nations," Jewish Currents, Sept 28, 2023
— "How Israel’s Illiberal Democracy Became a Model for the Right," Dissent, Spring 2024.
— "Beyond Athens and Jerusalem," Strange Matters, Spring 2024.
— "A Note on Means and Ends," Dr. Small Talk (Suzanne's Substack), Feb 4, 2024.
Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (2018).
— Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022).
Sarah Jones, "The Authoritarian Plot (Live from NatCon 4)," New York Magazine, Jul 14, 2024.
Further Listening:
KYE, The Rise of Illiberal Right, Jul 2019.
KYE, Return of the National Conservatives, Nov 2021.
Comments
I don't run in super intellectual lefty circles online, and I honestly wonder this myself. Generally I see it in the form of drive-by posting and it reads as critiquing neoliberalism, so I tend to roll with that and wish people knew enough to specify. But I've seen the way right-wing rhetoric has become part of some left spaces on other issues, and it makes me wonder. It kind of dovetails with the observation in another episode (can't remember which, but I think it was the Ettingermentum episode?) about how people with low trust in the government or in society as a whole are trending rightward. I can see a version of things in which problems with neoliberalism merge into a rejection of liberalism as a whole--neoliberalism becomes seen as the ultimate form of liberalism, rather than one possibility within liberalism.
morecoffeeplease
2024-08-13 23:52:25 +0000 UTCI’m on the left, but definitely worry about low birth rates. Look at the example of South Korea. It is literally becoming a gerontocracy. https://youtu.be/lmoZ_W4WjW0?si=m4S0r5lg0_USbJJH
Chad Bailey
2024-07-29 00:07:17 +0000 UTCJFC the simping of the United States Congress for Netanyahu was sickening.
DJM
2024-07-25 20:35:49 +0000 UTCThank you for a great conversation.
David Gillman
2024-07-24 18:22:26 +0000 UTCIf anyone wants to read the Jobotinsky essay they reference here it is, https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf
DJM
2024-07-23 22:37:53 +0000 UTCYeah, that view that the Declaration proposes an equality of nations/peoples is from the paleoconservative political theorist Mel Bradford. It's stated explicitly in section VI of this article by him https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/02/how-equality-is-misleading-m-e-bradford.html
Hunter McClure
2024-07-23 16:39:06 +0000 UTCThank you for this valuable episode. It reminded me of an earlier episode, I believe with John Ganz, where Matt referenced the paleo perspective that “all men are created equal” somehow refers to equality of peoples, not equality of individuals. I’d appreciate if someone could point me to some background material expressing that point. Thanks for the incredible service you do with this program.
Patrick Thronson
2024-07-22 20:07:52 +0000 UTCThis makes me think of a lot of the COIN stuff I read and it could in some case be a 1:1 ratio with how the world is viewed. Any chances of looking at it? I know it’s not your fields but would be interesting Revolutionaries for the Right by Kyle Burke and Blowback by Chris Simpson
Kyle Reesman
2024-07-22 13:15:14 +0000 UTC“You know how your family’s a fucking nightmare? What if the state were like that?” Spat out my coffee😂
Benjamin Langer
2024-07-21 18:29:33 +0000 UTCPossibly related episode topic: I'd love to hear something on the intellectual right's complex relation to Islamic thought. We so often associate the right with unadulterated anti-Islamic sentiment, but Strauss and so many of the figures he influences are Arabists. Indeed many of them are literally teaching in Islamic studies departments and have deep respect for the Islamic tradition as they conceive it. Hell, Strauss' entire method of reading is coming out of al-Farabi and Maimonides (a Jew, sure, but one writing within Islamic philosophical tradition). This is a little explored element of the right that you guys should delve into.
Hunter McClure
2024-07-21 15:18:51 +0000 UTCCosign that this would be an excellent episode topic. The deep dives into political philosophy are always the most timeless episodes. We need more!
Hunter McClure
2024-07-21 14:59:02 +0000 UTCA tragic loss for all of us
Zachary Roussie
2024-07-21 11:18:01 +0000 UTCno big deal, just another banger from KYE
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2024-07-21 03:53:12 +0000 UTCIt is amazing how much everyone is criticizing liberalism failures. As to the left’s anti-liberalism there’s the question of what is it opposing and is there a strand of liberalism worth defending. After all liberalism in the late 19th c and early 20th more or less absorbed socialist thought, ie. Marx, but this was later purged. In an interview on American Prestige the historian Penny Von Eschen in her recent book Paradoxes of Nostalgia pointed out how much capitalism and democracy became conflated after 1989. And voices of dissent, Mandela and Vaclav Havel, were silenced. The picture of how liberalism changed throughout the 20th c is starting to be filled out. That’s the theme of Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism against Itself. Lilly Geismer has two books on suburban liberalism and the Democratic Leadership Council that propelled Clinton’s career (they don’t come out looking great). Stephanie Mudge has a dense but thorough sociology of how the left transformed itself into neoliberalism that a generation of PhD candidates will need to flesh out. The Mudge book is particularly good because it discusses how PR people, spin doctors and non-PhD economists determined Democratic politics and policy and a sort of crude “econ 101 stupid” became dominant. I’m not sure of her personal history but I think Mudge belongs to a generation of economists who became alienated from economic circles and studied sociology with an older generation like Fred Block that while respected where outside elite policy circles.
Steven Ngo
2024-07-21 03:17:10 +0000 UTCIt’s even wilder than that. I can’t find the original article anymore so I’m going off recollection. But it was about a officially state-sponsored philosopher who defined his intellectual project as the fusion of Confucianism (tradition), Maoism (social justice), and modernity (capitalism) and he had adapted the idea from Strauss that Buddhism represented a dangerous form of nihilism. To the degree that conservative intellectuals are barnacles on a ship I wonder how comfortable they are with not being the ones dictating the intellectual project.
Steven Ngo
2024-07-21 00:37:28 +0000 UTCExactly the points Ziv is making! I believe the documentary's name is The Myth of Exile. It's available on OVID.
Henry Bachofer
2024-07-20 21:13:34 +0000 UTCWow!, this is very interesting. The Straussian Great Books model totally fits with Confucian emphasis on knowing the Classics.
erik w bjorke
2024-07-20 20:40:14 +0000 UTCThis is one of the greatest KYE episodes ever!!
erik w bjorke
2024-07-20 20:36:18 +0000 UTCAdd to complications the detail of genetic continuity (if I understand correctly) between that era’s Judea/Palestine population and pre-1948 modern population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians#Comparison_of_Jews_and_Palestinians
Paul Bowman
2024-07-20 20:36:10 +0000 UTCSome of those Jews could have converted to Christianity and started speaking Greek. Later those Greek speaking Romans could have converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic and eventually turned into Palestinians. I don’t have sources to cite, but I don’t think this is implausible.
erik w bjorke
2024-07-20 20:24:21 +0000 UTCIt is fucked up that right wing European parties like National Rally and AfD are campaigning on anti-antisemitism.
erik w bjorke
2024-07-20 20:16:41 +0000 UTCI had a riff on “the Hebrew Republic,” Puritans, Anglo-American political thought that got cut 🥲 (Matt)
mjs
2024-07-20 20:05:04 +0000 UTCOn the point about the historical Jewish presence in Palestine, there is a fascinating 2-part 2013 documentary by Ilan Ziv which presents evidence being unearthed (literally) by Israeli archaeologists that suggests the majority of Jews remained in Palestine following the revolt of 66 C.E. and continued to live in Palestine long after the fall of Rome and rise of Islam. I'm not qualified to say whether this is true or not. But it does complicate the picture ... as any appeal to history should.
Henry Bachofer
2024-07-20 19:30:24 +0000 UTCMoses-era Jewish Nationalism was an anti-imperial, settler colonial nationalism / (Running and rebelling against slavery before the settler colonial conquest of Canaan). Today anti-imperial right wing nationalism a la Modi and so many others is a force for the right.
his eyes just tell him lies
2024-07-20 18:25:29 +0000 UTCThis is a start!
Paul Bowman
2024-07-20 17:23:05 +0000 UTCOnline there are a lot of socialists who tend to be ideological Marxists who really, hair on fire, hate liberalism. These socialists also don’t distinguish between conservatism and liberalism. They tend to think of these things as the same. In any discussion of liberalism I think there needs to be a distinction between the Rights of Man part of liberalism and the market/capital part of liberalism. In a lot of discussions this distinction is never made. Certain socialists also think that human rights are used as a mask to justify market capitalism. Human rights are bourgeois. Democracy is bourgeois. The idea of private property does appear in the 1789 Rights of Man. Equality can only occur with the abolition of private property and private property is propped up by the idea of rights.
erik w bjorke
2024-07-20 13:41:28 +0000 UTCI don’t take it as silly necessarily. The terms — left, liberal, illiberal — need qualifying with some care if anybody were going to get much into it, though. Which leftists hate what liberalism? That’s not a simple thing.
Paul Bowman
2024-07-20 12:41:59 +0000 UTCMore like Yorem Baloney!
Matthew Sis
2024-07-20 10:52:37 +0000 UTCThe role of anti-modern Catholicism in the broad American-European conservative movement is an interesting question. One there’s the high number of Catholic converts in the NR-set. But also the origins of the concept of totalitarianism in catholic thought and the concepts continued importance to both conservatism and liberalism. I’ve haven’t read the entirety of James Chappell’s Catholic Moderns (just the intro and scholastic article/chapter published elsewhere) but it’s an interesting and often neglected context to consider. Especially since the conservative movement is often in desperate search for a systematic theorist comparable to Marx and I wonder to what degree an anti-modern Catholicism provided it…unless until Pope Francis. Because to quote Buckley himself: if you’re going to do whatever you want, why don’t you just become a Protestant?
Steven Ngo
2024-07-20 05:29:21 +0000 UTCI suppose I was contorting the issue by focusing on journalists', rather than Americans' at large, reactions to conservative Catholics ("weird but systematic") rather than to homegrown conservative Protestants ("tiresome and blustery"). But an example of what the first post might be seeking is Tim Alberta's book about his sincere Christian friends and neighbors joining the church of anger, threat and gun.
Adam Lewis
2024-07-20 04:27:12 +0000 UTCAs a diehard KYE listener if I was to make a request it would be an episode on the Great Books model relationship to the conservative movement, past and present. After the episode on the Straussians, I wanted to learn more about him and was surprised that the top google results were articles on the effort to bring Straussian hermeneutics and the Great Books model to China. Maybe I’m just a true sicko because I mostly want to hear Matt flex his background in political philosophy and hear more gossip from his time as a conservative. Apparently reading Joshua Tait’s PhD dissertation on the intellectual history of conservatism wasn’t enough…
Steven Ngo
2024-07-20 03:14:53 +0000 UTCDisagreeing slightly with the other commentator, I think you are correct in thinking that American Christians, super generally speaking, don’t have this trait. Part of it, probably, is that among Protestants in this country it is the more conservative Evangelicals who are more likely to not care about tradition (possibly due to a belief like Sola Scriptura, which is often explicitly stated to reject tradition as a source of authority on the same level as their interpretation of scripture) and also have a kind of general suspicion of anything that seems “too Catholic”, as my grandmother once said of the mainline Methodist church I was going to)
Zachary Roussie
2024-07-20 01:59:44 +0000 UTCYeah there’s a lot of early modern political theory that makes these same sort of moves, particularly associated with the Puritans. References to the laws of the Hebrew Bible are all over their writings.
Zachary Roussie
2024-07-20 01:50:43 +0000 UTCThanks, that makes sense. I guess might partly be a reflection of a general liberal fascination with conservative aesthetics? There's also the irony in the mythology of conservatism being about holding onto what's left of a great past and how neatly that aligns with the Dems trying to preserve democracy or something like it as the GOP pushes ever further rightward. So much to chew on.
genrepunk
2024-07-20 01:38:45 +0000 UTCSilly thought: leftists hate liberalism with the fire of a thousand Suns. Could that mean that they like illiberalism?
erik w bjorke
2024-07-20 01:38:24 +0000 UTCWhat do you think is the source of the respect and deference accorded to the Catholic conversions of so many Republican politicians since Richard John Neuhaus started fishing in the DC pond years ago? Journalists know they needn't watch their language around a guilty white liberal Congregationalist like my father, but the converts like Newt Gingrich and J.D. Vance have, in addition to the usual tedious zeal, an international and historical hierarchy to substantiate their devotions.
Adam Lewis
2024-07-19 22:35:43 +0000 UTCGreat interview! Suzanne's lucid explanations helped me work some things out. Something non-Jews might not be aware of that I noticed growing up is that there's this admiration liberal Jewry has toward the brands of Judaism it sees as more authentically traditional. Religious Jews who don't keep kosher for example often see their religiosity as less authentic than a religiosity that conforms to a stricter interpretation of Halachah. This is part of what drives Chabad, a Hasidic organization that actively evangelizes to other Jews. I first became aware of them in college--they have a house at many major universities where a rabbi in residence offers free Shabbat meals to students. Chabad receives tons of donations from Jews who feel guilty that they're not "more [religiously] observant". From what I can tell, the meat of Chabad's philosophy right down to its mystical marrow is aligned with ethnonationalism. Sure, they'll say that there's a place for everyone in this world, but they teach that every nation is like a limb of the body and Jews are meant to be the head, and moreover that Jews have a layer of soul, neshamah, that gentiles do not. This isn't to say there are no liberal, progressive, or leftist interpretations of Hasidism or even the Lubavitcher school of Hasidism that the Chabadniks practice, nor that Chabad is the sole driving force in Jewish conservatism and ethnonationalism. It's really just one example of this larger phenomenon where strict fundamentalism is mistaken for authenticity and rootedness in tradition. That is, American liberal Jewry seems to see Judaism's fundamentalists as they see themselves: as the torchbearers of tradition. I'm not aware of the same admiration toward fundamentalists from Christians of non-fundamentalist leanings. Do y'all see the same thing, or is this more a uniquely Jewish phenomenon?
genrepunk
2024-07-19 19:42:02 +0000 UTCI have not listened passed the intro, but I am so happy you took on this topic. It is incredibly difficult and dangerous to discuss. You’re not going to get black balled critiquing Orban.
Daniel Kamen
2024-07-19 19:25:46 +0000 UTCThis guy's theories of the state sounds like the people Thomas Hobbes was polemicizing against.
Nico Villarreal
2024-07-19 18:55:23 +0000 UTCCongrats Jesse and Catherine! ♥️
DC
2024-07-19 18:24:09 +0000 UTC
