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Self-Determination and Nationalism

But it does not change the fact that one reason liberals (especially those of a European persuasion) have fallen out of love with Israel is that it — along with the United States — was founded on and persists in maintaining a democratic and nationalist vision. This is why the liberal critics bracket Israel and […]

But it does not change the fact that one reason liberals (especially those of a European persuasion) have fallen out of love with Israel is that it — along with the United States — was founded on and persists in maintaining a democratic and nationalist vision.

This is why the liberal critics bracket Israel and the U.S. They claim they do so because the U.S. supports Israel. Actually, they do it because they reject the worldview on which both nations are founded, the worldview that has motivated the U.S. to support Israel. For the critics, democracy and nationalism must ultimately be in conflict. ~Ted Bromund

This could apply to some liberals, but it doesn’t seem to apply to Beinart at all, and it misses the larger point rather badly. Some critics of Israel on the left may be genuinely post-Zionist and regard Israeli nationalism as a fundamental problem that perpetuates conflict, but if we are speaking of liberals, and especially American liberals, this does not seem to be true at all. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find evidence over the last twenty years that most liberals believe democracy and nationalism are necessarily in conflict. As much as anyone, liberals have sympathized with, or openly advocated on behalf of, separatist and national independence movements around the world. This often involved exaggerating the liberal and democratic credentials of those movements, but there was no question that liberals have gone out of their way to regard many nationalist separatist movements as democratic movements. If self-determination was, as Bromund says, the “essence of liberalism,” most liberals today continue to embrace the “essence” of their worldview.

Liberal support for the principle of self-determination has been undeniable since the end of the Cold War, as we saw most dramatically in Bosnia and Kosovo. Liberal criticism of Israel focuses heavily on the denial of Palestinian independence, which is to say that many of these critics find fault with Israel because it is preventing the self-determination and self-government that they believe both Israelis and Palestinians should have. Obviously, in their support for a Palestinian state American liberals were among the first in the U.S. to arrive at the conclusion that the Palestinians were a nation that should govern itself back when more hawkish “pro-Israel” figures were still denying that Palestinians existed as a distinctive group of people. There were quite a few American liberals who gushed over the “Rose” and “Orange” revolutions in 2003 and 2004. They convinced themselves along with many others that the intensely anti-Russian nationalist demagogic leaders heading those revolutions were nonetheless good democrats, “reformers” and pro-Western. They took for granted that nationalism and democracy could complement one another, at least so long as the nationalism in question included hostility to Russia.

It seems to me that ethno-nationalism and democracy in a multiethnic state are in conflict, and pretty obviously and immediately so. One can have an ethnocracy in a state where one ethno-nationalism dominates at the expense of the rights of minorities, or one will tend to end up with a largely ethnically homogenous state that can retain both its ethno-nationalism and its democracy. What is strange about Bromund’s critique is that it doesn’t apply to Beinart in the least. Beinart remains a liberal convinced of the importance of preserving both Zionism and democracy together. In other words, Beinart does not believe that democracy and Zionist nationalism must ultimately conflict, but instead wants to find a way to keep them in balance without having to accept the agenda of someone like Avigdor Lieberman. Beinart wants to preserve a Zionism strong enough to keep Israel as a predominantly Jewish state, but not a Zionism so strong that it will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state and one that must eventually expel, transfer or de-naturalize its Arab citizens.

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