A historical friend responds to my report the other day in which Abe Foxman of the ADL said that Zionism is racist in the way that all forms of nationalism are racist:
Foxman is right, you know, about nationalism.
Germany had it. And the Slavophiles in the 19th c. Anglo-Saxon stock is so mixed (a fact that can't be hidden) that
English nationalism has always seemed ga-ga; more about Little than about
England; and, if you look for a nationalist speech anywhere in literature what do you come up with? Something like Henry V in his Crispin speech–"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers"–but it is the fight that makes them brothers not the blood of birth and soil. And who are they? Gower, Fluellen, Macmorris, Jamy (in the Hollywood WW II version: Ryan, Polodowski, Cohen, Ringstadt). Even great Shakespeare ladling out this patriotic chowder can't resist showing us the dissident Williams (a Welshman) who denies that the king has a national or supernatural authority that can justify the deaths of so many men.
But nationalism, like religion, may so reform itself as almost to cease to exist, except as a memory and a harmless holiday sentiment. The settled and civilized state of mind of a modern people is post-national. The free state (triumphant) supersedes the nation (militant) in which it began. The strangeness of Israel, inseparable from expansionism and the settler movement, is that it has become in this generation in some ways more militant than it was at its beginnings.
I can't recommend enough Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism," in the old HBJ edition of the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, vol. 3.
