There’s a lot of talk today of various peoples having claims to states. The Ukrainians and Ukraine. The Taiwanese and Taiwan. The Jews and Israel. The Palestinians and Palestine. Seems pretty cut and dry—these people correspond to this state and any other power that challenges that is imperialistic and evil.

But what is a state anyway? It seems like a question so simple and obvious that you shouldn’t even have to think about it, like you’re being asked on a math test to define addition. Perhaps you fall back on your Rousseau or Hobbes from CC, and stammer out some sorry explanation of the social contract or the general will. Maybe it has a date on which it was founded. You mention a governing body, borders, defense against external threats, justice against internal ones, a culture, maybe a language, and a people.

But Crips have culture, they have a founding year (1969), borders, and they defend those borders with violence against external threats and possess a monopoly on (in their eyes) legitimate violence within their borders. Can they not be said to be a part of some social contract, some general will? Wolf packs, for that matter, have territoriality, which they defend against other packs, a kind of governance structure (alpha, beta, omega) which is enforced with a snarl or a bite—do wolves have a state?

What distinguishes the state from a gang or a pack is not any of the above oft cited attributes—it’s the magic of international recognition. An aspiring nation must perform a series of rites, establish its date of genesis, divinely sanction its territory, go to the UN and pronounce their faith; then they’re officially inducted into the religious order—a “state.” This is the crux of political theory: it’s theology minus the God.

Now some of our Jewish readership might be quivering at this line of argument, as it has been weaponized by many postmodernist and mostly leftist thinkers to critique the international world order and, more specifically, Israel’s right to statehood. Noam Chomsky has stated that Israel’s “right to exist” was “invented” and that “Palestinians can’t accept it.” This is the same argument I’ve heard in classes on indigenous history, where professors bemoan settler colonialism, the occupation of native lands, and fetishize decolonization.

Another option is to take a more conservative liberal approach and say, as Obama did in 2009, “just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” This leads you down the road to the two state solution, which seems increasingly fantastical.

So while the Obama approach I find hopelessly naive and backwards looking, worse may be the Boomer-deconstructionism that seems to be selectively applied against oppressor states in the name of the oppressed peoples. I think it more logical to take a purely nihilistic stance: that the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy is also a fabrication—that neither Israel nor Palestine has the right to exist. Since these post-modernists have thoroughly debunked the notion of God-or-UN-given statehood as secularly religious, why don’t we apply such a Foucaultian scalpel equally to indigenous rights: that the claims of those peoples within their own cultural frameworks is just as much of a fabrication.

No matter how far back in history you go there is no true origination point, no pure claim: before Israel there was the British Mandate, before that the Ottomans, then the Mamluk Sultanate, then the Crusader states, then the Caliphates, the Byzantines, the Romans, before that the Hasmoneans, and the Greeks, before that the Persians, the Babylonians, going all the way back to the biblical Kingdom of Israel and Egypt and the Mesopotamians, before that there were tribes of Homo sapiens, and before them the Neanderthals and large mammals and fauna and before that the fucking dinosaurs.

We can ride this nihilistic road down to one conclusion: no one has an inherent right to anything. So what then? We fall into the void where nothing matters and allow society to sink into suicidal anarchy? No. This line of thought is useful merely in establishing the first principle that under all the political theorizing, all the national theology there lies a vacuum.

So when we accept the vacuity at the bottom of all the theorizing of statesmen, what reality are we left with?: the actions which states take to enforce their claims (however false they may be), the means by which their theories (no matter how theoretical) are enforced—the bullets, the missiles, the blood, the collective action proving that we are so serious, so blindfully and willfully faithful about our claims, our beliefs that we are willing to die for them. This is the process by which claims are made legitimate, by which truth is created.

The current conflict in the Middle East has, for the time being, taken on the moralizing form that previous conflicts have. Each side stages a victimhood campaign to exhibit moral sympathy from these International theological institutions to attain legitimacy and aid. What we have are two children squabbling over the inheritance of a decaying world order begging the paternal American empire “please, Daddy, give me a state” while the maternal globalist peacekeepers just try to keep the family together.

I’m getting quite sick of all this beggary, this pathetic victimhood. If you want territory, take it. If you want rights, make them. If you want a state, earn it. If there are other people in your way, get rid of ‘em. This is war. This is the way states, peoples are formed; the way history, nature happens.

My argument is not that each state should fight in autarkic isolation, i.e. that Israel should have to face this fight alone; in fact, I am arguing quite the opposite. Conflicts such as these provide an opportunity to redefine yourself along a Schmittian friend-enemy distinction. Israel in opposition to Hamas and eventually Palestine itself (as the line between the two is quite grey as we learned in Iraq as the dividing line between civilian and terrorist was increasingly muddied) and the Western world in opposition to the Neo-Caliphate.

The Marxist, decolonizer professors seem to have forgotten or are ashamed of the fact that they are a part of the greatest civilization that has ever existed: the West. Here we believe in freedom, technology, equality under the law, women wearing and doing what they want, tolerance of minorities, and progress. The jihadists do not. They’d behead the LGBTQers for Palestine and go back to the Stone Age.

Certainly, I’m stereotyping and othering; I might seem Islamaphobic, imperialistic, pompous, and hubristic; but there comes a point where in order discover who we are, we must establish what we are not. To love, you must hate.

Israel and the West should acknowledge not just Hamas but the entire jihadist world as antithetical to our way of life, and we, as states and individuals, should recognize that our two civilizational identities are mutually exclusive. We must dismiss the liberal universalist dream that these peoples can be brought into the womb of global markets and democracy, and instead view them as a cancer to the Western Body. It is said that there can be no true friends without true enemies: well here is a true enemy, let’s find out who our friends are. Not only then will Israel earn its statehood, but Western Civilization will reaffirm its supremacy over every other.

This was a draft for an article in the Independent that has since been reworked.

There’s a lot of talk today of various peoples having claims to states. The Ukrainians and Ukraine. The Taiwanese and Taiwan. The Jews and Israel. The Palestinians and Palestine. Seems pretty cut and dry—these people correspond to this state and any other power that challenges that is imperialistic and evil.

But what is a state anyway? It seems like a question so simple and obvious that you shouldn’t even have to think about it, like you’re being asked on a math test to define addition. Perhaps you fall back on your Rousseau or Hobbes from CC, and stammer out some sorry explanation of the social contract or the general will. Maybe it has a date on which it was founded. You mention a governing body, borders, defense against external threats, justice against internal ones, a culture, maybe a language, and a people.

But Crips have culture, they have a founding year (1969), borders, and they defend those borders with violence against external threats and possess a monopoly on (in their eyes) legitimate violence within their borders. Can they not be said to be a part of some social contract, some general will? Wolf packs, for that matter, have territoriality, which they defend against other packs, a kind of governance structure (alpha, beta, omega) which is enforced with a snarl or a bite—do wolves have a state?

What distinguishes the state from a gang or a pack is not any of the above oft cited attributes—it’s the magic of international recognition. An aspiring nation must perform a series of rites, establish its date of genesis, divinely sanction its territory, go to the UN and pronounce their faith; then they’re officially inducted into the religious order—a “state.” This is the crux of political theory: it’s theology minus the God.

Now some of our Jewish readership might be quivering at this line of argument, as it has been weaponized by many postmodernist and mostly leftist thinkers to critique the international world order and, more specifically, Israel’s right to statehood. Noam Chomsky has stated that Israel’s “right to exist” was “invented” and that “Palestinians can’t accept it.” This is the same argument I’ve heard in classes on indigenous history, where professors bemoan settler colonialism, the occupation of native lands, and fetishize decolonization.

Another option is to take a more conservative liberal approach and say, as Obama did in 2009, “just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” This leads you down the road to the two state solution, which seems increasingly fantastical.

So while the Obama approach I find hopelessly naive and backwards looking, worse may be the Boomer-deconstructionism that seems to be selectively applied against oppressor states in the name of the oppressed peoples. I think it more logical to take a purely nihilistic stance: that the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy is also a fabrication—that neither Israel nor Palestine has the right to exist. Since these post-modernists have thoroughly debunked the notion of God-or-UN-given statehood as secularly religious, why don’t we apply such a Foucaultian scalpel equally to indigenous rights: that the claims of those peoples within their own cultural frameworks is just as much of a fabrication.

No matter how far back in history you go there is no true origination point, no pure claim: before Israel there was the British Mandate, before that the Ottomans, then the Mamluk Sultanate, then the Crusader states, then the Caliphates, the Byzantines, the Romans, before that the Hasmoneans, and the Greeks, before that the Persians, the Babylonians, going all the way back to the biblical Kingdom of Israel and Egypt and the Mesopotamians, before that there were tribes of Homo sapiens, and before them the Neanderthals and large mammals and fauna and before that the fucking dinosaurs.

We can ride this nihilistic road down to one conclusion: no one has an inherent right to anything. So what then? We fall into the void where nothing matters and allow society to sink into suicidal anarchy? No. This line of thought is useful merely in establishing the first principle that under all the political theorizing, all the national theology there lies a vacuum.

So when we accept the vacuity at the bottom of all the theorizing of statesmen, what reality are we left with?: the actions which states take to enforce their claims (however false they may be), the means by which their theories (no matter how theoretical) are enforced—the bullets, the missiles, the blood, the collective action proving that we are so serious, so blindfully and willfully faithful about our claims, our beliefs that we are willing to die for them. This is the process by which claims are made legitimate, by which truth is created.

The current conflict in the Middle East has, for the time being, taken on the moralizing form that previous conflicts have. Each side stages a victimhood campaign to exhibit moral sympathy from these International theological institutions to attain legitimacy and aid. What we have are two children squabbling over the inheritance of a decaying world order begging the paternal American empire “please, Daddy, give me a state” while the maternal globalist peacekeepers just try to keep the family together.

I’m getting quite sick of all this beggary, this pathetic victimhood. If you want territory, take it. If you want rights, make them. If you want a state, earn it. If there are other people in your way, get rid of ‘em. This is war. This is the way states, peoples are formed; the way history, nature happens.

My argument is not that each state should fight in autarkic isolation, i.e. that Israel should have to face this fight alone; in fact, I am arguing quite the opposite. Conflicts such as these provide an opportunity to redefine yourself along a Schmittian friend-enemy distinction. Israel in opposition to Hamas and eventually Palestine itself (as the line between the two is quite grey as we learned in Iraq as the dividing line between civilian and terrorist was increasingly muddied) and the Western world in opposition to the Neo-Caliphate.

The Marxist, decolonizer professors seem to have forgotten or are ashamed of the fact that they are a part of the greatest civilization that has ever existed: the West. Here we believe in freedom, technology, equality under the law, women wearing and doing what they want, tolerance of minorities, and progress. The jihadists do not. They’d behead the LGBTQers for Palestine and go back to the Stone Age.

Certainly, I’m stereotyping and othering; I might seem Islamaphobic, imperialistic, pompous, and hubristic; but there comes a point where in order discover who we are, we must establish what we are not. To love, you must hate.

Israel and the West should acknowledge not just Hamas but the entire jihadist world as antithetical to our way of life, and we, as states and individuals, should recognize that our two civilizational identities are mutually exclusive. We must dismiss the liberal universalist dream that these peoples can be brought into the womb of global markets and democracy, and instead view them as a cancer to the Western Body. It is said that there can be no true friends without true enemies: well here is a true enemy, let’s find out who our friends are. Not only then will Israel earn its statehood, but Western Civilization will reaffirm its supremacy over every other.

This was a draft for an article in the Independent that has since been reworked.