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In his book The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony argues that the ideal world order is one based on the nation state. All the peoples of the world would have a place to call their home and be governed by their own kind. He defines the nation as a closely related people with a common language and history. Since shared history requires close proximity, he assumes this history happened in a place. He avoids the phrase “blood and soil” but that is his intent.

Of course, the ideal world can only exist in the abstract. He points out that there are thousands of identifiable groups of people without a county of their own. He points to India as having over one thousand languages. Since language is tangled up in blood and history, it is a good proxy for identity. All over the world there are pockets of people living as minority groups. It is unreasonable to think that all of these people should be granted a nation of their own.

He also points out that his definition of a people is arbitrary. Two groups of people could share a language and history, but also find a way to see themselves as distinct from one another. There has to be some limit to this as the logical end point is to reduce all human societies to tiny tribes. Without some lower bound on what constitutes a people, nationalism would “pulverize” exiting states. For a people to be a nation they must exceed some threshold of sustainability.

If on the one hand the ideal is for every people to have their own nation, but on the other hand it is impossible to create sustainable nations for every group of people, how can national claims be properly judged? Hazony’s answer is self-referencing in that he sets the threshold at sustainability. In Chapter XVII of his book, he argues that a people are entitled to a nation if they can sustain it and prudence suggests it is practical or moral to support their claim to national independence.

His first example is the United States. The thirteen colonies had a legitimate claim to independence, despite sharing language and history with England, because it was impractical for England to resist their demands. The great ocean between England and the New World was too large. On the other hand, the Confederacy did not have a rightful claim to independence, because the Union could and did force those states back into the Union. The South could not sustain its independence.

Another example he gives in Israel, which gained independence in 1948, thanks to changing moral perspectives in Britain and America. Hazony claims that the English-speaking world opposed the creation of a Jewish state on the grounds that it would upset the Muslim world. The events of World War II involving the Jews, however, changed this calculation. “The holocaust demonstrated with maximum moral clarity the moral case for Jewish national self-determination.”

Putting aside the veracity of his claims here, the Hazony model for determining the edge cases for national independence comes down to either winning the support of the international community through moral persuasion or gaining your independence and maintaining it against all challenges. The two can be combined to enlist the support of powerful neighbors to take your side, as the American colonists did when they got the support of France in the American war for independence.

When you boil it all down, the Hazony formula for determining who has and who does not have a moral claim to self-determination is quite simple. Your claim is valid if you can make it stick. If circumstances or the actions of larger nations around you prevent you from gaining independence, then your claim was invalid. In his view, the virtue of nationalism lies in its effectiveness. Nationalism is a virtue if it wins your people their independence, but it is not a virtue in and of itself.

If this sounds a little bit like trial by combat, that is because it relies on the same view of man and society as ancient people. From Hazony’s point of view, you are morally indistinguishable from your people. You are a virtuous person if your life is lived in service to your people. Your people deserve respect and support if they are able to gain and keep their independence, by any means necessary. Nationalism is, in effect, trial by combat but between peoples.

This is a way of viewing virtue that is alien to the modern Western mind, as we think of virtue as an end, not a means to an end. You are a virtuous person, for example, if you practice certain habits like charity and conscientiousness, not if you make a lot of money or attain great power. For Hazony, virtue is about your purpose in helping your people attain their freedom as a people. This means anything that you do in pursuit of that collective goal is by definition virtuous.

This may not seem all that interesting, but in the context of the war between Israel and the Arab population in Gaza, it sheds light on what we are seeing from the Zionist supporters of Israel. The reason they do not see the contradiction between their claims about the Palestinians and their behavior toward the Palestinians, is the difference in how they see virtue. It is not simply tribalism that lets them maintain these contradictory views, but an alien moral framework.

From the point of view of the Zionists, Israel has a right to exist because it has gained independence and convinced enough big countries to support them in their fight to maintain their independence. The Palestinians, in contrast, have not been able to secure their independence and even if they were granted it in Gaza and the West Bank, they lack the means to sustain it. Therefore, their moral case for independence is invalid and their war against Israel is immoral.

Despite it being alien to modern people, this view of the world has its appeal, which you can see in the bloodlust voiced by Americans in support of Israel. The calls for vengeance and retribution titillate some ancient part of our brains that was of great value to our ancestors but is now buried under the conditioning in favor of individualism and moral objectivism. The suburban peasant may not be allowed to root for his own side, but he can root for Israel, so he does that instead.

In the end, Hazony may be correct in that the only thing that matters is the survival of your people, so all moral abstractions must be sublimated to it. The West has simply taken a holiday from reality by asserting that there is an objective moral standard for how people should act and how nations should act. In reality, the only thing that matters is winning the battle for survival and the winner can then declare how he won as the only acceptable way for how nations out to live.

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