On July 19, the Knesset
voted to change the nation’s Basic Law.
Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and
national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language.
Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jews, came
swift.
Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism calls the
law a “retreat from democracy” as it restricts the right of self-determination,
once envisioned to include all within Israel’s borders, to the Jewish people.
Inequality is enshrined.
And Israel, says Brownfeld, is not the nation-state of American
Jews.
What makes this clash of significance is that it is another
battle in the clash that might fairly be called the issue of our age.
The struggle is between the claims of tribe, ethnicity, peoples
and nations, against the commands of liberal democracy.
In Europe, the Polish people seek to preserve the historic and
ethnic character of their country with reforms that the EU claims violate
Poland’s commitment to democracy.
If Warsaw persists, warns the EU, the Poles will be punished.
But which comes first: Poland, or its political system, if the two are in
conflict?
Other nations are ignoring the open-borders requirements of the
EU’s Schengen Agreement, as they attempt to block migrants from Africa and the
Middle East.
They want to remain who they are, open borders be damned.
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Britain is negotiating an exit from the EU because the English
voted for independence from that transitional institution whose orders they saw
as imperiling their sovereignty and altering their identity.
When Ukraine, in the early 1990s, was considering secession from
Russia, Bush I warned Kiev against such “suicidal nationalism.”
Ukraine ignored President Bush. Today, new questions have
arisen.
If Ukrainians had a right to secede from Russia and create a
nation-state to preserve their national identity, do not the Russians in Crimea
and the Donbass have the same right — to secede from Ukraine and rejoin their
kinsmen in Russia?
As Georgia seceded from Russia at the same time, why do not the
people of South Ossetia have the same right to secede from Georgia?
Who are we Americans, 5,000 miles away, to tell tribes, peoples
and embryonic nations of Europe whether they may form new states to reflect and
preserve their national identity?
Nor are these minor matters.
At Paris in 1919, Sudeten Germans and Danzig Germans were,
against their will, put under Czech and Polish rule. British and French
resistance to permitting these peoples to secede and rejoin their kinfolk in
1938 and 1939 set the stage for the greatest war in history.
Here in America, we, too, appear to be in an endless quarrel
about who we are.
Is America a different kind of nation, a propositional nation,
an ideological nation, defined by a common consent to the ideas and ideals of
our iconic documents like the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg
Address?
Or are we like other nations, a unique people with our own
history, heroes, holidays, religion, language, literature, art, music, customs
and culture, recognizable all over the world as “the Americans”?
Since 2001, those who have argued that we Americans were given,
at the birth of the republic, a providential mission to democratize mankind,
have suffered an unbroken series of setbacks.
Nations we invaded, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, to bestow upon
them the blessings of democracy, rose up in resistance. What our compulsive
interventionists saw as our mission to mankind, the beneficiaries saw as
American imperialism.
And the culture wars on history and memory continue unabated.
According to The New York Times, the African-American candidate
for governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, has promised to sandblast the
sculptures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis off Stone
Mountain.
The Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, has a pickup truck, which
he promises to use to transfer illegal migrants out of Georgia and back to the
border.
In Texas, a move is afoot to remove the name of Stephen Austin
from the capital city, as Austin, in the early 1830s, resisted Mexico’s demands
to end slavery in Texas when it was still part of Mexico.
One wonders when they will get around to Sam Houston, hero of
Texas’ War of Independence and first governor of the Republic of Texas, which
became the second slave republic in North America.
Houston, after whom the nation’s fourth-largest city is named,
was himself, though a Unionist, a slave owner and an opponent of abolition.
Today, a large share of
the American people loathe who we were from the time of the explorers and
settlers, up until the end of segregation in the 1960s. They want to apologize
for our past, rewrite our history, erase our memories and eradicate the
monuments of those centuries.
The attacks upon the
country we were and the people whence we came are near constant.
And if we cannot live
together amicably, secession from one another, personally, politically, and
even territorially, seems the ultimate alternative.
