Amid the controversy surrounding Israel’s nation-state law, which the Knesset passed last week, the legislation has now received support from American Alt-right white supremacist Richard Spencer.
“I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state law. Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans,” Richard Spencer tweeted over the weekend.
The law, which has quasi-constitutional status, officially defines the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in its homeland as a unique right for the Jewish people. It also enshrines the state’s hard and shallow Jewish symbols, Jerusalem as the capital city, the Jewish calendar as the country’s official calendar and the Hebrew language as the official language.
Last summer on Israel’s Channel 2, Spencer called himself a “white Zionist” and said he wants a homeland for whites.
“I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you [Jews] want a secure homeland in Israel.”
At the University of Florida in October 2017, Richard Spencer, whose twitter account identifies him as co-editor of altright.com, made reference to Israel as an example of an “ethno-state” of the kind that he aspires to create for whites in the United States.
Spencer’s statements in praise of Israel understandably make many Jews squeamish. Despite some futile attempts to transform Israeli (ישראלי) identity into a unifying civic national identity for Jews and gentiles to share when the Hebrew word has historically referred to the primordialist people of Israel, the inability for most Israelis or Palestinians to internalize this civic identity reveals one of Zionism’s major inherent contradictions. Granting Palestinians citizenship and calling them Israeli doesn’t suddenly make them equal in a society that relates to them as the enemy in a 100-year-old ethnic conflict.
But Israeli identity in even its most primordialist nationalist form is not an exclusivist ethnic nationalism in the way that Spenser understands his own white identity. Our people actually predates socially constructed Western notions of nationalism. In fact, so many of our ancient laws and ritual practices psychologically condition us to self-identify as a single spiritual organism expressing itself in world history as the biological children of Israel and those who’ve joined us by naturalizing into our identity (subsequently becoming infused with a piece of that national soul we share).
But without adopting foreign models like civic nationalism, Israel still needs to find ways to be inclusive to non-Jews who have no interest in becoming part of Israel but do have an interest in living with us and perhaps even participating in our historic mission.
Richard Spencer believes himself clever by praising Israel as a model for what he aspires to achieve for white Americans. The tactic seems a win-win. He either legitimizes his own racist ideology by pointing to Israel as an example of what he wants or he makes Jews – who the Alt-right perceive as ultimately responsible for the multicultural “white genocide” the see themselves resisting – uncomfortable with our own national identity.
From a conceptual perspective, we should be viewing the American Alt-right as Amalek. Our sages teach that Western civilization is the “Kingdom of Esav/Edom,” noting a development from ancient Rome to the Church to Europe, until it invaded and dominated the Americas. We further learn that Edom is the last of the four kingdoms that usurps our role and that Israel and Edom are in constant struggle until we eventually emerge triumphant.
While Edom thrives on a capitalist system that brutalizes most of the planet, Jewish liberation as it enters its universalist phase demands the deconstruction of oppressive systems and their replacement with better alternatives. This would make our most natural allies those who supports Edom’s decline and the deconstruction of unjust systems. Spenser and the Alt-right, who seek to protect their privilege and dominance in an unjust system, should be seen as Amalek – essentially the strongest and most self-aware part of Esav that intuitively senses Israel to be a threat to the broader civilization it seeks to protect.
