Palestinian Nationalism is (much) worse than Zionism

Either violent ethno-nationalism is bad, or it isn't

Nationalism is the belief that the borders of a nation and the borders of a country should be as co-extensive as possible. Nationalism therefore seeks to recreate the original purity and simplicity of the tribal unit, but at the scale of a modern state that can leverage economies of scale to compete with others. There is at least one very good reason to favour nationalism. If the social sciences have taught us anything, it’s that diversity is a constant source of aggravation and trouble, its absence a priceless jewel not to be squandered. The invocation of nationalist concepts can have many worthy uses, most notably to resist obviously bad ideas like allowing a limitless number of derelicts from chronically dysfunctional realms to just wander in and bring their dysfunction to you.

However, nationalism has three crucial flaws. The first is that its basic intellectual premise is just completely false. Nationalism asserts that first a thing called a nation exists and that then another thing called a state is, or should be, called into existence to govern over it, or on its behalf, but this just obviously contradicts historical reality. What actually happens is that, first, one tribe establishes dominance over a bunch of other tribes, then establishes a state apparatus to manage that dominance, only after which a process of assimilation to the center (usually with some hybridisation too) happens, the result of which is the formation of a nation. Historically, it is true that nations are generally forged out of tribal groupings that were already quite similar to each other in terms of language, biology and culture, for the obvious reason that they were the ones that were closest to each other. It stands to reason that it would also be easier to agglomerate tribal groupings in proportion to how similar they are, but history provides no evidence that this is actually true. The Spanish nation, for example, was formed by the union of the Visigoths (themselves a recent conglomeration of two separate Gothic groups and assorted bric-à-brac picked up while rampaging around the Balkans and France) with the Romanised population of Iberia, descendants of the Early European Farmers. A good case can be made that a certain proportion of hybrid vigour is a boon to nation forming. 

The problem that Nationalism seeks to solve is that political boundaries change quickly, sometimes very quickly, but national identities, once formed, are often sticky. This brings us to the second problem with nationalism in most of its historical incarnations, namely that the state of affairs it wished to bring about was very different from the one that actually existed, and the only way to bridge this gap was to get large numbers of people either to move or to just kill them, and that’s more or less what happened. There are lots of things that are desirable in and of themselves but are not worth the costs. The high degree of homogeneity that Poland today enjoys is certainly valuable, and not something to be surrendered lightly, but the costs borne, by both Pole and non-Pole to get there shock the imagination,

The most serious problem with nationalism, however, is that it provides no genuine theory of the central question of politics, namely who should rule. The nationalist will answer this question by saying that the nation should be ‘self-governing’, but this literally means nothing. The reality is that a small minority always rules. What nationalism means in reality is that the rulers are the members of nationalist political organizations or paramilitaries, who, as a predictable result of the dynamics that operate on and within these organizations, are basically the worst possible people to run a country. 

Perfidious Albion

The best book on nationalism from a sympathetic perspective is by a Jew (obviously) called Yoram Hazony. Of course, his book is a pretty transparent attempt to bolster support for Zionism in a western intellectual climate that is progressively more hostile, and in service of this cause he says many pretty silly things. However, one thing he writes which initially seems very silly indeed, and which he extended into a separate book, is actually completely correct, namely that nationalism was basically invented by Anglos cribbing from the ‘Hebrew Bible’. This seems too good to be true: a justification for why Hazony can simultaneously be an Israeli nationalist and a well-paid advocate of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, but some people are just lucky.

The English invention of nationalism was a result of unique circumstances. In general, countries with strong central governments that have the institutional gravity required to amalgamate their subject populations are also strong enough to expand their borders. Those regimes that are incapable of expansion are also too weak to unify their subjects. Thus, political boundaries expand faster than national ones, and the union of nation and state is indefinitely deferred. England was a rare exception to this rule both because of its uniquely effective natural borders and, for whatever reason, being really bad at war at a crucial stage. Henry VIII liquidated the monasteries to raise an army of 36,000 and reclaim the Angevin empire and came up with bupkiss. Had his armies not sucked so much, some 19th century theorist would have had to rustle up some theory about the eternal mystical bond of blood uniting the denizens of Nantes and Newcastle, but providence spared us. By the time the English got their act together militarily, the New World had been discovered, offering up a new form of low-cost territorial expansion at a distance that did not add heterogenous elements to the geographic core. As for all the Hebrew Bible stuff, well, when you are centralising power and building up your national myth, you use what you have to hands, and if that means LARPing as Mahershalalhashbaz Jenkins from Somerset, chosen by G-d to fight Popery, well that’s what you gotta do.

But the Anglo didn’t just birth nationalism, he gifted it to Europe, and then the world. In their competition with the continental powers, British elites noticed something odd. While they basically ruled over a united nation (don’t look at the Irish - they don’t count!), the monarchs of Europe were ruling over heterogeneous patchworks of different peoples. Some potentates ruled over as many as a dozen different peoples, whereas other peoples were divided into dozens of principalities. Clearly this was extremely not fair, and so Britain spread the enlightened gospel of one country per nation and one nation per country, which just so happened to be an incredibly effective tool for destabilising all of their rivals. Of course, this all kind of got out of hand when other nations realised that they too could use this powerful weapon, and before you know it you are sending thousands of men a day to die in a Belgian ditch because Bosnia is eternally - metaphysically! - part of Serbia dammit (until the 1990s software update, naturally). The great thing about nationalism is that there are zero epistemic standards whatsoever and it gives you direct access to the human limbic system, so you can literally just say anything no matter how obviously retarded and some dumb mug will pick up a gun for it. Eventually, people started saying that there was a something called a Ghanian nation, would you believe it! To take a current example, Ukrainians can’t be bothered to breed or anything hard like that, but they will put their helmets on and stand around getting picked off by drones to make sure that the mongoloid subhuman Russians of the Donbass won’t pay their (no doubt incredibly valuable) taxes to venal elites in Moscow rather than Kiev.¹

The eternal Ukrainian nation has some issues

In short, nationalism is a bioweapon that got out of hand, spreading imbecility and bloodshed across the world, which brings us to our main topic.

From the River to the Sea there were various Ottoman administrative districts

Palestinian nationalism is a subset of Arab nationalism, so we have to look at that first. Arab Nationalism started off as basically a psyop played by Christians, Alawites and other fringe minorities to answer the question of why they should rightfully dominate all the government positions even though most people in their countries were Sunni Muslims. The answer is ‘what do you mean? We are all part of the same Arab nation, after all we all speak the same language and … and … look a balloon!’ To be clear, in the abstract, this is a good thing. Sunni Muslims are - with due allowance made for bell curves and all that - dumb as rocks and can’t do anything right; that they should be ruled over by Middle Eastern cognitive elites is an application of the eternal rules of justice. However, the problem is, as always, that the Arab nationalists got high off their own supply and started genuinely believing all the nonsense they were pumping out. As Aboubakr Mansour documents at length, the fundamental implausibility of Arab nationalism as a concept required Arab nationalist theorists to really lay it on thick with the craziness, eagerly hoovering up every insane and depraved idea European intellectuals could conjure up and repackaging them for maximum lunacy. When you have everyone from the leaders down eagerly believing in objectively crazy delusions, and the human capital they have to draw on isn’t super great, then it is not surprising when they just do one imbecilic thing after another, like, say, ordering UN peacekeepers out of the Sinai in 1967.

Some people gearing up to do something incredibly moronic, again

Palestinian Nationalism followed the general template. At the end of the 19th century, around 15% of Palestine’s Arab population were Christians, and they were both genetically more intelligent and better educated than the Muslims around them, and thus naturally figured they should run the place. As elsewhere, they converged on the belief that they were the natural leaders of a Palestinian Arab nation, united by a common language and [insert retarded Hegelian woo]. Many of them had until recently been Aramaic speakers, but, y’know, whatever - the fellahin were buying it more less. The unique feature of Palestinian Nationalism was that it was shaped by the threat of Zionism, though this distinction should not be too overstated because Arab nationalism in Egypt and Syria was also obsessed with the issue. As many others have pointed out, the specifics of Palestinian nationalist doctrine as it developed were determined by inverting Zionism, giving it an incoherent and fundamentally negative character. Even something as basic as the borders of this nation were a function not of any indigenous traditions, but the land allocated to Zionist settlement by the British.

Ottoman administrative regions with modern borders handily overlayed to show you how meaningless they are

Obviously, Palestinian Nationalism, considered in the abstract as a system of ideas and judged by their coherence and correspondence with historical truth, is delusory, but that is not necessarily sufficient reason to damn it. A better reason is that fulfilling its goals entails massive political upheaval, and the killing, expulsion or subjugation of millions of people. However, let’s say that you don’t think that’s true and it’s feasible to establish a Palestinian national state in the West Bank and Gaza and the only people who have to be expelled are settlers (who don’t have human rights), Palestinian Nationalism is still really bad because of the main problem with nationalism in general we saw earlier.

To repeat myself, no nation is ever self-governing; that doesn’t even mean anything. A minority always rules, and the functional meaning of nationalism is that nationalist political organisations rule. The functional meaning of Palestinian Nationalism is that Palestinian Nationalist organisations rule, and the thing about Palestinian Nationalists is that they are just the worst people ever. Even if you are a big Ilan Pape fan and think everything that he said about the Zionists is true, even the bits he literally admits to having fabricated in his own footnotes, it just doesn’t come close. Take, for example:

Wasfi al-Tal was assassinated shortly after by members of Black September, the Fatah terrorist group that was created to avenge the Palestinian defeat in Jordan. His assassins shot him in a hotel lobby in Cairo; one of them got down on his hands and knees and lapped at Tal's blood.

We can talk at length (and should) about how bold and innovative the Palestinian national movement has been in pursuit of evil. Castrating Olympic athletes, suicide bombings, using hospitals as military installations, and given half the chance, a good old-fashioned massacre in a country that took you in. Sometimes, though, a picture speaks a thousand words. Look at the following picture of some radical settlers doing a faggy group pic on October 8th:

Scum, right? Imagine putting them in charge of a country. Now here’s the PFLP, all the way back in 1969.

Partly, no doubt, this is Israel’s fault. Since Moshe Dayan’s famous speech, the Zionist policy against Palestinian paramilitaries has been deterrence, and the thing about deterrence is that if you use it enough, eventually you end up with people who are undeterrable because they are completely mental. Like, say, a guy with an obvious criminal phenotype, who had a brain tumour and thinks he talks to the Mahdi or whatever. However, there have been other dynamics at play, notably the Palestinian’s embrace of patrons with a vested interest in promoting the most messed up elements of Palestinian society. In addition, the inherent viciousness of the Palestinian goal of massacring Holocaust survivors tended to inspire thoughts of ‘are we the baddies?’ in people who were not, in fact, baddies. 

Ultimately, though, history is interesting, but the present is important. The brute fact is that Palestinian Nationalism means putting incredibly depraved people in charge, and hence Palestinian Nationalism is not only a stupid and destructive ideology, but an actually evil one. As the cherry on the cake, the Christian psyop played on the Sunni Palestinians boomeranged on them, when some cripple holy-man freak with a weird voice figured out that you could take the nonsense of Palestinian Nationalism and combine it with militant Sunni Islam to create a sort of hyper-nonsense that was so potent you could overtly use people as human shields in the most cartoonishly evil and callous fashion to achieve literally nothing, and those same people will thank you for your ‘resistance’.

Enough of this. There is simply no principled system of ethics (except Nazism, I guess) according to which Palestinian Nationalism can be regarded as anything other than an abomination. For the anti-Zionists who don’t get it: imagine a Zionism in which Itamar Ben Gvir was considered a sellout moderate. Think about how utterly deranged and sick you would have to be to even passively support such a movement, let alone devote any amount of your time to promoting it or helping it achieve its goals. Well, you’ve got it. Either crazy nonsensical doctrines that motivate people to kill are bad, or they aren’t. Whatever the solution to this mess is, it starts with the end of Zionism’s most frightful creation: Palestinian Nationalism.

1. For the record, Russian Nationalism is also retarded.