Nice overview and yes, a great opportunity for the cultural-political-economic distinction.
Might be worth noting that it's not just the political that trumps the cultural all the time, it's the economic that controls the political. In the US "business" is still fighting the New Deal, and it has been quite comfortable with the cultivation of a white-supremacist "alt-right" in order to shore up a "conservative" party which, as the Senator from Florida recently affirmed, wants to destroy not just Obamacare but Medicare and Social Security. Why? Because crony/selfish capitalism depends on inequalities to make "opportunities" for the "free" (unrestrained) marketers. [Yes, jamming a few points together there.] So... does Israel have an economic sector? What's it up to?
There's a good book for the Anglo background from which, unintended, independent Israeli statehood emerged:
'The cool, aloof Balfour was anything but an Old Testament character himself. But of all the Englishmen who at one time or another helped along the Return he was possibly the only one interested in it from the point of view of the Jews. To him they were neither tools of the Christian millennium nor agents of a business imperialism, but simply exiles who should be given back, in payment of Christianity’s “immeasurable debt,” their homeland. Not just any land, but the old land. Why Palestine? “The answer is,” he wrote, “that the position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are inter-related as they are inter-related in the case of no other religion and no other country on earth.' [Tuchman, Barbara W.. Bible and Sword (p. 339). Random House]
So regarding economy mixing onto the state here in Israel. I just have two indications:
one, one example concerns the media, which is ideally a cultural thing... These days ex prime minister Netanyahu is standing trail because he allegedly benefited media owners while functioning as a regulator in what we call the office for communications. Media today is first and foremost a business (mixture of economy and culture): they wanted more money. Netanyahu wanted influence on public opinion for political power. Hence, the mix of media and economy met the mix of government and economy. The government owned a communication company that was sold, as an additional organ, to the media giants. In return Netanyahu got some control over what appeared on the existing news website (of the communication giants). We can see how corruption arose from the mixtures...
Secondly, a very big general issue. The national state here regards itself as an economic entity... it is more or less trivial to people that it is run like a business: Maximizing "profit" from the different taxes, trying to promote the national businesses so to make more money, and this of course puts it in competition and conflict with other national economies that perceive themselves similarly. So this is a big issue concerning the entanglement of state and economy, that I would like to go more deeply into and grasp better.
Those are helpful pictures, Omni - thanks for sharing.
It's interesting how so much of threefolding can be understood simply through an expanded understanding of the idea of "conflicts of interest." I say "expanded" because it's not just when someone makes money from a situation, which is what it seems like it's often reduced to (for instance, when a lawmaker is regulating the very industries they're invested in), but whenever they're able to maintain or grow their power in some way (i.e. they're able to stay in political office by manipulating the press, or they're able to have their religious or economic interests prevail by taking over the state, etc.). I think the term "conflict of interest" actually does cover any form of "interest," and not just money, but it seems like it's often reduced to money...
There's also a kind of "soft" version of this, where the person isn't driven by the desire for profit or power, but legitimately thinks that they're doing good. For instance, a business person might think it's helpful to bring their business skills into the realm of making laws about human rights, or an idealistic politician might think they should dictate what teachers teach based on what they think would be fair and just in terms of rights. They don't realize they're actually overstepping boundaries and applying their capacities in a realm where they no longer apply. This soft version of a conflict of interest I call "misplaced ideals" in my course on threefolding. It could also be called "misplaced expertise," but I like how "ideals" shows how someone can be meaning to do good, but just misunderstanding the situation.
You mentioned Netanyahu and the state promoting national businesses, which is pretty intriguing. If you do go more deeply into that topic and find any interesting articles in that direction, I'd definitely be interested so please do keep me in mind.
It's an interesting quote and helpful to think about how the Israeli situation is so specific. The religious element is definitely more emphasized than with other nations - the explicitly "religious homeland" gives the countryside itself a spiritual aspect that almost certainly doesn't exist with the same intensity in the Italian or French countryside. They'll of course also have their monuments and "sacred" sites, though probably less overtly religious (like the home of Dante or Joan of Arc) as well as less relevant to their modern experience (like the ancient sacred sites - say Delphi in Greece or Stonehenge in England).
There’s also the long history of exile within Judaism and, alongside that, the fact that other groups have lived on that land in large numbers. It creates a kind of mixed history that we don’t really see in the same way elsewhere. Also the fact that the land is sacred ground for other religions as well. That all creates a really specific and intense dynamic.
I don’t know too much about the economic situation there, though I assume it’s similar to much of what’s happening elsewhere around the world (crony capitalism, oligarchs, etc.) I imagine it would be a whole article in itself… :)
Thank you Seth. As an Israeli I can tell you that this is very inspiring. The light of threefolding is shinning bright and clear, and I feel that there is significance just in seeing a clear vision, just in feeling it as a comprehensive answer, even if the situation today seems so far from all this - there is still power in the very feeling, which is similar to the feeling of finding an answer to a complicated and confusing riddle.
I love, as well, the way you start from what may look like a "regular" political opinion, but then slowly move into a meta-political sphere - a sphere from which, I believe, real answers come.
That's great to hear, Omri. Yeah, it's amazing how short-sighted the "regular" opinions are when it comes to the nation-state. We badly need the meta view in order to make any sense of it at all. That said, I'd definitely recommend the Andre Liebich paper that I link to in the article - he gives a really concise and comprehensive overview of just how muddled our thinking is on this topic (and he's also got a book coming out this summer - "Cultural Nations and Political Sates" - that I'm excited to check out).
I know it's hard to imagine transitioning to a state that doesn't favor any one nation - especially in Israel where it was so explicitly formed for that purpose. But I think if we have a picture of the kind of social ideals we truly want to work towards, then we can slowly begin to untangle the knots that have formed, not just in Israel but everywhere.
Seth, this helps clarify your position. You’re not just critiquing Israel, you’re arguing that the nation-state itself is the root cause of conflict, and that “national self-determination” is inherently unstable.
But if that’s the case, then the argument has to be applied consistently, not symbolically. The modern world is almost entirely composed of nation-states. From Japan to Poland to Ireland, states preserve a dominant national culture while granting civil rights to minorities. The same is true across much of the Arab world, where many states explicitly define themselves in ethnic or religious terms. Constitutions in countries like Egypt describe the state as Arab and embed Islam as a central source of legislation, often leaving minorities such as the Copts with a more precarious status despite their deep historical roots that long predate the Arabization of the region.
Second, the claim that the nation-state inevitably leads to violence does not hold up historically. Some of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century were driven not by nation-states, but by empires and ideological regimes that suppressed national identity, including the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The problem is not simply that nations seek political expression, but how states manage diversity, rights, and power.
Third, even the examples often cited as alternatives reveal how difficult it is to move beyond national frameworks. Countries like Switzerland and Belgium are not nation-less states but carefully balanced multinational arrangements. In the case of Belgium, despite being at the heart of Europe and hosting the institutions of the European Union, the state exists in a near-constant state of political strain between its main linguistic and cultural groups, the Flemish and the Walloons, who often struggle to agree on governance. And when such tensions are not managed successfully, the results can be far more severe, as seen in the breakup of Yugoslavia, where competing national identities ultimately led to violent conflict and fragmentation.
Fourth, Israel is an especially difficult case to fit into a purely theoretical model. The Zionist project did not emerge in a vacuum as an abstract expression of nationalism. It emerged in response to the repeated failure of Jews to live safely as minorities, culminating in the Holocaust. That historical reality makes the question of Jewish self-determination qualitatively different from a general critique of nationalism.
Finally, the idea of separating nation and state entirely is philosophically appealing, but it remains almost entirely untested at scale. The question is not whether the nation-state contains tensions. It clearly does. The question is whether those tensions invalidate the concept altogether, or whether they can be managed within democratic frameworks that protect minority rights.
If the argument is universal, it needs to be applied universally. If it is applied selectively, then it stops being a theory and becomes a judgment about a single case.
Hey Yoav - thanks so much for this post, as well as your response to the note I wrote about the 2/26 Guardian piece ("Israel is promised only to the Jewish people"). I'll respond to both of your posts here (and if anyone wants to read your response to the Guardian note, I'll share the link below).
I want to be clear about one thing from the start that I think is often misunderstood about my argument: I don't see myself as trying to make a moral argument, but as trying to make an objective - one could even say "scientific" - argument. My thesis is simply that a state inevitably creates the conditions for conflict and violence whenever it structures itself so as to privilege one culture over another. If my thesis is true, than Israel should obviously want to restructure itself simply for self-preservation - not for the preservation of its own nation-state (which I'm arguing they should abandon), but for the preservation of Israeli Jews, which is the whole stated purpose of Israel to begin with. This is obviously a pressing concern and I wish people would take it more seriously. It's not an academic argument. It's a question of how the violence will actually end.
You seem to think that this thesis is false, and I will grant you that there are plenty of nation-states that appear stable and conflict-free. But these are just appearances. Tensions between ethnic groups flare up here and there, especially when the country falls on hard times. And the almost ubiquitous culture wars (left vs right) are also just another expression of this same dynamic - of one culture trying to shape the state in its image.
You say that there are other reasons for violence such as "empires and ideological regimes" - I totally agree. I'm not saying the nation-state is the only bad form of social organization out there (though your example of Stalinist Russia is just another example of the harm done when people's ethnic identities are suppressed).
One of the things you mention is that Israel is "uniquely singled out" - Israel's critics, you point out, are not consistent. I agree that such consistency is absolutely necessary, and I try to realize this ideal within my own writing. When I speak about the need to separate nation and state, I make it it clear that it applies to all nation-states. I point to Israel specifically only because it's in the news and I write about current events, trying to draw healthy principles of social organization from them. But in the last few years I've also written about this topic in relation to Ukraine and Myanmar, and I very, very, often write about the culture wars in the US in the same exact terms, urging people to understand the need for separating culture and state.
And that is the larger framework: the need to separate culture and state. It doesn't matter if you talk about nations and ethnic groups, or religious groups, or left vs right. They're all forms of cultural identity.
You claim that Israel's "historical reality makes the question of Jewish self-determination qualitatively different from a general critique of nationalism," but why?You can claim the Jewish people have greater need for security and safety because of their history, but creating a Jewish nation-state won't make them safer. It makes them lass safe. Jewish history does not make the Jewish people immune to the basic dynamics I'm describing.
And I'm certainly not championing plurinational states like Belgium and Switzerland - as you rightly point out, they have the same kind of ethnic/cultural tensions as regular nation-states - I'm championing nationless states.
One last point: in a democracy every individual has equal rights, but how can that be the case if not every individual has the right to express their ideas and beliefs equally? When the language of the state, the symbols of the state, the school curricula of the state, the immigration policy and land and settlement policy of the state, all privilege one cultural group over another, then those groups are not equal. You simply have to ask yourself how you would feel if the tables were turned and your culture was the minority group suffering such obstacles and indignities.
This dynamic creates tension, the conditions for endless conflict and violence. The solution I'm advocating for would remove this tension. Of course people would still think differently, in fact there would be far more diversity of viewpoints, but there would be no fear of political suppression. Right now, if you don't suppress you are in danger of being suppressed. The system makes you fight. It makes you more distrustful of your neighbor.
I can see a line in the sand that should be drawn, a line between culture and state. This would have radical implications for our lives. Am I perhaps not seeing that line correctly? Should it be drawn elsewhere? This is what I'm wondering. Is there another solution that will actually lead to peace, or will we just continue down the same road until we finally exterminate all our neighbors.
Thank you for the thoughtful and serious response. I appreciate the clarity with which you lay out your framework, and I agree that these questions are not academic. They are about how societies actually endure or collapse.
I want to engage directly with your central thesis that states which privilege one culture inevitably produce conflict, and that separating culture from the state would reduce or eliminate that tension.
I think the difficulty lies in the assumption of inevitability. The modern world is not composed of “neutral” states that have somehow transcended culture. It is composed of states that are, almost without exception, expressions of particular cultures, linguistic, historical, and civilizational. From Japan to Poland to Ireland, what we actually see is that cultural particularity is not an anomaly. It is the norm. These societies are not voids stripped of identity. They are living embodiments of distinct traditions, languages, and collective memories.
The more fundamental issue, then, is not whether culture should exist within a state, but whether a state can remain stable without a coherent cultural core. A society that attempts to strip itself of its defining culture does not become neutral. It becomes unmoored. Like a ship without ballast, it risks losing the very stability that allows it to function over time. The question is not how to eliminate a dominant culture, but how to sustain it while ensuring that those outside it are treated with full civic equality.
You asked how one should feel as a minority under such conditions. It is an important question. I do not approach this from a position of cultural dominance. I live as a minority myself, as a Jew in a predominantly Christian society in the United States. That experience does not lead me to conclude that the surrounding culture must be neutralized or removed from the public sphere. Rather, it reinforces the importance of balancing a society’s cultural identity with the protection of minority rights within it.
When we look at Israel through that lens, the picture is more complex than your model allows. Even at a basic structural level, the state is not organized around the suppression of other cultures. Hebrew is the primary language, but Arabic is widely used in public life, signage, education, and media. Roughly 20 percent of the population is non-Jewish, and there is no national program to impose religious observance or erase minority identities. Different communities, Muslim, Christian, and Druze, maintain their own institutions and public presence.
More than that, the “Jewishness” of the state is itself internally diverse. Jewish society in Israel is not a single, uniform culture but a convergence of diasporas, from Ethiopia to Eastern Europe, from the Middle East to Latin America and beyond, bringing with them different languages, liturgical traditions, cuisines, and ways of life. What emerges is not a rigid hegemony but a shared civilizational framework, Hebrew in language and orientation, within which multiple expressions coexist and interact.
That complexity also extends to minority outcomes. While disparities exist, as they do in many societies, there are also cases, particularly among Christian Arab communities, where educational and economic outcomes are strong, in some instances exceeding national averages. This points to a more layered reality than one of simple structural suppression.
This is part of why I see Israel differently. It is not simply a case of cultural preference embedded in a state. It is the restoration of a civilization. The Hebrew language has been revived into daily life. The Hebrew calendar structures public time. A culture with roots going back thousands of years has reconstituted itself in sovereign form. This is not abstract nationalism. It is a historical reassembly of a people that lived for centuries without sovereignty.
And that history matters. The Jewish experience is defined in large part by prolonged statelessness, by vulnerability across multiple societies, often regardless of how those societies structured themselves. The creation of Israel is, in many ways, a response to that condition. It is an attempt to restore agency, security, and continuity.
If one values the preservation of cultural uniqueness, then Israel represents something rare. It is not merely a community maintaining its traditions, but a civilization expressing itself in full sovereign form, linguistically, historically, and politically. It is the only place where Jewish life is not a minority experience, but the organizing framework of public life.
This is where I think your model runs into difficulty. It assumes that conflict is primarily generated by internal cultural structuring. But in Israel’s case, much of the conflict is driven by external rejection and historical realities that precede the state itself. Removing the Jewish character of the state would not address those forces. It would remove the very mechanism designed to respond to them.
You also raise the question of equality, and I agree it is essential. The challenge for any state, Israel included, is to ensure full civil and political rights for all its citizens. But that is a different question from whether a state can have a cultural identity. Many states attempt to do both, imperfectly, but meaningfully.
So I find myself asking a slightly different question than the one you pose. Not how to eliminate culture from the state, but how to balance cultural continuity with civic equality. How to sustain a particular tradition while ensuring that those who do not share it are nonetheless fully protected under the law.
The idea of fully separating culture from the state is philosophically appealing, and it has been explored in various intellectual traditions. But it remains largely untested in practice, especially under conditions of historical vulnerability like those that shaped the Jewish experience. The world we actually inhabit is one where cultures and states remain intertwined, and the challenge is not to dissolve that relationship entirely, but to refine it.
History suggests that removing identity altogether is not something states have successfully achieved. But it also suggests that societies can evolve in how they relate to identity, sometimes correcting deeply embedded tensions over time.
That, to me, seems the more grounded path forward.
I appreciate the conversation and the seriousness with which you approach it.
Thanks for your reply. At the end of it you mention that the idea of separating culture and state is philosophically appealing and has been explored in various intellectual traditions. I don't actually know of any such explorations (besides the fact that minorities often fight for their cultural freedom, there’s no larger understanding or discussion of this dynamic that I've seen). I would be very interested in such discussions if you know of any.
You said in a previous post that the idea of separating nation and state is “almost entirely untested at scale.” I think it is actually entirely untested, not almost. But that doesn’t matter. Every single aspect of social life started somewhere, and before that it was also entirely untested. The modern nation-state is also a relatively new social form in the world…
Unfortunately, though, the idea of the nation-state has almost entirely hypnotized humanity. Everyone wants it, but of course not everyone can have it: There are less than 200 nation-states in the world and well over 1500 distinct stateless nations that would all love to have their own states. And of course these are all people with their own languages and traditions. But they have no right of self-determination. They simply can't rule themselves. And doesn't it feel like they should be able to? Doesn’t it feel like an injustice? But my argument is actually that they shouldn’t be ale to - no cultural group should be able to “rule itself” in terms of claiming territory and forming its on government. Culture and state are two different things, and cultures have only been hoodwinked into thinking that the two should be one. If we really believe they should, then of course we should give each nation its own state, which would break the world up into thousands of pieces. It wouldn’t work. It would be hell. And there would always be minorities who didn’t go to their homeland who would always be second-class citizens in someone else's.
But this is all a little abstract. What would it mean to separate nation and state?
Here’s what modern nation-states look like around the world. States give money for education. Teachers are funded to do the important work of teaching - history, science, math, languages, literature. States give money for scientific research, and scientists are grateful to have a regular income to do their work. States give guidance on nutrition and healthcare, and doctors, healthcare providers, and insurance companies, are all grateful for that guidance and structure their work around it. States give money to the arts, to museums, to national parks - and all those organizations and people are then able to do their work. They can practice their art, they can preserve the natural world, etc., etc.
It sounds beautiful, but it’s not. When states gives money to schools, they expect them to teach certain things. The teachers who don’t teach those things have to either conform or leave - start their own schools and either find rich people to pay them or else scrape by on little or nothing. Same with scientific research. Same with medicine. Same with art. Certain people are funded because we elect politicians who think allopathic medicine is “evidence-based” and holistic medicine isn’t. Or who think that ballet dancing and the opera should be funded but not breakdancing. Or who think that national pride should be taught in our schools but not critical race theory.
But who exactly are they to say? They are the people we elect and we fight tooth and nail to get them into power because they represent our cultural views and will hopefully impose them on schools, hospitals, arts organizations, etc. They will make our neighbors think like us, which is the right way to think.
And all of this amounts to the government telling citizens what to think, what their children should be taught, what they should put into their bodies, which forms of art and science should be pursued, and which shouldn’t. And if you disagree, well hopefully you live in a “free country” (where you won't get thrown into prison) and are also independently wealthy, so you can just do whatever you want. Too bad if you’re poor.
But there is actually no need for the government to determine any of these things. They could simply give every citizen a voucher - a coupon - to use at the school of their choice. Any school. And another one to use with the doctor of their choice, etc., etc. They could pay the bill, as they do already, but let the "customer" decide where to spend the money. (I give this example for simplicity's sake, but it would be best if the money didn't even go through the government in the first place. That's a further ideal.)
We generally know it’s bad when the government funds the media. Why? Because they will eventually lean on the media to support the state’s agenda. But it’s the same with every other aspect of culture - the government wants something, they want to control how that aspect of cultural life forms. But we don’t yet recognize the damage this does even though it’s right before our eyes.
Would America look that different if the government stopped interfering with education, medicine, art, and science? Hell yeah. There would likely be an explosion of creativity in all those fields. People following their own inspiration and not waiting for some outer authority to tell them what to do, what to think. But the government itself would still exist and would still carry out many of its existing functions. The world wouldn’t end. There would just be much more freedom and creativity. And the culture wars would be over. And people wouldn't be so threatened by minorities, because everyone would be truly equal in the eyes of the state and other groups wouldn't be such a danger because there would be no way for them to impose their views on you and no way for you to impose your views on them.
Nice overview and yes, a great opportunity for the cultural-political-economic distinction.
Might be worth noting that it's not just the political that trumps the cultural all the time, it's the economic that controls the political. In the US "business" is still fighting the New Deal, and it has been quite comfortable with the cultivation of a white-supremacist "alt-right" in order to shore up a "conservative" party which, as the Senator from Florida recently affirmed, wants to destroy not just Obamacare but Medicare and Social Security. Why? Because crony/selfish capitalism depends on inequalities to make "opportunities" for the "free" (unrestrained) marketers. [Yes, jamming a few points together there.] So... does Israel have an economic sector? What's it up to?
There's a good book for the Anglo background from which, unintended, independent Israeli statehood emerged:
'The cool, aloof Balfour was anything but an Old Testament character himself. But of all the Englishmen who at one time or another helped along the Return he was possibly the only one interested in it from the point of view of the Jews. To him they were neither tools of the Christian millennium nor agents of a business imperialism, but simply exiles who should be given back, in payment of Christianity’s “immeasurable debt,” their homeland. Not just any land, but the old land. Why Palestine? “The answer is,” he wrote, “that the position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are inter-related as they are inter-related in the case of no other religion and no other country on earth.' [Tuchman, Barbara W.. Bible and Sword (p. 339). Random House]
Hi John and all,
So regarding economy mixing onto the state here in Israel. I just have two indications:
one, one example concerns the media, which is ideally a cultural thing... These days ex prime minister Netanyahu is standing trail because he allegedly benefited media owners while functioning as a regulator in what we call the office for communications. Media today is first and foremost a business (mixture of economy and culture): they wanted more money. Netanyahu wanted influence on public opinion for political power. Hence, the mix of media and economy met the mix of government and economy. The government owned a communication company that was sold, as an additional organ, to the media giants. In return Netanyahu got some control over what appeared on the existing news website (of the communication giants). We can see how corruption arose from the mixtures...
Secondly, a very big general issue. The national state here regards itself as an economic entity... it is more or less trivial to people that it is run like a business: Maximizing "profit" from the different taxes, trying to promote the national businesses so to make more money, and this of course puts it in competition and conflict with other national economies that perceive themselves similarly. So this is a big issue concerning the entanglement of state and economy, that I would like to go more deeply into and grasp better.
Those are helpful pictures, Omni - thanks for sharing.
It's interesting how so much of threefolding can be understood simply through an expanded understanding of the idea of "conflicts of interest." I say "expanded" because it's not just when someone makes money from a situation, which is what it seems like it's often reduced to (for instance, when a lawmaker is regulating the very industries they're invested in), but whenever they're able to maintain or grow their power in some way (i.e. they're able to stay in political office by manipulating the press, or they're able to have their religious or economic interests prevail by taking over the state, etc.). I think the term "conflict of interest" actually does cover any form of "interest," and not just money, but it seems like it's often reduced to money...
There's also a kind of "soft" version of this, where the person isn't driven by the desire for profit or power, but legitimately thinks that they're doing good. For instance, a business person might think it's helpful to bring their business skills into the realm of making laws about human rights, or an idealistic politician might think they should dictate what teachers teach based on what they think would be fair and just in terms of rights. They don't realize they're actually overstepping boundaries and applying their capacities in a realm where they no longer apply. This soft version of a conflict of interest I call "misplaced ideals" in my course on threefolding. It could also be called "misplaced expertise," but I like how "ideals" shows how someone can be meaning to do good, but just misunderstanding the situation.
You mentioned Netanyahu and the state promoting national businesses, which is pretty intriguing. If you do go more deeply into that topic and find any interesting articles in that direction, I'd definitely be interested so please do keep me in mind.
It's an interesting quote and helpful to think about how the Israeli situation is so specific. The religious element is definitely more emphasized than with other nations - the explicitly "religious homeland" gives the countryside itself a spiritual aspect that almost certainly doesn't exist with the same intensity in the Italian or French countryside. They'll of course also have their monuments and "sacred" sites, though probably less overtly religious (like the home of Dante or Joan of Arc) as well as less relevant to their modern experience (like the ancient sacred sites - say Delphi in Greece or Stonehenge in England).
There’s also the long history of exile within Judaism and, alongside that, the fact that other groups have lived on that land in large numbers. It creates a kind of mixed history that we don’t really see in the same way elsewhere. Also the fact that the land is sacred ground for other religions as well. That all creates a really specific and intense dynamic.
I don’t know too much about the economic situation there, though I assume it’s similar to much of what’s happening elsewhere around the world (crony capitalism, oligarchs, etc.) I imagine it would be a whole article in itself… :)
Thank you Seth. As an Israeli I can tell you that this is very inspiring. The light of threefolding is shinning bright and clear, and I feel that there is significance just in seeing a clear vision, just in feeling it as a comprehensive answer, even if the situation today seems so far from all this - there is still power in the very feeling, which is similar to the feeling of finding an answer to a complicated and confusing riddle.
I love, as well, the way you start from what may look like a "regular" political opinion, but then slowly move into a meta-political sphere - a sphere from which, I believe, real answers come.
That's great to hear, Omri. Yeah, it's amazing how short-sighted the "regular" opinions are when it comes to the nation-state. We badly need the meta view in order to make any sense of it at all. That said, I'd definitely recommend the Andre Liebich paper that I link to in the article - he gives a really concise and comprehensive overview of just how muddled our thinking is on this topic (and he's also got a book coming out this summer - "Cultural Nations and Political Sates" - that I'm excited to check out).
I know it's hard to imagine transitioning to a state that doesn't favor any one nation - especially in Israel where it was so explicitly formed for that purpose. But I think if we have a picture of the kind of social ideals we truly want to work towards, then we can slowly begin to untangle the knots that have formed, not just in Israel but everywhere.
Seth, this helps clarify your position. You’re not just critiquing Israel, you’re arguing that the nation-state itself is the root cause of conflict, and that “national self-determination” is inherently unstable.
But if that’s the case, then the argument has to be applied consistently, not symbolically. The modern world is almost entirely composed of nation-states. From Japan to Poland to Ireland, states preserve a dominant national culture while granting civil rights to minorities. The same is true across much of the Arab world, where many states explicitly define themselves in ethnic or religious terms. Constitutions in countries like Egypt describe the state as Arab and embed Islam as a central source of legislation, often leaving minorities such as the Copts with a more precarious status despite their deep historical roots that long predate the Arabization of the region.
Second, the claim that the nation-state inevitably leads to violence does not hold up historically. Some of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century were driven not by nation-states, but by empires and ideological regimes that suppressed national identity, including the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The problem is not simply that nations seek political expression, but how states manage diversity, rights, and power.
Third, even the examples often cited as alternatives reveal how difficult it is to move beyond national frameworks. Countries like Switzerland and Belgium are not nation-less states but carefully balanced multinational arrangements. In the case of Belgium, despite being at the heart of Europe and hosting the institutions of the European Union, the state exists in a near-constant state of political strain between its main linguistic and cultural groups, the Flemish and the Walloons, who often struggle to agree on governance. And when such tensions are not managed successfully, the results can be far more severe, as seen in the breakup of Yugoslavia, where competing national identities ultimately led to violent conflict and fragmentation.
Fourth, Israel is an especially difficult case to fit into a purely theoretical model. The Zionist project did not emerge in a vacuum as an abstract expression of nationalism. It emerged in response to the repeated failure of Jews to live safely as minorities, culminating in the Holocaust. That historical reality makes the question of Jewish self-determination qualitatively different from a general critique of nationalism.
Finally, the idea of separating nation and state entirely is philosophically appealing, but it remains almost entirely untested at scale. The question is not whether the nation-state contains tensions. It clearly does. The question is whether those tensions invalidate the concept altogether, or whether they can be managed within democratic frameworks that protect minority rights.
If the argument is universal, it needs to be applied universally. If it is applied selectively, then it stops being a theory and becomes a judgment about a single case.
Hey Yoav - thanks so much for this post, as well as your response to the note I wrote about the 2/26 Guardian piece ("Israel is promised only to the Jewish people"). I'll respond to both of your posts here (and if anyone wants to read your response to the Guardian note, I'll share the link below).
I want to be clear about one thing from the start that I think is often misunderstood about my argument: I don't see myself as trying to make a moral argument, but as trying to make an objective - one could even say "scientific" - argument. My thesis is simply that a state inevitably creates the conditions for conflict and violence whenever it structures itself so as to privilege one culture over another. If my thesis is true, than Israel should obviously want to restructure itself simply for self-preservation - not for the preservation of its own nation-state (which I'm arguing they should abandon), but for the preservation of Israeli Jews, which is the whole stated purpose of Israel to begin with. This is obviously a pressing concern and I wish people would take it more seriously. It's not an academic argument. It's a question of how the violence will actually end.
You seem to think that this thesis is false, and I will grant you that there are plenty of nation-states that appear stable and conflict-free. But these are just appearances. Tensions between ethnic groups flare up here and there, especially when the country falls on hard times. And the almost ubiquitous culture wars (left vs right) are also just another expression of this same dynamic - of one culture trying to shape the state in its image.
You say that there are other reasons for violence such as "empires and ideological regimes" - I totally agree. I'm not saying the nation-state is the only bad form of social organization out there (though your example of Stalinist Russia is just another example of the harm done when people's ethnic identities are suppressed).
One of the things you mention is that Israel is "uniquely singled out" - Israel's critics, you point out, are not consistent. I agree that such consistency is absolutely necessary, and I try to realize this ideal within my own writing. When I speak about the need to separate nation and state, I make it it clear that it applies to all nation-states. I point to Israel specifically only because it's in the news and I write about current events, trying to draw healthy principles of social organization from them. But in the last few years I've also written about this topic in relation to Ukraine and Myanmar, and I very, very, often write about the culture wars in the US in the same exact terms, urging people to understand the need for separating culture and state.
And that is the larger framework: the need to separate culture and state. It doesn't matter if you talk about nations and ethnic groups, or religious groups, or left vs right. They're all forms of cultural identity.
You claim that Israel's "historical reality makes the question of Jewish self-determination qualitatively different from a general critique of nationalism," but why?You can claim the Jewish people have greater need for security and safety because of their history, but creating a Jewish nation-state won't make them safer. It makes them lass safe. Jewish history does not make the Jewish people immune to the basic dynamics I'm describing.
And I'm certainly not championing plurinational states like Belgium and Switzerland - as you rightly point out, they have the same kind of ethnic/cultural tensions as regular nation-states - I'm championing nationless states.
One last point: in a democracy every individual has equal rights, but how can that be the case if not every individual has the right to express their ideas and beliefs equally? When the language of the state, the symbols of the state, the school curricula of the state, the immigration policy and land and settlement policy of the state, all privilege one cultural group over another, then those groups are not equal. You simply have to ask yourself how you would feel if the tables were turned and your culture was the minority group suffering such obstacles and indignities.
This dynamic creates tension, the conditions for endless conflict and violence. The solution I'm advocating for would remove this tension. Of course people would still think differently, in fact there would be far more diversity of viewpoints, but there would be no fear of political suppression. Right now, if you don't suppress you are in danger of being suppressed. The system makes you fight. It makes you more distrustful of your neighbor.
I can see a line in the sand that should be drawn, a line between culture and state. This would have radical implications for our lives. Am I perhaps not seeing that line correctly? Should it be drawn elsewhere? This is what I'm wondering. Is there another solution that will actually lead to peace, or will we just continue down the same road until we finally exterminate all our neighbors.
Thanks for the conversation,
Seth
(And your other post: https://substack.com/@yoavsliberman/note/c-240181761?r=kfj6s&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web)
Hi Seth,
Thank you for the thoughtful and serious response. I appreciate the clarity with which you lay out your framework, and I agree that these questions are not academic. They are about how societies actually endure or collapse.
I want to engage directly with your central thesis that states which privilege one culture inevitably produce conflict, and that separating culture from the state would reduce or eliminate that tension.
I think the difficulty lies in the assumption of inevitability. The modern world is not composed of “neutral” states that have somehow transcended culture. It is composed of states that are, almost without exception, expressions of particular cultures, linguistic, historical, and civilizational. From Japan to Poland to Ireland, what we actually see is that cultural particularity is not an anomaly. It is the norm. These societies are not voids stripped of identity. They are living embodiments of distinct traditions, languages, and collective memories.
The more fundamental issue, then, is not whether culture should exist within a state, but whether a state can remain stable without a coherent cultural core. A society that attempts to strip itself of its defining culture does not become neutral. It becomes unmoored. Like a ship without ballast, it risks losing the very stability that allows it to function over time. The question is not how to eliminate a dominant culture, but how to sustain it while ensuring that those outside it are treated with full civic equality.
You asked how one should feel as a minority under such conditions. It is an important question. I do not approach this from a position of cultural dominance. I live as a minority myself, as a Jew in a predominantly Christian society in the United States. That experience does not lead me to conclude that the surrounding culture must be neutralized or removed from the public sphere. Rather, it reinforces the importance of balancing a society’s cultural identity with the protection of minority rights within it.
When we look at Israel through that lens, the picture is more complex than your model allows. Even at a basic structural level, the state is not organized around the suppression of other cultures. Hebrew is the primary language, but Arabic is widely used in public life, signage, education, and media. Roughly 20 percent of the population is non-Jewish, and there is no national program to impose religious observance or erase minority identities. Different communities, Muslim, Christian, and Druze, maintain their own institutions and public presence.
More than that, the “Jewishness” of the state is itself internally diverse. Jewish society in Israel is not a single, uniform culture but a convergence of diasporas, from Ethiopia to Eastern Europe, from the Middle East to Latin America and beyond, bringing with them different languages, liturgical traditions, cuisines, and ways of life. What emerges is not a rigid hegemony but a shared civilizational framework, Hebrew in language and orientation, within which multiple expressions coexist and interact.
That complexity also extends to minority outcomes. While disparities exist, as they do in many societies, there are also cases, particularly among Christian Arab communities, where educational and economic outcomes are strong, in some instances exceeding national averages. This points to a more layered reality than one of simple structural suppression.
This is part of why I see Israel differently. It is not simply a case of cultural preference embedded in a state. It is the restoration of a civilization. The Hebrew language has been revived into daily life. The Hebrew calendar structures public time. A culture with roots going back thousands of years has reconstituted itself in sovereign form. This is not abstract nationalism. It is a historical reassembly of a people that lived for centuries without sovereignty.
And that history matters. The Jewish experience is defined in large part by prolonged statelessness, by vulnerability across multiple societies, often regardless of how those societies structured themselves. The creation of Israel is, in many ways, a response to that condition. It is an attempt to restore agency, security, and continuity.
If one values the preservation of cultural uniqueness, then Israel represents something rare. It is not merely a community maintaining its traditions, but a civilization expressing itself in full sovereign form, linguistically, historically, and politically. It is the only place where Jewish life is not a minority experience, but the organizing framework of public life.
This is where I think your model runs into difficulty. It assumes that conflict is primarily generated by internal cultural structuring. But in Israel’s case, much of the conflict is driven by external rejection and historical realities that precede the state itself. Removing the Jewish character of the state would not address those forces. It would remove the very mechanism designed to respond to them.
You also raise the question of equality, and I agree it is essential. The challenge for any state, Israel included, is to ensure full civil and political rights for all its citizens. But that is a different question from whether a state can have a cultural identity. Many states attempt to do both, imperfectly, but meaningfully.
So I find myself asking a slightly different question than the one you pose. Not how to eliminate culture from the state, but how to balance cultural continuity with civic equality. How to sustain a particular tradition while ensuring that those who do not share it are nonetheless fully protected under the law.
The idea of fully separating culture from the state is philosophically appealing, and it has been explored in various intellectual traditions. But it remains largely untested in practice, especially under conditions of historical vulnerability like those that shaped the Jewish experience. The world we actually inhabit is one where cultures and states remain intertwined, and the challenge is not to dissolve that relationship entirely, but to refine it.
History suggests that removing identity altogether is not something states have successfully achieved. But it also suggests that societies can evolve in how they relate to identity, sometimes correcting deeply embedded tensions over time.
That, to me, seems the more grounded path forward.
I appreciate the conversation and the seriousness with which you approach it.
Yoav
Hello Yoav,
Thanks for your reply. At the end of it you mention that the idea of separating culture and state is philosophically appealing and has been explored in various intellectual traditions. I don't actually know of any such explorations (besides the fact that minorities often fight for their cultural freedom, there’s no larger understanding or discussion of this dynamic that I've seen). I would be very interested in such discussions if you know of any.
You said in a previous post that the idea of separating nation and state is “almost entirely untested at scale.” I think it is actually entirely untested, not almost. But that doesn’t matter. Every single aspect of social life started somewhere, and before that it was also entirely untested. The modern nation-state is also a relatively new social form in the world…
Unfortunately, though, the idea of the nation-state has almost entirely hypnotized humanity. Everyone wants it, but of course not everyone can have it: There are less than 200 nation-states in the world and well over 1500 distinct stateless nations that would all love to have their own states. And of course these are all people with their own languages and traditions. But they have no right of self-determination. They simply can't rule themselves. And doesn't it feel like they should be able to? Doesn’t it feel like an injustice? But my argument is actually that they shouldn’t be ale to - no cultural group should be able to “rule itself” in terms of claiming territory and forming its on government. Culture and state are two different things, and cultures have only been hoodwinked into thinking that the two should be one. If we really believe they should, then of course we should give each nation its own state, which would break the world up into thousands of pieces. It wouldn’t work. It would be hell. And there would always be minorities who didn’t go to their homeland who would always be second-class citizens in someone else's.
But this is all a little abstract. What would it mean to separate nation and state?
Here’s what modern nation-states look like around the world. States give money for education. Teachers are funded to do the important work of teaching - history, science, math, languages, literature. States give money for scientific research, and scientists are grateful to have a regular income to do their work. States give guidance on nutrition and healthcare, and doctors, healthcare providers, and insurance companies, are all grateful for that guidance and structure their work around it. States give money to the arts, to museums, to national parks - and all those organizations and people are then able to do their work. They can practice their art, they can preserve the natural world, etc., etc.
It sounds beautiful, but it’s not. When states gives money to schools, they expect them to teach certain things. The teachers who don’t teach those things have to either conform or leave - start their own schools and either find rich people to pay them or else scrape by on little or nothing. Same with scientific research. Same with medicine. Same with art. Certain people are funded because we elect politicians who think allopathic medicine is “evidence-based” and holistic medicine isn’t. Or who think that ballet dancing and the opera should be funded but not breakdancing. Or who think that national pride should be taught in our schools but not critical race theory.
But who exactly are they to say? They are the people we elect and we fight tooth and nail to get them into power because they represent our cultural views and will hopefully impose them on schools, hospitals, arts organizations, etc. They will make our neighbors think like us, which is the right way to think.
And all of this amounts to the government telling citizens what to think, what their children should be taught, what they should put into their bodies, which forms of art and science should be pursued, and which shouldn’t. And if you disagree, well hopefully you live in a “free country” (where you won't get thrown into prison) and are also independently wealthy, so you can just do whatever you want. Too bad if you’re poor.
But there is actually no need for the government to determine any of these things. They could simply give every citizen a voucher - a coupon - to use at the school of their choice. Any school. And another one to use with the doctor of their choice, etc., etc. They could pay the bill, as they do already, but let the "customer" decide where to spend the money. (I give this example for simplicity's sake, but it would be best if the money didn't even go through the government in the first place. That's a further ideal.)
We generally know it’s bad when the government funds the media. Why? Because they will eventually lean on the media to support the state’s agenda. But it’s the same with every other aspect of culture - the government wants something, they want to control how that aspect of cultural life forms. But we don’t yet recognize the damage this does even though it’s right before our eyes.
Would America look that different if the government stopped interfering with education, medicine, art, and science? Hell yeah. There would likely be an explosion of creativity in all those fields. People following their own inspiration and not waiting for some outer authority to tell them what to do, what to think. But the government itself would still exist and would still carry out many of its existing functions. The world wouldn’t end. There would just be much more freedom and creativity. And the culture wars would be over. And people wouldn't be so threatened by minorities, because everyone would be truly equal in the eyes of the state and other groups wouldn't be such a danger because there would be no way for them to impose their views on you and no way for you to impose your views on them.