The Defense of Israel and Its Anti-Judaism

The military escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years has gone hand in hand with a sharpening of discursive hostility in which the defence of Israeland the critique of Israelconfront each other irreconcilably. One side conceives Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, disenfranchisement, and oppression as an avant-garde movement in the struggle of the global South against the perpetuated colonial domination (Herrschaft) of the West. Much has been debated about this position; there are good reasons to challenge the concepts it deploys – concepts such as apartheid, settler colonialism, racism, genocide – not only in their political consequences but in their diagnostic aptness and explanatory power. They are probably not simply inaccurate, but skewed and thereby misleading.

But what about the other side, the defence of Israel? Increasingly, it proceeds by adopting the conflict-description of postcolonial critique – merely inverting the evaluations. This is the logic by which right-wing movements, commentators, and governments operate when they defend Israel; if appearances do not deceive, this logic has become the dominant one. According to it, critique and defence of Israel share the same front line. Just as the former sees itself as the avant-garde of the global South, the latter sees in Israel the foremost bastion of the West, defending its political, economic, and cultural values (and interests) in a hostile environment – the “only democracy in the Middle East.” The defence as mirror-image inversionof the critique: they are concerned with the same thing. And that thing, despite all protestations, is not Israel. In this defence of Israel (as probably also in support for Ukraine¹), what is at stake for the West is – the West. It is about itself.

Is there another defence of Israel than the right-wing one that currently prevails? And thereby also: another critique of Israel than the equally prevailing one that sees in Israel nothing but an outpost of the West? To answer these questions, one must understand the right-wing defence of Israel more precisely; one must understand more precisely in what sense it is correct to call it “right-wing” – which is why the term is used here not merely as a polemical but as an analytical concept. If it is true that this defence of Israel in the name of the West in truth aims to defend itself: why does the West then need Israel for its self-assertion? And what does this defence make of Israel, what does its “Israel” mean, if what is at stake is the West? Israel is here a cipher of appropriative identification. Which is to say: the right defends Israel in order to eradicate a difference. It is the difference of Judaism: the difference of its freedom from the freedom that sustains the political order conceiving of itself as that of the West. More than that: the right defends Israel because it sees in Israel the place where Judaism has itself relinquished its difference: where it has assimilated itself to the freedom of the West, adopted this freedom as its own and thereby confirmed it. The right-wing defence of Israel is at its core anti-Jewish. Is this also why it so frequently – and without perceiving the abyssal characterof such a gesture – goes hand in hand with accusations of anti-Semitism directed against left-wing Jews?

The Anti-Judaism of the Republic

The difference of Judaism that is at stake here emerges starkly in Hegel’s early writings on the philosophy of religion, composed before 1800 and published a hundred years later from the unpublished papers under the title The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate.² In these reflections, Hegel develops, with reference to the Greek polis and with clear bearing on the question of state and revolution posed in 1789, the political concept of the “Republic”. Yet Hegel seems able to do so here only by sharply opposing the Republic to Judaism; Yirmiyahu Yovel rightly spoke of the “most blatantly anti-Jewish text Hegel ever wrote.” The Judeophobia of the young Hegel’s reflections is rooted in his enthusiasm for the freedom of the Greek polis. His anti-Judaism is merely the obverse of his politico-cultural philhellenism.³

The right defends Israel in order to eradicate a difference. It is the difference of Judaism: the difference of its freedom from the freedom that sustains the political order conceiving of itself as that of the West.

What is at stake is the opposition between two conceptions of law, which Hegel determines through two opposed relations to freedom. “Greek” is the conception according to which I am free because or when the law is my own. The Jewish law stands opposed to this as unfree and enslaving, because it is a foreign law, imposed from without. Hegel explicates this opposition as follows: the law in the “Greek republics” is valid because it is a “truth”, and the validityof truth implies freedom; “for truth is something free, which we neither dominate nor are dominated by.” The law, by contrast, that Moses gives to his peopleis grounded in a “decree”coming from without or from above – from God. “[T]he Jews are through and through dependent on God, and that upon which one depends cannot have the form of a truth.” If to the Greek law, as truth, there corresponds the freedom of the subject, to the Mosaic law as decree there corresponds its “servitude”. The fundamental trait of the Jewish form of life is the “perpetual passivity” of its subjects, who for that very reason are not truly subjects at all: as unfree, the Jews are pre-subjective, unemancipated – servile.

This, according to Hegel, explains why the Jews, as he believes he knows, are capable of leading only an extremely reduced, spiritually and culturally impoverished, indeed almost animal-like existence. For “in this perpetual passivity, nothing remained to them, apart from the attestation of their servility, but the pure, empty need to preserve physical existence and to secure it against distress.” Because in their relation to God and the laws they are merely servile and subjected, all that remains to the Jews for their activity is the “physical” domain, which Mosaic legislation has moreover afflicted “with an oriental – beautiful in form – threat of the loss of all enjoyment and all happiness”; in this physical life what is at issue is not enjoyment and happiness but mere self-preservation. Law and the inner life of each – the self – stand in externalopposition among the Jews: because the law comes only from without, which is to say it is transcendent, the self is merely physical – reduced to its interests, its needs, and the bargaining to satisfy them. The economism that Hegel attributes to the Jews, he explains to himself as an effect of transcendence.

If to the Greek law, as truth, there corresponds the freedom of the subject, to the Mosaic law as decree there corresponds its “servitude”.

These are widespread anti-Jewish motifs, yet Hegel traces them back to a political logic; Hegel’s anti-Judaism is political. What is at stake for him is the “beauty” of the “Republic”. Its model is the Greek polis; but the concept of political freedom that positions the Republic as anti-Jewish is fundamental to the European idea of the state as such. It consists in this: that the state expresses in the mode of obligation, hence in rules, what we are, and that we must follow these rules precisely because in truth we are as the rules say we ought to be. Obedience to the law is self-realisation; the law is the expression of what is our own. Republican freedom consists in this beautiful correspondence: to be free means to live under a law grounded in our own being. Or again: republican freedomconsists in making what we are prevail in laws. This freedom is the power of self-assertion.

Because the fundamental trait of Jewish moral life is on the contrary the passivityand dependence of its subjects vis-à-vis the law imposed upon them, the Jews are, according to Hegel, incapable of political freedom. They are incapable of the “Republic”: they cannot govern themselves; they lack the freedom to make what they are prevail in self-given laws. According to Hegel, the Jews are constitutionally apolitical, through the form of their religious moral life and hence through their servile habitus, which constitutes their (second) nature.

The strident tone of Hegel’s political anti-Judaism has an obvious reason. That reason is the weakness of his argument for republican freedom. A fundamental question remains unanswered in it, indeed is not even posed. It is the question of how the Greeks became free. As Hegel says of the republic-founding reforms of Solon and Lycurgus: “the Greeks were to be equal, because all were free, self-reliant.” Their reforms created equality for those who were already free – against those who were not. Freedom is a property that they possess. And because freedom must therefore be a capacity that belongs to the Greeks by nature or through culture; and because nature and culture are fields of infinite gradation and difference (by nature or through culture we are unequal) – this is why the Greeks held and postulated that their freedom separates them from all others, who are incapable of it. When freedom is a property, it is always already cleft within itself; that “all” are free, as Hegel says of the Greeks, means that they are – and the others are not.

The strident tone of Hegel’s political anti-Judaism has an obvious reason. That reason is the weakness of his argument for republican freedom. A fundamental question remains unanswered in it, indeed is not even posed. It is the question of how the Greeks became free.

The republican capacity to govern oneself is our freedom: a freedom that we possess, that is our own. Freedom is what is common to us – and sets us apart from others. This is what defines political freedom here, ever since the Greek republics: the capacity that distinguishes us and is common to us, to determine what is common to us. Political freedom is grounded in the given, in the given nature of the self-governing collective. This is why political freedom in the form of the Republic exists only by separating itself from those who cannot partake of it; who are too lazy, too stupid, simply incapable of being free. Hegel’s anti-Judaism – and this is what makes it strident – does nothing but express the originary separation that constitutes the Republic: the separation of the free from the unfree. The Republic grounds the self-government of the free as domination– as domination in the name of freedom.

The Passivity of Liberation

It is precisely here that it becomes apparent that the passivitybefore an imposed law, which Hegel locates in Judaism, contains a truth in matters of the theory of freedom; a truth that decomposes the secure ground on which the Republic believes itself to stand. Hegel can see in this passivity only a renewed subjection: “he who had released [the Jewish people] from one yoke laid another upon them.” The Jewish experience of subjection to the commandmentradically contradicts this reading. It is not the other of freedom, still less its blockage, but its ground; it is not subjugating and enslaving, but liberating. For while the Greeks conceive of freedom as their property, if not as their own accomplishment (and hence their privilege), the Jewish narrative of liberation places at its centre the paradox that freedom cannot owe itself to itself but can only be brought about by a force from without. Freedom is an effect of passivity.

Thus the second book of Moses, in Latin Exodus, tells how Moses became the liberator of his people. To be able to liberate his people from the servitudeof Egypt, he must first himself be torn from the immanenceof his familial-economic existence as husband and shepherd. And he is liberated from it by being called: “But Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock beyond the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, Horeb. And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flaming fire from the midst of a bush. And he saw that the bush was burning with fire yet was not consumed. Then he said: I will go over and see this wondrous sight, why the bush does not burn. But when the LORD saw that he went over to see, God called to him from the bush and said: Moses, Moses! And he answered: Here I am.” (Ex 3:1–4)

Liberationthus begins with a commandment, the callof an other. What is at stake in this call? How and to what end does God call Moses? This is shown in Moses’ answer. He says: “Here I am.” To say “here” is not here a spatial indication. “Here” means “present”: Moses says that he is there, that is, present and available to the one who calls. Instead of “Here I am,” the answer is also translated as “I am listening”. Moses answers that he is there for the call (and for the one who calls); he is there for the call by hearingit. The commandment that this call constitutes demands nothing else of the one to whom it is addressed than to hear the call: to hear the call that commands one to hear the call.

The Jewish narrative of liberation places at its centre the paradox that freedom cannot owe itself to itself but can only be brought about by a force from without. Freedom is an effect of passivity.

With the hearingof a call that commands and demands nothing other than to hear, to hear as such, liberation begins, according to the narrative of the Exodus. To follow the commandment of this call therefore does not mean, as it must appear from the standpoint of the political freedom of the Republic, submitting to a foreign law. For laws prescribe determinate actions (or prohibitions). Laws have a determinate content, in which is expressed the way we understand ourselves and therefore wish to live. The commandmentof the call, by contrast, is empty. It demands nothing. That is to say: nothing determinate.⁴ For it demands everything. It demands something of which we are not (yet) capable. The call commands one to hear as such: to hear the call, the commandment – the demand to hear that there be demand – to hear. Before this commandment, everything one can do falls short. Or rather: the commandment is always already too much: an “excess of demand (Sigmund Freud).

But why is this excessive demand liberating? It is, or becomes so, because it sunders those who hear the commandment from themselves. It sunders them from what they are, by nature or through their culture. Precisely and only insofar as the self is subjected to the demand of the unconditional commandment, and insofar as it says yesto this subjection, is it liberated. Liberated to what? To no longer being conditioned in its willing and acting by what it already is. The liberation that the excessive demand from without produces consists in the sundering from one’s own being, from one’s natural or cultural identity. Through this alone is there freedom. For freedom consists in beginning anewwithout being determined and conditioned by what has for its sole merit the fact that it is already there.

Emmanuel Lévinas brings this thought of the Exodus to its point, as simple as it is decisive. It states “that human autonomy rests upon the greatest heteronomy.”⁵ To think freedomJewishly means to think it as liberation and liberation as the “miraculous effect” (Lévinas) of an external, supreme force that we undergo. Liberation is passive. More precisely: it consists in saying yes to what one undergoes, to the subjectionto an external force. And liberation cannot have begun otherwise. If we therefore wish, in opposition to the Greek-republican model, to understand how freedom came into the world rather than simply presupposing it, we must think Jewishly. Judaism thinks what that model cannot think: the beginnin) of liberation as liberation to begin.

The Politics of the Exodus

Because the Exodus is grounded in the commandment, it radically transforms the way the political order of freedom must be constituted: the politics of the Exodus is anti-republican. Conversely, the anti-Judaism in Hegel’s apology for the beautiful freedom of the Republic is no epiphenomenon, no rhetorical excess. Hegel’s anti-Judaism is grounded in the concept of the “Republic.” That is its negative truth: Hegel’s anti-Judaism indicates that the Republic is directed against the politics of the Exodus, which calls into question the freedom of the Republic in its presuppositions and therefore radically.

The opposition between the two is grounded in the opposition of their respective concepts of freedom. The Exodus defines freedom as an effect: the effect of an unconditionally opening commandment. And because we owe our freedom to saying yes to this commandment, it consists in beginning anew– that is, in building without grounding ourselves in what we are. The Republic, by contrast, presupposes freedom as a property that its subjects possess and exercise. Their freedom is the freedom of self-assertion; understood in a republican sense, to be free means to persevere and assert oneself in one’s being – as we are.

Greek and Jewish freedom thereby stand opposed in their conception of political domination. The Republic understands political domination as authorityand political authority as representation: the sovereign speaks for us. Republican domination is the domination of representatives. They are authorised to prescribe to us through laws what we must do, because in doing so they merely ascertain who we truly are – hence what we already prescribe to ourselves (or would prescribe were we in our right minds). Precisely because, understood in a republican sense, political domination is thus bound to representation, it is incontestable – authoritative because authorised by us. As Hegel says, it is the authority of truth. And hence of freedom; “for truth is something free” (Hegel). In the Republic, freedom grounds domination; domination and freedom coincide.

All laws, the binding prescriptions that order the political community, are through the Exodus grounded in the commandment – and thereby relativised.

The revolutionary political significance of the Exodus lies in the fact that the Jews, in leaving Egypt, by no means merely escape the domination of Pharaoh. The rupture runs far deeper and therefore far further. The Exodus, writes Jan Assmann, is the “explosion of a bond between domination and communitythat in Egypt and (as far as I can see) everywhere else in the world of that time could only be thought as a unity.”⁶ This “bond between domination and community” is secured in Egypt by Pharaoh: “Pharaoh rules over ‘mankind’ and embodies their collective identity.” When, as in the Exodus, the domination of Pharaoh is destroyed by the “transfer of political bonds onto God”, what is at stake is therefore not merely the question of who is authorised to represent us in our “collective identity”: whether Pharaoh, someone we have elected, or indeed all of us together. The radicality of the political rupture accomplished in the Exodus concerns the logic of representationas such, upon which the republican model of political self-government rests. For in the politics of the Exodus, it is precisely not about us, about what we are and therefore want. It is about the commandment, about the freedom that is won in the hearing of the commandment.

The liberation of the Exodus is therefore political in that it delegitimises all authority to fix laws. All laws, the binding prescriptions that order the political community, are through the Exodus grounded in the commandment – and thereby relativised. They are validin passing, provisionally. They are transitory in the literal sense – a site of transit toward their own failing. They are not valid through themselves, not because we have given them to ourselves. But through something else, the commandment, and they are therefore not valid in the strict sense. And likewise, after the Exodus, all political authority is merely borrowed. It does not rule because it represents us and is thereby legitimised. But through something else, the commandment, and it therefore does not rule in the strict sense. Precisely because the politics of the Exodus is grounded in the unconditional “yes” to the commandment, it is as much antinomian, directed against the validity of the law, as it is anarchic, directed against the authority of political domination. The Exodus is not merely the flight from the oppressive domination of Pharaoh. The liberating force of the Exodus reaches far further. It calls into question the republican model of political order, valid to this day, at the very moment in which it is in the process of being constituted. Just as the Exodus is anti-republican, so republicanism is in its essence anti-Judaic.

The “Dilemma” of Zionism

But what can it then mean to found Jewish freedom? Can this be the founding of a republic? Can Jewish liberation found a “state”? Can there even be a “Jewish state”? Is this not a contradiction in terms? And is the defence of Israel as a state, as a state like all other states, which are republics in the sense described, therefore not the betrayal of its freedom?

This is the paradox of Zionism. It is thus, at least – as a paradox – that the project of a Jewish nation-state appears in Moses Hess’s great treatise Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationality Question of 1862. According to Hess, this project is determined by an insoluble “dilemma”: Jerusalem is the spiritual opposite of Rome and thereby opposed to the principles of the political form that Hegel called the “Republic,” yet at the same time Jerusalem can acquire political existence only by availing itself of this form. If it is true that Hess (as the German editor of his Jewish Writings, Theodor Zlocisti, writes) was the “creator of the modern Zionist idea,” it is precisely because in his programmatic work he brings into relief the contradictioninscribed within this idea. It drives him to a series of highly speculative constructions that cannot resolve the contradiction, and perhaps are not meant to resolve it⁷, but whose significance lies in exposing and attesting it. If one follows Hess, there is no Zionism that is not in contradiction with itself.

Is the defence of Israel as a state, as a state like all other states, which are republics in the sense described, therefore not the betrayal of its freedom?

On the one hand, Hess describes the founding of a Jewish state such that the Jews are merely claiming what also belongs to the “other historical peoples”. They are “nations”that have a right to their own state. What is at stake, then, is the “national rebirth of Israel” – the political rebirth of Israel as a nation, like all others. That these are not all other peoples testifies to Hess’s Eurocentrism.⁸ This is why he thinks the recovery of Jewish soil could be effected through the “founding of colonies,” which he envisions as closely linked to French “Oriental” policy, through which “the path of civilisation is cleared in the desert”; Hess sees in European colonialism an ally of Zionism. On the other hand, Hess clearly marks the unbridgeable difference, indeed the sharp opposition, in which Judaism stands to the assumptions underlying the concept of the nation. In the concept of the nation, the political form is tied to a given, indeed naturally existing community. According to Hess’s distinction, the nation is therefore “pagan”.

Paganism(and with it: Greek thought) consists, according to Hess, in the religion of nature – in submission to the naturally given. Judaism, by contrast, is the religion of history– liberation from the merely given. “[J]udaism is the religion of history, the cult of history, opposed to the pagan cult of nature.” The “Indo-Germanic” and the “Semitic peoples” are distinguished by “their fundamentally different views of life,” which “have come down to us in the classical works of the Hellenes and the Israelites.” “We see therein that the former proceeded from the multiplicity, the latter from the unity of life; that those conceived the world as eternal, these as an eternal becoming. There, the spirit seeks to penetrate spatial coexistence; here, temporal succession. In the Greek spirit is reflected the completed creation; in the Jewish spirit, the invisible labour of becoming.”

In the concept of the nation, the political form is tied to a given, indeed naturally existing community. According to Hess’s distinction, the nation is therefore “pagan”.

It is Greek or pagan to accept an irreducible, because naturally given, plurality of political units, of states; it is Jewish, by contrast, to think the unity of the human race as something to come in history under a transcendent divine commandment. In this opposition, the nation – the category of “nation” – in whose name Zionism seeks to found the Jewish state, falls on the pagan, the anti-Jewish side. If one follows Hess, a Jewish nation-state is therefore already anti-Jewish in its very form. The Jews are not a nation like the others, understanding themselves as particular, bounded, existing for themselves, hence essentially particularist among many others. The Jews are different precisely in that they are not – do not wish to be or remain so. What distinguishes Israel from the outset from the many different nations is that it “recognised or at least intuited the divine plan in the history of humankind,” and this plan is called: unity, “unity of the human race despite the diversity of human races.” Israel therefore cannot be a nation. It cannot be determined by what it simply or already is; for that is, as Hess says of the “natural, organic race, “the spiritless”.

This difference of Israel from the peoplesconcerns its political form. It therefore does not merely concern the scope of the political community: whether it consists of a plurality of nationally defined units or of humanity as a whole. It concerns the political form because what is called politics is fundamentally transformed from the standpoint of the Jewish people. The pagan politics of nations serves the respective community. Politics is here the collective practice of freedom that expresses in binding form what we already are; the political laws state the truth about us. Jewish politics, by contrast, realises the divine plan. In so doing, it always starts from what is given by nature and separates us; that is its “root.” But it is not its ground.⁹ Jewish politics is the “labour of becoming”, the labour of history. The consequence of Hess’s reflections is therefore inescapable: the Jewish state turns against itself. The Jewish state accomplishes the labour of history by aiming at its own dissolution; this is what makes the Jewish question, according to Hess, the “last nationality question.”¹⁰ As Friedrich Engels and Vladimir I. Lenin said of the state on the way to communism: it must, indeed it wishes to, exist only in being oriented toward its own withering away. For it is only in its withering away that it fulfils itself.

The Violence of Land-Seizure

Moses Hess’s argument concerning the dilemma inscribed in the constitution of a Jewish state bears directly on the present debate. It follows from his argument that whoever defends Israel in the categories of the nation-state and on the basis of its “right to exist” as a state sets himself against the Exodus. Such a defence seeks to refute the anti-Jewish argument that the Jews are incapable of the republic, indeed hostile to it. Through the founding of the State of Israel, they would have proven themselves to be one of the political peoples capable, like us, of beautiful republican self-government. This argument thus defends Israel at the price of stripping the Jewish state of the Jewish difference, of the negativity and universality of the Jewish spirit as expounded by Hess. The defence of Israel as a perfectly normal nation-state is in truth anti-Jewish.

Whoever seeks confirmation of this finds it – where else? – in the work of Carl Schmitt. In a text from 1953, Nehmen / Teilen / Weiden [Seizing / Dividing / Grazing], he seeks to show that all legal order rests upon a decisive presupposition. The awareness of this presupposition makes the law into a “nomos” (Nomos). The nomos orders the profitable “containment”and just “division” of goods and tasks. But every such order rests upon an act of “land-seizure” that occupies the ground on which the political order can be erected. This act can only be violent. Land-seizure is, according to Schmitt, “the last legal title for all subsequent divisions and distributions” – the radical title. It is here that the political community constitutes itself, a community that can then, on the basis of this originary act of violence, govern itself in republican freedom.

In the defence of Israel, the guilt of violence that lies at the foundation of every Republic is to be made over into immutable, eternal, mythic necessity. This is why this defence of Israel must be called “right-wing,” prior to any polemical intention.

The term “nomos,” in place of lawwas first introduced by Schmitt in order to forge a concept proper to grounding the anti-Jewish arguments that pervade his thought throughout. The concept is directed, as Schmitt explains in 1934, against “peoples who exist without soil, without state, without church, solely in the ‘law’” – that is, against the Jews; Judaism is, according to Schmitt, a “misrecognition of the nomos.”¹¹ But twenty years later, in Nehmen / Teilen / Weiden, he invokes as his very first example confirming “the fundamental primacy of seizing over dividing and grazing” the “biblical narrative of the Israelites’ seizure of the land of Canaan.”¹² Where Schmitt had previously regarded the Jews, in a radicalisation of Hegel’s argument, as incapable of politics – they have only the “law” but no nomos – he now presents them, in exact reversal, as a people that exemplarily embodies the political truth of the nomos: the truth that the law of the state rests upon a violent act of founding. By founding a state, a nation-state like all others that rest upon land-seizure, the Jews have overcome their religiously grounded passivity and become truly political (and thereby capable of the declaration of enmity. They have become like us: Greek, hence in Moses Hess’s distinction: pagan. The condition under which Schmitt recognises the Israelites is that they abandon their Judaism.

Schmitt’s assimilatory manoeuvre is more than the mere perfidious attempt to play the State of Israel off against the Jewish commandment and the freedom of the Exodus. It reveals, rather, the challenge before which every defence of Israel finds itself. All attempts to defend the Jewish state by declaring it a “normal” state, a state like all others, must, like Schmitt, retract and contest the Jewish experience of liberation. They must contest that Israel attempts to remain faithful to the truth of the Exodus. They must even contest the truth of the Exodus itself.

This reveals what is truly at stake in this defence of Israel. In defending Israel, it asserts the political form of the state against the epochal rupture signified by the departure from Egypt – the only true turning of the ages that has ever taken place. For if the Jews themselves have forgotten this rupture, and all the words of their prophets that recalled it to them, and if they rally to the violent and dominating form of state politics, then, so the calculation runs, we can no longer be reproached in the name of true liberation, of the Exodus, for proceeding likewise. In the defence of Israel, the guilt of violence that lies at the foundation of every Republic is to be made over into immutable, eternal, mythic necessity. This is why this defence of Israel must be called “right-wing,” prior to any polemical intention. Right-wing thought and action are always in the service of the dominationthat the right legitimises, normalises, naturalises. That is what it does here too: by abusing Israel to justify the violent nature of the state.

Critique of Israel

Israel itself contributes to this abuse. This is not true only of recent times, in which Israeli policy legally declares and militarily and by policing executes the logic of violence of the state. Jacob Taubes reports that Israel’s first Minister of Justice, Pinchas Rosen, in 1949 requested Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory from the library “for the elaboration of several difficult problems in the drafts of the constitution of the State of Israel.” One readily understands Taubes’s statement that he was “more stunned than enthused” by the idea that “the constitution of the State of Israel (which fortunately does not exist to this day) be developed following the thread of Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory.”¹³ In this recourse to Schmitt’s doctrine there manifests itself a danger, indeed a temptation already inscribed in the very founding of the state. It does not merely herald a right-wing, nationalist governmental policy that would deviate from the idea of this state. It is not so simple to separate the defence (of the Zionist founding of the state) and the critique (of Israel’s current governmental policy). For what is at stake in both is indeed the existence of this state. For what is at stake in the defence and critique of Israel is the existence of the state.

The right-wing defence of Israel is at its core anti-Jewish.

Moses Hess legitimated the establishment of the State of Israel by the fact that it has a historical task that no other proposes to accomplish. The other states, which install themselves, realistically, in the peaceless coexistence of self-asserting republics, are pagan in their spirit; they naturalise state domination and its violence. Hess conceives of Israel such that it accomplishes the “labour of becoming”, the becoming of unity in history. The Jewish state that the Exodus legitimates would therefore have to be a state that turns against itself. It would have to make of the “dilemma”, the contradictionbetween Jewish freedom and state form, its essence and its law of movement, as Hess’s definition of the Zionist project demands. It is in this knot that the defence of Israel is grounded just as much as its critique. The defence of Israel must therefore be as unconditional as its critique is without indulgence, excuses, or evasions.

The article was originally published in German in the journal Merkur: “Staatsräson: Israelverteidigung und Antijudaismus”.

1. Whether this is so, or whether support for Ukraine can also be pursued differently, was the subject of an exchange with Étienne Balibar in July 2022 (www.philomag.de/artikel/lieber-etienne-lieber-christoph). ↩︎
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox, with an introduction and fragments trans. by Richard Kroner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. ↩︎
3. On the history of this German constellation see Bernd Witte, Moses und Homer. Griechen, Juden, Deutsche: Eine andere Geschichte der deutschen Kultur. Berlin: de Gruyter 2018. ↩︎
4. This is contested by an interpretation that subjects the commandment to the logic of recognition, that is, of identity: “God, who speaks to Moses in the bush, is recognised because he is re-cognised as the God of Israel; Moses is addressed by God in view of the role he plays for Israel.” Matthias Möhring-Hesse, Herausforderungen für eine politische Theorie der Rechtfertigung. In: Ethik und Gesellschaft, no. 2/2025. – Through this interpretation, the (Jewish) commandment becomes a (Greek) law. ↩︎
5. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. ↩︎
6. Jan Assmann, Politische Theologie zwischen Ägypten und Israel. Munich: Siemens Stiftung 1992. ↩︎
7. The ambiguity lies in the fact that Hess is a Spinozist, but can grasp the sundering and the contradiction at the heart of the matter only with Hegel. ↩︎
8. Samuel Moyn points to a comparable double movement among authors of Cold War liberalism, who grant Israel the capacity and right to found a nation-state while simultaneously denying both to anticolonial liberation movements. Cf. Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself. Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. New Haven: Yale University Press 2023 (ch. 5: “White Freedom”). ↩︎
9. For its principle is the command. The tension between natural root and commandment is expressed throughout Hess’s work. Cf. “Judentum und Nationalität” (in: Ost und West, August 1904) and “Über den Begriff der Nationalität” (in: Jüdische Schriften. Berlin: Louis Lamm 1905). ↩︎
10. Bruno Karsenti, “Das Theologisch-Politische in der Gegenwart, oder der Messianismus der Moderne.” In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, no. 72/6, 2024. ↩︎
11. Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden. Eine deutsche Rechtslehre. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2005. ↩︎
12. Carl Schmitt, “Nehmen / Teilen / Weiden.” In: Ders., Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1958. It is exactly the same argument, which can see in the Exodus nothing but the seizure of the land of Canaan and hence the expulsion or oppression of the Canaanites, on which Edward Said grounds his critique of the Jewish state. Cf. Edward W. Said, “Michael Walzer’s ‘Exodus and Revolution.’ A Canaanite Reading.” In: Arab Studies Quarterly, no. 8/3, Summer 1986. ↩︎
13. Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt. Gegensträbige Fügung. Berlin: Merve 1987. ↩︎