The Bible's Sovereignist Version*

Gad Lerner
Journalist and writer

I confess that the almost-photocopied reviews eulogizing Yoram Hazony's The virtues of nationalism, indicated as the theoretical manifesto of the new sovereignist movements, were not enough to me. To drive me to read that book was the homage paid to it (in very good English) by Giorgia Meloni [leader of the Italian far-right party Fratelli d'Italia -Transl. Note] at the National Conservatism Conference held at Rome's Plaza Hotel, in the presence of Viktor Orban, Marion Maréchal, Ryszard Legutko and other leaders of the right: “Dear Yoram, your book will create great scandal in Italy, and I will contribute to it because I intend to cite it often”.

Come to the last page, I was confirmed in my suspicion that neither Meloni nor the almost-photocopying reviewers went beyond a clumsy summary, otherwise a bit of embarrassment they should have felt in espousing the theories of this Israeli ultra-orthodox essayist, who presents himself as at the same time a political scholar and Biblicist. To be clear: it is certainly not for the observance of religious precepts that he is to be criticized, God forbid! But his short-circuit between ancient and contemporary times, typical of fundamentalisms of whatever creed, drives him to pass judgments on the present that would make even Mrs Meloni or Mr. Salvini blush.

Let us start with the book's dedication, in which he expresses his fatherly love to his nine sons, indicated as “the members of my tribe”. Do not think this is accidental. Tribes are at the basis of his interpretative scheme. Preceded by families and clans, it is the tribes who, by joining together, form the Nation: on the primal mould of the twelve tribes of Israel. A mechanism that remains valid today, because the members of a tribe “bestow great reverence on self-sacrifice” and on “mutual loyalty”, “which they strenuously defend even resorting to violence”. An attitude that a nationalist is sharing, as he also is a particularist, but an attitude that he will be called upon to mitigate.

The virtue of nationalism, since its presumed origin in the Jewish Bible, would reside in its opposition to imperial powers. In the past, Egypt, Babylon, Austria, or Persia. Today, the European Union with its “liberal-imperialist political ideology”, “become one of the most powerful agents in fomenting intolerance and hatred in the western world”.

I am not exaggerating, nor warping Hazony's ideas. He does propose as an ideal model to the nationalists who revere him, not the State of Israel, but the ancient Kingdom of Israel. But for the present, once he has made the equivalence “liberalism = imperialism”, once he has portrayed as wicked any supra-national aspiration up to the point of putting on the same “globalist” plane the Marxists and the Islamic terrorists, the theorist we are talking of spares no recommendation to his followers. Since a historic clash is taking place between the imperial order and the national States that aspire to independence, it is necessary to rise up against the practice of “international coercion”. That is, it is necessary to rise up against the bodies possessing “the authority to take binding deliberations for all nations on the issues of war and peace”.

To prevent misunderstandings, Hazony makes a nice list of the masters people have to get liberated from: the European Union, the United Nations Security Council, the World Trade Organization and, dulcis in fundo, the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. Will Giorgia Meloni, during her tours in Italy, mention such bellicose intents too, expressed by her theorist of reference? If so, I would recommend her not to omit the next paragraph which she maybe did not read, but which sounds as a definitive watchword: “We shall not cede even the most infinitesimal bit of our freedom to whatever foreign body, or normative system, not established by the nation we belong to”. I would say that this is the key sentence of this cult book of sovereignists. I wonder in which political proposal our nation's sovereignists would insert such a steely refusal of obedience to any foreign organism; and also whether they agree with the denigratory accusations addressed by their guru against anyone who gives voice to a vision of supranational government, starting from Immanuel Kant up to today's liberals. There would be in addition a series of amazing statements missed by the drafters of press-office summaries, eulogizing the winner of the 2019 Conservative Book of the Year Award without having read it. Noticeable are Hazony's dialectical acrobatics when he aims at asserting that the horrors of Nazism were not the consequence of German nationalism, but rather of an imperial vision superimposed on it. So absorbed is our bard of nationalism in proclaiming its ideal virtues, rejecting the insinuations of those who denounce the fascism and racism that once again are nested inside those movements, that he has no perception of the kind of following he is stirring up in the extreme right. Very glad, the latter, that its activists can identify themselves with an Israeli, as if that were enough to wipe out not only the anti-Semitic past, but also the conspiratorial present they remain immersed in.

Typical of the nationalists who practice the idolatry of the land, on the despicable model “blood and soil (Blut und Boden)”, is the centrality that Yoram Hazony assigns to the clan, the tribe, the nation. But quite unusual is the semantic impudence with which he feels authorized to misinterpret the Biblical text and adapt it to his political views. At mid book, and then in the conclusions, he engages with a marvelous passage in Genesis, recounting the calling of young Abraham and the mission he receives by the Lord. It is the very famous Lech lecha (meaning both “leave” and “go towards yourself”) through which the mission of Judaism is conceived as a universal one. Well, in order to assert that the Bible is nationalist and that there cannot be communities but in a state of mutual separation, our ultra-orthodox author takes great care of not citing in full the verses of Genesis 12: “Now the Lord said unto Abram: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house...”. This is the premise – not at all nationalist, hence removed by Hazony – thanks to which it will be possible for Abraham to give rise to a great people, through which, lo and behold, “shall all the families of the earth be blessed”. All of them.

It is difficult to slip a straitjacket onto Patriarch Abraham, asked to leave his homeland and the idolatrous traditions of his father. It takes quite an impudent face for Hazony.

*This article was published in the daily la Repubblica on March 3, 2020

Translated by Lionello Casalegno