Liberalism v. the Left

A response to Freddie deBoer on nationalism and Israel

Israeli and Palestinian flags on a brick wall with blood splatters. Credit: Yuliia Bukovska (iStock / Getty Images Plus)

I’m traveling a lot next week, so I’m going to plan on just one lengthy post—my first “Ask Me Anything” since August. Paying subscribers will receive a prompt on Monday to pose questions, and my answers will appear in a post late in the week.

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I really appreciated a recent sharply argued and provocatively titled Substack post from Freddie deBoer: “I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States: Even One That’s Very Very Important to You.”

By “appreciated,” I want to make clear I do not mean “agreed with.” I consider the post flatly wrong. But it has value because deBoer is very much a man of the left (who gets a lot of flack from his fellow lefties for despising all things “woke”), and the post clearly states what I think is an underlying assumption of most leftist thought. It’s that underlying assumption I consider flatly wrong, and I appreciate it being stated so clearly and forthrightly by someone devoted to it.

The purpose of this post is to lay out this assumption and explain why my liberalism, decisively influenced by the writings of Isaiah Berlin, unhesitatingly rejects it.

Israel Shouldn’t Exist Because Nations Shouldn’t Exist

DeBoer is writing in response to accusations of anti-Semitism that he worries will stifle free speech and thinking in the United States and elsewhere. I share those concerns, while also acknowledging there has been more anti-Semitism expressed and acted upon in the United States and around the world since Hamas’ terrorist invasion of southern Israel on October 7 than at any time in my life. (I’m 54.) But that doesn’t mean it’s automatically anti-Semitic to denounce Israeli policies or the current right-wing Israeli government. That should be permitted and shouldn’t open the critic to accusations of anti-Semitism.

But deBoer goes further: He doesn’t just criticize Israel’s current government or current actions. He opposes Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. Isn’t this anti-Semitic? No, he claims, because he opposes all nationalism and nations. He’s a universalist and an individualist: it’s people who matter, wherever they are, whatever their ethnicity, no matter their religious convictions. That is his principle, which he merely applies to Israel out of consistency.

I’m sure there are some who would accuse deBoer of evasiveness or dishonesty here. Why does he not regularly declare that other nations also have no “right to exist”? Why only Israel? But I’m not especially interested in trying to demonstrate that he’s operating from a double standard or harbors special animus toward Israel. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and take him at his word: Freddie deBoer hates nationalism, and especially hates “ethnonationalist” states, and he’s singling out Israel because that’s the ethnonationalist state people are talking and arguing about at the moment—because it’s the ethnonationalist state our government is actively providing with military and diplomatic support as it kills thousands of Palestinians in a bloody war against an Islamist terrorist organization.

The deeper problem for me in this line of argument is the underlying principle: The presumption that moral and political decency is incompatible with sub-universal forms of communal solidarity.

The Left, The Right, and Liberalism