ISRAEL - WHEN NARRATIVE HARDENS AND DETACHES FROM REALITY
This is not a piece about the Jews, and it is not anti-Semitic, not at all, it is a piece about Zionist values, the narrative Zionists tell themselves, how that narrative has evolved into something quite catastrophic for Jewish people and potentially the world, and how Jewish people might save Israel by breaking the spell on this narrative.
1. Summary
This piece examines how a narrative evolves over time and how, under pressure, it can harden, transform, and ultimately detach from the realities it was designed to manage. The Israeli case is not simply political or military, it is a study in how values shift across generations, and how a system built on defensible human foundations can, through successive narrative layers, arrive at outcomes that contradict those very foundations.
The reader can skip the framework architecture section, next, and read through the narrative and maybe return to the framework at the end.
2. The Zionist Values Architecture
The evolution of Zionist values - a framework.
2.1 Founding values - Herzl's secular aspirational project
- Survival as the supreme value, overriding all others
- Collective security through sovereignty - safety requires a state
- Self-determination as the natural right of a people
- Pragmatism - territory, organisation, and political will as the instruments of salvation
2.2 Post-Holocaust values - the sacred layer
- "Never Again" as absolute moral imperative, licensing whatever is necessary
- Victimhood as moral authority - suffering confers legitimacy
- Memory as obligation - to forget or forgive is to betray the dead
- Existential vigilance - threat is permanent and must be met with permanent readiness
2.3 Post-1967 values - the religious nationalist capture of Zionism
- Divine covenant supersedes international law or human rights frameworks
- Land as sacred - territorial compromise is theological betrayal
- Chosenness as destiny - the Jewish people have a unique and divinely ordained role
- Strength as virtue - power is not merely necessary but righteous
2.4 Post-October 7th values - the terminal stage
- Collective punishment as justice - the distinction between combatant and civilian dissolves
- Genocide as self-defence - proportionality becomes irrelevant when existence is framed as being at stake
- Dehumanisation as permission - the enemy is redefined outside the category of the human
What is visible in this architecture is a values system that began with entirely defensible humanist premises - survival, self-determination, safety - and through successive narrative transformations arrived at values that literally invert humanism entirely. That inversion is the story being written and rewritten.
Value - a belief about what matters enough to justify action
Values architecture – the layered system of beliefs that emerges from experience and evolves over time and shapes the mission and decision-making within a political or social system
3. The Founding: Survival And Self-Determination
In the Russian Empire, Jewish communities were confined by law to the Pale of Settlement and subjected to waves of state-tolerated pogroms - organised mob violence intensifying sharply through the 1880s, instrumentalised by the Tsarist regime as a convenient deflection of popular anger onto a vulnerable minority. Across Eastern Europe, persecution was systematic so that assimilation came to be seen as an illusion and Aliyah ("ascent" or return to Homeland) became the dominating emotional expression of this experience.
Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist who had watched a Parisian crowd bay for the blood of a Jewish officer on fabricated charges during the Dreyfus Affair, drew the decisive conclusion: Jewish safety could never rest on the tolerance of host societies but required sovereign territory. In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat - The Jewish State - launching Zionism as a modern political movement in the 19th century European nationalist mould.
The founding values were secular and humanist: survival as the supreme imperative, collective security through sovereignty, self-determination as the natural right of a people, and pragmatism as the instrument of salvation. These were not exceptional values - they were the common currency of European nationalism applied to a stateless people with an urgent and legitimate problem. The founding mission was unambiguous: to secure a homeland and end the permanent vulnerability of Jewish life.
It is very interesting to note that the emotional and practical movement preceded Herzl's political theory - Herzl gave narrative and organisational form to something already stirring from the experience of the people.
Aliyah - the act of a Jewish person "rising" or "ascending" to the homeland. The word itself encodes the belief that return to the land of Israel is not not just migration, but is a spiritual elevation.
Self-determination – the principle that a people have the right to determine their own political status and governance
4. Balfour 1917: Legitimacy And Geography
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Great Britain formally endorsed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was the next step, the structural consolidation following the launch of Zionism as a modern political movement.
Recognition by a great power conferred legitimacy on the project. Palestine was now confirmed as the specific territory, and political possibility now hardened into a recognised programme. A new value entered the architecture - international endorsement as moral validation, the external world confirming the justice of the claim.
This would prove double-edged as a narrative that requires external validation is vulnerable when that validation is withdrawn.
Legitimacy – the perception that authority or a claim is justified and accepted by others
5. The Holocaust: Victimhood As Absolute Authority
The Holocaust transformed the values architecture at its very foundations. What had been a political argument became a moral absolute. "Never Again" emerged as the supreme value - an imperative so total that it licensed whatever would become necessary for its fulfilment (ends over means).
Victimhood, rooted in genuine and catastrophic suffering, became the primary source of moral authority.
Memory - kept in books museums galleries... - became sacred obligation - to question the state was to dishonour the dead.
Existential and eternal vigilance replaced pragmatic calculation as the governing disposition: threat was permanent, enemies were always present, readiness could never be relaxed. This is a kind of absolutism where it's easy to imagine violence replacing dialogue.
These values were entirely understandable given what had occurred. But they carried within them a dangerous seed: a framework in which existential fear as the organising principle tends toward the permanent identification of existential enemies, and a narrative built on victimhood will struggle to accommodate the moment it becomes the author of another people's similar suffering.
Existential threat – a perceived danger to the survival of a people or state
6. 1967: Divine Covenant Replaces Human Right, The Moment Zionism Became Religious Zionism
The 1967 war was the turning point at which the values architecture underwent its most consequential transformation. Victory on that scale, against multiple adversaries, capturing the biblical territories of Judea and Samaria, carried an almost theological charge. It confirmed the promise, the divine favour was real. It opened the intoxicating vision of a Greater Israel - the full biblical territory, the Promised Land - as political reality rather than religious dream.
The secular founding values were progressively displaced by a fanciful religious sense of entitlement in a nationalist framework. This is an important transformation of values. Figures such as Zvi Yehuda Kook provided the theological architecture: territorial expansion was divine obligation, settlement was sacred duty, and the land itself was a sacred covenant that no human authority could abrogate.
This values shift was profound and irreversible. Self-determination - a universal human value applicable in principle to any people - was replaced by chosenness, a value that is by definition exclusive and hierarchical. International law and human rights frameworks, which operate on the premise of universal human dignity, became irrelevant or actively hostile, since they applied the same standards to all parties and values that are inferior being man-given.
Land ceased to be a territory, an asset, and became testimony, divine recompense for a faithful people, proof that Yahweh's promise to his people had outlasted every empire that had tried to extinguish them.
And strength, previously understood as a necessary instrument of survival, was recast as a Nietzschian virtue, the expression of a people's vitality and right to existence, now fully able to defend what they believed had been divinely promised them.
Respect for others is also a value, but one that suffered in this self confidence.
Chosenness – the belief that a particular group has a unique, exclusive, divinely sanctioned role or status
7. October 7th 2023: The Terminal Inversion
October 7th was the final multiplier - the moment at which the accumulated values architecture reached its logical and catastrophic conclusion.
The Hamas attacks provided the trigger that dissolved whatever moral restraint had survived the preceding decades. The narrative, already hardened beyond internal reform, now seemed to separate entirely from physical restraint, reason and reality.
The terminal values emerged with terrible clarity. Collective punishment displaced individual accountability - the distinction between combatant and civilian, the foundational principle of the laws of war, was explicitly rejected by senior officials.
Proportionality, the value that calibrates response to threat, was declared inapplicable when existence itself was framed as at stake.
This looks like trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), one could be forgiven for thinking that some kind of big society group therapy or vaccine is needed, except that this highly emotional disposition seems to have percolated through the Epstein class, to judge by the latest warmongering against Iran. Obviously this is the opinion of the author of this piece, but surely anyone outside this group would recognise that the response of Israel is a completely over the top, boundless and bare, resort to barbaric violence over what is after all just a land rights issue.
Dehumanisation, previously implicit, became explicit and official - the language of animals, of Amalek, of human darkness, of the hangman's noose (the current lapel pin worn by some members of the Israeli cabinet), performing the necessary narrative work of placing the target population outside the category of those whose suffering counts. Annihilation, genocide, reframed as self-defence, and self-defence does not require a moral ceiling.
What is visible in this values trajectory is not the story of a people who were always capable of this, but of a narrative that began with entirely defensible humanist premises and through successive transformations - each driven by genuine fear, genuine trauma, genuine threat - arrived at the systematic inversion of the values it set out with.
Survival, a universal value, became the justification for denying survival to others. Self-determination became the denial of self-determination. Never Again became the operational framework for what the rest of the world labels genocide. Theology became the reason for routine ethnic cleansing and is referred to casually as "mowing the lawn".
Proportionality – the principle that response to force should be limited and commensurate with the threat faced
Amalek - the people in the Bible whom God commanded the Israelites to utterly destroy without exception - man, woman, child, and livestock - making it the closest thing in scripture to a divine mandate for total extermination of an enemy or what do we call today genocide.
8. The Catastrophe Of Narrative Capture
Unlike Rome, where narrative failure produced reinvention, (as we shall see in a subsequent post), a Make Rome Great Again story replacing an exhausted one, this Israeli case has produced something more dangerous that many find disagreeable, barbarian, disgusting even. In its latest incarnation, the Zionist narrative and its values has become so fused with identity, theology, and existential fear that it cannot be replaced without the entire political and institutional (ie state) structure it supports risking collapse in its entirety.
The values are the load-bearing pillars of the Temple. To question collective punishment is to question Never Again. To question settlement is to question divine covenant. To question the genocide in Gaza and now the West Bank is to question the Holocaust. Every challenge to the present is routed through the sacred past, creating a belief system that is totally rigid and making reform narratively equivalent to betrayal and apostasy.
The people this narrative was designed to protect have become, in the eyes of much of the world, the authors of the very crime that defined their own suffering. That is not a political failure alone, it is a narrative catastrophe - the point at which the story a people tells about itself has so completely captured their perception of reality that the values which once made the story defensible have been inverted beyond recognition, and no common ground for meaning with the outside world - with reality - remains.
Rome survived its narrative failure through transformation. Whether Israel's narrative can transform before it destroys both what it was built to protect and what it has actually built and achieved, remains the most urgent and most painful question with the greatest ramifications for contemporary political life.
Narrative capture – a condition in which a belief system becomes so dominant that it overrides external reality and blocks adaptation
Apostasy - the abandonment or betrayal of a sacred belief or commitment. In religious contexts, an act so grave it places the transgressor outside the community of the faithful.
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