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Notes -
Legitimacy & Israel
What is it that makes a state legitimate? It's amazing to me how many people simply take any existing state as legitimate, without asking whether it ought to be seen as legitimate or not. States commit horrific acts of violence and coercion daily, so this is an important question. How can we know whether such a state is actually justified in committing such blatantly awful acts?
There are, I think, at first appearance two popular theories of this: might makes right, and democratic moralism. The former theory is amoral, and the latter is moralistic. In practice, however, I think these are in fact merely two faces of the same coin.
On the one hand, the might-makes-right people say that the state is self-justifying. It exists, it has might, therefore obey it, end of discussion. This is unsatisfying in that it essentially dodges the topic of discussion. As such it is not really a valid answer to the question of legitimacy; rather it implicitly denies that there is any question to be had at all. Might makes right might be a good starting point for a science of state, which investigates how, in human history, states have emerged and become mighty, but it is inappropriate for the normative question that is the question of legitimacy (what type of state should there be?).
Now on the other hand the democratists say that the state is justified when it is popular. But why should that be? If you assume, empirically, that people have different levels of moral aptitude, then popularity immediately appears to be a formula to craft a wicked state. The only deeper justification is that popularity probably correlates with mightiness. But this is just a thin veneer over the first position.
So said Thrasymachus:
In the Gorgias, Socrates makes the link to democracy explicit, and Callicles agrees:
But Callicles then points out the absurdity of democracy:
I agree, rather, with Socrates (and Plato?) that the aristocratic rule by virtue is more just than the democracy. And likewise the most legitimate state is the state of Reason (or what was called philosophy). I believe in modern times, Francis Galton and Friedrich Nietzsche have shown us the way to establish a legitimate state.
Galton:
Now this brings me to Israel. Israel is a recent example of state foundation, by which I mean the art of creating a new state. It was founded in 1948 by a population made up largely of recent immigrants; for well over a thousand years Jews had been but a small minority in the region; for nearly two thousand there was no Jewish state.
Now, what kind of state is Israel? Obviously, it is Jewish. But it is also democratic. And it seems to premise its existence on the dwelling of the Jewish immigrants in the region. What inferences can we make here regarding probable hypotheses in the science of state? For one, we can guess that Israel and states like it depend on the influx of people into its vicinity for its sustenance. In other words Israel is predicated on the mass immigration of aliyah; the Jewish population grew from about 25,000 in the 1880s to about 630,000 by 1948, mostly through immigration. It is merely, then, the armed and coercive organisation of that population.
What sort of just foundation is that? Consider this: when one man declares himself sovereign, he is a laughing stock, like an ape. When a few men do it, they are criminals; yet when many men do it, I am supposed to profess that they are just?
I would prefer to keep my reason and see all such founders, not only Israel's, as laughing-stocks and criminals. Thus, I see Israel as the farce of state foundation. For before Israel we knew the way to the just state; yet it was the Torah and its aliyah which led to the foundation of Israel, a state not unlike all previous states, and all of its rivals in the region. There is nothing new or elevated about Israel. What is the higher purpose?
And if Israel is farce, who then is the tragedy? One does not have to look far; it is Israel's greatest ally, or should I say its uncle, old Samuel. For the United States was founded on philosophy, it was founded on higher ideals. But its ideals were flawed, because its philosophers were flawed, and so were its people. It started as an oligarchy, that saw itself as an aristocracy, and it never knew true justice. As Plato would predict, it degenerated to a democracy, and lost most of what apprehension of virtue it had, and now many say it is on the road to tyranny.
Imagine what could be done with North America if it were not already settled! That is the tragedy. And the farce is all the effort put in to crowding out the Muslims in Palestine, for nothing higher at all. The situation is so dire that people dream of settling Mars, a desert with no water and no breathable air, because at least it is not yet scourged by a state. Galton had the same dream:
Some will say all of this is silly because it is impossible. But we know true aliyah is not impossible; Galton showed us that much. If Israel were impossible, it would not be because of the Jews. It would be because of the gentiles. So too, if true Israel is impossible, it is because the true gentiles block the true aliyah of the true Jews. (Sozusagen). Ask yourself, are you a Jew or a Gentile? Is it just for the gentiles to stop the Jews? And how should Jews feel, if they are stopped?
To be plain, since the above is metaphor (which I think has value in itself): I am not talking about actual Jews or gentiles. Zionism showed that a scattered people can migrate and found a state within a few decades; Galton showed what kind of state would be worth founding. By «true Israel» I mean a state founded on reason and on Galton's eugenics rather than on scripture. By «true aliyah» I mean the migration of the people who want such a state to a place where they can found it. By «true Jews» I mean those founders, and by «true gentiles» the existing states and peoples who would stop them. So the question I am asking is: would it be just for existing states to block the founding of a better one, and would its founders be wronged if they were blocked?
A state is what happens when a nation holds and administers sovereign land. A nation is a group of people who feel themselves bound by kinship. The nation of Judaism has long existed without a state and then founded one in Israel. It's not really much more complicated than that.
So do you think the Holocaust was wrong, or that it was just an action but a legitimate nation, which had a group of people who feel themselves bound by kinship, and which held and administered sovereign land, according to its own whim? Because by your own standard (might makes right), it would seem you have to profess that the Holocaust was just a legitimate state being legitimate (whatever happens happens, man. states are states, don't ask further).
I think it was an evil action taken by a legitimate nation(or at least whether nazi Germany was a legitimate state turns on questions other than just the holocaust). I think the question of whether a state is legitimate is different to whether a state is good which is in turn different to whether the actions taken by a state are good, although these different questions interact. Might may not make right but it does often make states, I would actually add that there be some kind of internal coherency that is required. In a game of chess on turn one:
And all of this would then interact with the question of whether I had gambled $1 vs the orphan's life I Was playing the game of chess against, in which case it would be evil for me to make good moves.
Look, I am not sure where this insistence on redefining (wrt my post) legitimacy to become functionality comes from. Even if everyone who ever used the word before me meant it this way, if you actually read what I wrote in its entirety, and think about it sufficiently, and maybe even ask AI if a reference is unknown to you, you will easily understand that I meant moral legitimacy. So it is pointless to respond as if I am wrong semantically.
But, that's granting you too much. The reality is a boatload of writers use legitimacy exactly how I used it! From Claude:
Some people use it descriptively, or try to bake in democratism to it, but a lot of people just mean it fulfills a normative obligation! Which is what I want to talk about! I write legitimacy, you read statehood. There's pre-existing writing on this. Why are you doing that?
And, FWIW, I am not playing a trick here. I genuinely understand legitimacy to mean something like an emotive result determining the moral rightness of an authority or a thing. For example: « Is this copyright media usage legitimate? ». It is close to asking if it's legal, but more abstract. It could be legitimate and illegal if it is justified and the law is morally flawed. « Is this bag legitimate? » means is it authentic, meaning is it lying about its provenance or not? This meaning is a little different, but close to a moral evaluation and not a question as to whether the bag exists or if you did in fact pay a lot of money for it. Applied to a state, it's not asking if the state is a functional bag, it's asking for its moral provenance. I think this is a completely reasonable embodied understanding of the term for a heavy reader to have. The discussion is massively weighed down by people who can't get past my usage of the term who insist that legitimacy must mean and can only mean whether a state is functional, aka mighty.
I mean your OP turned almost entirely on the definition of "legitimate" so yeah, people are going to argue the semantics of it. You seem to want to essentially merge legitimate with good in order to justify denying the legitimacy of states you don't like or all states for that matter. I, and many, find that to be kind of a silly word game. You can say Israel delenda est if you want. That's fine, a totally legitimate thing to believe. But playing some word game about what it really means to be legitimate is unimpressive. Legitimate usually refers to whether something is authentic and Israel seems pretty authentic from most lenses, at least as authenticate as almost any other state. Its origin and composition is relatively normal as far as states go. I don't see any reason to overload the concept of legitimacy with all this other baggage when you could just use another term, like is Israel a moral state? And cut out all the confusion. If you're just an anarchist and don't believe that any states are legitimate then we needn't confuse things by focusing on israel.
Maybe the first paragraph, but I think that's a mischaracterization of the entire post. I think most the replies make a boatload more sense if people stop after 1 to 3 paragraphs and write something up. Like I can see how they make sense if that's happening. I'm not sure what else is going on. I wrote:
Yeah, I read your post and answered the narrow question of legitimacy. I think this would all be much clearer and maybe lead to better discussion if you didn't pose legitimacy as the question you are asking. People are consistently telling you that legitimacy and morality are separate questions and you keep scolding them for not answering the question of morality. As if legitimate but bad weren't a valid combination of descriptors. If you were asking "is Israel an immoral state" then there's some meat there. I'd argue that it's immoral by western standards but above par by mid east standards. Can you explain why you're insisting on the word legitimate?
American Heritage Dictionary, first thing I see when DuckDuckGoing the word:
What law do states submit to but natural law? Justifiable (morally) is the sense I am using, that is definition 3. Based on logical reasoning may seem different but I also hold to the reason theory of justice/legitimacy. So again, the question is more why people are insisting that I can't use the word. It's not weird at all that I'm using it, it's weird that there is difficulty understanding what I mean.
As for whether the state is immoral, maybe. I think I mean something deeper though, that is, whether there is any moral authority, while whether a state is immoral might be seen as less fundamental; a state might have moral authority but be temporarily immoral. Like their King, Solomon. He was immoral but they think he had moral authority / legitimacy. I would like to argue whether he had any moral authority (legitimacy) at all.
Another example, over 200 years ago: legitimists. Somehow everyone understood what they meant when they said Napoleon was not legitimate. They had a specific theory of legitimacy, birth right based on another aristocratic law, which I disagree with but not on the basis that I literally cannot understand their that concept differs from might.
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