Know Your Enemy - Yoram Hazony’s Israeli Model (w/ Suzanne Schneider)

Matt and Sam are joined by historian Suzanne Schneider to discuss how Israeli illiberalism is inspiring the global right.

Duration: 1h 6m
Broadcast on: 19 Jul 2024
Audio Format: other

Last week, as Israel continued to prosecute its eliminationist war against Palestinians in Gaza, an eclectic group of right-wing bigwigs gathered in Washington, DC for the fourth iteration of the National Conservatism conference — convened by Yarom Hazony, an Israeli-born writer, activist, and former speechwriter for Benjamin Netanyahu. As our guest, historian Suzanne Schneider, explains, Hazony aspires to export Israel’s model of illiberal democracy and dispossession to the nations of the world. And if the embrace of NatCon by American conservatives is any indication, he is succeeding.

Nations, for Hazony, derive their legitimacy not from the consent of the governed (which, for Israel, would include disenfranchised Palestinians in the West Bank) but from God, who designated the land of Israel as the home of the Jews. All nations are born of divine covenant, not consent; political community is based on unchosen and inherited obligations extending outward in concentric circles of coercion, from the nuclear family, to the clan, to the tribe, and so on. This slipshod political theology authorizes a world of sovereign, militarized ethno-states, intensely protective of patriarchal prerogatives, and with no obligation to international law, human rights, judicial interference, or constitutional guarantees for religious or racial minorities. If Israel is the God-given home of the Jews, why shouldn't America be the God-given home of white Christians?

It’s not difficult to perceive the appeal of this vision for NatCon’s attendees, including Trumpist senators like Josh Hawley and Mike Lee, Catholic integralists like Gladdin Pappin and Chad Pecknold, racist nativists like Stephen Miller, or Viktor Orbán propagandists like John O’Sullivan. These figures may not all acknowledge or recognize their debt to Israeli Zionism, but they all look with admiration on the impunity with which Israel has treated its Arab subjects, seeing in Israel’s contempt for liberal norms, universal rights, and human dignity an aspirational model for America and the globe.

Further Reading:

Suzanne Schneider, "Light Among the Nations," Jewish Currents, Sept 28, 2023

— "How Israel’s Illiberal Democracy Became a Model for the Right," Dissent, Spring 2024.

— "Beyond Athens and Jerusalem," Strange Matters, Spring 2024.

— "A Note on Means and Ends," Dr. Small Talk (Suzanne's Substack), Feb 4, 2024.

Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (2018).

— Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022).

Sarah Jones, "The Authoritarian Plot (Live from NatCon 4)," New York Magazine, Jul 14, 2024.

Further Listening:

KYE, The Rise of Illiberal Right, Jul 2019.

KYE, Return of the National Conservatives, Nov 2021.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our extensive catalogue of bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 96 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Heather Bell. Hey, Sam. Hello, Matt. I just want to get out of the way for listeners. This is not an episode on the assassination attempt on Donald Trump or the Republican National Convention, though we are going to record on those topics soon. This is something different, but equally timely in many ways. Sam, why don't you tell our listeners what we got cooked up for this episode? Yeah, this is an episode about the relationship between Israeli liberalism, Israeli Zionism, and the global far-right, basically how Israel's model of a liberal democracy is being exported to right-wing movements and parties all over the world. It's a story that we've been watching closely, but I think one that gets under-covered both in the context of coverage of Israel's genocidal war and Gaza, but also the way that people tend to cover right-wing movements around the world, they don't pay as much attention to the fact that, well, this very prominent and close, putative ally of America and Western Europe is actually a model for how you might run a country which treats many of the people under its control as inhuman or at least not democratic subjects. Yes. And our guest for this conversation, we really were excited to have on Suzanne Schneider, in part because when Sam and I guest-edited the spring issue of dissent, the special section on the global far-right, Suzanne wrote a really incredible essay on the liberal democratic model of Israel, the model that Sam, you were just referencing, and she'd also written on Yuram Hazoni, a figure we've talked about on the podcast before, who is kind of the brain behind the National Conservatism Conferences, a defender of nationalism specifically, Suzanne references a book of his that came out a few years ago on the virtues of nationalism. So it's a mix of kind of the Israeli model, how that fits into the global far-right with special attention to Yuram Hazoni, his thought, and how he figures into this story. Yeah, exactly, and we should say that when we were recording it was while NatCon 4 was taking place in Washington, D.C., Susie has attended NatCon conferences in the past, so we did talk quite a lot about national conservatism and how Hazoni's leadership of that conference and the various organizations that support it is representative of this project of exporting Israeli liberalism and a certain kind of vision of what nationalism and nationhood consists of to the far-right around the world. Yeah, can you tell us a little more about Susie and her work? Yes, Suzanne Schneider is the deputy director and core faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she specializes in political theory and the history of the modern Middle East, and she's the author of several books, including The Apocalypse and The End of History, Modern Jihad, and The Crisis of Liberalism. She was such a great guest, and I have to say I'm a huge fan of the Brooklyn Institute for listeners. You may know that the Brooklyn Institute is largely responsible for my Freud obsession of the past several years, so if you've been annoyed by that turn in my intellectual preoccupations, you can blame the Brooklyn Institute. I took three classes with Blanchefield on psychoanalysis at Bisser, the Brooklyn Institute. Over the past few years, it's a great place to learn outside of the academy, and Susie has been totally indispensable to building up that organization. Shall we get to some housekeeping items? Yes, sure.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam are joined by historian Suzanne Schneider to discuss how Israeli illiberalism is inspiring the global right.