The Last Vikings

The Nietzschean Roots of Israel

The founders of Israel were heroes. Not good by Christian standards or Mosaic law, but heroic in the Nietzschean sense: forged in hardship, tempered by defeat, driven by ancient goals, and willing to rule by conquest.

Nietzsche despised victimhood, even as his own affairs floundered. He was sickly, celibate, and socially awkward—wracked by migraines and loneliness. In 1882, he traveled through Italy with his friend Paul Rée and Lou Andreas-Salomé, a brilliant Russian writer twenty years his junior. The three imagined a radical life of friendship and philosophy, but Nietzsche fell in love. He proposed to Lou. She laughed. She went on to become a disciple of Freud. He went mad. But instead of collapsing into self-pity, Nietzsche forged a philosophy that exalted strength, conquest, and self-overcoming. The early Zionists shared that instinct. Like Nietzsche, they disdained victimhood and exalted self-help. They weren’t pleading for safety—they were demanding sovereignty.

Many came from German and Central European bourgeois culture. They believed not in God, but in order, sacrifice, and national destiny. They echoed German irredentists—blood seizing soil through will—as they led a degraded people to statehood and security. Israel’s founders honored the traditions of the Jewish folk and felt foxhole-level solidarity. Ben-Gurion treated the Pentateuch not as divine law but as national history. Weizmann called Zionism a civil religion. Their faith was in blood, soil, and will—almost Wagnerian in its intensity and romantic ambition. The fruit of their struggle, Israel, now has more nuclear weapons than Germany and is as rich as France.

Israelis remember David Ben-Gurion, their first prime minister, as a righteous visionary. His words are carved into stone near his grave at Sde Boker: “The desert shall bloom.” They are etched along scenic lookouts in the Negev: “It is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested.” They are engraved on a bronze wall at Ben-Gurion Airport: “A Jewish state must be a light unto the nations.” Israelis are more eager to remember these gentle words than Ben-Gurion’s calls for ethnic cleansing. In a 1949 letter, he wrote: “We must do everything to ensure they never return”—referring to the Palestinian refugees of 1948. In a 1938 address to the Zionist Executive Council in London, he said: “If I knew it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half to Palestine, I would choose the second.” In 1956, reflecting on the Nakba, he said: “The old will die, and the young will forget.” Ben-Gurion believed in Jewish democracy as sincerely as America’s founders believed in democracy for white men. He was just as serious about excluding those who didn’t belong.

There was no unusual perfidy in Israel’s early years. Almost every nation is born in violence. The Nakba was brutal, but not unique: in 1947–48, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of villages razed. Israel expelled fifty or sixty Arabs for every one it killed. By the standards of twentieth-century ethnic cleansing, this was almost humane. Israel’s founding sins were not annihilation, but weaponized expulsion and permanent exclusion. Ethnic cleansing was soon codified in the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law and the 1952 Entry into Israel Law. The fruits of ethnic cleansing were divided among Jews.

There are two kinds of settler colonies. The first is a warrior state: a small band of warriors who overthrow kings, confiscate land, and rule a native majority. These regimes survive by force of arms. Over time, they either assimilate or are expelled. The Normans became English. The Manchus became Chinese. The Mughals ruled India for centuries—and then collapsed into near oblivion.

The second model is the mass settler colony. Settlers arrive in large enough numbers to farm with their own hands, raise children, and build their own institutions. Natives may resist and may win temporary victories, but if enough settlers are determined to immigrate, their defeat is inevitable. Britain had the most robust settler tradition—probably because it had the largest supply of young men with enough money to emigrate. In America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it sent enough people to displace natives and forge new nations.

The French in Algeria were an intermediate case. They weren’t a warrior caste, and they never became a majority. For 132 years they lived under their own laws in physically separate communities and exploited Arab labor. At their peak, they made up barely ten percent of Algeria’s population. They stayed only as long as Paris stood behind them. When protection was withdrawn, they fled. White South Africans lasted a bit longer—they had their own farms, their own language, and eventually their own state—but they too never represented more than a fifth of the population. They succumbed to the inevitable once rising Black fertility reduced whites to an eighth of the population. They might have held on longer without sanctions—and certainly would have held on longer with sustained Western support.

Both cases show what happens when a settler regime cannot absorb or replace its natives. Settler ascendancy may last for a century, but eventually demography prevails.

Israel rests on the knife edge of demographic oblivion. There are thirty times as many Arabs in the world as Jews. There are thirteen Egyptians for every Jew in Israel. Israel’s demographic basis is sturdier than the Mughals or the Manchus—but not by much. It is not a warrior elite ruling from above, and it is not a mass settler colony whose victory is assured by demographic weight. It is in constant demographic competition with its neighbors, much like Germany and France at the beginning of the twentieth century. Israel cannot expand beyond the Jordan, and it positively refuses to assimilate.

This refusal is so deliberate that it has been codified through the abolition of civil marriage. Even secular Jews must have religious marriages if they want to be more than roommates. Jews cannot marry Christians or Arabs without traveling abroad. Zionism has built an entire legal architecture to prevent fusion. After a century of contact, there is no appreciable mixed population. Israeli marriage law echoes the logic of Nazi race law: legal protection of blood against dilution. Zionism has survived by holding the racial lines stricter than those the British maintained in India. The British created a large Anglo-Indian community. No equivalent exists in modern Israel.

By Western standards, Israel is a natalist outlier. Its Jewish fertility rate—at 3.1 births per woman—is near parity with the Palestinian figure. This is twice the OECD average and seventy percent higher than France, the most fertile state in Europe. It is the only Western country where women are breeding faster than German women in 1939—because it is the only one where demographic competition is taken so seriously.

Israel is the only advanced nation still taking the kind of military and political risks that were common in early 20th-century Europe because it is the only advanced nation still driven by the same ethnic and nationalist logic. Israel’s tragedy is that it was born too late. Settler cultures take a long time to pacify: Little Bighorn was a century after the American Revolution; the British were still founding settler colonies in Kenya three centuries after Jamestown. If the United States and Europe are liberal graduate students, Israel is the last Nietzschean—armed, disciplined, and unrepentant. And while the tracts it expropriates are often no bigger than American subdivisions, it is still a Viking.