About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full

made-up nations

11 Aug 2026 - 11 Aug 2026
Open in Logseq
    • For some reason last night I was drawn to reading about the Israel/Palestine conflict, a topic I mostly try to avoid, both because it is painful and because I feel I have nothing interesting to say or think about it.
    • A comment on this anti-Zionist piece caught my eye:

    • +BEGIN_EXPORT hiccup [:a {:native "true", :href "https://www.savageminds.co/p/israels-right-to-exist?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embeddingpublicationid=3465076"} [:div {} [:img {:src "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s!9mh2!,w56,climit,fauto,qauto:good,flprogressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdbd72419-a820-4799-83f1-625805c4832e_950x950.png"}] [:span {} "Savage Minds"]] [:div {} [:div {} "Israel’s “Right to Exist”"]] [:div {} "News that, in the midst of the genocide in Palestine, the German parliament was this week advancing legislatio…"] [:div {} [:span {} "Read more"]] [:div {} "2 days ago · 92 likes · 2 comments · Branko Marcetic"]] #+END_EXPORT

    • The commenter said in its entirety:
    • >
    • A made up country that survives off genocide since 1948.
    • The obvious response is that all countries are made up. Presumably everybody knows this even if they aren’t in the habit of acknowledging it. The original article gestures in this direction, pointing out that many countries that used to exist no longer do (Czechoslovakia eg, which existed for less than a century).
    • He means Israel is recently made up and thus inferior to those with long histories. He also means to dismiss Israel’s claim of continuity with the Israel of the Biblical era, which, fair enough, those were always pretty dubious.
    • The author of the comment is a European, so their country is probably old and may have the appearance of something eternal, whose form was fixed from the foundations of the world. As an American, my country was constructed fairly recently, with plenty of genocide involved. 250 years is not that long, but longer than Israel’s 70 or so. Is that the reason the US is perfectly well-established and Israel is “made up”?
    • Or is the founding principles? The US founding myth is on universalism (even if it has not adhered to that in practice, to put it mildly) while Israel is foundationally an ethnostate, and
    • I think roughly speaking all countries were built out of conquest and slaughter. That does not excuse Israel’s acts…
    • OK dropping this post because what could be its purpose other than, in fact, excusing Israel?
    • I have never really been much of an anarchist but I have the anarchist suspicion of all states and governments.
    • “legitmacy” is such a weird concept.
    • OK I give up, write this for me, with a focus on legitimacy whicih I assume has a lot of existing theoru Ask Claude

      • On Legitimacy and Made-Up Nations

      • The commenter's remark is doing several things at once, and they're worth separating.

      • What "made up" is actually tracking

      • The charge isn't really about invention - the commenter knows France was invented. The implicit theory is something like: legitimacy accrues through time and settled acceptance. A country becomes real by persisting long enough that questioning it becomes academic. Israel hasn't crossed that threshold yet, in this view. But this is a strange theory, because it means legitimacy is just successful violence that has aged sufficiently.

      • The actual political theory of legitimacy

      • There's a substantial literature here. The main traditions:
      • Procedural/consent-based (Locke, social contract tradition): states are legitimate if governed with consent of the governed. This immediately creates problems for any settler-colonial state, including the US.
      • Effectiveness (Weber, and realists generally): a state is legitimate if it successfully claims a monopoly on violence within a territory. This is purely descriptive and makes "legitimacy" nearly synonymous with "exists."
      • Democratic/self-determination (Rawls, Buchanan): peoples have a right to self-governance. This is where it gets recursive for Israel/Palestine - both populations claim it.
      • Substantive justice (more radical): states are only legitimate insofar as they don't systematically violate rights. Most states fail this continuously.

      • The anarchist point is actually the sharpest one

      • You're right to reach for it. The problem with "Israel is illegitimate" as a political claim is that it implicitly accepts a standard that, applied consistently, delegitimizes most states. The usual response is tu quoque - which looks like excuse-making - but it needn't be. It can instead be a reductio: perhaps the framework of state legitimacy is the wrong tool here, because it was never coherent to begin with.
      • The real question being avoided is: given that these people exist and are here now, what arrangements would cause the least harm going forward? Legitimacy talk tends to obscure this by making the past the primary object of dispute.

      • Why legitimacy discourse is sticky anyway

      • Even if theoretically confused, legitimacy claims do political work. They mobilize populations, justify (or withdraw) international recognition, and determine who gets to use force. So the concept persists not because it's philosophically sound but because it's socially load-bearing - which is roughly Max Weber's point, that legitimacy is about belief in legitimacy, not some external standard.
      • The commenter's claim is really a bid to withdraw that belief. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't tell you what to do next.