“Nationalism is the conviction that a nation is superior not through principle, justice, or collective accomplishment, but because one happens to have been born on its soil—preferably to parents and grandparents who were born there too. It is a mysticism of blood and land, in which ancestral accident becomes moral entitlement, and geographic nativity is mistaken for virtue. When one’s lineage does not fully root into the national soil, suspicion already begins: nationalism demands not just birthright, but inherited belonging—a pedigree of proximity that binds identity to territory like feudal claim.
Of course, this does not apply to Zionism. The vast majoreity of those who advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Palestine were not born there. The nationalist mimicry of the Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky thus needed to make some adjustments. Jabotinsky’s solution to the blood-and-soil problem of Zionism was to reinterpret “soil” as sacred history and “blood” as a metaphysical nation, not necessarily bound by continuous residence or organic relation to the land, but by a shared, mythic-national identity that demanded return and conquest. The mythical source of this was the biblical sequence of the promise to Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and the violent conquest of Canaan. There is no convincing archaeological evidence that these events as described in the Hebrew Bible actually occurred in historical reality. In fact, the archaeological consensus among both Israeli and international scholars overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction.
However, not only the claim to a destined, historical inheritance is derived from myth, so is the notion that Jews are a nation. This explains why Jabotinsky was so diametrically opposed to notions of assimilation and thus required the inauguration of a “Jewish State” through violent, military conquest (the doctrine laid out in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall). The problem is that there is no continuous historical record that can directly trace modern European Jews back to the ancient Judeans or Israelites of the 1st millennium BCE in Palestine. Ancient Judea was depopulated gradually, not entirely destroyed, after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE). Most historians now reject the myth of a mass Roman exile. Instead, many Jews remained in the region, converted to Christianity or Islam over time, or migrated gradually in various directions. The idea of a mass, forced diaspora (as Zionist mythology often claims) has no strong historical basis. The term “diaspora” more accurately describes long-term processes of dispersion, trade, and conversion over centuries.
The second reason why it is very difficult to argue for a direct genealogical connection between European Jews (Ashkenazim) and Palestine relates to linguistic facts. European Jews historically spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language with Slavic and Hebrew admixtures, and developed religious-cultural forms quite distinct from Middle Eastern Jewry. Yiddishkeit (Ashkenazi Jewish culture) arose in the Rhineland and Eastern Europe, reflecting medieval Christian-European environments, not ancient Palestine. Rituals and customs diverged from Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews who had closer cultural continuities with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Jewish traditions. It is therefore also logical that DNA tests are strictly regulated in Israel. The mythology around Jewish ethnicity is not expected to hold its own against molecular biological materiality. The halakhic-ethnonational identity of Jewishness is structured not by molecular inheritance but by a juridical-symbolic order that must resist biology to remain coherent
However, let is not deceive ourselves by thinking that nationhood is anything other than mythical. Just because in Zionism it is easier to expose the myths, does not mean that Germanism or Anglicism iare not equally mythical. When the Grimm brothers were retrieving or collecting fairy tales and calibrating the German language in the 19th Century, they were not discovering some ancient, hidden truth; they were merely inventing one. In publishing Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812–1857), the Grimms claimed to preserve authentic oral folk traditions passed down through generations. Though many of their sources were educated or urban women, they edited the tales to reflect a supposedly pure and rural “Volksgeist” (spirit of the people), even if many of these tales probably originated from all over Europe, noit just Germanic soil. These tales were stylized into a national archive of cultural memory, implying that a timeless, coherent German soul existed long before modernity. They thereby transformed fragmentary, diverse stories (and not just from Germany) into a symbolic continuity of Germanness that transcended class, region, and dialect.
The philologist Jacob Grimm developed Grimm’s Law that “traced” the development of Germanic languages, suggesting a scientific grounding for the idea of a common Aryan/Teutonic ancestry. Grimm’s Law is a systematic set of phonological changes that distinguish the Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages. This work established the scientific method in comparative philology. The Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), a massive linguistic project, aimed to encompass the entire German language in its historical depth—creating a sense of permanence and rootedness. As a result, language was mythologized as both bloodline and soil, the medium through which the German spirit was inherited and transmitted.
The Grimm brothers were part of a larger mythopoetic project to invent the German nation as a pre-political, natural entity. This itself was part of a broader European interest in nation-building that was the main cultural-political paradigm of 19th Century Europe, from which Zionism also emerged. Because the Grimm brothers claimed to have established the authoritative genealogy of the German language, other nations that have their own version of the German language, such as the Netherlands, could not engage in the same kind of mythopoeia. That is why Dutch national history focuses less on linguistic and cultural specificities, except religion (whereas German Protestantism was primarily Lutheran, Dutch Reformism was extremely Calvinist), but instead focused on wars and maritime conquests (colonialism). Hence, rather than focusing on the arbitrary selection of “genealogical matter” (genetics, wars, religions, language fairy tales), we – as critical scholars of mythopoeia – should focus on their abstraction.
This shift—from analyzing the elements themselves to the mode of abstraction that assembles them into a national essence—is essential for critically understanding not only German and Dutch nationalism, but also Zionism and modern ethnic statehood more broadly. Mythopoeia is the practice of abstraction through the establishment of a connection between actual places – in terms of land, habitat or territory – and the imaginary unity of an estate. Forging this connection as something that precedes the political, something that precedes even history, enables the re-imagination of a kind sovereignty that is natural (like that of the Lion King), divine (like that of Judaism) or both (like that of White Supremacism). It erases the actual violence of settlement and territorialisation and reinstates the estate as something that was always-already there. This in turn makes every act of violence against it illegitimate (perhaps unless it succeeds).
Indeed, notions of sovereignty cannot simply be upheld though violence alone. Jabotinsky’s iron wall did not project an end-game that remained stuck in armed conflict. He believed that once Jewish military supremacy had been established and consolidated, the estate – the Jewish state – could reabsorb the conquered peoples, primarily in a subservient role of course. In a similar vein, European nation states required internalized hierarchies: gender, class and in many cases also sub-national ethnicities (the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Basques, the Frisians, etc.) or ethnicized religions (e.g. Catholics in England and the Netherlands, Jews almost everywhere else).
No estate can exist autonomously. Ecology requires a circulation of material, for example in terms of trade. Sovereign entities are only sovereign in terms of an estate and every estate is defined by boundaries. Hence estates need a form of security that recognizes the violence of sovereignty. One’s own sovereignty is never guaranteed; it needs to be secured. Thus, European nation building of the 19th century was not merely focused on establishing domestic sovereignty; it was primarily focused on two connected elements: securitization and externalization.
The establishment of Ethno-Nationhood functions as the propping up of the base from which sacrifices could be demanded. What was asked is the sacrifice of interests – health, wealth, justice, sociality, beauty – working for the benefit of others, dying for the nation, giving up one’s own dignity to perform immoral acts, betraying friendships, embracing the ugliness of the lesser evil. These sacrifices are necessary to maintain the peace within the estate, the security of the estate and the overcoming of contradictions caused by the estate. The latter required a never-ceasing expansion of frontier-work. In the case of European “civilization”, the establishment of a capitalist world ecology was realized through imperial expansion.
This perfectly explains the project of Greater Israel, which has now become such a grotesque undertaking, that the Israeli State has expanded its national interests to undermining “Western” democracy to the extent that it criminalizes the freedom of expression and other fundamental rights of its citizens in defence of Zionism. Addressing Greater Israel as a logical consequence of Zionism also invokes the realization that Imperialism is the logical consequence of “Western Civilization”. This also obliterates the myth of Jewish Exceptionalism: Zionism is just like any other European nationalist ideology, nothing less but also nothing more.
The demand of sacrifices is extremely clear in the case of National Socialism. It was indeed the ethos of National Socialism: the identity of the worker-soldier as the denominator of German identity was entirely based on sacrifices. Dying for your country is the greatest honour for men; as was producing more Germans to die for their country was the greatest honour for women. The dignity of worker-soldiers, for example in terms of the administration and logistics of the Shoah, was not merely sacrificed, it was obliterated to the extent that one had to completely internalize its denial – wir hatten es nie gewußt – following the collapse of the Third Reich.
We can see the same happing with the worker-soldiers of the IDF and those who have been inculcated by Zionism. It is no accident that they celebrated the sacrifice of their personal dignity by positing videos of war crimes that they had committed in Gaza. It is no accident that Israeli politicians openly justify the rape and sexual violation of Palestinian prisoners. It is no accident that songs celebrating the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing Nakba of Palestine top the charts in Israel. Zionism demands the sacrifice of human dignity, it obliterates any sense of justice, it defecates on beauty, it kills, rapes, steals (as Francesca Albenese has shown: genocide is a profitable business) all in the name of retribution which itself is a mythopoetically contorted expression of racist imperialism. And – this is no trivial matter – it also manages to reveal that “Western” civilization is an accomplice in all of this, as it has been from the very beginning.
Disaffected Sociology 
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