Smotrich and the Naked Grammar of the State |
Bezalel Smotrich should not be defended, but he should not be misunderstood. That distinction matters. To defend him would be to become an apologist for a politics of dispossession. To denounce him only as an extremist would be easier, but also less serious. The word “extremist” allows us to imagine that the problem stands outside the house. Smotrich is more disturbing because he stands inside it, with a ministry, a map, a budget and a stamp.
He is not merely a man with radical opinions. He is a politician whose ideas have acquired institutional form. In the 2022 Israeli election, Religious Zionism won 14 seats and 10.8 percent of the vote. Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc won 64 seats, enough to form a government. That means Smotrich is not an accident outside democracy. He is a product of democratic admissibility, coalition arithmetic and the willingness of others to treat his project as a manageable price of power.
This is why the question is not simply whether Smotrich is dangerous. Of course he is dangerous. The deeper question is why he is functional. He functions because he understands something many liberal observers prefer not to see: states are not born clean. They define territory through war, compromise, settlement, displacement, recognition, demography, administration and later narration. First comes force, or the threat of force. Then comes the map. Then comes the textbook. Then comes the national holiday. Then comes the scholar explaining that the process was “complex.” It usually was complex. So is an axe.
This is not a defence of force. It is a refusal of innocence. Smotrich’s scandal is not that he invented the old grammar of statehood. He did not. His scandal is that he uses it too openly, with too little shame, in an age that still pretends international legality has abolished the older grammar of territory.
Smotrich did not invent this grammar. Europe, which today often lectures Israel from the highest moral platforms, built many of its own states in precisely this language, only in far more brutal forms and on a far larger scale. France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Britain and Russia were not formed by clean seminars in mutual recognition. Their borders and internal homogeneity emerged across centuries of war, expulsions, forced assimilation, religious persecution, dynastic violence, colonial conquest, mass killing and cultural destruction. Modern Europe’s relative ethnic homogeneity is not a natural fact. It is the result of a long and violent history of homogenization, including forced assimilation, resettlement and mass killing.
Spain expelled Jews in 1492 and Moriscos between 1609 and 1614. The latter operation affected hundreds of thousands of people and was carried out through state secrecy, coercion and deception. France’s religious wars, including the massacre of Huguenots, showed how confessional consolidation could become political violence. The partitions of Poland were not a regrettable footnote but a laboratory of imperial statecraft. The Balkans, repeatedly, displayed the lethal link between national form and population management. Europe’s colonial empires carried this grammar outward with........