The Order After the Citizen

The Golem returns not as myth, but as infrastructure.

The citizen is no longer the subject of order, but its managed variable.

War is not the deepest event before us today. It is the most visible layer of a deeper shift.

What we are watching is not only a military conflict. It is a struggle over what kind of political order will replace the one built after 1945.

That order was never innocent. It was selective, often hypocritical, often brutal, and full of exceptions. Yet it still rested on a familiar promise: relatively stable citizenship, at least a formal belief in universal rights, some boundary between law and permanent emergency, and the conviction that technology should serve public order rather than become its new language of rule. What is now emerging does not look like reform. It looks like replacement.

The Human Being Rewritten

The deepest change concerns not only law or war. It concerns what a human being now becomes in politics. The human being loses value as a political end and gains value as something useful to the system. Not dignity, but utility. Not automatic belonging, but conditional inclusion. Citizenship does not disappear. It becomes a status that the system can narrow, reshape, and manage through security fears, demographic pressure, territorial claims, and data. The citizen does not disappear. Membership does not disappear. Both turn into different levels of recognition.

The Filter of Belonging

That is why the American case matters beyond immigration. The attack on birthright citizenship matters not only because it narrows a legal right, but because it reopens a question the postwar order tried, however imperfectly, to close: who truly belongs. When a modern state begins to fight automatic belonging, it regains the power to decide who counts fully, who counts only conditionally, and who may remain physically present while becoming politically incomplete. Citizenship stops being something settled. It becomes a filter again.

But not only the legal threshold of belonging is changing. The machine that produces the categories to which belonging will later be assigned is changing as well. Modern power does not simply find populations and sort them. It co-produces the political figures it later claims merely to manage.

The Category Before the Person

This is one of the hardest lessons of twentieth-century critical thought. Political systems do not merely govern differences that already exist. They project, stabilize, and enforce the figures through which governing becomes possible. First the category is formed. Only then are people ruled as if that category were an objective fact.

A new order does not prevail only when it has full power. It prevails when it becomes imaginable as normal. That is why law alone, administration alone, or technology alone are not enough to understand what is happening. One must also grasp the sphere of images, fantasies, and collective habits in which a world of filtered citizenship, permanent mobilization, and managed humanity starts to appear not as a scandal, but as common sense.

Similarity Without Sameness

At this point, the comparison between the American and Israeli cases becomes useful, but only if it is made carefully. The two systems are not the same. One is not copying the other. Their histories, founding narratives, and legal forms are deeply different. The United States historically rested on a universal, territorial understanding of belonging, even if it repeatedly violated that principle in practice. Israel was founded as the national home of the Jewish people and never presented itself as a neutral civic republic in the American sense.

And yet similar pressures are now producing a similar political logic. In the United States, a constitutional order long tied to jus soli is being pushed to adopt stronger filters based on parental status and jurisdiction. In Israel, a state openly founded as the national homeland of the Jewish people is under pressure to harden the boundary between full political belonging and presence without full recognition under conditions of demographic strain, security pressure, and conflict over territory.

Land, Threat, and Full Standing

That is why the Israeli case should not be reduced either to simple settlement expansion or to a moral melodrama in which one side receives automatic innocence and the other automatic guilt. The process is more specific. It concerns the tightening link between Jewish collective identity, state sovereignty, and control over land. Whether one sees the current moves as security policy, historical reaffirmation, de facto annexation, or some mixture of the three, the question remains the same: whose presence counts as part of the community itself, whose claims are subordinated to security and inheritance, and whose status becomes increasingly conditional under the logic of permanent threat.

So the issue is not only territorial. It also concerns how reality is organized and named. A state living under permanent threat does not only protect a community that already exists. It increasingly produces graded descriptions of who is central, who is merely tolerated, and who is administratively present without equal recognition. First the category is created. Then the treatment of people makes the category look like a fact.

This does not mean moral equivalence. It means a shared movement from relatively automatic or broad belonging toward criteria that are more conditional, more selective, and more deeply shaped by the logic of security. In both cases, law is asked not only to protect existing members of the community, but to sort people and regulate access to full belonging.

America is renegotiating its universal self-image under pressure from migration, fragmentation, and nationalism driven by executive power. Israel is strengthening its definition of itself as a specifically Jewish state in a region where its right to exist as a Jewish state has long been contested, and where that hostility has repeatedly been expressed through wars, intifadas, and the rejection of successive compromise frameworks, while universal formulas have repeatedly broken against rejection, war, and exhaustion. The effects will not be identical. The historical weight of the two cases is not identical. But the political logic is becoming similar: law as filter, threat as lasting justification, belonging as something graded rather than stable.

The Limits of the Old Universalism

Here the limits of the old liberal language also become visible. The crisis of the post-1945 order does not lie only in the fact that it betrayed its own ideals. It also lies in the fact that those ideals often concealed how much sorting, asymmetry, and administrative hierarchy were already built into the system itself. The universal promise weakened not only because it was attacked from outside. It weakened also because it was never as real as its defenders claimed.

Silicon Valley as Co-Sovereign

At this point Silicon Valley stops being background and becomes central. Something new happens when the technological elite ceases to act like one sector of the economy and begins to act like a co-author of sovereignty. This is no longer ordinary lobbying. It is a sign that platform capital no longer wants merely to influence the state from outside. It wants to help redesign the very conditions under which the state will function.

The military dimension makes this pattern even clearer. War systems, software systems, and systems of political filtering begin to operate in the same field. Technology is not neutral here. It makes this sort of sorting easier, faster, more precise, and more durable. It makes permanent readiness and permanent exception administratively attractive.

The same logic is now reaching into biology itself. A Bay Area startup, R3 Bio, was described by Wired in March 2026 as pursuing brainless “organ sacks” as a future alternative to animal testing, while presenting the long-term ambition of making human versions as sources of tissues and organs. After the public backlash, the company’s own website began distancing itself from that language and stated that its current work is limited to cell culture, molecules, and microscopic in vitro structures. What matters here is larger than one controversial startup. The limit is no longer defended as a limit. It is redesigned as an engineering problem. Once the brain begins to appear chiefly as an obstacle to scalability, ethics is no longer asked how to stop the project. It is asked how to redesign the object. The new order does not merely filter citizens. It begins to filter the acceptable form of the human itself

Infrastructure of Rule

What emerges from this convergence is not simply a stronger state or a richer private sector. What emerges is a new mixture of state power, security power, software power, and capital. The question is no longer only: who governs? The question is: through what infrastructure does governing itself become possible?

Against this background, the war with Iran looks less like an isolated regional conflict and more like an accelerant. The pattern is politically revealing: maximum destabilization, an unclear endpoint, and the language of rapid exit before any stable order has been rebuilt. A war does not need to be a grand conspiracy in order to become useful. It is enough that it widens the space in which other changes can be imposed more easily.

Under cover of war, thresholds shift. Exceptional measures become normal. Systems of belonging harden. The language of survival begins to justify almost any redesign of political life.

That is also why Israel acquires a significance many analysts still fail to see. Not because Israel controls the whole process. That would be lazy and false. Israel matters because it offers, for parts of the American political and technological elite, a usable model: a state of permanent mobilization, advanced security technology, fortified borders, selective belonging, and unceasing legitimacy drawn from existential threat. When such a model meets the American move toward filtered citizenship, militarized AI, and the growing fusion of platform power with state power, the result is not only an alliance. It is a prototype. That prototype is not identical everywhere. But it is sufficiently legible.

When Untruth Becomes Real

One of the hardest lessons of twentieth-century political thought was that untruth does not need to persuade in order to win. It is enough that it is turned into policy and practice. When law, administration, and force transform a classification into something executable, the category begins to carry the force of fact.

Perhaps this is precisely the threshold we are crossing again. Not the triumph of a better description of the human being, but the installation of categories whose effectiveness begins to pass for truth.

The Human Being as Resource

The real scandal is not only that the new order is harsh. Political orders have often been harsh. The real scandal is that it no longer treats the human being as the point of reference of political order. It treats the human being as something to be sorted, assigned, secured, and, when needed, reduced. Citizen, resident, migrant, settler, minority, ally, suspect: these become less and less names of political standing and more and more categories of management. The population becomes inventory. Belonging becomes something the system measures, ranks, and adjusts. Sovereignty becomes the power to classify.

That is why the stakes are larger than Trump, larger than one war, and larger than one Israeli coalition. The real question is whether we are witnessing the exhaustion of the post-1945 order and the arrival of something harsher: less citizen, more status; less law as shield, more law as gate; less politics, more managed access; less universality, more selective access.

If this is indeed what is emerging, then the struggle over birthright citizenship, the sharpening fight over Jewishness and land, the fusion of Silicon Valley with the security state, and the war with Iran are not separate stories. They are different fronts of the same transformation.

The most disturbing possibility is not that the liberal order is failing. It has been failing for years. The more disturbing possibility is that an increasingly influential coalition has decided it no longer wants to repair it. It wants to replace it.

And for such a project, chaos is not an obstacle.

It is infrastructure.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)