How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror

David Ben Gurion Airport is a brash, beautiful, strikingly confident construction that, like much of Tel Aviv, looks as though it may have sprouted fully formed from the desert sands of the old Arab port city of Jaffa. Named after the surly general and chief architect of the state, the airport is a testament to Israel’s self-ascribed position as a bastion of social and technological advancement amidst a sea of inchoate enemies. In fact, Ben Gurion’s primary function seems to be to filter out these very enemies by tightly controlling access to the state. This is true of all international airports, I suppose, as anyone who has undergone the humiliation of being scanned, fingerprinted, and photographed to be allowed entry into the U.S. post-9/11 can attest. In the modern world, airports have become a kind of identity directory: the place where we are most determinately defined, registered, and catalogued before being apportioned into separate queues, each according to nationality.

Still, Israel has, for obvious reasons, taken this process to new and unprecedented heights. I am not two steps off the plane when I am immediately tagged and separated from the rush of passengers by a pimpled immigration officer in a knitted yarmulke.

“Passport please,” he barks. “Why are you here?”

I cannot tell him the truth: I want to sneak into Gaza, which has been sealed off for months. In 2006, when Palestinians were offered their first taste of a free and fair election, they voted overwhelmingly for the religious nationalists of Hamas, over the more secular yet seemingly inept politicians of Fatah, the party founded by Yasir Arafat in 1958. Despite having promised to allow the Palestinians self-determination, Israel, the US, and the European powers quickly decided that Hamas, whose founding charter refuses to recognize the state of Israel and whose militant wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has been responsible for countless Israeli military and civilian deaths, could not be allowed to govern. Gaza, the sliver of fallow land that has become Hamas’ de facto stronghold, was cut off from the outside world. International aid dried up and a plan was put in place to, as the New York Times put it, “starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections” to the point where new elections would have to be called. The result was a violent rift between Hamas and Fatah that split the Occupied Territories in two: the West Bank, governed by Fatah with the aid of the international community; and Gaza, ruled by Hamas and isolated from the rest of the world. Almost overnight, Gaza became a prison with one and half million hungry, fuming inmates.

I wanted to visit the ruined village of Um al-Nasr, in northern Gaza, some miles away from lush Tel Aviv. A few months earlier, a number of villagers, including two toddlers, had drowned in what the press was calling a “sewage tsunami.” The deluge was triggered by the collapse of a treatment facility that had been slowly and steadily leaking sewage just above the village. For months the villagers of Um al-Nasr had pleaded with Israeli authorities to allow the importation of the pumps, pipes, and filters necessary to stem the flow. But Israel, rattled by a ceaseless barrage of crudely constructed rockets launched daily from Gaza, some of which were - in the sort of grim irony that can only exist in such a place - constructed from old sewage pipes, refused. The villagers built an earthen embankment around what was fast becoming a lake of human waste acres wide. But the embankment would not hold. On the morning of March 27, 2007, while most of the villagers of Um al-Nasr slept, the embankment gave way. The village was inundated.

This is what we talk about when we talk about Gaza: that human beings - men, women, children - living alongside a wealthiest, developed country, could literally drown in shit.

“Why are you here?” “To visit the sites,” I say.

It is not a satisfactory answer and I am taken into a windowless room where the question is repeated, this time by a slightly older officer. An hour passes and a third officer walks in with the same question. “Why are you here?”

Thereafter, the question is repeated at regular intervals - in the sterile immigration office; in a smaller, even more sterile office inside the first office; in an even smaller office inside that office; and later, at the immigration queue, at the baggage claim, at customs - until I come to think of why are you here? as a form of greeting.

All of this understandable. I resent none of it. Though I am a citizen of the United States, I was born in Iran, and have spent a great deal of time in countries that do not even recognize Israel’s right to exist - countries that, were I to have an Israeli stamp on my passport, would not allow me to enter their borders, would maybe even cart me off to jail. Israel has every reason to be cautious considering the battering it as has received by people who look just like me.

The problem is not with Israel. The problem is with me, with the sum of my identities. My citizenship is American; my nationality, Iranian; my ethnicity, Persian; my culture, Middle Eastern; my religion, Muslim; my gender, male. All the multiple signifiers of my identity - the things that make me who I am - are in one way or another viewed as a national threat to the endless procession of perfectly pleasant, perfectly reasonable immigration officers whose task it is to maintain a safe distance between their people and my people.

Even so, throughout the entire exercise, I cannot help but think of the famed French theorist Ernest Renan who once defined the nation as “a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” Nowhere is that sentiment borne out more fully or with more force than among the relatively new nations scattered along the broad horizon of the Greater Middle East and North Africa (a region dubbed MENA). Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the region in which nationalism arose so late, and so often through the will of others, is the region in which it is now being most unmistakably subsumed by the tide globalization.

Globalization means many things to many people. Though the term itself is new, having entered our vocabulary only in the 1980s, the systemic social, economic, and cultural changes that the word conjures have been taking place for centuries. Nayan Chanda makes a compelling case for considering the process of globalization to have begun when the first humans footslogged out of Africa in search of game and refuge and a more temperate climate. The age of empires was in some ways the height of globalization; no other era in history could boast the fluidity and ease with which the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, and Mongols were able to cross-pollinate their trade, communication, and cultures across vast distances - except, perhaps, for the age of colonialism, in which the old imperial model of commercial relations between neighboring kingdoms was transformed into the more manageable, if less ethical, model of total economic domination of indigenous populations. And certainly no single force can be said to have had a greater impact on propelling globalization forward than religion, which has always sought to break through the boundaries of borders, clans, and ethnicities to spread a message of universalism. The point is that globalization is neither a new nor a constant phenomenon.

In its contemporary usage, however, the term globalization refers to modern trends like the expansion of international financial systems, the interconnectedness of national interests, the rise of global media and communication technologies like satellite TV and the Internet, the mass migration of peoples - all taking place across the boundaries of sovereign nation-states. The simplest definition of modern globalization belongs to the Danish political philosophers Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sorensen: “The intensification of economic, political, social and cultural relations across borders.” But I prefer Roland Robertson’s view of globalization as “a concept that refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.”

Globalization, in other words, is not just about technological advancement and transnational relations. It is about one’s sense of self in a world that is increasingly being viewed as a single space. The world has not changed so much as we have. Our idea of the self has changed. How we identify ourselves as part of a social collective, how we conceive of our public spaces, how we interact with likeminded individuals, how we determine our religious and political leaders, even how we think about categories of religion and politics - everything about how we define ourselves both as individuals and as members of a larger society changes in a globalized world because our sense of self is not constrained by territorial boundaries. And since the self is composed of multiple markers of identity - nationality, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, etc. - if one of those starts to give way (say, nationality), it is only natural that another (religion, ethnicity) would come to fill the vacuum.

For most of the last century, secular nationalism - the political philosophy that places the nation-state at the center of collective identity - has been the dominant identification marker in much of the world, even in the developing world, which tends to view the creation of a sturdy national identity as the first step in its economic and political advancement. Nationalism begins, of course, with the idea of the nation, but the nation is not always so easy to define.

A nation is “a community of common descent,” writes Anthony Smith, bound together by a set of shared values and traditions, myths and historical memories, and often linked to some ancestral homeland: “the place where ‘our’ sages, saints, and heroes lived, worked, prayed, and fought.” A state is the bureaucratic mechanism (i.e. government) necessary to organize and control a nation within territorial boundaries. A state has borders; it can be geographically defined. A nation is borderless; it is an “imagined community,” to borrow a much-borrowed phrase from Benedict Anderson. The only borders a nation has are those of inclusion and exclusion: who belongs and who does not.

In a state, membership is defined through citizenship. But membership in a nation requires some other measure of unity: the members must speak the same language, or share the same traditions, or worship the same god or practice the same rituals. The modern state can be traced back only to the 18th century. But the nation has existed from the moment human populations began to organize themselves as families, clans, tribes, a people. The Celts, the Aztecs, the Persians, the Jews, the Arabs - all laid claim to a degree of “nationhood,” all possessed a sense of community, and all maintained links to an ancestral homeland, long before they were absorbed into various states.

Think of the nation as a grand historical narrative - both mythical and real - written in the memories of generation after generation of a people. The state is the cover and binding that harnesses that narrative, creating a readable book. Thus, when we speak of the nation-state, we refer to the relatively new idea that a nation - a community of common descent - can be contained within the territorial or bureaucratic boundaries of a state. And when we speak of secular nationalism, we mean the even newer idea that the members of a nation-state should be bound together not by religious or ethnic affiliation, but through a social contract between free and equal citizens.

When the nation-state was an autonomous, territorially bounded entity governing a community of people who shared some measure of cultural homogeneity - as was the case throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries - secular nationalism thrived. But globalization has changed everything. The rise of cosmopolitan cities like New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Hong Kong; the surge in mass migration, dual nationalities, and hyphenated identities; the ceaseless flow of peoples across state borders; all of these have made achieving anything like cultural homogeneity within territorial boundaries almost impossible. The more the world becomes de-territorialized, the more nationalism loses its place as the primary marker of collective identity. Just as a narrative cannot be truly contained within the bindings of a book, so has globalization put the lie to the idea that a nation can be truly bound by the geography of a state.

The truth is that secular nationalism was a shaky idea from the start, one born in post-Reformation Europe, cultivated during the European Enlightenment, then systematically imposed upon the rest of the globe through conquest and colonialism. In large parts of the developing world, the nation-state is a foreign concept. The map of the Middle East is a palimpsest, with arbitrary borders, made-up names, and fabricated nationalities often aggressively imposed by colonizers. In this region, nationalism has never been the primary marker of collective identity. Most Sudanese do not refer to themselves as Sudanese. Rawandan identity is based chiefly on the clan not the state. Whatever their citizenship, a great many Sikhs will always view their national home to be Khalistan. The Kurds have never been a territorially bounded population, and Iraq is a fictive state built upon the myths and memories of peoples with whom modern-day Iraqis share little in common. In these countries, among these nations, citizenship is just a piece of paper. And, as Edmund Burke noted a century ago, “men are not tied to one another by papers and seals [but] by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.”

Even in Europe and the developed world, the idea of secular nationalism always seemed problematic. That is because membership, or rather citizenship, in the nation-state requires submission to state sovereignty over all aspects of life. Max Weber’s famous axiom that the state is that entity which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force has proven a woefully inadequate description of the nearly absolute powers claimed by even the freest and most liberal nation-state. The modern state holds a monopoly not only on force, but also on identity. It assumes meticulous control over every level of social life, both private and public. It is the primary repressive force for controlling human impulses. It declares what is and what is not proper religious or political expression. It demands consent over all activity - social, sexual, and spiritual. Above all it decides who can and who cannot share in the collective identity it has itself demarcated. The state’s sovereignty over life and death is absolute and unavoidable.

As one can imagine, not all members of a nation have been willing to allow the state to draw boundaries around them, call them a people, a religion, a culture, and thus enforce upon them a categorical sameness to the exclusion of others who may share many aspects of their identity, but who happen not to be bounded by the same geography. In all parts of the world, loyalties to family, clan, ethnicity, and religion tend to trump loyalty to the state. Now that globalization has, at the very least, begun to loosen the grip of secular nationalism on our identities, people are beginning to reassemble around older, more primal forms of identity like religion and ethnicity, those that cannot be so easily controlled by the state apparatus.

Witness the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia. The forced disaggregation of a people once united by a shared civic identity into tiny, ethnically homogenous states, each in conflict with the other, is perhaps the clearest example of what happens when transnational identities - in this case ethnicity - clash with national loyalties. Similar tensions led to the partitioning of Urdu-speaking West Pakistan and Bengali-speaking East Pakistan into the homogenized states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Still, when it comes to the power of transnational identities to challenge nationalist ones, no force exerts a greater pull than religion. Fatah learned this truth the hard way. The party of Yasir Arafat began its political career as merely the most formidable of a number of Palestinian underground guerrilla groups active in Egypt and Jordan, but it quickly rose to dominate the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO - the sole legitimate body representing the interests of the Palestinian nation. Fatah’s initial success was a result of its ability to unite all the disparate and often feuding Palestinian political groups under a single, secular, national identity.

But the same force that propelled Fatah to the top of Palestinian politics in the 1960s and 1970s - secular nationalism - is the force that has led to its slow demise. (Though it must be said that the unbridled corruption of many Fatah leaders certainly played a part) In 1988, when, after two decades of crushing occupation the Palestinian population suddenly rose up in open revolt, a new organization, the Islamic Resistance Movement - popularly known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas - burst onto the political scene. In direct opposition to the secular nationalism offered by Fatah, Hamas framed its political platform in exclusively religious terms. It relied on the widely recognized symbols and terminology of Islam to create a new collective identity, one that could cut across all boundaries of culture and class and unite the Palestinian people in resistance to Israel.

In the Muslim world, the fusing of religion and nationalism is called Islamism. Islamism is a political philosophy, developed primarily in post-colonial Egypt and India, which seeks to establish an Islamic state - either through grassroots social and political activism, or through violent revolution - built upon a distinctly Islamic moral framework. Some Islamist groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), or Algeria’s Front Islamique de Salut (FIS), are committed to civic, even democratic, participation in society. Others, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamic Jihad in Egypt, or the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), wish to overturn their governments through armed revolt.

Religious nationalism is by no means a uniquely Islamic phenomenon. The civil war between Fatah and Hamas (between secular and religious nationalism) is a battle that is taking place all over the globe. This is partly due to the fact that secular nationalism, in demanding that the nation-state be placed at the center of collective identity, was consciously conceived of as an alternative to religion. A great deal of nationalism’s success in the first half of the 20th century came from its ability to co-opt the vocabulary, authority, and resources of religious institutions for its own ends. It was perhaps inevitable that, as secular nationalism began to give way, religion would once again become the principle marker of collective identity - and with a vengeance.

The problem with religious nationalism is not its aspirations, which in most cases involves little more than injecting (or, perhaps, imposing) a particular set of values and customs into society. The problem is that religious identities cannot be tethered to the nation-state. That is why the greatest threat to global security comes not so much from the rise of religious nationalist ideologies like Islamism, which, at least in a democracy, may be unavoidable, and which, given space and time, may evolve into mature and responsible governance, as has been the case with Turkey’s AKP or with many of Europe’s Christian Nationalist parties - the real threat to global security comes from the rise of religious transnationalist movements, like Jihadism, which cannot be contained within territorial boundaries of any state.