Israel as a case study in starting a country
(This has been kicking around as a draft for many months, so it’s not inspired by any current events.)
Many futurist thinkers have considered starting their own country, their own city, or otherwise building new, radically different political institutions. (“World Optimization”, as Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality calls it.) While I’ve sadly never visited myself, I think the founding and growth of Israel is an excellent case study for these kinds of goals. It was very successful in many ways, but there were still a lot of problems, and the successes depended on a bunch of pre-conditions that most amateur planners haven’t written about or discussed much. (Note that totally replacing a political system is very different from working within an existing system, like most lobbyists and activists do.)
The first major element that the Israelis had was a very strong motivation. Starting your own country, or ripping up your whole political system (as the French or Russians did), is very costly, a huge amount of work, and also incredibly dangerous. It’s stepping outside of political tradition, rule of law, and other protections that most Westerners take for granted. If you screw up in a big way, you’re likely to be arrested by your ideological opponents, or killed in your new country’s first civil war (hello South Sudan). So to even get off the ground, there has to be a very compelling reason, one big enough to take risks, move across the world, learn a new language, start a new career, and otherwise do whatever has to be done. In the case of Israel, the obvious motive was the centuries of European anti-Semitism, which culminated in the Holocaust shortly before Israel’s independence. Something like tax reform or a fairer penal system, even if a good idea, probably isn’t compelling enough for anyone to abandon their existing lives.
The second factor was that this motivation was held by a large group of people with a stable, long-term identity. In many countries this identity comes from ethnicity, which is of course permanent, but the case of Israel shows that you can also have one among a widely dispersed group who aren’t biologically related. However, the bar for this was fairly high. Judaism was costly to enter, costly to leave, and usually involved ongoing commitments that lasted for one’s entire life. The vast majority of modern-day groups, whether atheists, goths, Lady Gaga fans, or Bernie Sanders supporters, don’t have anything like that level of dedication. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl , died 43 years before Israeli independence, but his followers were dedicated enough to the long-term that they carried on anyway. If, eg., Trump lost the next US election, and he then proposed creating an independent “Republic of Trumpistan”, there is no way that anyone would still be fighting for it 43 years after Trump’s death. The “Trump supporter” identity lacks enough depth to sustain that effort.
The third factor is that the proposed location, Palestine, was open enough to allow for years of large-scale immigration decades before Israel was formally founded. Xenophobia has always been ubiquitous, but the size and power of modern states means that anti-immigrant forces have largely shifted from informal harassment to regulations and legal barriers . Nowadays, populated places will be controlled by local elites that use state power to reward long-term residents, punish newcomers, and restrict entry as much as they feasibly can. Unpopulated places, since there is no local constituency or business community, will generally be restricted as some type of environmental preserve by whoever has sovereignty. Therefore, mass immigration to anywhere will require either gaining a lot of political leverage inside of some existing state, or picking a state that is too weak to enforce its restrictions so that large numbers of people can come without authorization (as later happened in Palestine during WWII).
The fourth factor was that, although it obviously had many enemies, Israel had some degree of support from the major world powers; it was quickly recognized by both the United States and the Soviet Union, which both had significant Jewish populations ( 1948 Arab–Israeli War ). Even when a country is nominally independent, there is a very strong incentive to have enough diplomatic support to remain connected to the global financial and trade system. Modern technology, like microchips, aircraft, steam turbines, etc., requires massive economies of scale to be viable, which means production becomes centralized at a handful of facilities, which means modern life requires both having export goods to sell and a connection to global trade networks. Diplomatic support, of course, also provides protection. The libertarian Republic of Minerva was quickly defeated by Tonga, a tiny country without a real military, because no one else in the area had any reason to back them up.
Given all of this, the largest unanswered question (and the biggest place where Israel screwed it up) is how to deal with irredentism. For essentially any piece of land, if a new group starts living on it and governing it, some other group will still claim that it “rightly” belongs to them, often for decades or centuries afterwards. (If uninhabited, there will be similar quasi-environmentalist movements to simply keep it uninhabited.) Israel handled this problem mostly by using raw military and economic strength to enforce its demands, which was a remarkable feat of skill and did… sort-of work, but also created the mess we see today. I wish I knew what the best way to handle this was.