The stakes constitute a fundamental building block of a new 21st-century world order: the nature of the state. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the sharp end of the rise of a critical mass of world leaders who think in civilizational rather than national terms. They imagine the ideational and/or physical boundaries of their countries as defined by history, ethnicity, culture, and/or religion rather than international law. In 2018, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, adopted a controversial basic law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Israeli religious Zionist writer Ehud Neor argued that “Israel is not a nation-state in Western terms.

Source: The North Africa Journal May 14, 2023 17:02 UTC