Such myopia can have serious repercussions. For example, one of the major obstacles for any peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians is that Israelis are unwilling to divide the city of Jerusalem. They argue that this city is ‘the eternal capital of the Jewish people’ – and surely you cannot compromise on something eternal.3 What are a few dead people compared to eternity? This is of course utter nonsense. Eternity is at the very least 13.8 billion years – the current age of the universe. Planet Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and humans have existed for at least 2 million years. In contrast, the city of Jerusalem was established just 5,000 years ago and the Jewish people are at most 3,000 years old. This hardly qualifies as eternity.
As for the future, physics tells us that planet Earth will be absorbed by an expanding sun about 7.5 billion years from now,4 and that our universe will continue to exist for at least 13 billion years more. Does anyone seriously believe that the Jewish people, the state of Israel, or the city of Jerusalem will still exist 13,000 years from now, let alone 13 billion years? Looking to the future, Zionism has a horizon of no more than a few centuries, yet it is enough to exhaust the imagination of most Israelis and somehow qualify as ‘eternity’. And people are willing to make sacrifices for the sake of ‘the eternal city’, which they would probably refuse to make for an ephemeral collection of houses.
As a teenager in Israel, I too was initially captivated by the nationalist promise to become part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to believe that if I gave my life to the nation, I would live for ever in the nation. But I couldn’t fathom what it meant ‘to live for ever in the nation’. The phrase sounded very profound, but what did it actually mean? I remember one particular Memorial Day ceremony when I was about thirteen or fourteen. Whereas in the USA Memorial Day is marked mainly by shopping sales, in Israel Memorial Day is an extremely solemn and important event. On this day the schools hold ceremonies to remember the soldiers who have fallen in Israel’s many wars. The kids dress in white, recite poems, sing songs, place wreaths and wave flags. So there I was, dressed in white, during our school’s ceremony, and in between flag waving and poem recitations, I naturally thought to myself that when I grow up I too would like to be a fallen soldier. After all, if I were a heroic fallen soldier who sacrificed his life for Israel, then I would have all these kids reciting poems and waving flags in my honour.
But then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. If I am dead, how would I know these kids were really reciting poems in my honour?’ So I tried to imagine myself dead. And I imagined myself lying under some white tombstone in a neat military cemetery, listening to the poems coming from above the ground. But then I thought, ‘If I am dead, then I cannot hear any poems, because I don’t have ears, and I don’t have a brain, and I cannot hear or feel anything. So what’s the point?’
Even worse, by the time I was thirteen I knew that the universe is a couple of billion years old, and will probably go on existing for billions of years more. Could I realistically expect Israel to exist for such a long time? Will Homo sapiens kids dressed in white still recite poems in my honour after 200 million years? There was something fishy about the whole business.
If you happen to be Palestinian, don’t feel smug. It is just as unlikely that there will be any Palestinians around 200 million years from now. Indeed, in all probability by then there won’t be any mammals whatsoever. Other national movements are just as narrow-minded. Serbian nationalism cares little about events in the Jurassic era, whereas Korean nationalists believe that a small peninsula on the east coast of Asia is the only part of the cosmos that really matters in the grand scheme of things.
Of course even Simba – for all his devotion to the everlasting Circle of Life – never contemplates the fact that lions, antelopes and grass aren’t really eternal. Simba does not consider what the universe was like before the evolution of mammals, nor what would be the fate of his beloved African savannah once humans kill all the lions and cover the grasslands with asphalt and concrete. Would this render Simba’s life utterly meaningless?
All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them.
Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that ‘something bigger’. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: ‘Don’t bother about it. From there onwards it’s turtles all the way down.’