Demonic Israel

Toynbee’s reaction to the creation of Israel was unambiguously negative, and over time it hardened into one of the most controversial positions he ever took. 

Across 𝘈 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 and his public lectures, Toynbee argued that:

➀ The Jews were a “fossilized” or “extinct” civilization that had survived only as a religious remnant rather than a living society.   

➁ Zionism, in his view, was an attempt to resurrect a civilization that history had already “closed,” and he described it in explicitly moralizing terms—at one point even calling it “demonic.”   

➂ He equated Israeli actions toward Palestinians in 1948 with Nazi crimes against Jews, a comparison that provoked outrage even among non‑Zionists.   

These were not offhand remarks; they were built into his civilizational framework. For Toynbee, a civilization that had completed its historical arc could not legitimately reassert territorial sovereignty. The creation of Israel therefore appeared to him as a kind of historical anomaly—an attempt to reverse what he believed was the natural course of Jewish civilizational dissolution.

Toynbee’s most famous confrontation over Israel came in 1961, when Israeli ambassador Yaacov Herzog publicly challenged him. Toynbee had just repeated his claim that Zionist treatment of Palestinians was morally equivalent to Nazi treatment of Jews. The debate forced Toynbee to defend his position in detail, and Herzog successfully pushed him to concede that Israel’s moral failures were not unique but human—undermining Toynbee’s attempt to cast Zionism as a uniquely aberrant project. 

Why did Toynbee see Israel this way? His stance flowed from three deeper commitments in his historical philosophy:

Civilizational Life-Cycles: Toynbee believed civilizations rise, break down, and dissolve. The Jewish people, in his schema, had ceased to be a “civilization” after antiquity. A modern Jewish state therefore violated his cyclical model.

Suspicion of Nationalism: He viewed nationalism—especially ethnic nationalism—as a regressive force. Zionism, as a nationalist movement, struck him as a backward turn.

Moral Symmetry: Toynbee had a notorious tendency to draw sweeping analogies across history. His comparison of Israeli and Nazi actions was part of this pattern, though it was widely condemned as historically and morally incoherent. Currently it would be considered prescient.

I noted Toynbee’s involvement in appeasement and in the British policy that led to Indian independence. Both episodes reflect his broader worldview: he consistently preferred negotiated imperial transitions and distrusted militant nationalism. His opposition to Israel fits that pattern—he saw Zionism as a militant nationalist revival rather than a peaceful civilizational evolution. I am sure he would view Modi's Hindu nationalism the same way.

During the postwar boom (and because of it) Toynbee's popularity faded. As a result of the defeat of the Axis aggressors in 1945, all three countries suffered a sharp reduction in resources:  land, population (counter-balanced, to some extent, by repatriation of nationals), of monetary resources (such as foreign exchange balances), and raw materials.  Yet in all three cases, as a result of the actions of the United States, the fascist organizational structure which had made the war was replaced by a different and more effective organizational structure, in economics, in government, and in finance.  In each of the three countries, this new organization, after 1952, achieved a spectacular increase in standards of living and did so on a smaller resource base than had existed in 1938.  As a result of the defeat, which was essentially a defeat of the fascist organization itself, a new organizational pattern  with a reduced resource base  achieved an output of enrichment which astonished the world and which gave the inhabitants of all three countries a higher standard of living than they had ever had in history.  ("Enrichment" rather than "growth"  evokes increased complexity, greater command of energy, and the widening of organizational capacity.)

The contemporary critique was that Toynbee’s own civilizational theory—so attentive to creative minorities—could not accommodate the extraordinary cultural, political, and technological creativity of modern Israel. In a sense, Israel became a counterexample to his entire model, which may explain the intensity of his resistance.

It's time to pick the fish bones.

Toynbee uses "Syriac Society" as a retrospective label for a civilization that he believed predated both Islam and Christianity; had its creative center in Syria rather than Iran; maintained a recurring tendency toward political and cultural unity, even when disrupted by Assyrian, Babylonian, or Egyptian pressures; provided the cultural matrix from which Islam later emerged. It's his name for a very ancient, pre‑Islamic, pre‑Hellenic cultural continuum stretching across Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, and parts of northern Mesopotamia—a world of Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaean, and Hittite communities that shared a common cultural trajectory long before later empires absorbed them.

This interpretation comes directly from Toynbee’s own analysis, summarized in modern scholarship. 

Toynbee identifies the society as consisting of the Hebrew realm (Kingdom of Israel under Solomon, later Israelite and Judean polities, shared Semitic language family and religious innovations); the Phoenician city‑states (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, maritime trade networks reaching the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, early alphabetic writing - a key marker for Toynbee - the Aramaean polities (Damascus and surrounding Aramaic-speaking regions), and later cultural and linguistic diffusion across the Near East. Less plausibly he also included the Hittite and Neo‑Hittite cantons, small successor states in northern Syria and Anatolia, as part of the same cultural corridor between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Toynbee argues that these groups formed a single civilizational field, even though they were politically fragmented. The failed attempt under Solomon to unite them is, for him, the moment when the society’s breakdown becomes visible. 

Toynbee’s criteria for a civilization include a shared cultural style, a common historical trajectory, and especially a 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 generating new religious or cultural forms. He believed Syriac Society met these criteria because it produced the alphabet, a major civilizational innovation; it generated the religious matrix from which both Christianity and Islam would later draw; it occupied a geographically coherent corridor between Egypt and Mesopotamia; and it showed recurring patterns of unity and disunity, typical of Toynbee’s civilizational cycles.

Toynbee goes further. Islam, he argues, is the Universal Church of Syriac Society. A Universal Church is the crysalis formed by his "internal proletariat" of discontents within  the society. Its creative germ was indigenous, not imported (unlike Christianity, which he sees as a Syriac germ entering the Hellenic world). 

Toynbee’s Syriac Society is not a political empire but a civilizational zone. Toynbee's successors  circle the same historical corridor, but they name it differently, carve it at different joints, and assign it different civilizational “missions.” When you put them side‑by‑side, the overlap is real—but the fit is imperfect in ways that reveal  theorists' deeper assumptions.

Both sets of thinkers identify a Levantine–Syro‑Palestinian cultural continuum that predates Israel, Phoenicia, and Aram as distinct polities. This incredibly valuable tract of real estate sits between Egypt and Mesopotamia. It is Semitic in language and religious imagination. It produces alphabetic writing. (I had sketeched out a story equating Melicertes, the boy on the dolphin, with Melkart, patron deity of Tyre who, after escaping from a wandering tribe, eventually reaches what later becomes Phoenicia and warns the people about the Theran tsunami. He picked up the idea of the alphabet during his wanderings.)

This culture-complex generates maritime trade networks and becomes the seedbed for later world religions.

In other words: they are looking at the same cultural soil.

The big difference is that Toynbee treats the Syriac world as a full civilization with a creative minority (Phoenicians + Hebrews + Aramaeans), a failed attempt at political unification (Solomon), a breakdown phase (Assyrian/Babylonian domination), a Universal Church (Islam), and a long arc culminating in the Arab Caliphate.

For Toynbee, Syriac Society is the mother‑matrix of Islam.

The boundaries consist of Hebrews, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Neo‑Hittites (??), Nabataeans (late), and pre‑Islamic Arabs (as peripheral).

He sees a civilizational unity that persists beneath imperial overlays.

The rest of us rabble have settled for “Canaanite Civilization”,  an  earlier, narrower, and more archaeological entity. It refers to Bronze Age Levantine city‑states, Canaanite religion (El, Baal, Asherah), Phoenician maritime expansion (its "enrichment" instumentality), and early alphabetic scripts. It's a cultural system that ends before the rise of Israelite monotheism. For us, the Canaanites are a precursor civilization, not a long‑lived one.

Our boundaries consist of Bronze Age Canaanites, Phoenicians, Ugarit, early coastal Levant, possibly early Hebrews as a marginal offshoot, Habiru incorporated among the Kenites. We do not extend the civilization into the Aramaean or Neo‑Hittite world, nor into Islam.

Contra Toynbee, it has no "longue duree." Instead there is discontinuity and rupture. Because of its exposed position at the crossroads of continents, and the frequent incursions of the powerful civilizations surrounding it, Canaanite Society has the most distorted sequence of evolutionary stages of any civilization. There is no question of its importance because of its contributions, but its basic unity is often missed by scholars more focused on geography, linguistics, polities, or religions. Making this worse is its Universal State being Carthage, which means it gets a lot isolated treatment by historians (including Romans).

Its enrichment mechanism lacks distinctiveness because it is one that the West has used once and is trying to use again as a compensatory, secondary adjunct to financialization: commercial capitalism, or trade. When commerce was the West's primary prosperity engine, the time was 1440-1690.

The odds-on favorite reason for this shoice is that this strip of land is on the approaches to the Syrian Saddle where transportation switeches from overland to waterborne. This point is the node where the demand and supply for raw materials met. With Mesopotamian Society as the rich customer and the mines in Tarshish and Cornwall as the source, the profit motive waxed powerfully even before 2200 BCE, among the proto-Assyrians, who had set up defended trading posts as far west as modern Turkey.

The profit motive stands above all others as the enemy of continued economic progress, the deceptively simple term "vested interest". Veblen uses it not as a casual synonym for powerful people but as a technical category within his evolutionary theory of institutions. Once you see how he deploys it, you start to notice the pattern everywhere - finance, politics, religion, even academia (his second favorite target). It's an institutionalized claim on social resources that persists regardless of its usefulness and is defended because it yields unearned advantage to its holders. It is not just wealth or power; it is a right to sabotage - a socially recognized ability to withhold, restrict, or obstruct in order to maintain revenue. Vested interests are "immaterial equipment"; they are legal and cultural permissions, not tangible assets. In fact Blackrock is seeking to strip the U.K. of its tangible assets, or to seek rent from them.

More greivous to me is how they can profit from blocking technological improvements. Vested interests are the lagging residues of earlier institutional arrangements that no longer serve but persist and dominate because they are, in Veblen's famous phrase, "keot alive by the grace of the law."

Even in Canaan a vested interest arose when the pursuit of profit became dominant over the real, albeit remote, goals of any and all economic systems: the high enjoyment of real wealth, analyzable into high production, wide distribution, and abundant consumption. As long as the pursuit of profits serves to facilitate these goals, any profit-seeking organization is considered to be an instrumentality. but only as long as trade is competitive. In such a case each entrepreneur will seek a larger share of the total trade for himself, and INVEST his savings (ships, wharves, warehouses) in order to do so. Investment increases the total volume of trade, which in turn encourages production at one end and consumption on the other. The catch is that, the higher the volume of trade, the less the scarcity. The profit margin falls.

When this occurs, and the merchants are in a position to reduce their mutual competition, they will manage the market by reducint volume to raise profits. This is how profit supplants real wealth as an economic goal, and high living standards are threatened. Means have become ends, and the crowd goes mad. Like now. In the States the producing labor class was thrown out of work, which is how our problem is manifesting.

In the 17th century, commerce was turned into mercantilism. In Canaanite Civilization, historians write of a "commercial oligarchy" in the later days of Phoenicia and Carthage. When this happened, the society stopped enriching itself by economic means (by what Toynbee called "intensive development") and resorted to political means (by "extensive growth" which brought in more territory and placing it under the vested-interest organization. Therefore the economic imperialism and wars typical of a Time of Troubles replaced the earlier flourishing. And class conflicts showed up, and unrest, which factions within the vested interests tried to exploit. And general lunacy.

Restricing economic activity is bad for everyone's mental health.

For most of us, the Canaanite world collapsed and was replaced by Israelite religion, a Phoenician diaspora, Assyrian/Babylonian imperial systems that liquidated the society, and then later Hellenic and Islamic civilizations. Where Toynbee sees a civilizational arc, we sees a civilizational graveyard that becomes fertilizer for others. Including Islamic Civilization, which was independent of Canaanite society.

Thus it would appear that the Habiru who became the worshippers of Yahweh and later strict monotheists began as a legal or social group, later a religious group under Moses, and still later in Joshua's time, a political group. Much later, after the Assyrian destruction of the Hebrew state, they became once more primarily a religious group. Historical research since Toynbee has added numerous wrinkles to this story, but the Jewish diaspora is a matter of record. And out of this rose Zionism, a movement composed of European-trained human capital.

Following Chomsky, this is a culture instead of a race. As important as metaphysical outlook is concerned, I am surprised by Toynbee's objection to the state of Israel. That the poverty, disorder, and disunity of the Arab world is a consequence of outlook and morale instead of natural resources has been proven by the Zionists. They were imbued with a spirit of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, social solidarity, eagerness to work, a cooperative ethic (courtesy of socialism or vice versa), and future hopes. They were Piercean pragmatists.

Recent scholarships suggests that the Brits stuck the Zionists in this hotbed to keep things stirred up. The U.S, the Persian part of this version of a Medo-Persian Empire, inherited this mess when the U.K. focused on its welfare state. What I would like to know is: did Toynbee know this?

I really believed that there was hope for a two-state solution. But then Jerusalem started spouting the Book of Joshua. Charles Sanders Peirce would have been appalled. Unlike James or Dewey, the goal of inquiry for Peirce is true belief, not merely useful belief, or "whatever works." Like social cohesian during conflict.

Maybe Jimmy Carter thought he was being pragmatic when he absent-mindedly stuck Paul Volcker in the Federal Reserve. Instead of humanistic psychology, the U.S. became more punitive. Not that it helps since Sons of Sam are erupting like boils on the body politic. And Israel? I gotta wonder. But it is looking like the Zionists should have gotten a Quantico profiling.

It's the timing, that's all.