Solomon2
Elite Member
@PAKISTANFOREVER
Aug 26, 2026
Congratulations. The United Nations (UN) has selected you to determine whether a particular territory constitutes a legitimate nation.
This is an important responsibility. Nations are delicate political organisms whose legitimacy must be assessed according to sophisticated criteria developed over many decades by people with lanyards or their medieval equivalent.
Please do not let crude considerations such as self-determination, historical continuity, international recognition, effective government, defensible borders or a population that lives there distract you.
These are just factors, not determinants.
The real question is whether the country has the correct kind of history.
This handbook will help you distinguish between legitimate nations, artificial colonial constructions and Israel.
There are nearly 200 countries, most created through some combination of conquest, migration, partition, imperial collapse, civil war, dynastic marriage, ethnic cleansing, arbitrary cartography and British officials drawing lines while eating beef wellington.
Fortunately, the UN has developed a rigorous method for sorting through this complexity.
First, identify the country. Then ask whether it is Israel. If no, congratulations. You have almost certainly found a legitimate nation. If yes, please allow 3,000 years for processing.
The United Nations Department of National Authenticity, Historical Purity and Jewish Exceptions has prepared this 12-point guide for diplomats, journalists, academics, human-rights activists and TikTok undergraduates.
Step One: When was the country founded?
Recent countries may be artificial colonial constructions and therefore illegitimate.
Israel was founded in 1948, which is suspiciously recent.
Jordan became independent in 1946. Different. Pakistan was created in 1947. Also different. Syria became independent in 1946. Lebanon in 1943, and the UAE in 1971. All perfectly normal.
Do not obsessed over the dates. The important principle is that 1948 is alarmingly recent when Jews are involved.
Germany, in its modern unified form, dates to 1871. Italy to 1861. Singapore became independent in 1965. None is required to demonstrate that Cicero, Charlemagne or Confucius personally approved its borders.
Israel, however, must provide documentation extending several thousand years into antiquity. Fortunately, it can. It is a dawdle for a nation with Israel’s pedegree.
This creates additional problems.
Step Two: Are the people indigenous?
Modern progressive politics places great importance on indigeneity, except when doing so produces the wrong indigenous people.
Ask whether a people has ancient connections to the land. Archaeological remains? Ancient texts? A language originating there? Religious traditions centred upon it? Festivals tied to its agricultural seasons? Continuous physical presence? An ancient capital? Have they spent two millennia facing that capital while praying?
If yes, you may have discovered an indigenous people.
Unless they are Jews. Then you have discovered European colonialists. This classification remains valid if the Jews came from Baghdad, Aleppo, Sana’a, Fez or Tehran. We must refrain from unnecessary geography.
Step Three: Did foreigners ever rule the territory?
Foreign rule can prove that a present state is illegitimate, provided we do not apply the principle consistently enough to discover that most of the world is illegitimate.
India was ruled by Britain, Vietnam and Algeria by France, and Indonesia by the Netherlands. Much of the Middle East spent centuries under Ottoman rule.
These peoples nevertheless retained historical identities and legitimate claims to self-determination.
Palestine was ruled successively by Jews, Romans, Byzantines, various Islamic dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and the British.
Jews, despite holding ancient sovereignty there and maintaining a continuous presence afterward, spent long periods without sovereignty. This proves they were foreigners.
Please do not apply this reasoning to Tibetans, Kurds, Armenians, Poles or anybody else who spent centuries without a state.
That would be grotesque.
Step Four: Were the borders artificially created?
Artificial borders are another warning sign.
Israel’s borders emerged from imperial collapse, war, diplomacy and international agreements. Highly suspicious.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and much of Africa also have borders that emerged from imperial collapse, war, diplomacy and international agreements. Completely normal.
Indeed, almost every border is artificial in the sense that mountains and rivers rarely convene constitutional assemblies.
Belgium exists because European powers found Belgium useful. Pakistan was carved from British India. Czechoslovakia was created and then uncreated. Yugoslavia appeared, disappeared and left several countries behind. The Soviet Union collapsed and produced fifteen sovereign states before everyone had finished changing the stationery.
None is required to prove its borders were ordained during the Bronze Age. Israel’s borders, however, must possess an unusual metaphysical property called legitimacy.
Nobody knows exactly what this means. That is why it is so useful.
Step Five: How did the country come into existence?
Violence during national formation is deeply troubling. Did the country’s creation involve war? Displacement? Refugees? Territorial disputes?
Excellent. You have described human history.
Turkey emerged from the Ottoman Empire amid enormous violence and population transfers. India and Pakistan were born through partition, massacre and the displacement of millions. European borders moved repeatedly through war. The US expanded across lands that indigenous peoples inhabited. Australia was established on a continent Aboriginal peoples had inhabited for at least 40,000 years.
Yet the international community does not hold annual conferences on whether Australia should be dismantled.
Israel’s War of Independence produced roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees. This remains a central argument against Israel’s moral legitimacy nearly eight decades later.
Roughly 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries. Please file them under:
Refugees Who Mysteriously Do Not Affect the Argument.
Step Six: Does another people claim the same territory?
Competing national claims can undermine a state’s legitimacy. Except normally they do not.
India and Pakistan dispute Kashmir without anyone concluding that India must therefore cease to exist. Serbia and Kosovo maintain competing historical narratives. Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought over territory. Morocco and the Polisario Front dispute Western Sahara.
Territorial conflict is one of humanity’s oldest hobbies.
Only in Israel’s case does another people’s national claim become evidence that the existing nation is itself fraudulent.
This is an exciting intellectual innovation. Argentina claims the Falkland Islands, therefore Britain must be abolished. Spain claims Gibraltar, therefore Britain must be abolished again.
Do not actually apply this principle outside Israel.
People may notice.
Step Seven: Examine the minorities
A legitimate country should protect its minorities, a requirement that is especially important for Israel.
Arab citizens of Israel vote, form political parties, sit in parliament, serve as judges, work as doctors, attend universities and possess citizenship.
There are inequalities and social tensions, naturally, but those are not the interesting part.
The interesting part is classification. An Arab living among Jews can be evidence that the Jewish state is practising apartheid. A Jew living among Arabs in a future Palestinian state can be evidence that the territory has not yet been sufficiently liberated.
Advanced students may detect a small philosophical difficulty here.
They are advised to stop. The Middle East peace process has failed for decades by ensuring that certain questions are never asked consecutively. This record must be preserved.
Step Eight: Examine the country’s enemies
This is the advanced module. A country’s legitimacy depends partly upon how sympathetically its enemies can be described. If those enemies are obviously unpleasant, people may accidentally sympathize with the country they are trying to destroy.
Careful terminology is therefore essential. When Hamas attacks Israelis, explain the context. When Israel attacks Hamas, report the death toll. When Hezbollah accumulates missiles, describe regional tensions. When Israel destroys the missiles, describe escalation. When Iran threatens Israel, translate generously and liberally. When Israel threatens Iran, translate literally.
This is nuance, something the UN believes in very strongly, particularly when it travels in one direction.
Step Nine: Did the population arrive from somewhere else?
Migration may invalidate indigenous claims. Again, use this test carefully or everybody will have to leave.
Arabs migrated across enormous territories after the Islamic conquests. Turkic peoples migrated into Anatolia. Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin. Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain. Europeans crossed the Atlantic by the millions.
Human history has involved an inconvenient amount of humans moving.
Jews returning to their ancestral homeland, however, constitutes a foreign implantation.
This produces a useful administrative formula: A Jew whose family lived in Poland is Jewish when Poland persecutes him, Polish when discussing Jewish colonialism, European when he reaches Palestine and indigenous nowhere once he reaches Israel.
Please memorize this. There will be on the test.
Step Ten: Was the country approved by the United Nations (UN)?
The feckless UN provides an important stamp of international legitimacy. In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
The Jewish leadership accepted. The Arab leadership rejected the proposal, and armies from neighbouring Arab states invaded after Israel declared independence.
You might imagine that UN approval therefore strengthens Israel’s claim to legitimacy but that shows only that you misunderstand the UN.
UN resolutions are authoritative when Israel is accused of violating them. Resolutions supporting Israel are historical curiosities.
This doctrine is known as retroactive selective multilateralism.
Several once-excellent universities offer postgraduate courses in it.
Step Eleven: Does the country have the correct origin story?
Every nation has myths. Americans have 1776. The French have the Revolution. Modern Greeks invoke ancient Greece despite several empires inconveniently occupying the middle. Italians invoke Rome, although Julius Caesar would have been puzzled to discover he was Italian.
Nations construct identity through memory, language, history, religion, territory, myth and selective forgetting. This is called nationhood. When Jews do it, it is called Zionist mythology.
This is the point at which the serious scholar should begin asking questions. Was King David real? Are modern Jews really descended from ancient Israelites? Exactly how continuous was Jewish settlement? What percentage of ancestry counts? Can DNA confer political rights? Was Zionism really national liberation?
Do not ask equivalent questions about Palestinians. That would be racist.
Israeli legitimacy is essentially an Ancestry.com subscription administered by a hostile doctoral committee.
Step Twelve: Apply the final legitimacy test
You are now qualified to determine whether a country deserves to exist.
Ask: Was it created relatively recently? Did migration contribute to its population? Did war accompany its birth? Were people displaced? Are its borders disputed? Did foreign powers influence its creation? Does another people claim its territory? Does it contain minorities? Has it fought its neighbours? Has its territory changed? Does its national mythology simplify history?
If you answered yes to several of these questions, congratulations — you have found a country.
There is only one remaining question.
Is it Israel?
If no, stamp the application:
LEGITIMATE NATION — NORMAL HISTORICAL COMPLEXITIES.
If yes:
APPLICATION PENDING — PLEASE PROVIDE ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION FOR THE PERIOD 1000 BCE–PRESENT.
And there lies the peculiarity. Israel is subjected to tests of national legitimacy that would dissolve much of the international system if anyone had the poor judgment to apply them consistently.
It need not be ancient enough, ethnically pure enough, peacefully conceived enough, historically uncomplicated enough or approved retrospectively by every population that ever fought it.
No country could pass such a test.
Nations are not laboratory specimens manufactured under sterile conditions. They emerge from the usual debris of human history: peoples, wars, migrations, memories, religions, languages, catastrophes, victories, compromises and accidents.
Israel’s great distinction is not that its history contains these things. It is that they are treated as uniquely disqualifying when Jews are involved.
Perhaps the United Nations Department of National Authenticity, Historical Purity and Jewish Exceptions could therefore save itself several thousand pages of paperwork.
Its entire handbook requires only two articles.
Article 1: All peoples have the right to self-determination.
Article 2: Yes, Jews are people.
Please update the relevant forms.
The UN guide to recognizing a legitimate nation
The rules of national legitimacy are perfectly straightforward, provided you remember that they need not be consistent, historical or applicable to anyone except Israel.
Nachum Kaplan נַחוּםAug 26, 2026
Congratulations. The United Nations (UN) has selected you to determine whether a particular territory constitutes a legitimate nation.
This is an important responsibility. Nations are delicate political organisms whose legitimacy must be assessed according to sophisticated criteria developed over many decades by people with lanyards or their medieval equivalent.
Please do not let crude considerations such as self-determination, historical continuity, international recognition, effective government, defensible borders or a population that lives there distract you.
These are just factors, not determinants.
The real question is whether the country has the correct kind of history.
This handbook will help you distinguish between legitimate nations, artificial colonial constructions and Israel.
There are nearly 200 countries, most created through some combination of conquest, migration, partition, imperial collapse, civil war, dynastic marriage, ethnic cleansing, arbitrary cartography and British officials drawing lines while eating beef wellington.
Fortunately, the UN has developed a rigorous method for sorting through this complexity.
First, identify the country. Then ask whether it is Israel. If no, congratulations. You have almost certainly found a legitimate nation. If yes, please allow 3,000 years for processing.
The United Nations Department of National Authenticity, Historical Purity and Jewish Exceptions has prepared this 12-point guide for diplomats, journalists, academics, human-rights activists and TikTok undergraduates.
Step One: When was the country founded?
Recent countries may be artificial colonial constructions and therefore illegitimate.
Israel was founded in 1948, which is suspiciously recent.
Jordan became independent in 1946. Different. Pakistan was created in 1947. Also different. Syria became independent in 1946. Lebanon in 1943, and the UAE in 1971. All perfectly normal.
Do not obsessed over the dates. The important principle is that 1948 is alarmingly recent when Jews are involved.
Germany, in its modern unified form, dates to 1871. Italy to 1861. Singapore became independent in 1965. None is required to demonstrate that Cicero, Charlemagne or Confucius personally approved its borders.
Israel, however, must provide documentation extending several thousand years into antiquity. Fortunately, it can. It is a dawdle for a nation with Israel’s pedegree.
This creates additional problems.
Step Two: Are the people indigenous?
Modern progressive politics places great importance on indigeneity, except when doing so produces the wrong indigenous people.
Ask whether a people has ancient connections to the land. Archaeological remains? Ancient texts? A language originating there? Religious traditions centred upon it? Festivals tied to its agricultural seasons? Continuous physical presence? An ancient capital? Have they spent two millennia facing that capital while praying?
If yes, you may have discovered an indigenous people.
Unless they are Jews. Then you have discovered European colonialists. This classification remains valid if the Jews came from Baghdad, Aleppo, Sana’a, Fez or Tehran. We must refrain from unnecessary geography.
Step Three: Did foreigners ever rule the territory?
Foreign rule can prove that a present state is illegitimate, provided we do not apply the principle consistently enough to discover that most of the world is illegitimate.
India was ruled by Britain, Vietnam and Algeria by France, and Indonesia by the Netherlands. Much of the Middle East spent centuries under Ottoman rule.
These peoples nevertheless retained historical identities and legitimate claims to self-determination.
Palestine was ruled successively by Jews, Romans, Byzantines, various Islamic dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and the British.
Jews, despite holding ancient sovereignty there and maintaining a continuous presence afterward, spent long periods without sovereignty. This proves they were foreigners.
Please do not apply this reasoning to Tibetans, Kurds, Armenians, Poles or anybody else who spent centuries without a state.
That would be grotesque.
Step Four: Were the borders artificially created?
Artificial borders are another warning sign.
Israel’s borders emerged from imperial collapse, war, diplomacy and international agreements. Highly suspicious.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and much of Africa also have borders that emerged from imperial collapse, war, diplomacy and international agreements. Completely normal.
Indeed, almost every border is artificial in the sense that mountains and rivers rarely convene constitutional assemblies.
Belgium exists because European powers found Belgium useful. Pakistan was carved from British India. Czechoslovakia was created and then uncreated. Yugoslavia appeared, disappeared and left several countries behind. The Soviet Union collapsed and produced fifteen sovereign states before everyone had finished changing the stationery.
None is required to prove its borders were ordained during the Bronze Age. Israel’s borders, however, must possess an unusual metaphysical property called legitimacy.
Nobody knows exactly what this means. That is why it is so useful.
Step Five: How did the country come into existence?
Violence during national formation is deeply troubling. Did the country’s creation involve war? Displacement? Refugees? Territorial disputes?
Excellent. You have described human history.
Turkey emerged from the Ottoman Empire amid enormous violence and population transfers. India and Pakistan were born through partition, massacre and the displacement of millions. European borders moved repeatedly through war. The US expanded across lands that indigenous peoples inhabited. Australia was established on a continent Aboriginal peoples had inhabited for at least 40,000 years.
Yet the international community does not hold annual conferences on whether Australia should be dismantled.
Israel’s War of Independence produced roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees. This remains a central argument against Israel’s moral legitimacy nearly eight decades later.
Roughly 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries. Please file them under:
Refugees Who Mysteriously Do Not Affect the Argument.
Step Six: Does another people claim the same territory?
Competing national claims can undermine a state’s legitimacy. Except normally they do not.
India and Pakistan dispute Kashmir without anyone concluding that India must therefore cease to exist. Serbia and Kosovo maintain competing historical narratives. Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought over territory. Morocco and the Polisario Front dispute Western Sahara.
Territorial conflict is one of humanity’s oldest hobbies.
Only in Israel’s case does another people’s national claim become evidence that the existing nation is itself fraudulent.
This is an exciting intellectual innovation. Argentina claims the Falkland Islands, therefore Britain must be abolished. Spain claims Gibraltar, therefore Britain must be abolished again.
Do not actually apply this principle outside Israel.
People may notice.
Step Seven: Examine the minorities
A legitimate country should protect its minorities, a requirement that is especially important for Israel.
Arab citizens of Israel vote, form political parties, sit in parliament, serve as judges, work as doctors, attend universities and possess citizenship.
There are inequalities and social tensions, naturally, but those are not the interesting part.
The interesting part is classification. An Arab living among Jews can be evidence that the Jewish state is practising apartheid. A Jew living among Arabs in a future Palestinian state can be evidence that the territory has not yet been sufficiently liberated.
Advanced students may detect a small philosophical difficulty here.
They are advised to stop. The Middle East peace process has failed for decades by ensuring that certain questions are never asked consecutively. This record must be preserved.
Step Eight: Examine the country’s enemies
This is the advanced module. A country’s legitimacy depends partly upon how sympathetically its enemies can be described. If those enemies are obviously unpleasant, people may accidentally sympathize with the country they are trying to destroy.
Careful terminology is therefore essential. When Hamas attacks Israelis, explain the context. When Israel attacks Hamas, report the death toll. When Hezbollah accumulates missiles, describe regional tensions. When Israel destroys the missiles, describe escalation. When Iran threatens Israel, translate generously and liberally. When Israel threatens Iran, translate literally.
This is nuance, something the UN believes in very strongly, particularly when it travels in one direction.
Step Nine: Did the population arrive from somewhere else?
Migration may invalidate indigenous claims. Again, use this test carefully or everybody will have to leave.
Arabs migrated across enormous territories after the Islamic conquests. Turkic peoples migrated into Anatolia. Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin. Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain. Europeans crossed the Atlantic by the millions.
Human history has involved an inconvenient amount of humans moving.
Jews returning to their ancestral homeland, however, constitutes a foreign implantation.
This produces a useful administrative formula: A Jew whose family lived in Poland is Jewish when Poland persecutes him, Polish when discussing Jewish colonialism, European when he reaches Palestine and indigenous nowhere once he reaches Israel.
Please memorize this. There will be on the test.
Step Ten: Was the country approved by the United Nations (UN)?
The feckless UN provides an important stamp of international legitimacy. In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
The Jewish leadership accepted. The Arab leadership rejected the proposal, and armies from neighbouring Arab states invaded after Israel declared independence.
You might imagine that UN approval therefore strengthens Israel’s claim to legitimacy but that shows only that you misunderstand the UN.
UN resolutions are authoritative when Israel is accused of violating them. Resolutions supporting Israel are historical curiosities.
This doctrine is known as retroactive selective multilateralism.
Several once-excellent universities offer postgraduate courses in it.
Step Eleven: Does the country have the correct origin story?
Every nation has myths. Americans have 1776. The French have the Revolution. Modern Greeks invoke ancient Greece despite several empires inconveniently occupying the middle. Italians invoke Rome, although Julius Caesar would have been puzzled to discover he was Italian.
Nations construct identity through memory, language, history, religion, territory, myth and selective forgetting. This is called nationhood. When Jews do it, it is called Zionist mythology.
This is the point at which the serious scholar should begin asking questions. Was King David real? Are modern Jews really descended from ancient Israelites? Exactly how continuous was Jewish settlement? What percentage of ancestry counts? Can DNA confer political rights? Was Zionism really national liberation?
Do not ask equivalent questions about Palestinians. That would be racist.
Israeli legitimacy is essentially an Ancestry.com subscription administered by a hostile doctoral committee.
Step Twelve: Apply the final legitimacy test
You are now qualified to determine whether a country deserves to exist.
Ask: Was it created relatively recently? Did migration contribute to its population? Did war accompany its birth? Were people displaced? Are its borders disputed? Did foreign powers influence its creation? Does another people claim its territory? Does it contain minorities? Has it fought its neighbours? Has its territory changed? Does its national mythology simplify history?
If you answered yes to several of these questions, congratulations — you have found a country.
There is only one remaining question.
Is it Israel?
If no, stamp the application:
LEGITIMATE NATION — NORMAL HISTORICAL COMPLEXITIES.
If yes:
APPLICATION PENDING — PLEASE PROVIDE ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION FOR THE PERIOD 1000 BCE–PRESENT.
And there lies the peculiarity. Israel is subjected to tests of national legitimacy that would dissolve much of the international system if anyone had the poor judgment to apply them consistently.
It need not be ancient enough, ethnically pure enough, peacefully conceived enough, historically uncomplicated enough or approved retrospectively by every population that ever fought it.
No country could pass such a test.
Nations are not laboratory specimens manufactured under sterile conditions. They emerge from the usual debris of human history: peoples, wars, migrations, memories, religions, languages, catastrophes, victories, compromises and accidents.
Israel’s great distinction is not that its history contains these things. It is that they are treated as uniquely disqualifying when Jews are involved.
Perhaps the United Nations Department of National Authenticity, Historical Purity and Jewish Exceptions could therefore save itself several thousand pages of paperwork.
Its entire handbook requires only two articles.
Article 1: All peoples have the right to self-determination.
Article 2: Yes, Jews are people.
Please update the relevant forms.
