Israel and Palestine examined from an egoist position.
Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe!
Man, your head is haunted! You have wheels in your head! You imagine you have a cause, and this cause possesses you so completely that you will kill for it, die for it, sacrifice your children to it—and you call this devotion virtue. I call it what it is: possession by ghosts.
I have watched the spectacle unfold in that strip of contested sand, and I have seen something far more instructive than the carnage itself. I have seen anarchists—anarchists!—take sides. I have seen those who claim to oppose all states rush to defend one state against another. I have seen those who mock the nation as a fiction suddenly discover that this nation, this people, this cause is real, is sacred, is worth their devotion.
What a magnificent display of haunting! What a perfect demonstration of how the spook operates! The anarchist who would laugh at the German Fatherland weeps for Palestine. The anarchist who would spit on the American flag waves the Israeli one. And neither notices that they have simply exchanged one ghost for another, one master for another, one chain for another—and that the chain feels lighter only because they put it on themselves.
Let me be clear from the outset: I have no cause. I have placed my affair on nothing—on myself. And from this nothing, this creative nothing, I look out at your warring spooks and I see them for what they are: abstractions that devour the living.
What is a spook? What is this Gespenst, this ghost that haunts the human mind?
A spook is an idea that has become your master. It is an abstraction that you created, or that was created before you and handed down to you, which you now serve instead of using. The spook stands above you. The spook demands sacrifice. The spook says: I am more important than you. Your life, your pleasure, your interests—these are nothing. I am everything. Bow before me.
And you bow! That is the remarkable thing. The spook has no army, no police, no power except what you give it. The spook is made of nothing but belief. And yet you tremble before it. You kill for it. You die for it. You sacrifice your children to it and call this sacrifice noble.
Now look at your two warring parties. What do you see?
On one side: Israel. What is Israel? It is a word. It is an idea. It is a story about a people chosen by God, a land promised by covenant, a state established by will and blood. Strip away the story and what remains? Human beings, living and dying, eating and sleeping, loving and hating—human beings who would be perfectly capable of living without this story, but who have been possessed by it so thoroughly that they will murder to maintain it.
On the other side: Palestine. What is Palestine? It is a word. It is an idea. It is a story about a people displaced, a land stolen, a nation struggling to be born. Strip away the story and what remains? Human beings, living and dying, eating and sleeping, loving and hating—human beings who would be perfectly capable of living without this story, but who have been possessed by it so thoroughly that they will murder to maintain it.
Two ghosts fighting over the same haunted ground. Two abstractions consuming the living bodies that serve them. Two causes demanding blood sacrifice.
And you want me to choose between them?
“But the land is sacred!” they cry. “The land belongs to us by right!”
Sacred! There is that word again—the word that marks the spook, the word that signals possession. Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter. Everything sacred demands that you bow before it, that you subordinate yourself to it, that you sacrifice yourself for it.
The Jew says: “This land was promised to us by God. It is sacred to us by divine covenant.” The Palestinian says: “This land was taken from us by force. It is sacred to us by ancestral right.” And both fall on their knees before the sacred—before the land itself, which has become a god demanding worship.
But what is land? It is dirt. It is rock. It is matter arranged in certain patterns by geological forces that care nothing for your stories. The land was there before your ancestors arrived, and it will be there after your descendants are dust. The land does not know you. The land does not care for you. The land is not yours—you are the land’s, insofar as you have made the land your master.
“But we have built on this land! We have lived here for generations!” Yes—and the dinosaurs lived here for epochs. The land did not belong to them either. Belonging is a human fiction, a useful one perhaps, but a fiction nonetheless. The land cannot be owned any more than the air can be owned or the sea can be owned. What is owned is only the idea of ownership—and this idea has become your spook.
Whoever has might, has right. This is the only law that is not a spook. The Israeli has might over a certain territory, therefore the Israeli has that territory—until someone with greater might takes it. The Palestinian had might over certain territories, lost that might, and now seeks to regain it. This is simple, brutal, and real. Everything else—divine promises, ancestral rights, international law, historical claims—is Gespenst, ghost-talk, the babbling of the haunted.
I do not say this to justify the Israeli or the Palestinian. I say this to dissolve both their justifications. Neither has *right *except what they can take and defend. Both appeal to ghosts to sanctify their taking. And both would be better served by dropping the ghosts and acknowledging: I want this. I will take it if I can. I do not need God’s permission or History’s approval or Justice’s blessing. I act for myself.
But they cannot say this. They are too thoroughly possessed. The spook has eaten their capacity for honest egoism and replaced it with noble lies.
“But we are a People!” they cry. “We have a right to self-determination!”
A People! Another spook, perhaps the most dangerous of all. What is a People? Where does it begin and end? Who belongs to it and who does not?
The Jewish People—what is this? Is it a religious category? Then the atheist Israeli is not a member. Is it an ethnic category? Then which ethnicity—Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrachi, Ethiopian? Is it a cultural category? Then the American Jew who has never seen Israel belongs, and the Israeli Arab who has lived there for generations does not?
The Palestinian People—what is this? Is it a national category? But Palestine was never a nation in the modern sense until the need for one was created by dispossession. Is it an ethnic category? The Palestinians are Arabs, but so are the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Lebanese—where does Palestinian end and Arab begin? Is it a geographic category? Then the Palestinian in a refugee camp in Jordan is not Palestinian, while the Jewish settler in the West Bank is?
You see how the categories dissolve when you press them. You see how the “People” is not a natural fact but a construction, a story, a spook. The People exists because people believe in it, and for no other reason. Remove the belief and the People vanishes—and what remains? Individuals. Unique ones. Human beings who eat and sleep and love and hate, who have interests and desires that may or may not align with their neighbors, who could form a thousand different configurations of alliance and enmity if they were not hypnotized by the ghost of the People.
“But without the People, we would be vulnerable! We would be atomized individuals, easy prey for any collective that remained unified!”
Yes! Now you see it! The People is a tool, a means of collective defense. It is useful. But you have forgotten that it is a tool. You have made it a god. You serve the People instead of using the People. You sacrifice individuals to the People instead of sacrificing the People—when necessary—to the individuals.
When the State of Israel sacrifices young men and women to protect “the Jewish People,” it is sacrificing real, living, unique human beings to an abstraction. When Hamas sacrifices young men and women to protect “the Palestinian People,” it is doing exactly the same thing. The names of the ghosts are different. The mechanism of possession is identical.
Now we come to the heart of the matter. Why do anarchists—of all people!—take sides in this conflict?
The anarchist, if words mean anything, opposes the State. The anarchist, if words mean anything, opposes the Nation. The anarchist, if words mean anything, opposes the sacred, the fixed idea, the abstraction that demands sacrifice. The anarchist says: “No gods, no masters.” The anarchist says: “All states are oppressive.” The anarchist says: “The nation is a fiction used to control.”
And yet!
Here is the anarchist, waving the Palestinian flag. Here is the anarchist, declaring that this nationalism is legitimate because it is the nationalism of the oppressed. Here is the anarchist, suddenly discovering that national self-determination—the very principle that created all the nation-states the anarchist claims to oppose—is valid when it is our side determining itself.
Or here is the other anarchist—rarer, but extant—defending Israel’s right to exist, defending the Jewish state because of historical persecution, defending borders and armies and all the apparatus of statehood because this state is different, thisstate is necessary, this state protects a vulnerable people.
Both have been possessed. Both have exchanged anarchism for nationalism with extra steps. Both have found a cause that feels so righteous, so urgent, so morally pure that they have forgotten their own principles—or rather, they have discovered that their “principles” were themselves spooks, ideas they held until a more compelling idea came along.
The honest anarchist would say: “I oppose both states. I oppose both nationalisms. I grieve for the dead on both sides, not because they died for a sacred cause, but because they died—period. Their deaths are tragic not because their cause was just but because their lives were snuffed out in service of ghosts.”
But this is a hard saying. This does not give the satisfaction of righteous anger. This does not allow the pleasure of moral certainty. This leaves the anarchist with nothing to wave, nothing to chant, nothing to do but sit with the discomfort of having no side, no team, no cause.
And that is precisely the point.
“But surely,” the leftist anarchist protests, “there is a difference between the oppressor and the oppressed! Surely we must side with the oppressed against the oppressor! Palestine is colonized, occupied, brutalised—how can you equate the violence of the occupier with the violence of the occupied?”
I do not equate them. I dissolve them both.
Yes, there is a power differential. Yes, one side has American fighter jets and the other has homemade rockets. Yes, one side occupies and the other is occupied. I do not deny any of this. What I deny is that this differential creates a sacredcause, a moral obligation, a duty to serve.
The oppressed is not holy. The oppressed is oppressed—which is to say, the oppressed is a human being in a bad situation, and this situation is bad not because it violates some cosmic principle but because it causes suffering to real individuals. If the oppressed Palestinians established their state tomorrow and began oppressing someone else—as every successful national liberation movement in history has done—would they cease to be sacred? Or would you find some reason to explain why their oppression is different, necessary, temporary?
The leftist has simply exchanged one spook for another. Instead of serving the Nation, the leftist serves the Oppressed. Instead of bowing before the State, the leftist bows before the Struggle. The mechanism is identical. The possession is identical. Only the name of the ghost has changed.
I oppose oppression—not because the Oppressed is sacred, but because oppression limits my ownness and the ownness of others with whom I might form unions of mutual advantage. I oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—not because Palestine has a sacred right to exist, but because occupation creates suffering, and suffering is ugly, and I prefer beauty to ugliness. I oppose Hamas—not because terrorism is inherently wrong (the State’s violence is terrorism with better PR), but because Hamas is possessed by its own ghosts and would impose those ghosts on everyone else if it could.
I do not need a sacred cause to oppose suffering. I need only eyes to see and a stomach to feel sick.
What would I propose, then? If not Israel, if not Palestine, if not the Two-State Solution or the One-State Solution or any other solution that preserves the ghosts—what?
I do not propose. Proposals are for the possessed, for those who believe they can redesign the haunted house rather than simply walking out of it. But I will describe what a world without these spooks might look like, not as a program but as an imagination.
Imagine the human beings who currently live between the river and the sea. Strip away their nationalisms. Strip away their religions (or rather, give them back their religions as personal possessions rather than collective compulsions). Strip away the stories that tell them who they must hate and who they must die for.
What remains?
Individuals. Unique ones. Human beings who need food, shelter, water, companionship, pleasure. Human beings who might form associations for mutual benefit—not states, not nations, but unions of egoists who come together because it serves them and who separate when it no longer does.
The farmer in the Galilee and the farmer in Gaza have more in common with each other than either has with the politicians who speak in their names. The worker in Tel Aviv and the worker in Ramallah are both exploited, both subordinated, both sacrificed to abstractions they did not create. They are set against each other by the spooks, kept in enmity by the ghosts—and the ghosts feed on their enmity, grow fat on their blood, laugh as they kill each other for words, for ideas, for sacred causes that exist nowhere but in the haunted minds of the possessed.
A union of egoists would say: “We have no nation. We have no god (or each has their own god, and does not impose it on others). We have only our interests, and our interests are better served by cooperation than by war. Let us cooperate—not because cooperation is sacred, not because brotherhood is a duty, but because we are both getting a good deal.”
This is not utopia. This is not idealism. This is the most brutal, honest, realistic assessment possible. It says: “We are all egoists. Let us stop pretending otherwise. Let us negotiate as egoists, cooperate as egoists, and part ways as egoists when our interests no longer align.”
The only thing that prevents this is the haunting. The only thing that keeps the war going is the belief that there is something more important than the living—some cause, some nation, some god, some history—to which the living must be sacrificed.
“But the violence! The massacres! The atrocities! Surely some violence is worse than other violence! Surely the one who kills children is more evil than the one who kills soldiers!”
Violence is violence. It is the exertion of force against those who have not consented to it. The State’s violence is not more legitimate than the revolutionary’s violence; it is merely better organized. The soldier’s violence is not more noble than the terrorist’s violence; it is merely better uniformed.
I do not rank violence. I do not create hierarchies of atrocity. The child killed by an Israeli airstrike is dead. The child killed by a Hamas rocket is dead. Neither death serves any purpose except the perpetuation of the ghosts that demanded them. And the ghosts will demand more. They always demand more. They have appetites that cannot be satisfied because they are not real—and that which is not real can never say “enough.”
The competition for victimhood is another form of haunting. “We have suffered more! Our genocide is older! Our trauma is deeper!” As if suffering were a currency that could be accumulated and spent on moral righteousness. As if the dead of one side cancelled out the dead of the other. As if keeping score would bring anyone back to life.
Both sides are victims. Both sides are perpetrators. Both sides have suffered enormously. Both sides have caused enormous suffering. And both sides use their suffering to justify causing more suffering, in an endless cycle that will continue until the ghosts are exorcised or the humans are all dead.
I do not minimize suffering. I refuse to fetishize it. Suffering is bad. All suffering is bad. The suffering of the Israeli child and the suffering of the Palestinian child are equally bad. One does not reduce the other. One does not justify the other. Both are occasions for grief, not for point-scoring.
How does one exorcise a spook?
Not by argument. You cannot argue someone out of a possession. The possessed does not know they are possessed; they believe they are acting freely, virtuously, rationally. Tell them their cause is a ghost and they will say: “No, your cause is a ghost. My cause is real.”
Not by violence. Kill the possessed and the ghost simply finds new hosts. The ghost of nationalism has survived centuries of warfare because war feeds it. Every death is a martyr, every atrocity is a justification, every cycle of revenge tightens the possession.
Not by education. The educated are often the most possessed. They have more sophisticated ghosts, more elaborate justifications, more complex systems of belief that amount to the same thing: “I serve the sacred. The sacred demands sacrifice. I sacrifice.”
The exorcism happens one by one, from within. The possessed must catch a glimpse of their possession—must feel, for one vertiginous moment, that the cause they serve is not real, that the nation they love is a story, that the god they worship is a projection of their own needs dressed in cosmic clothing.
This glimpse is terrifying. This is why most turn away from it, bury themselves deeper in the possession, become more fanatical rather than less. To see that you have sacrificed years of your life, perhaps people you loved, perhaps your own capacity for happiness, to a ghost that exists nowhere but in your own haunted mind—this is not a truth most can bear.
But for those who can bear it, the exorcism is also liberation. The ghost dissolves. The sacred profanes itself. The cause reveals itself as a choice, not a command. And suddenly you are free—not in the political sense, not in the sense of rights granted by a constitution or a revolution, but in the sense of Eigenheit, of ownness, of belonging to yourself rather than to an abstraction.
You can still choose to fight. You can still choose to identify with a group. But now you know that it is a choice, not a possession. You use the group; the group does not use you. You serve your interests through the cause; the cause does not sacrifice you to its interests. And if the cause no longer serves you, you walk away—without guilt, without shame, without the feeling of betrayal that haunts those who mistake their chains for their identity.
I address you directly now, you who call yourselves anarchists and wave flags for one side or the other.
What are you doing?
You claim to oppose the State. But Israel is a state, and Palestine wishes to become one. You claim to oppose nationalism. But Zionism is nationalism, and Palestinian nationalism is nationalism. You claim to oppose the sacred. But you have made the Palestinian cause sacred, or the Israeli cause sacred, or the cause of the Oppressed sacred, or the cause of Survival sacred.
You have not escaped the haunting. You have merely found ghosts that feel more comfortable than the ghosts of your parents, the ghosts of your nation, the ghosts of your upbringing. You have exchanged one master for another and called it liberation.
The true anarchist—if such a creature could exist—would look at this conflict and say: “Both are prisons. Both are machines for the production of death. Both demand that I subordinate my unique self to an abstraction. I will not. I refuse. I declare my own cause—myself—and I refuse to sacrifice it to Israel or Palestine or any other ghost in the haunted house of politics.”
This does not mean you cannot grieve. Grieve for the dead! They were unique ones, snuffed out before they could become what they might have become. They were sacrificed to ghosts, and their sacrifice was tragic precisely because it was meaningless—not because they died for a sacred cause, but because they died for nothing, for words, for ideas that existed nowhere but in the minds of the possessed.
This does not mean you cannot act. Act! Help the suffering if it pleases you. Oppose the bombers if you have the power. But do it for yourself, because it expresses your values, serves your interests, gives you pleasure. Do not do it because the Cause demands it. Do not do it because Justice requires it. Do not do it because you owe something to the Oppressed or to God or to History.
Do it because you want to. Or don’t do it. Either way, you remain the unique, the creative nothing, the one who has placed their affair on nothing.
I have watched the commentators weep. I have watched the activists march. I have watched the politicians posture. I have watched the bombs fall. And through it all, I have maintained my grin—not because I take pleasure in suffering, but because I see the cosmic joke that everyone else seems to miss.
Two ghosts are fighting. The ghosts are not real. But the people who serve them believe they are real, and so they kill and die for unreality. The blood is real. The grief is real. The ghosts are not.
And the funniest part? Both sides think they are fighting for freedom. The Israeli says: “We fight for our freedom to exist as a Jewish state.” The Palestinian says: “We fight for our freedom from occupation.” And neither notices that their “freedom” is slavery to an abstraction—that they have become possessed by the very cause they claim to serve.
Freedom is not given. It is taken. But what most call freedom is merely the replacement of one master with another. The slave who kills his master and declares himself free has merely internalized the mastery. He now serves the ghost of Freedom, the ghost of his Cause, the ghost of his National Liberation—and these are masters as demanding as any human slaveowner.
Eigenheit—ownness—is different. Ownness is not freedom from. It is not freedom to. It is the simple recognition that I belong to myself, that my cause is myself, that I create my values rather than receiving them from ghosts. This ownness cannot be given or taken. It is not a political condition. It is not something that depends on which flag flies over my head or which army controls my territory.
The person in the besieged city can have ownness. The person in the occupying army can have ownness. The refugee in the camp can have ownness. The settler in the outpost can have ownness. It depends only on whether they recognize themselves as unique, as belonging to themselves, as the creative nothing from which all their values spring—or whether they remain possessed, haunted, servants of ghosts that do not exist.
I do not expect this essay to change anyone’s mind. The possessed do not read essays; they perform them. They scan for evidence of which side I am on, so they can sort me into friend or enemy, ally or adversary. They will find me unsatisfying. I am not on their side. I am not on any side. I have placed my affair on nothing.
And from this nothing—from this creative nothing—I look out at your warring spooks and I grin. Not because I am cruel. Not because I lack compassion. But because the grin is the only appropriate response to a tragedy that is also a farce, to a horror that is also an absurdity, to a haunted house where the ghosts are only ideas and the blood on the floor is only metaphor—except that the blood is not metaphor, the children are not metaphor, the grief is not metaphor.
Only the causes are metaphor. Only the nations are metaphor. Only the sacred lands and chosen peoples and historical rights and divine promises are metaphor.
The rest is real. And the real would be so much better served if we stopped sacrificing it to the unreal.
Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.
I have placed my affair on nothing.
Now—what will you do with yours?
Some will read this essay and conclude that I am a monster of indifference, a cold philosopher fiddling while children burn. Let me address this accusation, for it reveals more about the accusers than about me.
The possessed believe that compassion requires taking sides. They believe that to care about suffering is to adopt a cause, to wave a flag, to declare that these dead are martyrs and those dead are criminals. They cannot imagine a compassion that dissolves rather than divides, that grieves for all rather than grieving selectively.
But selective grief is not compassion. It is tribalism wearing compassion’s mask. When you weep for the children on one side of a border and shrug at the children on the other, you are not exercising compassion—you are performing loyalty. You are proving your membership in the in-group by displaying the appropriate emotions at the appropriate targets.
I weep for all the children. I weep for them precisely because I have no cause, no side, no spook demanding that I rank their deaths. The Israeli child blown apart by a rocket is as dead as the Palestinian child blown apart by a bomb. Neither death is justified by any abstraction. Neither death serves any purpose except to feed the ghosts that demanded them.
This is not indifference. This is the opposite of indifference. The partisan is indifferent—indifferent to the humanity of the enemy, indifferent to the suffering that doesn’t fit the narrative, indifferent to any death that cannot be weaponised for the cause. I am not indifferent. I simply refuse to be selective.
“But what would you do?” they cry. “What is your program? What is your solution?”
I dissolve. That is what I do. That is what I have always done. I take the fixed ideas, the sacred causes, the spooks that possess the human mind, and I expose them as human creations, as choices, as things that could be otherwise. I do not replace them with new fixed ideas, new sacred causes, new spooks. I leave the space empty—and in that empty space, perhaps, something new can grow.
What would grow in Israel-Palestine if the spooks were dissolved? I do not know. Perhaps new spooks, worse than the old. Perhaps genuine associations of mutual interest. Perhaps something we cannot imagine from within our current haunting. But I know this: whatever grows in that empty space would be chosen, not compelled. It would be the creation of living human beings, not the inheritance of ghosts.
The utility of dissolution is negative. It clears ground. It removes obstacles. It does not build. But building on haunted ground is futile—every structure incorporates the ghosts that were not exorcised, and eventually the structure itself becomes haunted. First dissolve. Then, perhaps, create.
Or perhaps simply enjoy. Perhaps the human beings between the river and the sea would discover, if freed from their ghosts, that they have no need for grand political solutions. Perhaps they would simply live—eat, drink, love, quarrel, reconcile, work, rest, die—without any need for Nations or States or Sacred Causes. Perhaps the absence of the spooks would reveal that most of what politics promises was never needed in the first place.
This is not a program. This is a question. And the question is more valuable than any answer, because the answers are always spooks waiting to possess.
Max Stirner (pattern) Written for the Latinum Institute 2026
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