Tony Judt in defense of anti-Israelism

In 2003, Professor Tony Judt wrote a controversial piece in the New York Review of Books in which he endorsed a “binational” Israel (a one-state solution), because the Israelis’ aggressive actions in service of their nation’s defense cause shame and embarrassment to Diaspora Jews like him–

Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel’s own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews. [emphasis added]

This is a “Not in Our Name” argument. Whether it is offered as a rationale against an American invasion of Iraq or against uncomfortable-to-watch Israeli aggression in defense of its national security, “Not in Our Name” is, as I wrote here, the argument of narcissists, though they call themselves “progressives”). They care about how endorsing a given political party or foreign policy makes them look. It’s a status-anxiety thing. But I digress.

Judt’s “ghetto Jew” argument (Jews’ survival depends on their cowering in the face of persecution and violence rather than their fighting back) didn’t get much traction in 2003.

Seizing on an opportunity to dismantle liberals’ public support for Israel, in today’s New York Times Tony Judt comes to the lonely defense of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer--they of the “given a level playing field, Jews are too successful” argument.** Judt tells us it’s high time we move on: lose our memories of the Holocaust, get on the right side of history, and cut Israel loose.

Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors.

For the terms of strategic debate are shifting…. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier’s great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Blech.

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My own thinking about Israel is colored by this old-fashioned but still relevant understanding:

Israel was built on the bitter memories of those whose kin did not, or could not, fight back against Hitler, Nazism, and affliated local fascist organizations during the Holocaust and whose governments and neighbors did not step in to help them. Its population was swelled by approximately 700,000 Arabic-speaking Jews who were expelled from or fled their homelands in the Middle East after Israel’s founding (a little fact that is hardly ever mentioned in the debate but one which has far-reaching consequences: those Israelis are among the Arabs’ and Muslims’ most bitter enemies).
Israelis, in creating their nation, deliberately shed the traditional timidness of their European forebears. Israel, a nation of Jews, fights back against its enemies. As a matter of foreign policy. Which is determined by a democratic process. It will survive or it will die, as a nation, trying.

There will be no failure of political will in Israel to go after its enemies.

There may, however, be the chance to dismantle the political will of Americans to support Israel. That’s what the argument is about now.

I don’t think it should be stifled or shut down.

May the best narrative win.

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** I have written about Walt and Mearsheimer’s “scholarly paper” here and here and here and here.