Tony Judt salivates for the end of Israel

In an expanded version of his recent NYT op-ed (which I wrote about here), Tony Judt sticks it to Israel again—this time in an Israeli newspaper.

Stop talking about the Holocaust!, he advises. The world has moved on—there are other genocides now. You are evil colonialists, you commit atrocities, and now all the world can watch them 24/7 and see the truth. No one believes Israel is a victim. Everyone can see that it’s the Palestinians who are the victims.

Whatever purchase Israel’s self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country’s frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel’s behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel’s point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. “Remember Auschwitz” is not an acceptable response….

We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state’s very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe…. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank. [emphasis added]

Whatever, dude. We’ll see how it plays out. Remember Masada!

I do get what you mean, though. I too read the disapproving words of the Swedish prime minister about the “warlike history” of the Israelis.

Then I turned again to the words of David Mamet:

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don’t like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in “Exodus.” These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at “Sophie’s Choice,” sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at “The Diary of Anne Frank” — we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any “Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism” but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself “why?” [emphasis added]

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updated to fix typo in title and to add a missing link