Love of the Land: Hanukkah's Scrooge

Hanukkah's Scrooge

Robert M. Goldberg
American Spectator
14 December 09

Based upon his recent article in the Financial Times ("Israel must unpick its ethnic myth"), I know what Tony Judt wants for Hanukkah: The evaporation of a collective Jewish existence and the elimination of the Zionist entity -- the state of Israel -- which is essential to that dream.

In the FT article, Judt complains that when he was a lad in Israel his Zionist teachers told him a fairy tale that only a Jewish state could be an "alternative to persecution, assimilation or cultural dilution…. The Israel they wished me to join was therefore grounded, and could only be grounded, in an ethnically rigid view of Jews and Jewishness."

For this reason, Judt, a University Professor at New York University, regards the establishment and existence of Jewish state as a dangerous aberration and the major source of many of the world's ills. In fact, he hates being reminded he is Jewish and has concocted an ideology around that pathology unrelated to both history and fact.

So, for instance, Judt ignores the creation of Pakistan as Muslim state in 1947, a year before Israel was founded, or that many of the European states he regards a examples post-ethnic enlightenment have a "right of return" for ethnic Germans, French, Spanish, etc. or that their treatment of immigrants is more restrictive and selective than Israel or America.

Judt supported American intervention in the Bosnian conflict and the creation of the predominantly Muslim state of Bosnia-Herzegovina on humanitarian grounds. In 1999, " in defending the U.S.-led NATO effort, he wrote: "the extermination of minorities within national frontiers has many recent European precedents." There is precedent in the Middle East too where, as Victor Davis Hanson observed, "over half-million or so Jews… have been ethnically cleansed from (and sometimes murdered in) Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and almost every Jewish community in the Arab Middle East."

But to Judt the creation of the Jewish state is something unique to nature and politics; particularly in the idealized global village Judt's brain seems to wander. He has decided that its perpetuation depends largely on too many Jews around the world believing in the "fiction" that Israel is the restoration of a people to their ancient nationhood and that such a nation must play a transformative and positive role in human affairs.

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Love of the Land: Hanukkah's Scrooge