Love of the Land: Thank You, Tony Judt

Thank You, Tony Judt

Emmanuel Navon
For The Sake of Zion
20 December 09

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don't actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their "imagined self."

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn't exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn't been invented. There is also no point in making such a point –except, that is, if you manage to prove that what you believe to be real is just an illusion. Pull the fighting Jews out of Plato's cave, make them realize that what they thought to be true and real is just a fiction and a sham, and you've solved the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand's contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history "is at best redundant" ("Israel must unpick its ethnic myth," Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand's book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

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Love of the Land: Thank You, Tony Judt

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