Tim Rutten’s review in the LA Times of Tony Judt’s new book (Reappraisal: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. Penguin, 2008) provides a summary of Judt’s views on Zionism and the State of Israel and some leading rebuttals to his thinking on these matters. Judt argued in a 2003 article in The New York Review of Books that the current state of Israel should be replaced with a single binational state. Rutten quotes a key paragraph:
“‘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 today is bad for the Jews.’”
Rutten then provides a rejoinder from one of Judt’s strongest critics, Leon Wieseltier:
“‘Why must Israel pay for his [Judt's] uneasiness with its life? The reason, I fear, is that Judt has misinterpreted the nature of the hostility that vexes him. . . . For the notion that all Jews are responsible for whatever any Jews do, that every deed that a Jew does is a Jewish deed, is not a Zionist notion. It is an anti-Semitic notion. But Judt prefers to regard it as an onerous corollary of Zionism (’not least by Israel’s own insistent claims upon their allegiance’). He refuses to place the blame for this unwarranted judgment of himself upon those who make it. Instead he accepts the premise of the prejudice, and turns on Israel. He makes a similar mistake in his evaluation of ‘the increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe.’ He knows that they are ‘misdirected,’ but still he describes them as ‘efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel.’ In what way, exactly, is the burning of a synagogue a method for getting back at Israel? In the anti-Semitic way, plainly. It is the essence of anti-Semitism, as it is the essence of all prejudice, to call its object its cause. But if you explain anti-Semitism as a response to Jews, and racism as a response to blacks, and misogyny as a response to women, then you have not understood it. You have reproduced it.’”
Tim Rutten, “The Fate of Nations (Book Review), LA Times, April 23, 2008
Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 23, 2003
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