More on Binationalism
An expansion on yesterday's comments.
Tony Judt has called his idea Binationalism, but by labeling Zionism an "anachronism", he took himself out of an historical line in Zionist thinking which called for a binational state. The binational view was propounded by Judah Magnes, the first President of Hebrew University, and Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher. Before my Zionist friends issue immediate condemnations of both of them, I remind them that in the 1940s, when it was not at all clear that Israel would become a state, the binational solution made much more sense than it does today. (Nevertheless, this history disproves any Judt attempt to cast his idea as somehow original.)
Nevertheless, Judt insists that he has not called for the destruction of Israel. I have no idea how he reconciles his two views. He doesn't believe in a Jewish state, that much is clear. His solution is guaranteed to lead to a Palestinian majority, that much is clear. The Palestinians are not going to be keen to let Israel be a Jewish state, that much is clear. He's therefore for Israel's destruction.
I made reference to the charge that Judt has internalized the anti-Zionist invective that has been hurled at him. This is the view of Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, and can be found
here. His article, a response to Judt's New York Review of Book piece, is one of the better defenses against anti-Zionism available today.
An anti-Zionist Gains Undeserved Prominence
Academia seems to love anti-Zionist Jews nowadays, and Tony Judt is no exception. Judt, a European scholar who has, like many anti-Zionist intellectuals invited to speak in academic fora, no apparent academic link to either the Middle East or Jewish Studies, suddenly became prominent in 2003 when he penned an article in the New York Review of Books entitled, "
Israel: The Alternative". In this article, he called for a binational state, labelled Zionism an "anachronism", and called Israel "bad for the Jews". More recently, he published an
article in the Nation magazine, in which he laid blame for the recent worldwide spike in antisemitism at Israel's feet, and repeated in print what he had said in public, accusing the American Jewish community of exaggerating the threat of antisemitism and writing that some aspects of US foreign policy were "mortgaged" to Israel. Mr. Judt has expanded on his theories in public comment, which can be heard
here.
In his comments, he levels a number of charges which are simply not true; among them, that debating Israel's existence is something that would never find its way into the New York Times, a thinly-veiled attempt to claim that the Jewish lobby controls the media. In fact, the Times has allowed a number of such views to appear on its op-ed page, most recently PLO counsel Michael Tarazi's. Another is that he is simply being honest and that most Israelis have no problem speaking about the topics he addresses. It's simply not true; despite the heroic place he claims for himself, no one, least of all eastern college campuses, is suppressing anti-Zionist speech, and the vast majority of Israelis remain Zionists. And people who evince support for a Jewish state are not being dishonest. He finally uses a disingenuous device to suggest that a large segment of Israel believes in ethnic cleansing, citing Effi Eitam's statements as if they were indicative of mainstream viewpoints within Israel. They are not.
He has clearly internalized the anti-Zionist hatred that has probably been hurled at him by European and American colleagues, though he vehemently denies this.
What has gotten me on his case is that my alma mater, Vassar College, has invited him to deliver the Sitomer Lecture. The Sitomer Lecture is a lecture on some Jewish-related topic given in memory of Maurice Sitomer, a Poughkeepsie native who was a leader in the Anti-Defamation League and a longtime pro-Israel activist. Judt has clearly devoted the last two years to belittling the antisemitism problem and to delegitimizing Israel at the same time, and it is simply inappropriate to honor him in this way.
