Israel Matzav

Tony Judt's conspiracy theory

Other than seeing his name around the web a lot, I didn't know a whole lot about Tony Judt until I read this article from the Forward. There are parts of it with which I don't agree, but I found it interesting so I thought I would pass it along. Besides, I don't want to be accused to quashing dissent :-)

Hat Tip: Marisa Wetzel

The NYU historian, Tony Judt, is now a cause celebre in his own right. One of two panelists to take Mearsheimer’s side at Cooper Union last month, his name was already mud in pro-Israel circles, mostly because of his 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books arguing that Israel was an “anachronism” and would probably end up a binational Jewish-Arab state. A quick Web search for his name turns up entries like “Tony Judt’s Jihad Against Israel.” Lately he’s become a dinner-table name, attacked as an enemy by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and a host of others.

“I find the whole thing, in the end, depressing,” Judt told the Forward this week. “Antisemitism is a real thing, and it’s a serious thing. I’ve written about it and I care about it. So to find myself attacking the ADL for implicitly accusing people of antisemitism — it seems, well, upside down.”

His complaint about the ADL stems from the Polish consulate affair. Press accounts suggest that the ADL and AJC had a hand in the cancellation of his speech. Judt says the ADL was doing precisely what Mearsheimer and Walt claim it does, muzzling dissent.

The ADL replies on its Web site that Judt’s complaint is simply “part and parcel of Judt’s conspiratorial ideas about pro-Israel groups and ‘Jewish control’ of U.S. foreign policy.”

For the record, they’re both wrong. The ADL’s role in the consulate flap was little more than to call and ask what the event was about, according to both ADL and the consulate. Told that a room had been loaned to an outside group, the league said thanks and backed off. The consul-general then Googled Judt to find out what the fuss was about and concluded that the controversial historian was not someone Poland’s New York consulate needed to be associated with, given Poland’s sensitivities about Jewish sensitivities.

On the other hand, ADL indignation over Judt’s “conspiratorial ideas” is wildly misplaced. The only time he has publicly discussed conspiracies or “Jewish control” of American policy was in a 2005 essay in The Nation, in which he flatly condemned such notions as “anti-Semitism.”

His reputation as an Israel-basher rests almost entirely on that one essay in 2003, “Israel: The Alternative.” In it he wrote that the scope of Israel’s West Bank settlements had made the old partition idea of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine nearly impossible. Dismantling settlements and separating the two peoples was no longer conceivable. The only alternatives left were mass expulsion of the Palestinians or a single state in all of the land of Israel, which would inevitably be binational. He was not advocating a binational state, he says. It was an observation.

Would he have written the same essay now, after seeing Israel withdraw from Gaza? “I might have written some things differently,” he said. “A lot of my friends still believe that a two-state solution is possible. I’m more pessimistic, I guess.”

He wouldn’t have changed the word “anachronism,” though. “As a historian, I do believe that nation-states based on ethnicity are an anachronism.” But, he added quickly, “you can be an anachronism and still have a perfect right to exist.”

Does he think Israel’s existence is morally wrong? “Good God, no,” he said. “Of course I don’t believe that.”

I see nothing wrong with a voluntary transfer program - paying 'Palestinians' (or for that matter 'Israeli Arabs') who don't wish to live in peace to leave the country. The main problem with it is that no one else - especially not their Arab 'brothers' - is willing to take them.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:37 PM