Israel Matzav

Who was Tony Judt?

For those who never heard of him before, the Jerusalem Post has an editorial that does a fair job of summarizing Judt's 'intellectual' legacy.

At the center of Judt’s attacks on Israel was a stubborn refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in a distinctly Jewish state. In the above-mentioned article, entitled “Israel: The Alternative,” Judt posited that Israel artificially imported “a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law.”

For Judt, an “ethno-religious” state that provides special privileges to its Jewish citizens – such as the Law of Return – and seeks to preserve its Jewish character through Jewish symbols, is an anachronism “in an age when that sort of state has no place.”

Yet Judt applied totally different rules when he scrutinized nationalism outside of the Israeli context. In A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe, Judt acknowledged that the nation-state was “the only remaining, as well as the best-adapted, source of collective and communal identification.”

With all the desire for a supranational framework that provides universal equality, and eradicates the bigotry and discriminations of cultural and religious distinctions that cause war and strife, argued Judt, there is no substitute for the social cohesion and communal identification provided by a unique national identity.

Therefore, a “truly united Europe” is so unlikely that it would be “unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it.”

As a result, Judt was extremely pessimistic about attempts to create a politically homogeneous Europe devoid of borders and cultural distinctions.

For Israel, by contrast, the time has come to “move on,” “to think the unthinkable,” to replace the Jewish state with “a single, integrated, bi-national state of Jews and Arabs,” in his vision. For Judt, European particularism was an undeniable fact, but the Jewish variety was outdated.

WHY THE double standard? Irrational prejudices are difficult, if not impossible, to fathom, belonging as they do to the murky realm of the psyche.

In other words, he was an irrational, self-hating Jew, which is why he was a darling of the Left.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:02 AM