Kesher Talk

Tony Judt revisited. Last week I rounded up some critiques of Tony Judt's bone-headed piece on Israel - bone-headed in factual errors as well as its central thesis - and I wanted to add this masterful fisking by Leon Wieseltier, in whose sights you do not want to be when he is loaded for bear. Since it's a registration-only site, let me share some choice quotes:

"The time has come to think the unthinkable." . . . Only truly free minds think the unthinkable. The rest are shackled by dogmas and sentiments and clichés and interests. The thinker of the unthinkable may even envy the others their intellectual tranquility, but now "the time has come," he has no choice any longer but to wound the others with the truth, to utter something bold and new, to "speak out" or "tell truth to power" or otherwise indicate that the unpopularity of his opinion is evidence for its correctness. Is it dissent? Then it must be right.

If ever an idea was not unthinkable, it is the idea of a bi-national state of Israelis and Palestinians. The fantasy is as old as the conflict itself. It has been thought and thought and thought--by Jews in the late 1920s and early 1930s and by Palestinians and Israeli Arabs during the last decade. Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, propounded the notion in the early 1990s. Edward Said championed it in his final years, as a way of maintaining his moral elevation without having to assent to the finality of the other. Noam Chomsky has been virulently advocating an anarcho-socialist version of it for decades. Palestinian intellectuals and journalists in the occupied territories and abroad have been discussing the blandishments of bi-nationalism with increasing fervor in the years of this intifada. Even Thomas L. Friedman, a creature of the thinkable if ever there was one, recently speculated on CNN that "maybe there's actually a whole different framework here. Maybe we're actually beyond the two-state solution anymore and we're now in a one-state solution. OK, that either there is going to be a bi-national state in some way or there's going to be, you know, some kind of ethnic cleansing." So we are not exactly in the kingdom of advanced thought. . . .

. . . [Judt] does not acknowledge the most inexorable feature of his Levantine erewhon: that in a matter of a few years the demographic realities between the river and the sea would determine its social composition and its political character. It would be a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority: Greater Palestine. . . . The nightmare of ethnic cleansing in Greater Israel disturbs his sleep, but the nightmare of ethnic cleansing in Greater Palestine does not. Greater Israel means war, but Greater Palestine means peace. Will the jihadists of Hamas really stay their hands when Afula finally is theirs? And who will protect the Jews in Greater Palestine from their wrath? An "international force"? The suggestion is outrageous. The record of international forces in conditions of ethnic cleansing is a sentence of death for any people who would look to them for salvation. . . . Judt has not replaced a national state with a postnational state; he has replaced a national state with another national state. He wishes to relieve Palestinian statelessness with Jewish statelessness, to exchange one vulnerable minority with another (even more) vulnerable minority. This, justice? The moral calculus of Judt's proposal is baffling.

Judt's history is also awry, which is unlike him. Israel was hardly the last or the latest nation-state to come into being. India and Pakistan were established at the same time as Israel. They, too, were born in violence and in partition. And the partition did not quell the violence. Was the partition of the subcontinent, therefore, a mistake? If it was, why does Judt not demand also the dismantling of Pakistan? Moreover, the United Nations is swollen with post-colonial nation-states that were created since the late 1940s, whose moral authority in the General Assembly and the Security Council does not seem to be vitiated for Judt by their belatedness. . . . Where is this beautiful cosmopolitan planet, this merrily deracinated family of man, in which Israel is the disfiguring exception? "A world of individual rights [and] international law"? Tell it to the Bosnians, the Rwandans, the Albanians, the ... well, he knows the list.

. . . Judt's characterization of Israel as "a faith-driven ethno-state" is wildly erroneous, a tendentious caricature. There are places in Israel that are hybridity heaven. (And there are places in Palestine where a little hybridity would go a long way.) It is true that national feeling, which exists in abundance even in "post-Zionist" Israel, is a scandal for the hallowed fluidity that the contemporary catechism prescribes for human affairs, but there are worse scandals. It might even be argued that national feeling, and group membership, and the engagement with tradition, and the preservation of peoplehood--all in a critical spirit, of course, and diversified by alienation and other affiliations, and vigilant about the corruptions of self-love--is all another blow against the philosophical casualness of the age. Anyway, the problem of the spirit of the age is not a Jewish problem. Zionism is not the only "constraint" in the world. Judt does not explain why the rectification of identity hangs upon the rectification of Israeli identity.

. . . Judt is embarrassed by Israel. And so Israel must be gone. What follows is a passage of the sort that I never thought I would read in my time, at this late date in the modernity of the Jewish people. I squirm and type:

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.

. . . The behavior of the self-described Jewish state seems to have affected the way everyone else looks at him. I detect the scars of dinners and conferences. He does not wish to be held accountable for things that he has not himself done, or to be regarded as the representative of anyone but himself. It is disagreeable to be falsely represented by others. These are old anxieties. But there is a new source of relief, as Judt himself reports. There is the saving elasticity of contemporary identity. Why doesn't he simply delete his Zionism or his support for Israel from his inventory of multiple elective identities? Why must Israel pay for his uneasiness with its life?

. . . 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.

. . . [Judt] is not alone in his mood of hopelessness, in his desperation for a solution. But he has forgotten the dangers of desperate solutions, and adopted one. It is necessary to note that in other hands the elegy for the peace process does not have the integrity of sorrow and the turn to a bi-national state does not have the integrity of despair. The Palestinians who espouse binationalism are acting on their fondest and most uncompromising dreams. It is their device for defeating Zionism and gaining dominion over the entirety of the land, the shrewdest form of the Palestinian rejection of the idea of partition.

It is worth remembering, then, why partition was, and still is, the only admirable answer to the question of Palestine. . . . the idea of partition, the two-state solution, does not deny the nationalisms and it does not pander to them. It limits the fulfillment of the one only by the fulfillment of the other. It transforms the problem--the sharing of the land--into the solution. It insists that fairness is a variety of justice. And that variety is not Greater Israel with a Palestinian minority (or worse, a Palestinian majority) or Greater Palestine with a Jewish minority, but Israel and Palestine.

UPDATE: Andrew Northrup offers his usual sanguine spin on the topic. Commenters - who obviously didn't read the Weiseltier essay - knock down many straw men. Andrew's tooth-brushing analogy (in the comments - search on "tooth") is worth the price of admission.

posted by Judith @ 10/27/2003 05:49:14 PM