The foolishness of a fantasy

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined/JPost
08 August '10

Tony Judt has passed away. He was Jewish. He descended from Lithuanian Rabbis. He was British. He was relatively as brilliant a thinker as a writer. He once loved Israel. And for the past three decades, he hated it and despised Zionism.

"Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life," Judt told the Financial Times in 2007.

He was right. Not that Israel is not to be immune from criticism or that there is, perhaps, an ominous conspiratorial nature to the ability of Israel's supports to trump its opponents: witness Oliver Stone and even Barack Obama. But Judt went to the core of Jewish nationalism in seeking to rip out from the world's oldest cultural, ethnic and religion-based nationalism its actuality to all conditions of the Jewish people.

He once wrote:

Israel arrived too late. The very idea of a "Jewish state" is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."

Eight years earlier he penned this:

[One of the] 'life-sustaining lies' is the fiction that "Israel and the Jews" form a single bloc and that to criticize any part of one is to perpetrate an unacceptable attack on both."

Judt was the product of his own fantasy which was the idealistic presumption that Israel was but a creation of and the continuing "creating a socialist, communitarian country through work" as he once said, further noting that this view was "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible." Ignoring the question whether only a kibbutz-style Israel is acceptable, thus reflecting on Judt's own personal prejudices rather than an objective analysis of what indeed is the essence of Jewish nationalism, there is another stark fantasy that Judt promotes: Israel's responsibility for the condition of the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate post 1947 when they rejected the UN partition plan.

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