Here is Frum's answer to Judt's latest nutty proposal in the "New York Book Review." Pretty compelling, I would say.
Money quote: "'Avram, this man in the newspaper says we shouldn't exist.' 'So what else is new?'"
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OCT. 14, 2003: THE ALTERNATIVE
Perhaps you have heard of Tony Judt. He runs an institute of European politics at New York University; has written some widely praised books on modern European history; contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books - in short, he is a distinguished member of the professoriate. He is by no means an extremist. In fact, his best known book attacks French intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s for their susceptibility to extremism – and not only extremism of the far right but also to communism and other ideologies of the far left. It says something about the spirit of our time that this moderate soul has just now published a lengthy article titled "The Alternative" that proposes to solve the problems of the Middle East by destroying the state of Israel.
Judt’s views may sound outlandish to Americans. But Judt is a European, originally from Belgium I believe, and his attitudes represent a growing consensus within the European center left, and indeed within European politics period. (It should be added that Israelis will find little in Judt's piece that they have not heard before: "Avram, this man in the newspaper says we shouldn’t exist.” “So what else is new?”)
About Judt's interesting article, there are dozens of things to be said, and many individual instances of bad faith and hypocrisy to be noted. But let’s restrict ourselves to three:
1. The idea that it is “anachronistic” to imagine that Jews might need a refuge against persecution is … well, optimistic. Israel’s latest waves of immigrants have originated in Russia, Argentina, and France – three countries where Jews have good reasons for fear of their neighbors’ intentions.
Anti-Zionists sometimes say that it is unjust that a Jew can leave Argentina one day, arrive in Israel the next, and be welcomed as a citizen, while a Palestinian Arab whose family lived in the region for generations or even centuries will not be so recognized. But this injustice is just the flip side of another and much more terrible injustice: the family of that same Argentine Jew may have lived in Argentina for generations or possibly centuries – but let there be a crisis, as there is now, and he too will discover that the fellow-occupants of the land of his birth regard him as no kind of citizen at all. In the 1990s, agents of Hezbollah and Iran carried out two huge bombing attacks in Argentina, murdering almost 200 Jews – and for years the Argentine government hesitated to investigate; it was so sluggish, in fact, that many people wondered whether there had not been some quiet complicity between Hezbollah and the old Peronists in the Argentine government.
2. Judt repudiates Zionism as outdated, old-fashioned, and indeed offensive.
“It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
But the implacable hatred that Zionism has elicited from Arabs and Muslims over the past century has very little to do with “individual rights, open frontiers, and international law,” all of which are conspicuously absent from the Middle East. The Arab and Muslim world rejects Israel for the same reason it expelled its Jewish minorities between 1948 and 1956 – and that it is expelling its Christian minorities now: because that Arab and Muslim world has refused to tolerate the presence of non-Arabs and non-Muslims as anything other than subordinated castes at the mercy of their rulers.
Why, if we were to abolish nationalisms and particularisms, would we choose to begin with the nationalism of the persecuted rather than, say, the nationalism and particularism of the persecutor? It is the Arabs, and only the Arabs, who have the power to end the conflict in the Middle East. They could have done so by accepting Israel in 1949; they could do so today. It is their passions that prevent it. Why not seek an "alternative" to those?
3. Judt’s alternative to a Zionist Israel is a binational state of Jews and Arabs.
“What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural.” This is the point where liberal wishful thinking steps over the line into gibbering delusion. The alternative to Israel is not a Middle Eastern Belgium. If the day were ever to come when the Jews of Israel lost the power to defend themselves and had to submit to the rule of their neighbors, the outcome would not be “pluralism” but slaughter. Judt himself seems dimly to recognize this: one word curiously missing from his prescriptions is the word “democracy.” Even for a man with as active a political fantasy life as Professor Judt, this is a fantasy too many. He recognizes that the existing Palestinian leadership could not be trusted to respect the rights or even the lives of the Jews of the former Israel. He recognizes that a binational” state in Israel would have to be policed from outside – and probably administered from outside too.
“The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force …. A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class.”
Oh, so that’s all.
One must hate Israel very much indeed to prefer such an outcome to the reality of the liberal democracy that exists in Israel today.
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There has been much anguish over whether to describe the new European anti-Zionism as “anti-semitism.” Judt, for one, evinces no animus against Jews as individuals or as a community. Indeed, he reports on the rise of anti-semitism in Europe in tones of sorrow – even as he makes clear that he believes that the Jews have brought this scourge upon themselves. “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.” His intentions are high, his conscience is clear, he hates nobody. His solution, however, is one that would expose millions of Jews – and not just those living in the Middle East – to persecution, expropriation, political oppression, exile, and murder. We cannot describe this outlook as anti-semitism. We need some new term. Here’s my nomination: genocidal liberalism.
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