‘Israel has to become a normal state.’
The March 25 issue of the London Review of Books includes an interview with the historian Tony Judt, whose Ill Fares the Land has just been published by Penguin. We’ll have something to say about that important book both here and in the magazine. It’s the sort of book one wishes every college student, if not every voter, had to read. The LRB interview ranges over many topics, including the European union, the war in Afghanistan, and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Judt’s remarks on this last subject are a useful addition to the ongoing conversation that Peggy Steinfels has been moderating here at dotCommonweal.
Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?
Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.
Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed.
Perhaps I mentioned this before but Judt was a panelist at a Cooper Union debate in 2006 with Mersheimer and others about the Mersheimer/Walt book. It was quite a “show” to a packed house. Can’t find a link now, but will look. Judt has also been mentioned (below) by Joe Komanchank; Judt is suffering from a debilitating and paralyzing disease, yet continues to write as Matthew’s link about attests.
Here is a heated account of the debate from the NY Observer:
‘The latest New Republic has an emotional attack on Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt by Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier says that W-M are antisemites who don’t understand how policy is formulated and Tony Judt is trading in antisemitic legends. He gets very angry. All this stems from the Walt Mearsheimer paper and Judt’s defense of their ideas at Cooper Union.
‘A few points:
‘—The piece underscores the fact that the media failed to cover a hugely significant event (the Cooper Union Debate). Wieseltier says that he understands that the moderator Anne-Marie Slaughter refused to engage the question of whether the original LRB paper was antisemitic. I was there. She specifically asked that question at the start. It was openly debated. How unfortunate that a serious publication cannot even get this basic point right, because the author is dealing with hearsay.
“—Wieseltier tries to dismiss these ideas by saying that they are tk. He is saying, They’re echoing the Protocols of Zion, so there are going to be pogroms. This is a form of name calling, and it keeps people from going near the questions. But the questions are just too important, and in the end journalists and writers should deal with facts. When Judt said that the New York Times required him to identify himself as a Jew before he could write a support of the paper, and when Rashid Khalidi said that he rarely gets to speak about Palestinian issues in a mainstream forum, they were both speaking about the taboo that continues to exist on this subject because of, because of—let’s be straight about this, Jewish power in the discourse, and the fear of offending Jews. I’ve dealt with this from editors too long to try and dissimulate about it. When Judt spoke in the Observer last week about Jewish influence and power, he was speaking openly and honestly.
“—The stunning thing about the debate, in retrospect, is that when it was done, no Jews were murdered in the streets of the East Village. At least not on the north side of Cooper Union. I should stop joking. The stunning thing was that 900 people entered a hall with diverse opinions, some of them called out abuse and mockery during the debate, but not many. The seven men and woman on stage exchanged ideas without being muzzled or bitch-slapped”
I’d like to just thank Mrs. Steinfels for continued threads and information on a continuing story of vital import to not only Middle East but World peace.
More than other threads here, as important as they be, these deserve our attention and without some of the highly partisan posts we’ve previously seen.
You know, Bob, respectfully, as I’m presumably the partisan you refer to, I have to disagree that the Mearsheimer/Walt/Judt school of analysis pushed in these threads is a two-sided approach to the issues.
But I think the point Matthew’s citation raises is very interesting and I’ll give it a brief whack in a couple hours after I finish some business. In the meantime, I think my “glass house” argument still applies to self-righteous American critics of Israeli politics.
Do you think our country behaves like a normal state?
How do you think America would behave if our soldiers were being murdered while on duty in, say, Delaware?
This news is an hour old:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM
ISRAELI MILITARY: TWO SOLDIERS KILLED IN THE GAZA STRIP
(AP) JERUSALEM — The Israeli military says two soldiers have been killed in an exchange of fire with militants who were planting explosives along the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip.
The military says two other soldiers were wounded and evacuated to a hospital.
Craig wrote:
“How do you think America would behave if our soldiers were being murdered while on duty in, say, Delaware?”
Your comparison of the Gaza Strip to Delaware is an embarrassing display of willful ignorance. Delaware, the first American state to ratify the Constitution and voluntarily enter into a union of American states, a state that our current Vice President calls home, is in NO WAY AT ALL analogous to Gaza, a walled-in concentration camp under siege by the military forces of an ideological nation-state.
Brian, my brother, you mistake the point of my post. It was never my intention to besmirch the great state of Delaware, a.k.a “The Diamond State” and “The Small Wonder” – proud home at one point to medical innovator Henry Heimlich, gunpowder tycoon E. I. Du Pont, and American small screen charmer Valerie Bertinelli.
My point was that leaders of “normal” states don’t have their soldiers getting ambushed and shot dead 43 miles from their legislative chambers while those leaders are trying to perform normal legislative functions. (Dover is 83 miles from D.C., so maybe Baltimore would have been a better analogy.)
And, according to the skewed paradigm espoused in these threads, I could more fittingly equate Delaware with Israel itself, as “The First State” could never have come into existence had it not run off the Lenapi indians.
Do you think the Delaware state motto “Liberty and Independence” differs essentially from the aspirations of the Israeli leaders?
Would you describe the country your tax dollars support as “non-ideological”?
Would you say the US is a “normal” nation state?
Craig,
Sarcasm, it has been said, is the lowest form of wit.
Brian,
I’m not being sarcastic; I’m clarifying the point you mistook and asking three simple questions.
And I’m honestly very interested in any answers you might have.
Craig,
Re: the word “normal” in this context – I regard states in which some citizens have more rights than others due to their religion and/or ethnicity as not normal.
The mileage between Tel Aviv and Gaza is not a serious argument for Israeli aggression. The IRA were thugs and murderers who carried out bombings in London, but peace was not achieved by besieging the entire population of Northern Ireland.
you asked: “Do you think the Delaware state motto “Liberty and Independence” differs essentially from the aspirations of the Israeli leaders?
Yes, in the context of universal human rights; no, in the context of Zionism. And this is what Tony Judt is getting at. How can Israel occupy and continue to expand development into a territory whose people do not have and will never be given Israeli citizenship? This is not how ‘normal’ states behave. Any normal state, which more or less espouses Enlightenment values of equality and fraternity before the law, would be rightly condemned for such actions. If Zionism is contrary to this model, then Israel must either reformulate Zionism or undergo a self-dezionization (unlikely under the current political regime).
you asked: “Would you describe the country your tax dollars support as “non-ideological”?
Notice the anti-social free-marketeering formulation of your question. The “country [my] tax dollars support” (as if I can go to WalMart and pick up a new citizenship if I wanted to, which I don’t) is the US. The ideologies of the US are another issue. To claim I should be silent regarding Israel lest I sound like a hypocrite, calling an ideological country home, is as bad as Bill Donahue defending the Church by saying, “well, rabbis and ministers abuse kids too so Jews and Protestants can’t criticize us.”
Finally, you said: “according to the skewed paradigm espoused in these threads, I could more fittingly equate Delaware with Israel itself, as [Delaware] could never have come into existence had it not run off the Lenapi indians.”
Is that really a “skewed paradigm”? What you find askew is national self-reflection and the desire to bring injustice into the light.