[Peace-discuss] Fwd: FW: The New Jewish Question [2/11/07]

[Chuck Minne]

Ron Weiner <ronweiner1 at comcast.net> wrote:  

Forwarded to me from the NIMN (Not In My Name) Bulletin Board:



[A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over
the rights and wrongs of criticizing Israel. At its centre is a British
historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about
Israel. His opponents say his views give succor to anti-Semites. One
thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been
shattered.] 

The New Jewish Question (by Gaby Wood, Sunday, February 11, 2007)


On 3 October last year, the distinguished British-born historian Tony Judt
was preparing for a public lecture when the telephone rang. He was due to
give the talk, entitled 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy', at the
Polish consulate in New York in less than an hour. The caterers were already
there. But when he picked up the phone he was informed that his lecture had
been suddenly cancelled.

He was also told that Abraham Foxman, the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was on the phone to the Polish consul. Whether
the call from the ADL was the cause of the cancellation would become the
subject of heated debate in the days and months to come. Foxman labelled
such accusations “conspiratorial nonsense.” However, the Polish consul,
Krzysztof Kasprzyk, later acknowledged that he had been contacted by a
number of Jewish groups - including the ADL and the American Jewish
Committee (AJC) - who were concerned about Judt's anti-Israel message.

'The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a
delicate pressure,' Kasprzyk said. It didn't take him long to see how it
might look for Poland, given its history, to be fostering arguments that in
certain spheres of American intellectual life have been conflated with
anti-Semitism.

'They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to
do in late Communist society,' Tony Judt says of the ADL when I speak to him
from his home in New York. 'They point out how foolish it is to associate
with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: Did you know
that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or
giving comfort to anti-Semites?'

In the New York Jewish press, the episode was dubbed - with a debatable
degree of sarcasm - 'l'Affaire Judt'. Certainly, not everyone felt Judt was
a latter-day Dreyfus. The New York Review of Books published an open letter
to Abraham Foxman in Judt's defence, which was signed by 114 intellectuals,
many of whom disagreed with Judt on the Middle East yet felt that his right
to free speech had been indefensibly curbed. But Christopher Hitchens,
reminiscing about an occasion when a talk of his own was cancelled for
similar reasons, cried out: 'What a chance I missed to call attention to
myself!' - not the sort of opportunity Hitchens is in the habit of passing
up - 'Once again, absolutely conventional attacks on Israeli and US policy
are presented as heroically original.'

In the past two weeks, the Judt Affair has entered an entirely new gear. In
an essay written by the Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld and published by
the American Jewish Committee, Judt's views - and those of other
'progressive Jews' such as the American playwright Tony Kushner and the
British academic Jacqueline Rose - were expressly linked to anti-Semitism.
That row was reported in the New York Times, giving it an unprecedented
prominence, and since then the story has opened the floodgates of a debate
that until now has been shrouded in fear. Americans have long been in the
grip of a cultural 
taboo that is characterized by Judt as follows: 'All Jews are silenced by
the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by
the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the
subject.'

Philip Weiss, a bold polemicist whose New York Observer blog, MondoWeiss,
has been besieged by posts on the subject since he addressed it last week,
has even gone so far as to declare a new movement. His account of it
embraces the new forum for dissent, Independent Jewish Voices, which was
launched in Britain last week by an eminent group that includes Eric
Hobsbawm and Harold Pinter. In launching its manifesto, Independent Jewish
Voices has taken the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip as an occasion to create 'a climate and a space in which Jews of
different 
affiliations and persuasions can express their opinions about the actions of
the Israeli government without being accused of disloyalty or being
dismissed as self-hating.'

One of its founding principles is: 'The battle against anti-Semitism is
vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies
is automatically branded as anti-Semitic.'

'A lot of people, like Tony Judt, have been doing brave work here in the US
for a while,' Weiss tells me. 'What has happened specifically is that for
once, the mainstream is paying attention.'

He dates the beginning of this back to last March, when an explosive article
about the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy, written
by two American political scientists, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, was
published in the London Review of Books (having originally been turned down
by the Atlantic Monthly). The response to the piece was so overwhelming –
and so colored by accusations of anti-Semitism - that the LRB decided to
host a debate on the subject in New York last September. That debate was
sold out; Tony Judt, one of the speakers, gave an exceptionally eloquent
performance, in the course of which he said it was significant that the
event had been hosted by a London publication. Public conversation on the
issue had been so absent in America, he suggested, that it could only be
opened up by importation.

'When Walt and Mearsheimer were published in London,' Philip Weiss
continues, 'I said: something's changing.' Since then, the publication of
former president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and
the attention given to Rosenfeld's accusations in his AJC article, have
proved, in Weiss's view, that 'there's no question that something has
changed. One of the excitements of what's going on right now is that people
who have had feelings about this and have not expressed them are popping up
all over. It's personally very stirring to me that this is happening. I
can't believe it.'

In fact, the debate is so current that the online magazine Slate has come up
with a quiz entitled 'Are You A Liberal Anti-Semite?' (Sample question:
'Which state's offences against humanity bother you most? a) Sudan b) Israel
c) Massachusetts'.) One of the prizes is dinner with Tony Judt.

Judt is, in the words of a fellow historian, 'one of our most dazzling
public intellectuals'. As a prominent professor at New York University and a
regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and
The Nation, he has a strong and widely heard voice. His latest book, Postwar
- a magnificent, opinionated and vast history of Europe since 1945 - was
voted one of the 10 best books of last year by the New York Times. A
talented forger of links between thinkers from countries all over the world,
Judt worked tirelessly after 1989 to bring together eastern European and
American intellectuals, and he solidified these efforts by founding the
Remarque Institute at NYU in 1995 to promote the study and discussion of
Europe in America. A natural polemicist, he brought with him to New York an
Oxbridge tradition more pugnacious than is generally characteristic of
American academic life, and found himself - after years spent concentrating
on European history - drawn back into an engagement with the Middle East.

In 2003, Judt wrote an articulately provocative piece for the New York
Review of Books entitled 'Israel: The Alternative', in which he argued,
among other things, that Israel was 'an anachronism' that was 'bad for the
Jews' and should be converted into a binational state. The offices of the
New York Review were inundated with letters as a result. Last year, Judt
wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he argued that
America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel wrought tremendous
damage. As the page was about to go to press, the editor rang him up. 'Just
one thing,' he said, 'You are
Jewish, aren't you?'

Judt was born in London in 1948. Growing up Jewish in 1950s Britain, as he
has said, he came to know a thing or two about anti-Semitism. His mother was
from London and his father, who was born in Belgium, had come there as a
stateless person. Judt was brought up in what he describes as 'a fairly
standard left-wing Jewish secular political environment', but with close
links to his Yiddish-speaking grandparents, all of whom were eastern
European Jews, from Romania and Russia and Lithuania and Poland.

As a teenager, he joined a left-wing Zionist organization and became very
active in the kibbutz movement, living in Israel on and off for a large part
of the early 1960s. 'What changed for me,' he says now, 'was that in 1967 I
went out as a volunteer at the time of the Six Day War; after the war was
finished I volunteered for auxiliary military service and I ended up as a
sort of informal translator for other volunteers up on the Golan Heights.
And there for the first time I began to see another face of Israel that had
been camouflaged from me by my enthusiasm for the idealism of the kibbutz
movement.' He became, he recalls, quickly very detached from Israel. 'And in
fact when I was a student in Paris I became involved in 1970 with
Palestinians and young Israelis, trying to organize groups to talk about
peace settlements and ending the conflict.'

Last week, as he looked over the list of signatories of the new British
network, Independent Jewish Voices, Judt says he was struck by how many of
them are people who have not in the past identified themselves publicly as
Jewish. 'Of course they're Jewish,' he clarifies, 'but it was not part of
their public identity tag. And now they feel - and I would share this
sentiment - a need to say, look: if it helps you understand just how bad
things have got in the Middle East, I am willing to act not as a
freestanding historian but as a Jew. I don't normally like to act as though
being Jewish was who I am, but it's a kind of inverse moral blackmail that
forces you to go the other way.'

Speaking from Bloomington, Indiana, where he is a director of Indiana
University's Jewish Studies Program, Alvin Rosenfeld tells me that his essay
'does seem to have struck a raw nerve'. 'I've been accused of wanting to
shut down debate and stifle free speech,' he says, 'and none of that is
true. I stand strongly for vigorous debate and open discussion. What in the
past was said behind the hands and on the margins of society has been coming
into the mainstream of discourse,' Rosenfeld adds, echoing the sentiments of
those he attacks. 'Now one can deal with it. And that's one of the things I
set out to do.'

Though Rosenfeld is careful not to say in his essay that anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism are identical, he does state that 'Anti-Zionism is the form
that much of today's anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see
earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present-day
desires to get rid of the Jewish state.' He labels the work of Judt, Rose,
Kushner et al 'This Jewish war against the Jewish state.' I ask him if he
would say that an increase in anti-Zionist sentiment might be caused by
Israeli policy. 'I doubt it,' he replies. 'As I read these people, it
strikes to the heart, not of particular policies, but the idea of a
sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East. I think it goes to the question
of Israel's origins and essence.'

'Oh that's nuts,' Judt counters, 'I've never said Israel doesn't have a
right to exist. I'm not actually sure that anyone in what we would call the
respectable political mainstream ever has.'

'He says that,' says Rosenfeld, 'but it's not true. In his writings he calls
not for a two-state solution but for the dissolution of the state of Israel
and a one-state solution, and everyone knows that in no time at all, were
such a scenario to come about, Jews would be a minority within this newly
configured state, and would be at the mercy of a population that's not
likely to treat them gently. Tony Judt is a kind of political fantasist, it
strikes me.'

'The issue is not whether Israel has a right to exist,' Judt says plainly.
'Israel does exist. It exists just like Belgium or Kuwait or any other
country which was invented at some point in the past and is now a fact. The
question is what kind of a state Israel should be. That's all.'

Anti-Zionism has, like Zionism itself, a long and complicated history. 'The
thing that we tend to forget,' Judt explains, 'is that until World War II,
Zionism was a minority taste even within Jewish political organizations.
The main body of European Jews was either apolitical or integrated, and
voting within the existing countries they lived in. So to be anti-Zionist,
at least until the late 1930s, was to be lined up with most Jews. It would
make no sense to think of it as anti-Semitic.

'After the Second World War, for a fairly brief period - from let's say 1945
to about 1953 - the overwhelming majority of Jews who were politically
thinking were Zionists, either actively or sympathetically, for the rather
obvious reason that Israel was the only hope for Jewish survivors. But then
many of them, like Hannah Arendt or Arthur Koestler, both of whom were
Zionists at various points, took their distance, on the grounds that it was
already clear to them that Israel was going to become the kind of state that
as a cosmopolitan Jew they couldn't identify with.

'Ever since then, there has been an unbroken tradition of non-Israeli Jews
who regard Israel as either unrelated to their own identity or something of
which they sometimes approve, sometimes disapprove, sometimes totally
dislike. This range of opinion is not new,' Judt concludes. 'The only thing
new - and it's a product of the post-Sixties - is the insistence that it's
anti-Semitic.' Judt tells a story about an Israeli journalist who was in
Washington in the 1960s. 'The Israeli ambassador was retiring, and the
journalist asked him what he thought was his biggest achievement. The
ambassador said: "I've succeeded in beginning to convince Americans that
anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism."

There has been a progressive emergence of a conflation,' Judt explains. 'It
didn't just happen naturally. And it was pushed quite actively in the
Seventies and Eighties, to the point at which it became so normal in this
country that it was for a while the default assumption. It's really only in
the last five to eight years that it's started to be questioned.'

The actions of very pro-Israel Jewish organisations - for instance, making
carefully placed phone calls relating to certain public speakers - are, Judt
believes, now born of panic rather than confidence.

'They've lost control of the debate,' he says. 'For a long time all they had
to deal with were people like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky, who they
could dismiss as loonies of the left. Now they're having to face, for want
of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long
established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and
certainly not on the crazy left on most issues, saying very critical things
about Israel. They're not used to that, so their initial response has been
to silence people if they could, and their second response has been to
ratchet up the anti-Semitic charge.' Judt thinks it's telling that the New
York Times 'is willing to report these issues and let reporters quote both
sides. In the past, you would have had silence.'

Whether this will have any effect in Washington is another matter. The
political influence of AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobby, American Israel Public
Affairs Committee) is as strong as it ever was, and Judt argues that since
it's not worth going out on a limb on Israel from a Congressperson's point
of view, change has to happen at a presidential level. Hillary, he says, 'is
pretty gutless on this'; she has already given two gung-ho speeches to
AIPAC. It's not a topic Barack Obama has yet picked up on, Judt adds, but
Obama was brave enough to oppose the Iraq war from the outset, so it's
possible that he would take a courageous stance elsewhere in the Middle
East. 'A presidential candidate has to feel that once he or she gets into
office - they wouldn't dare open their mouths while they're running for
election - they don't stand to lose very much in public opinion if they put
pressure on Israel,' Judt says.

In Postwar, Judt writes of Europe that 'After 1989, nothing - not the
future, not the present and above all not the past - would ever be the
same.' Is there a moment like that, I ask him, in this situation? 'I think
so,' he replies. 'It's not as tidy a moment as 1989 in Europe. But I think
one could say that after the Iraq war, for want of a better defining moment,
the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East
was broken. The shell broke, and conversation - however uncomfortable,
however much slandered - became possible. I'm not sure that will change
things in the Middle East, but it's changed the shape of things here. Even
five years ago, I don't think it would have looked the way it does now.' He
sounds almost optimistic. 'Well,' he sighs, 'I do my best.



_http://observer.

guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2010212,00.html_
(http://observer.

guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2010212,00.html)._,___ 

_______________________________________________




 
   
   
  
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