To the Editors:
Tony Judt should be lauded for cutting through a forest of clichés [“Israel: An Alternative Future,” NYR, October 23]. Refreshingly free from the usual cant about Israel’s allegedly robust democracy, he makes a remarkable attempt to think through the long-term possibilities of a binational—and, of course, secure—state. Few who face the facts of recent history can doubt that if Israel persists in its current settlement policy, there will be no acceptable alternative to such a solution. The tragedy is that neither Sharon nor Arafat is likely to emulate the statesmanship and foresight of de Klerk or Mandela. The end result is more likely to resemble Zimbabwe than post-apartheid South Africa.
Even if Israel should once again return to being a national state within its pre-1967 borders, there would still remain compelling reasons for its finally turning into a secular “state of all its citizens” instead of the “state of all Jews” of the world—as it has been repeatedly defined by Knesset resolutions, which have been implemented by a series of discriminatory laws. Between one quarter and one fifth of Israel’s population today are Arabs.
During the first decade of Israel’s existence, a time when hundreds of thousands of stateless Jews lingered in European DP camps and many others were forced to leave Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, a convincing case could still be made for consolidating the new immigrant state by the “affirmative action” of the Law of Return and other seemingly ad hoc laws that served official state ideology. There was hope that an Israel at peace with its neighbors would be able to reconcile the ethnic and religious diversity of its population (and to deal with the diversity and plurality of assimilated Jews elsewhere). In such a country, the state, religion, and ethnicity would be clearly separated, as they increasingly are in the modern democratic world. This had certainly been the aim of Israel’s founding fathers, notably Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Instead, the fundamentalist clamor for a dominantly “Jewish” state—as pre-war Poland or Romania were ruthlessly “Polish” and “Romanian”—has increased over the years. “Affirmative action” for Jews has degenerated into crass discrimination against Israeli Arabs by means of punitive legislative as well as judicial, budgetary, and administrative measures.
In the Occupied Territories, as the settlements have constantly increased in size, such discrimination has led to oppression and dispossession of the restive Palestinian population. The resultant dead end both in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper has been well described by David Grossmann in his book The Yellow Wind and its sequel Sitting on a Wire. To all who doubt the seriousness and cogency of Judt’s observations, I would highly recommend both books.
Amos Elon
Buggiano, Italy
To the Editors:
I have great respect for Tony Judt as a scholar, an essayist, and a political observer. But his recent essay is strangely wrongheaded. Judt’s main premise is that Israel is an anachronism because it insists on being a Jewish state. His solution is to make it into a binational state of Palestinians and Jews. These two assertions obviously contradict each other: If most Israelis want to live in a Jewish state, why would they ever wish to be in a binational state where they would quickly become a minority? These assertions are also based on a bizarre view of recent history. Watching the flow of humanity from the vantage point of a café in Paris or London, one may indeed believe that the future is a happy pluralistic society. But examining some historical examples more closely will indicate that Judt has his history backward.
Compared to which nations is Israel an anachronism? Obviously Judt does not mean Syria, where a brutal military dictatorship by a religious minority keeps the population isolated from the rest of the world in a state of poverty and fear. Or Saudi Arabia, where a corrupt monarchy has managed to squander its huge oil revenues while refusing to modernize society under the name of a fundamentalist reading of Islam. Or Iran, where a theocracy of old men is oppressing a majority of young men and women who long for a better future. Judt means that Israel is an anachronism compared to Europe. But according to his reading, modern Poland and Serbia, for instance, are anachronisms, because they are based on a view of a unity of nation and state. Conversely, Poland of the interwar period, 40 percent of whose population was made up of Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, and other minorities, and which was rife with ethnic conflict and antiSemitism, points out the way of the future for Israel. Or Yugoslavia, which broke up in a sea of blood.
Judt neglects to mention that Germany, the most populous and important European country, still bases its citizenship on a law dating back to 1913, which defines Germans by blood and heritage, and that a majority of Germans today support the idea of minorities accepting the Leitkultur (primary culture) of the land. He also curiously leaves aside the fact that about a fifth of the French recently voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen in the name of kicking out foreigners, and that traditionally the French republic accepts foreigners only if they are willing to become culturally French republicans. Finally, he does not mention that the European Union is based on the principal of opening its interior borders and sealing itself off from the rest of humanity, which is banging on its gates in despair caused not least by economic policies pursued by Europe and the United States vis-à-vis the poorer countries of the world.
The idea of a binational state in Israel/ Palestine is absurd not only in the light of recent history, but also because apart from Tony Judt and the late Edward Said, no one wants it, neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs. Even the so-called post-Zionist Israeli left spoke before the last intifada about “a state for all its citizens,” which meant equal rights for Israeli Arabs, but never of a binational state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Avraham Burg, cited so approvingly by Judt, would be vehemently opposed to this idea. For Hamas or Islamic Jihad the notion of sharing sovereignty with the Jews, whether in Nablus or in Jaffa, is anathema. And the more reasonable and rational people on either side of the emerging security fence—whose numbers are diminishing every day—know that if such a binational state were ever to be imposed, it would spell civil war and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale even for this long-suffering region. The only solution is finally to create two separate states, more or less along the 1967 Green Line, with as a high a wall as is needed separating between them. Most Israeli settlers would be happy to accept compensation and move to Tel Aviv; the remaining minority can either stay in the Palestinian state or replace the Palestinians in Israeli jails. Most Palestinians would prefer to have peace and a modicum of economic prosperity in their own state than return to their nonexistent villages in pre-1967 Israel. When the wounds heal and the memories fade, perhaps the fence could also be removed. But for now separation and mutually recognized statehood is the only viable solution.
Omer Bartov
John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
To the Editors:
Tony Judt paints an offensive caricature of the State of Israel in order to justify his call for the demise of that country’s sovereignty and independence. He calls for a binational state to replace the State of Israel on the grounds that it is failing on many levels and cannot be both a Jewish and democratic state.
In fact, Israel is a modern state with all the democratic and civil rights of any modern Western country. Its identity as a Jewish state is comparable to France’s identity as a state of the French and Italy’s identity as a state of the Italians. Minorities live and flourish in all these countries, have equal rights and protections, but there is something inherently French, Italian, and Israeli to these countries.
Mr. Judt chooses to see Israel as a failure but the truth is it’s a remarkable story in the face of tremendous odds. It has built a modern democratic society while integrating millions of people from different backgrounds. It has managed to be an open society with a boisterous press despite being surrounded by enemies intent on killing Israelis and, if possible, destroying the state. It has maintained moderate positions including the overwhelming readiness to make significant concessions on territory and settlements despite the murderous intent of its neighbors. And it has been a staunch friend of America in the face of extremist Islam which sees America as the enemy, not because of Israel, but because of everything we represent—modernity, power, wealth, and democracy.
Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League
New York City
To the Editors:
Tony Judt believes that it is a hopeless task to persuade Israeli Jews to remove 200,000 of their fellows from the West Bank and Gaza. So he wants to persuade them instead, all five million of them, to give up political sovereignty and remove themselves from the society of states. The craziness of the proposal is matched, of course, by everyone else’s craziness when it comes to Israel/Palestine, but it does have its own peculiar features. Here is a state with the strongest army in the region, with a nuclear arsenal, a flourishing economy that provides (despite today’s hard times) a Euro-American standard of living, and the only democratic political system in the whole of the Middle East. And Judt proposes to make it disappear. It is a nineteenth-century nation-state, and the nation-state is, as we all know, an anachronism: away with it!
Ridding the world of the nation-state is an interesting, if not a new, idea. But why start with Israel? Why not start with France—which is, after all, the original nation-state? The French led the way into this parochial political structure that, in violation of all the tenets of advanced opinion, privileges a particular people, history, and language. Let them lead the way out. Or the Germans, or the Swedes, or the Bulgarians, or the Japanese, all of whom have enjoyed those “privileges” much longer than the Jews.
But the real problem with Judt’s proposal is not that it unfairly focuses on a single nation-state. Israel is, after all, an occupying power, at war with another people. The real problem is that Judt’s proposal would simply replace one nation-state with another. In the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, there will, within a decade or so, be a Palestinian majority. And a Palestinian majority will, sooner or later, make a Palestinian state. This is the explicit goal of Palestinian nationalists, and the recent history of the movement hardly suggests that they have given it up. They would ask the same question I have asked: If the nation-state is to be abolished, why should we go first? (And they would think it no more than marginally better to go second.)
