Toward the end of his career as a much-lauded historian of 20th-century Europe, the late Tony Judt made a name writing scathing condemnations of American foreign policy and of Israel’s existence as the nation state of the Jews. Reviewing a recently-published collection of these essays, entitled When the Facts Change, Adam Kirsch finds Judt’s ideas both devoid of “novelty or originality” and disconnected from reality. Moreover, writes Kirsch, they bespeak a deep-seated pathology, perhaps best exemplified in a 2003 article calling for Israel’s dissolution, that has seized hold of many on the American-Jewish left:
[The article] is . . . a dramatization of the crisis of conscience that many liberal Jews now find themselves suffering with regard to Zionism. For Judt, Zionism is an ethnic nationalism, and if there is one thing 21st-century liberals pride themselves on, it is their rejection of ethnic nationalism. As Judt writes, we live in an age “when that sort of state has no place”: “In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel truly is an anachronism.”
What is striking about this is how deeply unhistorical it is, coming from a historian. For of course, we do not live in such a world—not in 2003 and still less in 2015. What may be true of the more cosmopolitan quarters of Europe and America is far from true in the Middle East, where Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, and Kurds are now engaged in a massive sectarian war stretching from Lebanon to Turkey. And as the rise of anti-immigration and nationalist parties in Europe suggests, even there the appetite for multiculturalism is dwindling. For the Jews of Israel to stake their future on joining a multinational state, just at the moment when all such states in the Middle East are unraveling in civil wars, would be madness.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/188406/tony-judt-is-aging-poorly