Tony Judt is of the opinion that the “occupation” is the root of all anti-Israel.
Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel’s existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism – or else a paragon of modernizing energy “making the desert bloom.”
Ah, to see the world through Tony Judt’s eyes. Ah, the days when Israel had legitimacy, and when the world actually liked her. Ah, for the days when the United Nations didn’t issue anti-Israel after anti-Israel resolutions.
Like in 1960, when the UN Security Council released this resolution, in protest of violating Argentina’s sovereignty. Why did Israel violate Argentina’s sovereignty? Because the Mossad found Adolf Eichmann hiding there, and kidnapped him, brought him to Israel, and tried and executed the Nazi war criminal.
In 1961, there was another UN Security Council resolution against Israel, this one on “the question of Palestine.” But — but — I thought it was all about the occupation!
In 1962, the UN felt it necessary to come down on Syria’s side in this resolution on the Lake Tiberias incident. Here you can see a report to President Kennedy discussing the many times Israel has been chastised for “retaliatory raids” in response to her Arab neighbors firing on her citizens. But Tony says the world admired little victim Israel, the Middle East David. According to him, before 1967, Israel was the world’s darling!
In November of 1966, days after three Israeli soldiers were killed by a mine laid by terrorists from Jordan, the IDF entered the Jordanian village of Samu, destroying several buildings. Three civilians and at least fifteen soldiers died, as well as an Israeli commander.
Fatah was raiding regularly from Jordan for years. The raid was in retaliation for attacks on Israelis. The UN was silent about the years of terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, but found its voice over the Samu incident. Against Israel, of course. Always against Israel. If there is a resolution against the PLO or Fatah in existence, I’ll eat my sneakers.
When you review the UN Security Council resolutions in 1967, you don’t see a single resolution condemning, say, Egypt’s closing the Straights of Tiran to Israeli shipping (a clear violation of international law), let alone notice of the UN Secretary General’s removal of UN forces from the Sinai at Egypt’s request — clearly an indication that something nasty was about to occur. Instead, there are no resolutions concerning the Middle East at all — until the Arab nations started losing the war.
Let us return to Mr. Judt’s article:
I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War – and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel’s earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.
Essentially, his argument is one of sheer anecdotal evidence. Since he remembers that people on his college campus actually liked Israel back then, obviously, that was how the world was. Physical evidence of anti-Israel resolutions notwithstanding, Judt has declared Israel to be popular — until shortly after the Six-Day War, when the territories came under Israeli control. (As for college students not caring about events nine years previous, well, uh, duh. College students, hello!)
But Israel tried to give the territories back. With the exception of Jerusalem, they were ready to give Jordan the West Bank, and Egypt Gaza and Sinai. All they asked in return from their neighbors was peace. But the Arab nations refused. By putting that responsibility solely on Israel’s shoulders, Judt ignores the Arab nations’ infamous “Three No’s of Khartoum“: No negotiation, no recognition, and no peace with Israel. Judt ignores the fact that the occupation is mostly the fault of the Arabs, and that Israel did not want to control the West Bank and Gaza.
As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the “West Bank” and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians’ case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.
[…] Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless.
Do you think, perhaps, that might be because the palestinian propaganda effort, aided and abetted by the mainstream media’s anti-Israel bias, could have had anything to do with that? Do you think that perhaps, just perhaps, the overwhelming tilt towards the palestinians in academia might have something to do with that? But then, Tony Judt wouldn’t see that at all, as he is a proponent of the one-state solution. An advocate of the death of the Jewish state cannot be counted on to accurately reflect the history of that state. His bias is unmistakable; Israel will never be in the right.
I would not be at all surprised to find out that Tony Judt did not admire pre-1967 Israel, but then, I’ve always been a bit of a cynic with an eye for catching bullshit.
Another main point of his article — that Israel has not changed at all in the last forty or so years — is patently false. And he relies on his other famous tropes: That Israel plays the anti-Semitism card fast and loose, criticism of Israel, yadda yadda yadda and, of course, he quotes Walt and Mearsheimer with respect and affection. But it is this that betrays Judt’s absolutely naivete and blindness:
However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment – because people expect so little from Israel today – a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’ bluff by offering the movement’s leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately beneficial effects.
Hamas has stated, time and again, that they will never recognize Israel. Hamas has stated, time and again, that their purpose, their mission, their only reason for being, is to establish an Islamic state where Israel used to be. Hamas has reiterated Khartoum’s three no’s, and they continue to do so on a regular basis. Hamas will never recognize Israel. They are playing the same word games that Arafat used to play.
Only a naif or wilfully blind man refuses to take Hamas at its word. But Judt’s conclusion proves that it isn’t Israel that refuses to grow. It is Judt and his ilk on the left:
But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won’t always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population.
Ah, here we go. It’s South Africa all over again. Except, well, it’s not. But hey, let’s hear it for the 80s, and all that great music and big hair, and We Are The World and Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City.
You go on thinking that, Tony. It obviously makes you feel better about hating your ancestral homeland. Guess that one-state solution isn’t so appealing anymore, so you have to have something new to work towards. Or something old.
Maybe you could get a bunch of aging rockers together and get them to rewrite Sun City into “Ain’t Gonna Play Jerusalem” or some such nonsense. People would really stand up and take notice.
Well, no, they wouldn’t. But I would. Promise.
References to 1948 and “Nabka” blow any claims that “occupied Palestinian territory” just refers to Gaza and West Bank and Golan completely out of the water.
Funny how Judt and his ilk refuse to acknowlege that in the North fields were plowed in armoured tractors and the dairy cows were in special stables to protect them from Syrian shelling during the years 1948 to 1967.
During those years the kids in the North never saw the stars because they were always sleeping in bomb shelters.
Where was the Western World let alone the UN?
If by accident a potted plant were to fall from a skyscraper onto Tony Judt’s head – I would not spend much time bewailing the incident.
Interesting that Haaretz gave this guy a paltform. It says a lot (negatively) about the mindset of its publishers.
The world is full of people who only love dead Jews. Judt is apparently one of them. Jews who fight back, who refuse to be victims, well, they’re imperialist war mongers, blah, blah.
This sentence is a key to Judt’s thought:
“Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left”
Clever revisionism. This is how Judt disposes a critical argument – that the post-1967 anti-Zionist/Semitic propaganda campaign was the or a root cause of left thought, a mirror of Soviet obsessions.
It poses that Soviet bloc anti-zionism is the same before and after the ’67 war. Not true. Only after did the Soviets start their incessant campaign. And he implies that the “non-communist left” regarded Israel well because the Soviets opposed Israel. Laughable, but telling revisionism in order to portray a “left” that was anti-Soviet.
The reality is the Soviet propaganda campaigns coined and originated all the templates for anti-Zionist left thought (racism, apartheid, colonialism, nationalism, etc.) These were imbibed by leftist critics. The campaign was incessant because the ’67 campaign piqued many Soviet fears. Their major exports, arms, were inferior. Nationalism, a great domestic fear of the Soviets borne out by the Soviet dissolution. Global Power politics. Need to suppress Arab oil production, coompetitors of just about the only other export anyone would buy from the Soviets. And good ol’ Russian anti-Semitism.
Joel says:
“Interesting that Haaretz gave this guy a paltform. It says a lot (negatively) about the mindset of its publishers.”
Haaretz and some of the Israeli left I suppose, are still engaged in a set of dual identities. One, Israel. The other, Western leftist discourse influenced by Marxism and Soviet foreign policy objectives posing as ideology. Since 1967 this divide has been problematic for the faith-based left. “Post Zionism” is a comfortable position within Marxism and the Soviet fears of nationalism, a domestic fear projected outward.
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Well, it’s false that the non-communist left liked Israel before 1967 unless you define “non-communist left” in a way that includes mildly liberal Demcorats, say, and no one else.
It’s worth looking for Ephraim Kishon’s article, “How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy,” written not long after the Six Days War. His thesis is that Israel forfeited world sympathy by…well, surviving. I have no doubt if they hadn’t left-wingers all over the world would hold Israel Memorial Days, lamenting that wonderful, kibbutznik country that so tragically went down before the onslaught.
My guess is that if the Israelis had to choose they’d opt for what happened rather than maintaining the sympathy of the world.
And your point is absolutely correct–when Judt says people liked Israel, he means pampered and cossetted western intellectuals like, say, Tony Judt liked Israel. Once defending Israel in the faculty lounge required a little backbone he caved in.
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Nice point about Judt’s statement that:
Tony Judt graduated Cambridge in 1969; he must have been 18 or 19 years old in 1967 — and 7 or 8 years old in 1956.
The “condition” of the Palestinians in 1967 was that they had the entire West Bank, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem, but three years earlier had formed the “Palestine Liberation Organization.” The geographical reference in the title of their new organization was not to the West Bank, but to Israel.
We don’t we (Jews) excommunicate anybody anymore. It seems to me that Judt and Noam Chomsky, just to name two, have earned the honor by joining those whose sole desire is the extermination of the Jewish people.
So, why not hold a ceremony so that when anti-Semites say: “But, the Jew Judt says Israel is an apartheid state.” We can say, well that is his opinion, but he is not Jewish.
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@ Alex Bensky
Kishon’s “How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy†is 1962, after 1956, written. :-)