Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Thank You, Tony Judt

Emmanuel Navon

www.navon.com

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don't actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their "imagined self." It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn't exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn't been invented. There is also no point in making such a point–except, that is, if you manage to prove that what you believe to be real is just an illusion. Pull the fighting Jews out of Plato's cave, make them realize that what they thought to be true and real is just a fiction and a sham, and you've solved the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand's contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history "is at best redundant" ("Israel must unpick its ethnic myth," Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand's book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

For Judt, "the perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory … is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio." In other words, one of the central tenets of Judaism is "perverse" and is "the single most important" reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So Jews must abandon one of their strongest beliefs –a belief that gave them hope and helped them survive throughout two millennia of exile. On the other hand, the fact that Islam holds that a land that was once ruled by Muslims must be "liberated" from "infidels" is not a problem. Nor is the fact that the Palestinians insist on invading Israel with millions of descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 refugees, or that they deny the very existence of the Jerusalem Temple. The problem is not Muslim theology or Palestinian myths. The problem is Jewish faith.

Judt's ultimate "hope" is to establish what he calls "a natural distinction" between Jews and Israel. Judt is correct in assuming that, were Jews to lose their unity as a people and to abandon their faith, then Israelis would inevitably come to wonder what it is exactly that they are fighting for. And this would, undoubtedly, be one way of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Judt has the merit of saying clearly what Europe's public discourse has been insinuating for years: That if the price for Jewish survival is a war that may never end, then the Jews "must" give up.

They won't. Three thousand years of Jewish history and unfathomable survival are here to contradict Judt's wishful thinking. But we Jews must be vigilant and realize that our survival does, indeed, depend on our unity and faith–and we should be thankful to Shlomo Sand and to Tony Judt for reminding us of that, and for reinforcing Jewish combativeness by calling for Israel's surrender.

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