Tony Judit in Financial Times article advocates stripping Israel of Jewish identity

Financial Times article advocates stripping Israel of Jewish identity

 

Yesterday's Financial Times published an opinion piece by New York University professor and Israel critic Tony Judt. Arguing that 'Israel must unpick its ethnic myth', Judt claims that Israel's classification as a Jewish state is the underlying cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and as such, this element of the state's identity should be removed..

The 'ethnic myth' of the title is a reference to the belief that the Jewish people constitute a nation, and are therefore deserving of national self-determination. This view was recently criticised by Shlomo Sand in his newly translated book, 'The Invention of the Jewish People', and Judt builds on the premise that the Jewish people are invented to promote what he sees as 'the logical upshot of [Sand's] arguments': that the creation of one bi-national state is the only solution to the conflict.

Whilst acknowledging that 'there were other justifications for the State of Israel', Judt contends that 'Prof Sand has undermined the conventional case for a Jewish state'. Once the premise that 'Israel's uniquely "Jewish" quality is an imagined or elective affinity' is accepted, Judt then proceeds to describe what he believes is the only acceptable conclusion: that Jewish national self-determination is illegitimate.

Throughout the article, Judt refers to the very notion of Jewish nationalism as a delusion; a 'perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory [which] is dysfunctional in many ways'. While he recognises that a two-state solution 'might still be the best compromise', Judt states that an inevitable downside to this arrangement would be that 'it would leave Israel intact in its ethno-delusions.'

These 'ethno-delusions' have a far wider impact then simply reducing 'all non-Jewish Israeli citizens and residents to second-class status', as Judt claims. Instead, Israel's classification as a Jewish state 'is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestine imbroglio.' He also suggests that Israel is to blame for the wider conflict between itself and the Arab world. He argues that if America were to 'see the futility of attaching American foreign policy to the delusions of one small Middle Eastern state', then Israel 'would have to make other friends, preferably among its neighbours.'

It is clear that Judt finds much to criticise in the way that Israel defines itself, and while he uses the publication of 'The Invention of the Jewish people' as a springboard to present his argument in the Financial Times that it is an illegitimate state, his belief that Jewish self-determination is unacceptable predates Sand's work by many years. In his article 'Israel: The Alternative', published in 2003 in The New York Review of Books, Judt stated that Israel is 'not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one'. Tuesday's article carries the same message: until Israel stops defining itself as the Jewish national home, there will never be a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

9 December 2009