JANIP

ACADEMIA’S ANTI-ISRAEL IMPERATIVE

April 23rd, 2007 Posted by Ralph

Even when not explicitly on the agenda, knocking Israel seems to be a favorite pastime in academia nowadays. Last December, I attended two events at New York University that exemplify this tendency. One was a conference honoring the legacy of Hannah Arendt (otherwise a most satisfying and impressive affair). The other was a speech by the outspoken NYU historian, Tony Judt.

Hannah Arendt

Arendt was a controversial and complex character – a political philosopher and vocal social critic – widely regarded as a critic of Zionism. But the screening of an interview with her made clear that after leaving Nazi Germany for Paris, she worked with great dedication for a Zionist organization preparing young German and Polish Jews to move to Palestine in the 1930s. She was also the inspiration and mentor for a left-Zionist group in the US that included the young Nathan Glazer (who went on to be a well known sociologist and social critic in his own right). Her orientation was for a binational state in Palestine, but her connection with Zionism cannot be regarded as merely that of a critic.

A number of great Jewish-refugee minds from this period are honored in certain intellectual circles, not only for their academic work, but likewise for supposedly being critics or opponents of Zionism. Most of this is anti-Zionist wishful thinking or exaggeration; for example, Albert Einstein was probably a dove regarding the Arabs, but he was a renowned supporter of Zionism and Israel. The same can be said of the famed theologian-philosopher Martin Buber, who definitely was a peacenik, but spent nearly half of his long life as a Zionist oleh (immigrant) living in Palestine and Israel.Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a psychoanalyst who has written two books on Arendt and co-organized the program at NYU. She articulated a psychoanalytic theory of Israeli militarism that Israelis obsessively repeat the trauma of persecution or the Shoah with the goal of getting it right this time. This is a peculiarly reductionist and caustic way of thinking about Israel’s predicament.

This statement was made at a session with Rony Brauman, the writer for a film on the Eichmann trial, The Specialist, who served as president of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) from 1982 to 1994. Out of the blue, Mr. Brauman announced that he, a secular Jew, was not Zionist (supposedly like Arendt). During this French speaker’s rambling presentation, in his halting English, Brauman even gratuitously made the bizarre claim that the 1967 war was caused by Israel being a nuclear power.

At the concluding session, another jarring moment occurred when Steven Wasserman, a New York literary agent, recounted Arendt’s response to Gershom Scholem’s accusation that she didn’t love the Jewish people. Her response was that she couldn’t love the Jewish people or any people, because it makes no sense to love an abstract construct.

In the Q & A, I indicated that I knew what Arendt meant logically, but that she was ignoring the deep sentiment that Scholem expressed. Was he really wrong in feeling love for his people? And, at any rate, he was simply a scholar of Jewish mysticism.

Wasserman responded that Scholem wasn’t such an innocent: he had tried to get the refugee intellectual Walter Benjamin to join him in immigrating to Palestine. At which point I quickly interjected, And this would have saved his life. Wasserman had to admit that to be true.

Now Wasserman is not exactly a cold non-Jewish Jew and he indicated that Arendt was not either. Wasserman recommended a new anthology of Arendt’s work, The Jewish Writings, 1930–1975. But Wasserman had still felt compelled to express a visceral hostility toward Zionism, which emerged awkwardly as if he objected to people saving themselves from the Holocaust by emigrating to Palestine.

Tony Judt

On the evening of Dec. 4, New York University historian Tony Judt, having achieved the esteemed rank of University Professor, delivered an address before a packed auditorium at the NYU School of Law. Liberal intellectuals in an illiberal age was an artful talk that critiqued United States policy for taking a neoconservative direction in its perceived self-interest.

Judt caused a stir in the September 21, 2006 issue of the London Review of Books with a barbed rebuke at American liberals for becoming Bush’s Useful Idiots. It was an attack on Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens and others on the left who supported the US invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds, but some other liberals took it as insulting and grossly over-stated. The Yale legal scholar, Bruce Ackerman, and the Columbia professor of journalism and sociology, Todd Gitlin, responded defensively in The American Prospect with We Answer to the Name of Liberals. In his speech, Judt ridiculed their piece for including a defense of Israel’s right to exist; Judt implied that this was an extraneous point of political orthodoxy and but another proof of Israel’s undue hold on American public discourse.

He made a cutting remark on the Bush administration’s delay of a cease-fire on behalf of Israel in the recent war against Hezbollah, with no mention of Hezbollah’s aggression, and followed this with a slap at US silence in the face of a fascist, Avigdor Lieberman, being elevated to Israel’s cabinet. Mind you, I share much of his unhappiness with these events, but I see them as complicated. Judt felt no need to add that arguably fascist parties, which are clearly antisemitic, are in the government of the Palestinian Authority and fighting for power in Lebanon. Why would he? He was polemicizing, not making a fair recounting of the facts.

I was surprised at the relative lack of response (other than an ovation) from the thousand or so in the hall and decided to get to the wide-open microphone a few feet away. I asked if Prof. Judt still held to his view expressed in the New York Review of Books (Israel: The Alternative, Oct. 23, 2003) that Israel, as a “religio-ethnic state,” is an anachronism ; he had also argued in the article for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his reply, he wound up reiterating his notion that Israel’s Law of Return, privileging Jews, is uniquely unjust.

I had made a tactical error in sitting down for his answer. If I had remained at the mike, I might have responded that Germany and other countries have promulgated a similar right of return for ethnic kin and that Israel, although less than perfect in civil rights matters, is more liberal than any other country in the Middle East in the access of all its citizens (including Arabs) to judicial redress and the democratic process. (This is not to mention the separate problem of Palestinian Arabs in the territories who do not have comparable recourse.) I might also have added that Israel’s Law of Return should be regarded as affirmative action for an historically persecuted minority. That Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and numerous other countries in Asia regard themselves explicitly as Islamic, with most countries in the Middle East defining themselves as Arab, apparently eludes Prof. Judt’s notice.

Until Jan. 1, 2000, Germany did not even confer citizenship upon German-born children of guest workers. Germany has over two million people, mostly of Turkish origin, living long-term as non-citizens.

If Judt were only making valid liberal criticisms of Israel, I would be with him. I am a dovish Zionist and a partisan of the liberal left. I cringe at aspects of Israel’s laws and practices that are unjust, and am allied with elements in the Zionist spectrum, particularly the Meretz party, that fights for reform in this regard.

It’s profoundly disturbing that a liberal such as he, not an extremist, is questioning Israel’s right to exist. He’s suggesting a moral death penalty on the sovereign rights of the Jewish people as opposed to many other sovereign nations that have similar or far worse failings. A growing body of liberal intellectual opinion is clearly receptive to such a view.

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