Tony Judt takes aim at settlements
New York Times Op-Ed contributor Tony Judt, a British historian who is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, does not much like the idea of Jews living in the West Bank.
In an Op-Ed on Monday, he writes that Israel promotes the use of the word "settlements" to connote something positive, due to the word's association with the pioneering settlers of Israel's kibbutzim. But, he writes, in truth the settlements contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the annexation of land conquered by force. (Actually, Israel has not annexed the West Bank, but why quibble?)
Judt also inflates the size and proportion of the settler population -- they number half a million, which exceeds the population of Tel Aviv by one-third, he writes. Judt fails to mention that the Jewish residents of eastern Jerusalem, whom he counts as settlers, are not considered as such by Israelis (or, generally speaking, by the U.S. government) or that metropolitan Tel Aviv actually has 3 million people -- it's just the municipal boundaries that are small.
Judt also makes Bar-Ilan University sound like a Taliban madrassa by calling it "the heartland of rabbinical intransigence" and the place where "Yigal Amir learned to hate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before heading off to assassinate him in 2005."
He concludes:
President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond.
Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel’s defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. They are nothing but a colonial takeover that the United States has no business subsidizing.
While Judt slams the American news media for taking Benjamin Netanyahu's "bait" of "honeyed cliches" on Palestinian statehood -- "On June 14 he gave a much-anticipated speech in which he artfully blew smoke in the eyes of his American interlocutors," Judt writes -- Israeli political commentator Ari Shavit counters in a Times Op-Ed (which appears only online) that most analysis of Bibi's speech failed to grasp what made it so historically important:
Many failed to see what was new in Netanyahu’s vision. For decades, peace professionals and activists believed that when peace comes, Palestine will be demilitarized and Israel will be Jewish. Americans, Europeans and Israelis involved in the peace process took this premise to be self-evident.
But the Palestinians never accepted this premise. They did not agree to limit the sovereignty of their future state so that Israel’s security would be guaranteed. They did not recognize the existence of a Jewish people which expresses its right of self-determination in the Jewish nation-state. They did not go through the profound ideological conversion required so that a real two-state peace could be achieved and sustained.
That is why Netanyahu’s new interpretation of the two-state solution is of historical importance.
Its significance is two-fold. On the one hand it seals Israel’s psychological and ideological conversion regarding the Palestinians; on the other hand it calls for a similar Palestinian conversion. It commits even the Israeli right to the need to establish a Palestinian state, but it demands an unequivocal Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state.
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In order to advance the argument being made by the Professor, it is necessary to distort everything else too. That is the only way you can support the faulty conclusions. By the way, is the Professor also an international lawyer? What are his credentials in regard to the International Law?
I don’t deny the fact, that I hate Tony Judt more than I hate Ahmadinejad. Iran’s
mad man wishes to eradicate israel and he says it clear and loud. Judt wishes
to eradicate Israel, because it is too “postmodern” for his leftist taste and starts his “explanation” with memories of his short life in a kibbutz. This self-hating Jewish enemy of a Jewish state makes me sick.
If you read Judt carefully, you come away with the impression that his anti-Zionism leads him to berate Israel for all its “settlements”, pre- as well as post-1967 communities. Do awau with it all.
Unfortunately,the light that T.Macabbee would enjoy having the Israelis see on the subject of peace and goodwill with a Palestinian Arab state would be the exhaust of incoming missles from their neighbors’ launch sites.Regarding control of the West Bank, the Israelis would be worse than fools for not taking the necessary security requirements to protect their populations against the efforts by Hamas and Fatah-yes, the latter also-to eliminate the Jewish State.Nations interested in peace with Israel would receive the generous respect and sincere co-operation in building a solid future that should be demanded.Peace with Egypt resulted in the return of the Sinai and its oil field, and removal of civilian settlements and military bases in the Sinai ;peace with Jordan,a long continuous quiet border .
If it weren’t so dangerous, it would have been merely boringly predictable. This Tony, whatever his surname is, or whatever his academic credentials are, would have been just another windbag spouting off the usual platitudes about Israeli “violations of international law” if it weren’t for the fact that he, as is his ilk, is contributing flammable fuel for the Islamofascist match.
Not to understand the Israeli case and to ignore the realities of a sixty-year siege (long before the “occupation” and the ‘illegal settlements") is to engage in a horrific fantasy, the kind GeorgeOrwell described as having a particular attraction for the idiot savants of the academe.
I wish they would just go away, but I guess we’ll have to continue putting up with these incomprehensibly angry children of our people.
Judt a “historian”? He may know something about medieval Europe, but certainly nothing about recent Middle East history.
Judt a “professor”? Well...I can only feel sad about his students and the distorted narratives he is teaching them.
The good professor should have a look at Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, recognized under international law since July, 1922 and do one of the following:
a) admit his error and issue an apology, to be displayed in the NYT as prominently as his original article, or…
b) tell us why the provisions of the Mandate are no longer valid, who abrogated them, and when it did happen.
Anything short of the above is unbecoming of a respected academic.
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Truthiness Macabbee
06/22/09 12:03 PM
You’re right, Uriel; Israel has not “annexed” the West Bank, so I guess it’s just “quibbling” to point out how much land the settlers have taken. Are they simply “borrowing” it? It’s obvious that for the settler movement, this is HOW they’re going to get the West Bank, through “facts on the ground” rather than through official annexation. But I suppose as long as Israel hasn’t “officially” annexed the land, nothing they do with it should be considered “illegal” in the eyes of the world, right?
RE: counting Jews in East Jerusalem, Judt counts them because he is going by international law, not by what is convenient for Israel or her U.S. supporters.
Pointing out picky issues like how many Jews live in Tel Aviv proper versus the municipality, or how right-wing he describes Bar-Ilan, is a way for you to avoid the substance of Judt’s arguments, which I don’t see you addressing in this blog entry. The various abstractions that the Palestinians have or have not yet accepted (the supposed “historically important” parts of Netanyahu’s speech) are diversionary tactics to avoid acknowledging that (a) Israel controls the land, (b) Israel has taken over and settled large swaths of it, and (c) Israel has total decision-making power over whether or not to give the Palestinians their own state.
Yes, keep “quibbling” over whether or not the Palestinians have had their “profound ideological conversion” yet as Israel continue to crush them under the Army’s boots. How long can this go on? How profound a conversion can an occupied people have?