There’s a long article here about the British historian Tony Judt and from it I’d like to focus on the following paragraph:
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London’s East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. “Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable,” Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. “I was the ideal convert,” he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. [… ]In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were “right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views”; others, he says, “were just dumb idiots with guns.” Israel, he came to believe, “had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society.”
The young Judt converted to Zionism. The word convert is most commonly associated with religion. One converts to a specific creed and by so doing accepts that it has a particular hold on the God given truth, a grasp of what is right, just and necessary that is denied, wholly or in part, to other faiths. When one converts, one lifts up one’s gaze from human imperfection to the divinely ordained.
Later, Judt comes across some boorish and racist Israelis, feels defrauded in his conversion and begins a drift towards his current position which is, as I understand it, that Jews have no right to self government. Naturally, I realize that this is just one article and that that Judt didn’t write it but I would like to suggest that movement sketched out in the paragraph I have quoted represents an increasingly common trope in contemporary anti-Zionist discourse - and in some cases antisemitic discourse too.
The writer begins, usually from afar, with a high opinion of the nobility of the Zionist cause. To him or her idea of the Jews governing themselves seems a fine thing. Mention may be made of the kibbutzim, the socialist ideals of the early pioneers, the greening of the desert, the heroic victories in the early wars and suchlike. Later the writer may visit Israel or simply broaden their perspective on it. They realize that there is plenty wrong with Israel, that many Israelis are as stupid, racist and small-minded as their own neighbors back home in whatever leafy corner of the UK or the USA they hail from. They realize, in short, that Israel is just a country inhabited by a range of people similar in moral rectitude and acuity of political vision to those that live in Estonia, Ireland, the Cotswolds and Cambridge, MA.
Disappointment and rejection now set in. The Jews sold Zionism as a utopian historical project in which they could establish their own self-government in the form of the creation of a just society and do so without harming a hair on anyone’s head. What they have in fact created is a country with many problems of inequality and injustice at home and still with many enemies abroad.
Faced with a disappointment like this the convert might react in a number of ways. He or she might say “Well, I once had an unrealistically idealistic vision of what Israel could be but now I realize that hell, Jews are just people and Israel is simply a country. While I’m not going to cheer for everything Israel does I’m not going to say that it should be destroyed either.” Or he or she might say “I was duped! The whole thing was a lie from the start, or at any rate from 1967. The only thing for it now is to put an end to the pretension of the Jews to govern themselves and create a single state for Israelis and Palestinians. And no, I’m not bothered by the fact that neither Israelis nor Palestinians want this or that it would likely lead to the expulsion of the Jews from what is now Israel. The main thing is to take revenge on those who conned me with a dream of an unreal, utopian Zionism, chief amongst them, my youthful self.”
Bravo! I hate it when these Islington dinner-table Jews think Israel was a project to impress the world and not a tiny country that has the flaws and features of any other.
Thank you for the article.
I understand the point about people like Judt feeling let down as soon as they find anything that contradicts their unrealistically idealized view of Zionism, but let’s not go overboard with this “country like any other” thing: by any standards Israel’s achievements were, and continue to be, remarkable, possibly unprecedented, and I am really puzzled that presumably intelligent people can be so influenced by a few bad apples/ experiences and fail to see the larger picture.
Reminds me of the story of Egyptian Marxist Jew Joel Beinin. Same disillusionment, same self-hatred. Thank you for pointing out there are many ways to deal with confusion, not just one called hatred.
While I also reject Judt’s position, I understand it differently to you. I don’t think he rejected zionism on account of being confronted with a reality he didn’t like about Israel that contrasted with his previous vision of the country. Rather, it was that he came to believe that the unpleasent reality he saw was the result of factors intrinsic to zionism.
His problem was not a feeling that Israel was normal when he thought it was perfect. Rather it was that he came to feel that what he saw as its problematic abnormalities were the product of its zionism.
Again, I’m not in complete agreement with him, but I think this is his position and it should be understood (and therefore critiqued) as being such.
I just read Tony Judt’s latest series of short impressions about his life in the New York Review of Books (February issue not on line yet) and it seems to me that had the unfortunate Mr. Judt not been dying of a horrible disease, (and I do wish him well) they would not have been published.
In these apercus he says that studying German was one of the best things that ever happen to him in his life and being involved in the Zionist movement was one of the worst. He called Israel a prison and the Kibbutz a cell in that prison. (He has also described, elsewhere, that is own condition makes him feel as if he were imprisoned in his own body.)
Now, I lived on an Israeli Kibbutz and I never felt as if I was in a “prison there.” More importantly the many millions of Jews who live in Israel don’t consider it a prison either.
His latest writings show the mental deterioration of a once lucid thinker. For example, in the Review article he states that when he left the Kibbutz their leaders “considered him dead.” It’s as if he were comparing his leaving the Kibbutz to an excommunication from a religion. He offers no evidence and I have no idea what he is talking about. Judt’s hatred of Israel is based on something personal. He seems to blame Zionism both consciously and unconsciously for life’s ills. Eamonn is therefore right to see a religious like disillusion in his views on Zionism: “Tony Judt: Anti-Zionist as Disillusioned Convert”
One would have hoped that his friends and editors would have asked him to expend, clarify and most importantly document his charges. Unfortunately he has attracted a cult following who revere him for his anti-Zionism and they would be last ones to ask for evidence that Israel is ‘a prison and that its citizens prisoners.’
The carping short memoir by Tony Judt I mentioned above is now on line:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23601
Three Memoirs by Tony Judt
New York Review of Books
Volume 57, Number 2 · February 11, 2010
Jacob,
It’s behind a sub wall. If you have it could you send it to me?
E
I don’t Eamonn, I read it at my local library which has a subscription. I stopped subscribing to that rag years ago.
It’s worth reading, though, and it will confirm your own view about Judt’s religious like conversion away from his early view of Zionism.
Well, Judt has now time to think. I have a suggestion for the direction of his thinking. Disillusioned or not, one should never allow to be used by the enemies of his own, vulnerable, tragic people.