Evan Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Ed profiles Tony Judt, and does a nice job tracing his path to the groundbreaking one-state essay in the New York Review of Books. But note that Goldstein uses the opportunity to convene the liberal-Zionist bashers, most of them deeply invested in the Jewish state, instead of focusing on the central truth of the matter, that Judt was moved by his own Jewish experience in the liberal west to try and imagine a liberal future for Israel/Palestine. And that the NYRB has essentially retreated from his position. Extended excerpts:
Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel.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. (A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a "bourgeois deviation.") 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."..
Early in 2002, when Judt was at home recovering from radiation and surgery to treat cancer in his left arm, he became "more and more worried about the failure of Israel to do the right thing." In May of that year, The New York Review published his first major statement on the Middle East conflict, the solution to which, he contended, was obvious: two states, the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and no right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees. Judt fingered Israel for the bloody impasse, provocatively likening its actions to those of France in its colonial war against Algeria. By 1958, he noted, the damage that French policy was inflicting on the Algerians was surpassed by the harm France was inflicting upon itself. Israel, he wrote, was in a similarly dire predicament.
Judt’s historical analogy drew sharp rejoinders. "If Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France’s imperialism?" asked the political writer Paul Berman. That was a good question. A few months later, Judt revised his position. "The time has come to think the unthinkable," he proclaimed in a widely disseminated essay in The New York Review. The two-state solution—a Jewish state and an Arab state—"is probably already doomed," and the least-bad option remaining was for Israel to convert from a Jewish state to a binational state. "The depressing truth," Judt wrote, "is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."
According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judt’s essay placed the one-state idea "squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas." The Forward described it as "the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism." Within weeks, The New York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to the editor. Suddenly, says Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice weighing in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of Judt’s friend the literary critic Edward Said, in 2003, left a "yawning void" in the national conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is Judt himself who has filled that void.
And like Said, who also advocated a one-state solution, Judt has become a very public target for criticism. An op-ed essay in The Jerusalem Post accused him of "pandering to genocide." Omer Bartov, a professor of European history at Brown University, dismissed the binational idea as "absurd"; Walzer, co-editor of Dissent magazine, derided it as an escapist fantasy that "offers no practical escape from the work of repressing the terrorist organizations and withdrawing from the Occupied Territories." Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University and a close friend of Judt’s for a quarter of a century, blasted the article as "one more in a long series of calls (perhaps the silliest yet) for Jewish self-immolation."
The most trenchant critique is that Judt’s embrace of binationalism echoes the reckless, unrealistic style of trafficking in ideas that he condemned in Past Imperfect. "I, too, wish everyone was a cosmopolitan Kantian, and we had one huge democracy for the brotherhood of all mankind," says Gadi Taub, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of a forthcoming book, The Settlers and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale University Press). "But these are two peoples (Jews and Palestinians) severely traumatized by the lack of national independence." To argue that such a situation lends itself to shared sovereignty in a binational state is, says Taub, "the strikingly irresponsible kind of thing that intellectuals sometimes do for their own convenience vis-à-vis their own conscience. In reality, a one-state solution will doom Israelis and Palestinians to a permanent civil war."
Judt seems unconcerned that his public image is now so tied to his views on Israel. "Google me," he says nonchalantly. "You will end up at the binationalism essay straightaway." He goes on to observe that "to the outside world, I’m a crazed, self-hating Jewish left-winger." Joking aside, Judt is not entirely comfortable in his role as the public face of the anti-Zionist crowd. "I wouldn’t call myself anti-Zionist, because there are openly anti-Semitic people who use anti-Zionism as a cover," he explains. Some of them, like the white nationalist David Duke, have reached out to him, prompting accusations that he is giving intellectual cover to bigots. Despite such "foul vilification," says the Columbia historian Fritz Stern, "Tony has, if anything, only become more outspoken."
There have been efforts to silence Judt.
“But these are two peoples (Jews and Palestinians) severely traumatized by the lack of national independence.” To argue that such a situation lends itself to shared sovereignty in a binational state is, says Taub, “the strikingly irresponsible kind of thing that intellectuals sometimes do for their own convenience vis-à-vis their own conscience. In reality, a one-state solution will doom Israelis and Palestinians to a permanent civil war.”
This is an accurate summary.
If Judt and other advocates were able to motivate sufficient majority of Israelis and Palestinians to regard themselves as “one nation”, and preferred civilist non-nationalist and non-religious parties in their regions, then it would be a current possibility.
Its not yet. In the name of sober realism, its better to acknowledge that, rather than in invest in the short-term in a discontinuous ideal (that as likely as not may not even be an ideal).
If the public advocacy of a single-state detracts from the progress from an oppressive state to two sovereign states, why pursue it. How can one then justify their activist or intellectual life if it deters peace, reconciliation, justice?
One man, one vote.
Then argue out the details after the election.
Otherwise, the oppression will simply continue.
Even if one doesn’t favor a one state solution, the fear of a one state solution is a tool that can be used to push for a two state solution acceptable to most Palestinians. In the US we tend to start with the idea of a two state solution and then as potsherd said in comment 2, the pressure is on the Palestinians to give away this, and this, and this, and this and then whatever the Israelis are willing to give up is called “a generous offer”. The Palestinians should ask for their basic human rights (the right of return) and then, if they wish, they can use it as a big fat bargaining chip. It’s indecent that they should be expected to give it up at all and while one can concede that a one state solution might turn out very badly (I’d worry about that), if they are going to give it up Israel should give up something pretty big in exchange. Palestinians are asked to throw away their biggest claim for nothing.
I don’t see what is so sacred about the 78 percent 22 percent division for instance–why should Israeli annexations of Palestinian land be balanced by an equal amount of Israeli land given in return? Give the Palestinians Aqaba, for instance. Let’s see some really hard bargaining in favor of the Palestinians for a change.
It would be nice if all the voices busying themselves bashing Judt would have been pressing Israel to reverse the occupation of the WB that makes their preferred two-state solution impossible.
I am very concerned about current developments. There is a lot of pressure being placed now on Mahmoud Abbas to “return to negotiations” towards a 2S agreement. Now, when Netanyahu is pressing for a thing, you can be sure it is not a good thing for the Palestinians. There has even been talk that Abbas should be deposed and an even more complaisant puppet put in his place, who will do what he’s told.
What Netanyahu wants, what Clinton is pressing for, is the Indian chief’s signature on the treaty. They want Abbas, or some other empty suit, to sign away the Palestinian birthright and accept the bowl of pottage, the string of beads in exchange for Manhattan. Once they have the signature, they can wave the treaty in the air, call it a solution, and reject all subsequent calls for Palestinian rights.
They want someone to sign away the Palestinian right of return. They want a signature signing away the right of Palestinians to the whole of the occupied WB and accepting a Bantustan “state.” They want a signature signing away the Jordan Valley. They want a signature signing away Jerusalem. They want a signature signing away the Palestinian state’s right to defend itself, signing away its water rights, its rights to control its own borders, its own airspace.
It is a full-court press going on today, and every voice calling for a “two state solution” is only adding to this pressure. The “two state solution” of Netanyahu’s dreams is the death of Palestinian national aspirations. All he needs is a signature on a piece of paper, and he wins.
The USA Civil War fomented lots of intellectual chatter at the time. The key to deciphering chatter concerning the I-P situation is to imagine that the Confederates are the Israelis. But they have the industrial power of the Union.
If Lee had won at Gettysburg, both France and England would have given them total support. Are we there again?
It seems to me that the debate being advanced by many opponents of the one state solution is merely a stalling tactic. It is similar to the ‘interim negotiations’ tactic which seeks to postpone the inevitable and prolong the so-called peace process, providing Israel with ample time to create facts on the ground.
In the last few years, the Israeli government has been intent on tightening the noose on the West Bank and Gaza to the breaking point hoping for a third Intifada and then, perhaps, justifying the Transfer of Palestinians across the Jordan river. Case in point is East Jerusalem where entire neighborhoods have been evacuated of their Palestinian residents.
The land grab is not confined to East Jerusalem, or West Jerusalem or even to one or two colonies in the West Bank. It is in fact taking place in northern Israel too, in the Galilee, albeit at a slower pace.
If current trends are any indication, then the future doesn’t bode well, for Israel seems reluctant to adopt either solution, neither the two state solution nor the one state solution. That is not on the Israeli government’s agenda because those two solutions are viewed as lose-lose solutions from the Israeli perspective.
It is hard to imagine any visionary within Israel ascending to power anytime soon and making such a decision that requires moral courage.
Not to sound like a broken record, but again, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions will be the only way to — not only bring about a non-violent solution — but the only way so-called liberal Zionists can truly save Israel from itself.