This is a remarkable statement from the former prime minister of Israel. He’s explictly saying that Israel is not necessary as a refuge for the world’s Jewry. His statement lays bare the most glaring contradiction of contemporary Zionism. Why is it necessary to do things like raze Bedouin villages, bar African immigrants, and worry about the growing Arab population — all in service of preserving the Jewish character of the state — when, as Barak says, "Jews know that they can land on their feet in any corner of the world"?
Barak is in effect agreeing with the formulation of the late historian Tony Judt that caused so much controversy when he wrote it in 2003: that Israel is an anachronism. Here’s the key passage from Judt’s New York Review of Books essay:
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
