Check out the review of the Tony Judt interview book by Francis Fukuyama in the Times last Sunday. It strikes me as so weirdly balanced between insult and a faint readiness to entertain that Judt might in the end be right. The controversy is all about Israel and Palestine. Judt is deemed genius lucid on everything else, which he of course was, but taken to the woodshed for criticizing a bit too strongly the neocons and their liberal Iraq war enablers, and being unrealistic about Israel–too much an “intellectual,” says Fukuyama.
Yet Judt’s arguments, and his great rogue state that uses the Holocaust as a get out of jail free card line, are quoted.
[Judt] argues that Israelis and their American supporters have used the Holocaust as a “Get Out of Jail Free card for a rogue state,” but seems to think that his own Jewishness and the fact that he lived in Israel at one point give him the authority to be as morally obtuse in return. Judt seems intent on transferring the lessons learned in Eastern Europe, where genuine liberalism mostly replaced ethnic nationalism, to a part of the world where such liberalism just won’t work. His proposal for a binational state was put forward with the self-certainty of an intellectual who has never had to deal with the realities of practicality and power…
[My students] are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes.
I wonder what Fukuyama really thinks–did he perhaps want to go further and praise Judt a bit more, and the Times wouldn’t let him? It kind of gives me that impression, but one never knows.
There’s a context. Fukuyama is a subtle and accomplished thinker, a former neoconservative who broke over the Iraq war. Eight years ago, he had a semi-famous feud with Charles Krauthammer, who implied without saying so directly that Fukuyama was an anti-semite for noticing that the neocons may have internalized Israeli hostility to Arabs, and that it distorted their world view. An outsider could see that Fukuyama clearly won the ensuing exchanges, but it’s a bruising thing for a gentile trying to maintain establishment credentials to go through– and not everyone has the thick skin or temperament for it.
Can one sense in Fukuyama’s criticism of Tony Judt’s anti-Zionism a whiff of Stockholm syndrome, of bruises that still need shielding. Or does he really think (as Israel and its Washington allies try to steer America into yet another Mideast war) that the “realities of practicality and power” require shutting our minds to the questions Judt was raising?
“[My students] are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes.”
American elite smugness there. The dismantling of the American social net 1980-2012 would not have been possible without the support of the academy. Where did all those working class jobs go? And what are we going to do with Cleveland ? Where is my pension fund?
Judt was a brave risk taker. Bless his soul. Out on the front lines of this issue. An ability to apply compassion to the Palestinians plight
Fukuyama has sure changed his tune.
Fukuyama: “[My students] are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes.”
His students live in the same world I do. I trust that he teaches them reality. I trust, in other words, that he teaches them that they live in a world that includes the USA where the high court has promoted the ridiculous idea that corporations are for many purposes “persons”. I hope he teaches them (for they are students, after all, trying to learn about the world they live in!) that Israel was created according to the “monstrous idea” that — just because Jews from Europe believed they needed a homeland and wanted one and wanted it in Palestine — that, therefore, it was OK (because of this “idea” the “monstrous project” of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947-50 was born.
Perhaps, he merely seeks to find refuge for university types and other intellectuals and say that the crimes and monstrous ideas and monstrous projects of recent years have not sprung from the academy.
Tell that to John Yoo.
“and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes.”
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What do you mean ” could often” Frankie? Seems to me, intellectuals “often are complicit in enormous crimes” — with a few exceptions.
Fukuyama: but [Judt] seems to think that his own Jewishness [and …] give him the authority to be as morally obtuse in return.
He “seems to think that”? Nowhere in the piece does Fukuyama quote or reason anything that supports that statement. He is connecting Judt’s Jewish background (not quoted in intself, just entered by Fukuyama) with a self-fabricated explanation for Judt’s attitude.
Now, when you use someones Jewish background to ”explain” behaviour, unsourced, there is a word for that and it is not “smearing”. But of course, anti-Semitism is OK when you are a supporting Zionism.