Communicated: TefillaChillul Tefila Bifarhesia, as well as halachicly challenged verbiage and dress, are external manifestations of a critical lack of personal yiras shomayim which has lethal consequences.
tell a friendIn the New York Review of Books back in 2003, Tony Judt published his view that the Jewish state should be deleted. This was the predicate of his proposal to reanimate the corpse of the one-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Steeped in academic authority and writing during the overlap of the second Intifada with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Judt argued that Israel was a harmful anachronism. He was not the first to express an abolitionist anti-Zionism, but his prestige and timing led him to become the celebrity spokesman for the internationalist case against Israel.
Seven years later, the Arab-Israeli conflict is stalled, though the specter of a nuclear Iran has imbued the political moment in Israel with angry uncertainty. The Netanyahu government has assumed a coiled posture of defense and accommodation with a PLO emasculated by Hamas. In turn, leaders of Arafat’s rump oligarchy have been speculating publicly about pursuing a one-state strategy.
Ideas are living things that generate results. To reverse what he considered the moral decay of man during the Enlightenment, Rousseau recommended in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that primitivism and an inchoate Luddism replace intellectual and technical progress. This too was unoriginal, but it made Rousseau’s fame. After being refined by two hundred years of illiberal thought, Rousseau’s atavism was bolted like a gun turret to a totalitarian reading of his concept of democracy, and we entered upon the abattoir of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
The logic of Judt’s “Israel: The Alternative” looms as the leftish auxiliary to the Islamist enterprise to destroy Israel. As with the Khmer Rouge and Rousseau’s primitivism, the one-state proposal has a precursor: Judt creepily recapitulates a facet of Marx and Engels’s thought, which Engels articulated in an 1849 essay called “The Magyar Struggle” (this was the quasi-Darwinian idea that certain European ethnic groups had been orphaned by the historical-evolutionary process and would have to be exterminated to permit the onset of socialism):
There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples, the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.
This view was part of a larger meditation on the short-term political failure of the revolutionary violence that had begun the previous year in France and resonated throughout Europe. Arrayed in opposition to the “historical” and “revolutionary” Germans, Poles and Magyars were “petty hidebound nations” of Slavs, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Serbs. These, in an absurd attempt to restore their national historicity, “put themselves at the disposal of Austrian reaction,” i.e. the Habsburg Austrian Empire. Engels blamed these Slavs seeking self-determination for the eclipse of internationalism by nationalism and ensuring the failure of the Revolutions of 1848.
Judt begins by referencing these same national movements. Then he recasts this analysis as an internationalist lament about Israel’s twilight attachment to its Jewish character:
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.
If you consider Israel’s geography, this is a breathtaking passage. The Jewish state is situated in a region where the timbre of nationalism isn’t exactly Scandinavian. Nonetheless Judt argues there is now a status quo of ‘post-racial’ states, if you will, whose peace is imperiled by the “hidebound [nation]” of – curiously, only – Israel. He cites Israel’s nuclear weapons as the primary impediment to nonproliferation; he says Israel was a major reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, with Syria on deck.
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