who they could dismiss as loonies of the Left. Now they’re having to face, for want of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and certainly not on the crazy Left on most issues, saying very critical things about Israel.”
Although Judt spoke confidently, the rancor generated by his outspoken statements on the subject of Israel had clearly affected him deeply. Earlier in the interview, he explained how a talk he was scheduled to give at the Polish consulate in New York the previous October, entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” had been cancelled at the last minute due to pressure from those same groups that—though they may have lost control of the debate—still had the power to restrict where it could take place. “They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to do in late Communist society,” Judt remarked of the Anti-Defamation League. “They point out how foolish it is to associate with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: did you know that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or giving comfort to anti-Semites?”
The possibility of being classified as one of those “wrong people” has increased markedly for commentators like Tony Judt over the past decade, as well as for Jews who would once have been exempt from such labeling. Whereas organizations like the Anti-Defamation League once concentrated their efforts on professed anti-Semites, they now seemed more preoccupied with finding Jews who claim not to be anti-Semitic while fostering support for anti-Semitism. Although Judt’s analogy between such organizations and the enforcers of totalitarian states is compelling, they might be more aptly compared to the Red-hunting of the McCarthy era. What people like Judt have experienced is an attempt— however muted its public expression—to blacklist.
That’s why the Jewish press in New York referred to the controversy over the cancellation and its aftermath as “l’affaire Judt,” conjuring the late-nineteenth-century Dreyfus affair in which a French officer of Jewish descent was accused of treason. The fact that over 100 intellectuals (many of whom disagreed with Judt on key points) found it necessary to sign an open letter of protest on his behalf underscores the significance of an episode that under other circumstances might have attracted little attention.
Published in the November 16, 2006, edition of the New York Review of Books, the letter excoriated the Anti-Defamation League for working behind the scenes to have Judt’s talk canceled, and then denying its role in the affair. “In a democracy,” the letter declares, “there is only one appropriate response to a lecture, article, or book one does not agree with. It is to give another lecture, write another article, or publish another book.” The letter’s conclusion underscores the gravity of the situation, noting that despite the many differences of opinion held by its signatories “about political matters, foreign and domestic, we are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy.”
Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League’s National Director Abraham Foxman answered the letter with outrage, also in the New York Review of Books, complaining that its coauthors Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett had not bothered to get the organization’s side of the story before going public: “What is so shocking about this letter is that a group claiming to be defending fundamental values of free expression in a democratic society—values that ADL has worked to ensure for decades—employs techniques which completely debase those values.” Although Foxman was aware that some of the letter’s signatories, including Lilla himself, could hardly be considered progressives, his reply nevertheless managed to artfully conjure the specter—rooted in the student radicalism of the 1960s—of a Left more intolerant than its antagonists. “Their behavior is a much subtler and more dangerous form of intimidation than the baseless accusations conjured up against ADL.”
The most striking part of both this exchange and l’affaire Judt generally was its lack of civility. The speed with which each side resorted to implicating the other in totalitarian tactics clarifies how threadbare the sense of common identity and purpose had become within the Diaspora by the mid-2000s. Whereas previously one could have imagined heated debates about Israel cooling off into the impression of solidarity, in this case any resolution seemed impossible. In a sense—to play off of Judt’s formulation—everyone had lost control of the debate. The American Jewish Committee raised the stakes even further when they published an essay by Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld asserting that the position on Israel held by Judt and other progressive Jews like American playwright Tony Kushner and British literary theorist Jacqueline Rose is functionally anti-Semitic. Suddenly everyone in the Diaspora seemed to be talking about issues that in the old days no one wanted to discuss.
In his Observer interview, Judt explained to Wood that this reticence had been secured by fear: “All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject.” Though it seems deeply ironic that the fear of more vigorous silencing would inspire people to speak freely, this shift is one that Judt—a former translator for the Israel Defense Forces—clearly welcomed, concluding the interview on a hopeful note: “I think one could say that after the Iraq War, for want of a better defining moment, the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East was broken. The shell broke and conversation—however uncomfortable, however much slandered—became possible. I’m not sure that will change things in the Middle East, but it’s changed the shape of things here.”
For better or worse (or, more precisely, for better and worse), discussion of Israel has shifted markedly in the wake of the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Trends that began to emerge at the conclusion of the Cold War are now fully manifest. As l’affaire Judt amply illustrates, rancor has supplanted reasoned exchange as the dominant mode of discourse. Even when people are on the same general side, they find ways to treat each other as opponents. The polarization of the debate has made people who want to find solutions despair of making progress. But it has also provided an opportunity to rethink the way Israel is regarded both within its borders and beyond. What we need in the midst of all the heated polemics on Israel is a way to perceive the gray in both black and white.
That’s my primary goal here. I want to bring depth to conversations that have been flattened into reflex. In this chapter and the ones to follow, I focus on specific examples from recent debates in the media. Frequently, I connect them to the history that preceded them. But this is not a history book. What concerns me, as I suggested in my introduction, are not the facts of modern Israel’s existence, but the way people have marshaled those facts in the service of polemics, whether in the United States, Europe, or the Middle East. Although denouncing arguments for their rhetorical sleights of hand may feel good, it does little to advance the cause of peace. Just as it becomes harder to generalize about members of a particular ethnicity or religion when you get to know some of them personally, it’s more difficult to judge positions in a debate after you study them in depth, with as much attention to their nuances as their broad strokes. But that’s a challenge I take up eagerly, as the only way for us to make progress in an ideological debate is to challenge our certainties.
PREOCCUPIED TERRITORIES
Visiting New York in February 2007, I got into a conversation with a Jewish gentleman in his sixties who wanted to discuss what Israel had achieved in the Six-Day War of 1967. Because I was born in that year and grew up in a context where Israel’s stunning victory remains so crucial to understanding contemporary Jewish attitudes toward the country, I’m always eager to talk about it, and have become accustomed to Americans rationalizing the necessity of the occupation, in one form or another, as a means of ensuring Israel’s security, as though they were justifying the defense of their own country. But what this man said unsettled me more than usual. He only seemed able to countenance the war’s impact on American life.
Israel’s transformation into a state with military muscle and the imperial conquests to prove it was significant, he explained,
