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Friday 5 December 2008

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

The making of modern myths

Jonathan Mirsky on the new book by Tony Judt

Then there is Israel itself, and here Judt, a Cambridge-educated Jew who once lived on a kibbutz, will enrage many readers, especially Jewish ones, but may nudge the dormant brains and sensibilities of others. In its first decades, Israel, he says,

represented nothing so much as a trans- position into the Middle East of the preoccupations and mores of the Independent Labour Party of 1890s Britain or the Wandervogel walking clubs of late Wilhelminian Germany.

The Arabs were barely considered by these founders, because ‘taking the Jews out of Europe did not take Europe out of the Jews. Israel in 1967 was a European country in all but name.’ He recalls that ‘many Israelis were just as prejudiced against immigrant Jews from North Africa or the Near East as they were against Arabs. Perhaps more so’.

In those years, Judt asserts, Israel was widely admired as the beleaguered little country that had made the desert bloom. Then came the Six Day War in 1967, a victorious Israel expanded four-fold, and ‘no responsible Arab leader would ever again seriously contemplate the military destruction of the Jewish state’. From this emerged what Judt terms a messianic Israel armed with ‘a Bible and a map’. Its ‘mainstream politicians connived at the subsidised establishment in the West Bank of tens of thousands of religious and political extremists’. Judt quotes Israel’s great statesman Abba Eban:

The exercise of permanent rule over a foreign nation can only be defended by an ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness that are incompatible.

Nowadays (and I await letters to the editor), to criticise any of this triumphalism is to be to condemned in many quarters as anti-Semitic. Judt is cruel but bang on target:

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