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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

Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one ‘understands’ it and everyone is ‘against’ it; full of wounded amour propre, quick to take offence and quick to give it. Like many adolescents, Israel is convinced that it can do as it wishes; that its actions carry no consequences; and that it is immortal.

He observes that an otherwise friendless Israel is defended to the knife by Americans — no American congressman dares question the $3 billion paid annually to Israel, 20 per cent of the American foreign aid budget — and that American Middle Eastern policy seems to

imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self-destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy.

To come back to his great theme, Judt reserves his greatest scorn for those American intellectuals — he spares no reputations — who supported the second Iraq invasion and now condemn it because it has worked out badly. In today’s America, he wrote in 2006, ‘neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical figleaf. There is really no difference between them.’

I hope that readers of Reappraisals will resist the knee-jerk which so often passes for thought, and warm up those parts of their brains where true intellectualism always demands ‘could some of this be true?’.

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