Uncomfortable truths.....Paul Laity – The Guardian

[blackbear]

Tony Judt has never fought shy of questioning long-cherished ideas. Postwar, his panoramic study of Europe after 1945, was loudly acclaimed in part because it dealt so bracingly with the lies and cover-ups on which the rebuilding of the continent depended - the number of Nazis and collaborators who retained positions of power, for instance, and the myths surrounding wartime resistance. Detail after striking detail documented how nations are never honest about their pasts, and how quickly inconvenient truths are buried.....

Since September 2001, however, Judt's articulate polemicism has taken a new direction - one that has transformed his life. Uneasy about the political reaction to 9/11 in the US, he soon began to publish a series of condemnations of Bush's international policies. But whereas his anti-communism sat comfortably with mainstream liberal opinion in America, his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks. Judt, who was born and has spent most of his life in Britain, began to feel more aware of being European - and different.

He raised hackles by labelling liberal commentators in America - including New Yorker editor David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman - Bush's "useful idiots". But by far the biggest tumults Judt has caused have followed an essay he published five years ago, entitled "Israel: The Alternative", which opened with the notion that "the president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line", and went on to contend that the time had come to "think the unthinkable" - the bringing to an end of Israel as a Jewish state, and the establishment in its place of a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8621

conscious of the cultural prohibition unique to America, whereby "all Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought antisemitic"; the result is that "there is no conversation on the subject". This is especially regrettable because any resolution of the Israel/Palestine question depends on a change of attitude on the part of the US. At the moment, Israel is like an "adolescent", he argues in Reappraisals: it "is convinced that it can do as it wishes ... that it is immortal".

Judt's views on the Middle East became headline news in the autumn of 2006 following the cancellation - an hour before it was due to start - of a public lecture he was to give, entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", at the Polish consulate in New York. The Polish consul, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, later acknowledged that he had been contacted by a number of Jewish groups - including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, who were concerned about the subject of Judt's address. "The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said.

When news of the cancellation broke, and accusations began to fly, the incident developed into the "Judt affair". The New York Review published an open letter to Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, signed by 114 intellectuals who felt that Judt's right to free speech had been abrogated. Numerous articles on both sides appeared in the press and the matter of criticism of Israel in America was - for once - thoroughly ventilated. The implications of the cancellation, Judt believes, were "serious and frightening", though the affair had its absurd side: the organisers of a talk he was due to give at Manhattan College on October 17 2006 asked him not to mention Israel - not an easy task given that it was a Holocaust memorial lecture, and its agreed title was "The Holocaust in postwar Europe". (He withdrew.)

Judt says, resignedly, that the adjectives used to describe him in the media have now changed. He has become, in America, "the controversial Tony Judt" and "Tony Judt, well-known critic of Israel". He finds this "a bore", especially as his opinions "aren't regarded as especially unconventional in the rest of the world". So it made his day when a member of the audience at a lecture he gave recently came up to him afterwards and said, perhaps a little disappointedly: "You're not controversial, you're just complicated.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2280547,00.html

[Dallas]

That bit about "all Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought antisemitic" is so true.

I can't really ignore the gross violations of human rights on the part of the Israeli government, but being that my boss, several friends, almost all of my company's clients, and 20% or so of the residents of my city are Jewish, it does feel very much like my life could be ruined if I was too outspoken on the subject.