...keeps changing."

--Tony Judt

IT ANOTHER of those furious Jewish arguments. Tony Judt, a New York-based English academic, began it a couple of years ago in the New York Review of Books when he described Israel as an anachronistic, nineteenth-century ethno-state that should be abolished and turned into a bi-national Arab and Jewish state. All it does at the moment, he said, is create anti-Semitism.

The child of a long line of rabbis, he had been steeped in Yiddish culture in London's East End and gone to Hebrew school before working for some years in Israel. But despite these credentials, critics quickly labelled him a Jewish anti-Semite and self-hating Jew. In New York the New Republic struck his name off its masthead. In London a newspaper columnist created the annual Judt Award for dunces who write stupidly about Israel.

The main attack was not on his idea that Israel is an ethnic anachronism. It was on his naivety in imagining that the Islamist jihadists and terrorists could live peacefully with the Jews in a bi-national state and not launch a new campaign of extermination. Judt, who enjoys a good argument, made few concessions. He bided his time. The debate turned out to be a curtain-raiser for his real defence: the formidable (878...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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