Doug Henwood Talks

Washington Post - October 9, 2006

In N.Y., Sparks Fly Over Israel Criticism Polish Consulate Says Jewish Groups Called To Oppose Historian By Michael Powell Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 9, 2006; Page A03

NEW YORK — Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a
prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish
consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of
Israel and American Jewry.

The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University’s
Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was
scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space
from the consulate. Judt’s subject was the Israel lobby in the United
States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled
honest debate.

An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General
Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation
League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly
concluded Judt was too controversial.

“The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as
exercising a delicate pressure,” Kasprzyk said. “That’s obvious — we
are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that.”

Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family
in the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his
speech. He noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later
this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish
group had complained. Other prominent academics have described
encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching
over the past three decades.

The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.

“This is serious and frightening, and only in America — not in
Israel — is this a problem,” he said. “These are Jewish
organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with
them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen.”

The leaders of the Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate
to block Judt’s speech and accused the professor of retailing “wild
conspiracy theories” about their roles. But they applauded the
consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.

“I think they made the right decision,” said Abraham H. Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s taken the
position that Israel shouldn’t exist. That puts him on our radar.”

David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress,
took a similar view. “I never asked for a particular action; I was
calling as a friend of Poland,” Harris said. “The message of that
evening was going to be entirely contrary to the entire spirit of
Polish foreign policy.”

Judt has crossed rhetorical swords with the Jewish organizations on
two key issues. Over the past few years he has written essays in the
New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and in the
Israeli newspaper Haaretz arguing that power in Israel has shifted to
religious fundamentalists and territorial zealots, that woven into
Zionism is a view of the Arab as the irreconcilable enemy, and that
Israel might not survive as a communal Jewish state.

The solution, he argues, lies in a slow and tortuous walk toward a
binational and secular state.

He has, of late, defended an academic paper — co-authored by
professor Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy
School of Government and John J. Mearsheimer, a professor at the
University of Chicago — which argues the American Israel lobby has
pushed policies that are not in the United States’ best interests and
in fact often encourage Israel to engage in self-destructive behavior.

These are deeply controversial views — Foxman of the ADL and writer
Christopher Hitchens, among others, have attacked the Walt and
Mearsheimer paper as anti-Semitic. And Judt’s advocacy of a
binational state has drawn a flock of critics, the more angry of whom
accuse him of “pandering to genocide” as the Committee for Accuracy
in Middle East Reporting in America put it. Former Bush speechwriter
David Frum said Judt was pursuing “genocide liberalism.”

Foxman has referred to Judt’s views of Israel as “an offensive
caricature.”

The Mearsheimer and Walt paper, however, has drawn praise in some
quarters in Israel, particularly on the left. So, too some Israeli
writers, not least Israeli historian and social critic Amos Elon,
have praised Judt’s writings on Israel. Nor are Judt’s arguments
without historical precedent: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky, who is Jewish, has
advocated a binational solution in Israel, a view that three decades
ago sparked such anger that police stood guard at his college talks.
More recently, the ADL repeatedly accused DePaul University professor
Norman G. Finkelstein, who is Jewish and strongly opposes Israeli
policies, of being a “Holocaust denier.” These charges have proved
baseless.

“There is an often organized and often spontaneous attempt to
marginalize anyone in the Jewish world who offers a critique of
Israeli policy,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal
magazine Tikkun. “It’s equated with anti-Semitism and Israel denial.”

Foxman says such complaints are silly. “Nobody has called Judt an
anti-Semite,” Foxman said. “People who are critical of Israel and of
the Jewish people often flaunt their Jewishness. Why isn’t that an
issue?”

Judt replies that he only reluctantly talks of his Jewishness, in no
small part to inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism.
“For many, the way to be Jewish in this country is to aggressively
assert that the Holocaust is your identification tag,” Judt said. “I
know perfectly well my history, but it never occurred to me that my
most prominent identity was as a Jew.”

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