Tony Judt takes aim at settlements

New York Times Op-Ed contributor Tony Judt, a British historian who is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, does not much like the idea of Jews living in the West Bank.

In an Op-Ed on Monday, he writes that Israel promotes the use of the word "settlements" to connote something positive, due to the word’s association with the pioneering settlers of Israel’s kibbutzim. But, he writes, in truth the settlements contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the annexation of land conquered by force. (Actually, Israel has not annexed the West Bank, but why quibble?)

Judt also inflates the size and proportion of the settler population — they number half a million, which exceeds the population of Tel Aviv by one-third, he writes. Judt fails to mention that the Jewish residents of eastern Jerusalem, whom he counts as settlers, are not considered as such by Israelis (or, generally speaking, by the U.S. government) or that metropolitan Tel Aviv actually has 3 million people — it’s just the municipal boundaries that are small.

Judt also makes Bar-Ilan University sound like a Taliban madrassa by calling it "the heartland of rabbinical intransigence" and the place where "Yigal Amir learned to hate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before heading off to assassinate him in 2005."

He concludes:

President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond.

Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel’s defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. They are nothing but a colonial takeover that the United States has no business subsidizing.

While Judt slams the American news media for taking Benjamin Netanyahu’s "bait" of "honeyed cliches" on Palestinian statehood — "On June 14 he gave a much-anticipated speech in which he artfully blew smoke in the eyes of his American interlocutors," Judt writes — Israeli political commentator Ari Shavit counters in a Times Op-Ed (which appears only online) that most analysis of Bibi’s speech failed to grasp what made it so historically important:

Many failed to see what was new in Netanyahu’s vision. For decades, peace professionals and activists believed that when peace comes, Palestine will be demilitarized and Israel will be Jewish. Americans, Europeans and Israelis involved in the peace process took this premise to be self-evident.

But the Palestinians never accepted this premise. They did not agree to limit the sovereignty of their future state so that Israel’s security would be guaranteed. They did not recognize the existence of a Jewish people which expresses its right of self-determination in the Jewish nation-state. They did not go through the profound ideological conversion required so that a real two-state peace could be achieved and sustained.

That is why Netanyahu’s new interpretation of the two-state solution is of historical importance.

Its significance is two-fold. On the one hand it seals Israel’s psychological and ideological conversion regarding the Palestinians; on the other hand it calls for a similar Palestinian conversion. It commits even the Israeli right to the need to establish a Palestinian state, but it demands an unequivocal Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state.