A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as prophetic critics of Israel, despite a lack of real knowledge of the relevant subject matter. Mearsheimer and Walt are two; Tony Judt, whose academic specialty is European history, is another. Judt has a rather predictable op-ed in today’s Times, replete with (at best) tendentious contentions (Hamasistan Gaza is a democracy? Really? When are the next elections scheduled?). Most interesting to me, though, was the following addendum:
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: June 10, 2010
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Israel has a written constitution.
If you don’t know enough about Israel to know that it doesn’t have a written constitution–a very significant omission that comes up all the time in debates over a vast array of Israeli policies–and, indeed, are so confident that Israel does have a written constitution that you don’t, say, bother to even check Wikipedia before you submit an op-ed to the Times, you have no business writing such op-eds, and no one should take your views about Israel seriously. [Okay, that last bit may have been too harsh; but it certainly detracts from Judt's credibility.]
UPDATE: To give you a sense of why Judt’s error is so egregious, imagine that Judt had been writing a series of controversial essays critical of the U.S. and its system of government, and had mentioned that the “U.S. has no written Constitution.”
FURTHER UPDATE (edited): In the original version, quoted here, Judt wrote
Perhaps the most common defense of Israel outside the country is that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” This is largely true: the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.
So, contrary to the wording of the correction, Judt didn’t say explicitly that Israel has a written constitution. A commenter raises the possibility that he didn’t mean a written constitution, but a constitution in the English sense.
I doubt it. First, one would think that the editors who posted the correction checked with Judt to ensure the correction itself was accurate. If so, they confirmed that when he wrote “constitution” he meant “written constitution.”
Second, it would be very odd to praise Israel, or even damn Israel with faint praise, regarding democracy and civil liberties by mentioning its constitution, given that civil libertarians in Israel are constrained by the lack of a constitution. If anything, one would think Judt would have written, “the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though, in part because it lacks a constitution guaranteeing minority rights, it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.
Third, there are constant proposals in Israel to adopt an “Israeli constitution,” (e.g.) because people in Israel typically don’t think of themselves as having a constitution, so it would be odd for Judt to assert that they do without caveat, unless he simply erred.
Finally, if Judt, an Englishman (though he has lived in the U.S. for many years), was thinking of the English constitution, it would be odd to pair “constitution” with “independent judiciary,” given that the English constitution is not judicially enforceable.
But, to be fair, I wanted to point out the issue.
Gruest says:
Hate to get in on a surprisingly haterade-filled thread, but DB, you’re an educated person! You don’t need to use such limp rhetorical devices as “Period.” to make your point.
[ED: Point taken, and edited accordingly. Period!]
June 10, 2010, 2:38 pmJasmindad says:
Sorry to say, but this bs. He knows a hell of a lot more about Israel than the average commentator on the middle east. Judt actually spent time in his youth in Israel as a Zionist enthusiast, working in a kibbutz. Whether Israel has a written constitution or not may well be relevant for some issues, and correspondingly knowledge of this factoid may be a relevant qualification for commenting on those topics, but it is not really relevant for the general set of points Judt is making. Also, your comment that he is only a European historian, implying that he is thus not to be listened to on the middle east, is rather eyebrow raising, since you are not a historian of any kind at all, and yet you post opinions on Israel and her neighbors. Yes, Judt’s point about Hamas being a democracy can be problematic, especially if there are no new elections there for some time, but there is no question that Hamas was legitimately elected in the last election. In fact, many on the right roundly condemned the Bush administration precisely on the ground that its focus on democracy in the middle east was foolish because it brought Hamas to power.
I don’t necessarily agree with Judt on all his points, but the bases for your criticism seem awfully weak.
June 10, 2010, 3:05 pmPlugInMonster says:
* elections by themselves do not signify freedom
* there have been no scheduled elections since
* where is the Palestinian constitution guaranteeing human rights?
Oh yeah right, you’d rather bash David Bernstein then deal with the reality.
June 10, 2010, 3:08 pmStrict says:
That’s a pretty bad error.
DB is correct on the point about democracy. TJ concluded that because Hamas had been elected democratically in the past, Gaza is now a democracy. It is not, because Hamas is currently boycotting calls for further elections. Hamas was democratically elected, but is retaining power undemocratically. It would be fairer to say that Gaza was, for a brief moment, a democracy, but is no longer.
However, it should be noted that he used the word “democracy” in reference to Hamas in scare quotes. There might be a difference between saying Gaza is a democracy, and Gaza is a “democracy,” but I’m not sure what it is.
Finally, making a single error about Israel [e.g. the author didn't know Israel doesn't have a written constitution] does not completely discredit the author. For example, DB last week wrote that no Israeli government had ever wanted Gaza, but that was not factually correct. That doesn’t mean that “no should ever take DB’s views about Israel seriously. Period.” Everyone makes mistakes.
June 10, 2010, 3:08 pmStrict says:
Jasmindad,
I don’t think it’s fair to call this a “factoid.” It’s not as though a constitution or the lack thereof is a trivial matter.
June 10, 2010, 3:10 pmDavid Bernstein says:
If a European historian who had recently criticized the U.S. form of government (as Judt has re Israel in advocating a “one-state” solution) wrote an op-ed in which he offhandedly noted that the U.S. has no written Constitution, I think it would be fair to dismiss his views on the U.S., no matter how much time he had spent in the U.S.
June 10, 2010, 3:10 pmStrict says:
Here’s the report from today saying that Hamas is boycotting the elections which were scheduled for July 17. The boycott resulted in the cancellation of the elections.
June 10, 2010, 3:12 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Everyone makes mistakes, but there are egregious mistakes that suggest an underlying lack of familiarity with your subject matter, and trivial mistakes that even an expert can make.
June 10, 2010, 3:17 pmDavid Bernstein says:
If so, that is more of a reflection on the sad state of the commentariate than a good reflection on Judt.
June 10, 2010, 3:18 pmD. Laden says:
Holding the Times to the accuracy standard of an Internet blog?
June 10, 2010, 3:21 pmYou must not think much of that publication…
grackle says:
It seems ironic that you would advocate dismissing his views when those views, as expressed in the editorial, are either unexceptional or else don’t appear to differ substantially from many of the things you have expressed in this forum. This is not to say that you agree on all points with his views; but exactly on which things that he says do you differ?
June 10, 2010, 3:21 pmSteve says:
I think I would have to see the context of the original error before I could say how egregious it was.
June 10, 2010, 3:23 pmAutist says:
Nice ad hominem.
June 10, 2010, 3:24 pmzuch says:
Is it strictly necessary to have scheduled elections to be a democracy? That would be news to me. For that matter, is it necessary to even have “elections” (as opposed to votes) to have a democracy? Note that I’m not making a claim here that Gaza is a “democracy”; I’m just wondering what the deciding criteria are.
Cheers,
June 10, 2010, 3:24 pmscattergood says:
Which is the democracy:
One person, one vote.
One person, one vote, one time.
One seems to be the Western notion of democracy, the other seems to be Hamas’.
June 10, 2010, 3:31 pmcheckit says:
Autist,
Check the original post.
June 10, 2010, 3:32 pmPlugInMonster says:
Why do we fetishize democracy anyways? America is a Constitutional Republic and we should hold ever nation out there to the same standard.
June 10, 2010, 3:35 pmDavid Bernstein says:
This piece was more moderate than much of what Judt has written on the subject, and I actually do agree with some of it. But I object to the idea that the NY Times op-ed page editors, among many others, consider Judt to be some sort of expert, despite his lack of academic background on the subject, and despite the embarrassing error noted. I know that MSM op-ed pages often allow celebrity academics to bloviate on all sorts of things outside of their expertise, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
June 10, 2010, 3:35 pmJasmindad says:
Strict says:
> I don’t think it’s fair to call this a “factoid.”
> It’s not as though a constitution or the lack
> thereof is a trivial matter.
Whether the error is trivial or not depends on whether his conclusions, or any specific conclusion, crucially depends on this error. Please you, DB or anyone else, tell me which of his 6 points are negated because of this mistake. While identifying an error that is not demonstrated to be especially fatal to the conclusion doesn’t score as high on the ad hominem scale as say saying he wears mismatched clothing and thus should not be listened to, resorting to this still shows that DB can’t attack the logic of Judt.
I know Judt enrages the “Israel can do no wrong” wing of Zionism, but he can’t be called anti-semitic, he can’t be easily caricatured as a self-hating Jew, so the standard lines of criticism are not available. DB now comes up with, Oh, he doesn’t know something important about Israel. Well, convince me that it is important to his conclusions.
June 10, 2010, 3:37 pmPlugInMonster says:
and you belong to the “Palestinians can do no wrong” wing of Leftism.
June 10, 2010, 3:40 pmcheckit says:
“the NY Times op-ed page editors, among many others, consider Judt to be some sort of expert, despite his lack of academic background on the subject, and despite the embarrassing error noted.”
Could you give us a precis of your academic background on the subject?
June 10, 2010, 3:40 pmzuch says:
Fallacy of bifurcation.
Cheers,
June 10, 2010, 3:40 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I can pretty much guarantee that the Times isn’t going to publish my op-eds on the subject. Moreover, if the Times did, and I made an error as egregious as Judt’s, you’d be perfectly rational to ignore anything further I said on the subject.
June 10, 2010, 3:43 pmDavid Bernstein says:
And by the way, I’ve never claimed to be an “expert.” I previously criticized Mearsheimer, for example, for not knowing something about Israel that “even an amateur like me knows.” My lack of expertise explains why I generally limit myself to pointing out others’ errors, misrepresentations, omissions, and biases, rather than, e.g., presenting my grand solution to the Arab-Israeli context.
June 10, 2010, 3:44 pmsaytwice says:
“A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as prophetic critics of Israel, despite a lack of real knowledge of the relevant subject matter.”
There’s irrelevant academics and then there’s irrelevant academics at third-tier Universities.
Which are worse?
June 10, 2010, 3:44 pmJasmindad says:
Another thing I noticed. DB calls Judt’s comments “predictable.” Why is predictability a relevant feature? If I had to make a guess, a term like this is intended to demean an argument without actually engaging it. On June 3, Michael Oren had an Op Ed in the NYT, and guess what: I predicted what he would say before I read it. I didn’t see any posting by DB about how predictable Oren’s piece was. (Thank goodness there was a nice piece by Amos Oz the day before.)
I know DB cares a lot about Israel, but if he wants to be taken seriously by people (like me) who really are willing to listen, he should write better-argued pieces. I’m not a romantic about the middle east, i.e., I understand that Israel is a bad neighborhood. But I try not to read certain styles of pro-Israel arguments, lest they make me more anti-Israel than I want to be, because all I see is froth coming out the month rather than arguments that respect my intelligence. Marty Peretz of TNR is a prime example.
June 10, 2010, 3:53 pmkiwi dave says:
DB:
While you are, strictly speaking, right that Israel does not have a written constitution (it is in fact one of three western democracies without one, the other two being New Zealand and the UK), the situation is a bit more complicated than that.
Israel has a series of Basic Laws (חוקי היסוד in Hebrew) that have been enacted over time covering certain subjects of core importance. While these laws do not themselves have the status of a written constitution, they do form a key part of Israel’s constitutional law, and are seen as occupying a status somewhat higher than that of regular statutes. Moreover, former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak used to discuss how the Basic Laws, once complete, would basically coalesce into a de facto, if not de jure, written constitution.
June 10, 2010, 3:56 pmPlugInMonster says:
Nobody considers it important to take you seriously.
June 10, 2010, 3:57 pmJasmindad says:
PlugInMonster says: and you belong to the “Palestinians can do no wrong” wing of Leftism.
Care to tell me what makes you say that? As a matter of fact, I belong to the school that thinks that the Palestinians have committed very bad intellectual, strategic and moral errors. But if you can find evidence that I said something that leads you to believe that I belong to the “Palestinians can do no wrong” wing of Leftism, out with it.
June 10, 2010, 3:57 pmBored Lawyer says:
What is really annoying is his faux moderation and his avoiding of the real issues.
For example:
Judt is either oblivious to both past and recent history or he is being disingenuous. Israel is unique in that its very right to exist is constantly questioned by its neighbors — who several times have tried to wipe it off the map. (Not to mention others in the world.) Today, you have Gaza, which is run by a group whose charter calls for elimination of Israel, and categorically refused to engage in any negotiations. Not to mention, Iran, Hizbollah, Syria, and several others.
Furthermore, one of the basic incidents of sovereignty is the right to use force to defend oneself and one’s country. It is not Israel’s supposed “bad behavior” which deligitimizes it, it is critics like Judt who leave Israel no option of self-defense at all.
Or how about example No. 2:
Note how losing Turkey (whatever that means) is Israel’s fault, “Thanks to Israel.” Does Turkey’s treatment by the EU (mentioned by Judt) have anything to do with it? How about Turkey’s internal politics? Or the radical Islamism of the ruling party in Turkey?
Nope, it’s all Israel’s fault.
One could go on, but why bother.
June 10, 2010, 3:58 pmJasmindad says:
> Nobody considers it important to take you seriously.
Nobody? That takes a bit of omniscience, which I will charitably assume you have, since otherwise it would be foolish to make the above universally quantified assertion.
June 10, 2010, 4:00 pmgladetariba says:
Is it strictly necessary to have scheduled elections to be a democracy?
June 10, 2010, 4:01 pmduhh..yes
Strict says:
“Holding the Times to the accuracy standard of an Internet blog”
The standard of accuracy is simple and applies equally to all media: be accurate. If you make a mistake, admit it and issue a correction. This isn’t a lowered standard or a heightened standard. The Times made a mistake, and it issued a correction. The blog made a mistake, and issued a correction.
As for egregious mistakes versus regular mistakes, sometimes the distinction is not so clear. For example, Alan Dershowitz heaped praises on Bruno Bettelheim and talked about how brilliant and kind and charming Bruno is. It seems like Alan made a mistake of character and morals. Does that mean we should completely discredit Alan and not listen to anything he has to say about morality, considering that one of his good friends who he held in high esteem was a disturbed and immoral child abuser?
Speaking of “moral clarity,” Natan Sharansky wrote that that kolkhoz in the USSR were established in 1929. That is incorrect. Is it a minor mistake, or a serious mistake? Does this mean that Natan is completely discredited and we should not listen to anything he has to say about the USSR, history, communism, agriculture, etc?
June 10, 2010, 4:02 pmFederal Farmer says:
Wow, using a fancy “argumentum” term and a link to a cheesy website of fancy terms, but no actual content agreeing with or disputing the comment.
Is a government that doesn’t stand for election a democracy or not? I say it is not and no condemnation of bifurcation or not is a valid dispute.
June 10, 2010, 4:05 pmVisitor Again says:
Nobody? I consider it important to take Jasmindad seriously. In fact, his/her comment is virtually the only one on here worth reading.
June 10, 2010, 4:11 pmBored Lawyer says:
Actually it is not only that. I would argue that freedom of expression (at least political expression) and freedom of politicial opposition are just as important as regularly held elections.
After all, there are countries like Syria or Iraq under Saddam Hussein where elections are held, and surprise, surprise, the ruling party gets 99% of the vote. That is not a democracy by any means.
June 10, 2010, 4:11 pmGuy says:
What, precisely, was the nature of his error, how did the original sentence read? Was it slightly overbroad, or egregiously wrong? My understanding is that Israel’s Constitution is partially written (the “Basic Laws”) and partially unwritten, I’m by no means knowledgeable on the issue, but I’ve gotten the impression from past commentaries that the Supreme Court of Israel has found laws “unconstitutional” based on noncompliance with the written portions of the Constitution. Am I totally in error here? I would appreciate clarification on this point.
June 10, 2010, 4:16 pmPierre Corneille says:
A better analogy might be a series of controversial essays critical of the UK, with a passing reference to the “fact” that the UK has a written constitution. If such a reference is made to criticize any given British Government’s actions as violations of Britain’s constitution AS WRITTEN, then such an error is not only egregious, it also deflates the entire argument.
Whether to dismiss some criticisms out of hand, is, I guess, up to the reader, but here’s some thoughts:
1. Judt is obviously responsible for anything that he is correctly reported as saying, especially when he said/wrote it in a piece meant for public consumption.
2. The fact that Judt made such a facially egregious error detracts from his credibility. Still, one must consider Judt’s writing as a whole to determine how much it detracts from his credibility.
3. Almost everybody makes egregious, factual errors at least a few times in one’s life. Sometimes those errors are made in public forums in a manner meant for public consumption. Yawn. For me, it depends on how frequent systematic such mistakes are, who they’re made by, and most important, how quickly and honestly the person making the errors acknowledges and corrects his or her mistake.
June 10, 2010, 4:21 pma long-time reader of Judt says:
David’s posting does a disservice to Tony Judt. While I have never met the man, I am long-time reader of his essays and scholarship. He is, in my humble opinion, one of the most perceptive English-language writers on Western Europe post WWII. His writings, particularly the recent auto-biographical writings, suggest he is quite familiar with Israel. I expect the error David belabors is a product of Judt’s illness. As for the merits of the essay I think what I take to be Judt’s major point is spot on. This is that relevant actors need to stop arguing who is in the right and who is in the wrong.
June 10, 2010, 4:22 pmColin says:
DB, I’m sure that in your entire academic career, you’ve never made any embarrassing errors on factual matters that made you seem less knowledgeable on the topic than you were. Right?
This sort of nitpicking and gotcha-ism isn’t becoming.
And neither is your questioning of your opponents qualifications as a means of dismissing their opinions, when their qualifications are every bit as relevant as your own (in the case of Walt & Mearsheimer, their specialities are more so). I’m not saying you’re underqualified to comment on Israel. Far from it. But they’re every bit as qualified as you are. If you want to disagree with them, do so. That “aging and irrelevant” bit is schoolyardish.
June 10, 2010, 4:34 pmAriel says:
Elections != Democracy. Why is this point so hard to understand? Elections are certainly a necessary component of democracy, except if your democracy is small enough (or technologically advanced enough?) that every person can vote on every bill. A representative democracy, then, requires elections.
While elections are necessary to democracy, they are not sufficient for democracy. For example, at one extreme, imagine an election where you can vote for party A or party B, but anybody running under party C or D will be summarily shot. This situation is actually pretty close to what happened in the Palestinian territories – people who were not Hamas or Fatah were not allowed to run in the elections.
Moreover, if you don’t have reasonable freedom of speech, you cannot have a real meaningful election. For example, if espousing certain positions may lead to death or imprisonment at the hands of the current rulers, it may not be a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. Again, this is very similar to the situation in the territories. During the first election they had, Arafat carefully suppressed the speech of his opposition, as well as selecting who would run against him. During the second election, only certain view points were admissible.
And this brings up the next point. One election does not a democracy make. Nor can a system be called a democracy when the representatives routinely stay on past their time in office without being forced to come to another election. Again, this is the case in the Palestinian territories, which have had two elections, and in both cases the elected folks were not forced to stand for election when their term ran out.
Finally, if one part of the country has a violent uprising and kills all of the folks who support the party by throwing them off buildings and that part of the country no longer submits itself to the rule of the central government, it’s pretty clear that that part of the country is no longer a democracy, at least inasmuch as it has not had its own elections. Again, that’s the case in Gaza.
So please, to those of you who claim that the Palestinians are a democracy, there is really no way that that claim is plausible.
June 10, 2010, 4:37 pmColin says:
DB, I just read through the comments here.
Imagine that the New York Times, tomorrow, offered to publish an editorial contribution, written by you.
Since you object so strenuously to their supposedly conferring “expert” status on Judt and even dismiss people who actually have IR credentials, I assume that you’d turn them down yourself. Because to do otherwise would be unprincipled.
June 10, 2010, 4:40 pmUgh says:
Really? For what reasons?
June 10, 2010, 4:44 pmAnderson says:
Has it occurred to no one that we don’t yet know whether the error was Judt’s or an editor’s?
… I also tend to give a bit more slack for minor factual errors to people who are dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. YMMV.
June 10, 2010, 4:45 pmCJColucci says:
Shouldn’t it be “aging ,dying, and otherwise mostly irrelevant academics”? May as well finish the job.
June 10, 2010, 4:46 pmBob from Ohio says:
Judt’s conclusion paragraph is laughable;
“Along with the oil sheikdoms, Israel is now America’s greatest strategic liability in the Middle East and Central Asia.”
That is every US friendly state in the Mideast (except for maybe Iraq). Is it our enemies that provide strategic benefits?
The “strategic liability” phrase is just acceptance of the cliche that the Palestinian cause is the source of Arab violence and hatred against the US.
“Thanks to Israel, we are in serious danger of “losing” Turkey: a Muslim democracy, offended at its treatment by the European Union, that is the pivotal actor in Near-Eastern and Central Asian affairs.”
It is Israel’s fault that Europe has supposedly offended Turkey? Maybe its “Thanks to Europe”?
And Turkey hasn’t been the “pivotal actor” since the sultan was overthrown.
“Without Turkey, the United States will achieve few of its regional objectives — whether in Iran, Afghanistan or the Arab world.”
Name one Mideast objective that Turkey has ever helped us with? Turkey is in NATO and hence an ally (increasingly nominal)because it borders the former Soviet Union and controls the Straits. It is now far less important.
Let’s ask the 4th Infrantry Division how much help Turkey is in reaching our current objectives.
“The time has come to cut through the clichés surrounding it, treat Israel like a “normal” state and sever the umbilical cord.”
We already treat Israel as a normal ally. We support it most of the time even when we sometimes are mildly critical of it. What he means is that we should make “peace” by siding with the Arabs.
June 10, 2010, 4:47 pmThumbcruncher says:
My comment on this is the social History of the World, published by cambridge scholars in the early 1930s. Written by academics using second and third hand information on events and situations in other nations around the world, it was used by people for about a decade to justify certain policies and even to predict future events. That is until World War 2 broke loose during which the book’s praise of Germany in the 1930s brought it down.
For those who wonder why I would bring this up, the book is one of the key pieces of evidence for the Miller ruling of 1938. So eventhough it was discredited by 1940, the book’s interpretation of the world is still being used in legal rulings until the 21st century. Thus, whatever is the outcome of the present Israeli/palestinian situation, the scholarly interpretation of the situation will be with us for decades.
June 10, 2010, 4:48 pmEngineer says:
Shmuel Rosner lists the other factual errors in Judt’s piece:
eg. “The expression of strong dissent from official policy is increasingly discouraged”
“It is a democracy dominated and often governed by former professional soldiers”
“[T]hree catastrophic invasions of Lebanon”
etc.
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/judt_s_problem_with_facts
Judt is underinformed, and his real problem with Israel (he has written previously) is that it is not adopting a post-national program the way all the other advanced nations are (or were until very recently).
It’s quite amusing that Judt is now saying that Israel is not going anywhere and that he doesn’t seek it’s delegimitization. He is after all the one who wrote an article called Israel the Alternative
June 10, 2010, 4:48 pmTony Judt: Mr. Know-nothing-at-all | Moderate Israel says:
[...] David Bernstein points out, Tony Judt’s NYT op-ed originally stated that Israel has a written constitution — which [...]
June 10, 2010, 4:56 pmColin says:
Rosner appears to have a different definition of “factual errors” than most. Apparently factual errors includes subjective matters of disagreement. I’m actually on Rosner’s side for most of the matters he brings up, but to care them factual errors is a rhetorical reach.
June 10, 2010, 5:05 pmEngineer says:
Apparently factual errors includes subjective matters of disagreement.
No. The ones I listed are factual.
* Dissent is tolerated in Israel more than in the US (a country where the president demonizes TV networks and pundits who disagree with him).
* There were two invasions of Lebanon – not 3.
* Israel is not “dominated by professional soldiers” except in the sense that most people do have to serve in the army.
June 10, 2010, 5:16 pmHarryEagar says:
It seems to me that Judt’s more serious error was speaking of Gaza’s government as democratic.
June 10, 2010, 5:24 pmEngineer says:
Judt’s bit about “strong dissent” not being tolerated is his excuse for refusing to actually listen to what Israelis are saying about the situation.
There’s a reason that the public has moved significantly to the right since 2005 – but Judt prefers not to ask what it is – and instead he condescends and caricatures.
June 10, 2010, 5:30 pmJJ says:
Two posters have now appealed to Judt’s illness as a mitigating factor that excuses or explains the error. I actually think this works the other way – if his illness is causing him to get basic facts so wrong, that is yet another reason he should not be opining on the topic on the Op-ed pages of the NYT.
June 10, 2010, 5:32 pmPlugInMonster says:
Yeah but the lefties were like ZOMG… THEY HAD ELECTIONS ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG
June 10, 2010, 5:36 pmCJColucci says:
Two posters have now appealed to Judt’s illness as a mitigating factor that excuses or explains the error.
If you’re including me among the “two posters,” that’s not why I referred to Judt’s illness at all.
June 10, 2010, 5:38 pmColin says:
Apparently you also share Rosner’s heterodox definition of factual.
Whether Israel is intolerant of dissent is a subjective, abstract question. As is whether a nation whose leaders are primarily ex-military is a nation dominated by professional soldiers.
These are both questions of degree, about which people can reasonably disagree. They’re not “facts” as the word is traditionally conceived. Something like the existence of a constitution? That is a fact, and is a different sort of claim from the one about ‘professional soldiers.’
(The Lebanon one I grant you)
June 10, 2010, 5:41 pmJJ says:
No, wasn’t talking about you, but about ‘a long-time reader of Judt’ who wrote “I expect the error David belabors is a product of Judt’s illness”, and about Anderson, who wrote ‘I also tend to give a bit more slack for minor factual errors to people who are dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease’.
June 10, 2010, 5:44 pmIn Defense of Mearsheimer and Walt « Pileus says:
[...] a very intelligent legal scholar at George Mason University and a Volokh Conspiracy blogger, goes just a bit too far today in criticizing critics of Israel. And I say this as someone sympathetic to Israel’s [...]
June 10, 2010, 5:48 pmStrict says:
Engineer: “Dissent is tolerated in Israel more than in the US”
Engineer, this is not a fact, and is instead a matter up for debate or disagreement.
What is meant by “dissent”? What type of dissent? Dissent about what? Dissent by who? What is meant by “tolerated”? Tolerated by whom? The public? The government? The media? Political parties? What are the metrics? What are the comparisons between the two nations? Etc.
“There were two invasions of Lebanon — not 3″
1. 1978.
2. 1982.
3. 2006.
That’s three.
June 10, 2010, 5:50 pmPierre Corneille says:
I would say the first, and possibly the third, points are subjective, or at least open to interpretation. The first, especially, depends on how one measures dissent and toleration of dissent. Now, you might be able to provide me with a powerful argument to justify your assertion about toleration of dissent in Israel, and if so, I presume you would use facts in your argument, but the argument is not a “fact” in the sense that Mr. Bernstein seems to mean when he identifies Judt’s error of fact.
June 10, 2010, 6:06 pmc-/d+ says:
now, now. there is no need to attack david bernstein’s preferred mode of argument so vehemently. if you have read any piece by him, you will see that ad hominem is his stock in trade. that and an exceedingly thin skin.
June 10, 2010, 6:10 pma long-time reader of Judt says:
Do the participants in this thread appreciate that, like the original posting, most of what they have said confirms what I take to be Judt’s basic point? Apart from the ad hominum arguments (which distract even more from the point) you are busy toting up the relative moral accounts of the Israelis and Palestinians. One way to restate what I take to be Judt’s message is that neither side clearly has the moral highground so it would be better to put moral arguments to the side and get relevant actors thinking about how these two peoples can live side by side.
June 10, 2010, 6:17 pmEngineer says:
Rather than continue to debate how uniequivocally true the “factual” things should be, let me put it this way …
His remarks about tolerance of dissent and domination by the “professional military” describe a country very different from the one that I am familiar with and the one you can read about it many online Israeli newspapers.
So different, in fact, that Judt seems to be indulging in fanciful caricature – rather than speaking from understanding.
I don’t know if Judt intended the 1978 Litani operation, but there were many similar operations carried out over the year
June 10, 2010, 6:20 pmEngineer says:
Judt’s message is that neither side clearly has the moral highground so it would be better to put moral arguments to the side and get relevant actors thinking about how these two peoples can live side by side.
Does he really think the “relevant actors” are so obtuse that they need to be told this?
The “Oslo process” began in 1993 with a statement of mutual recognition. Oslo failed, for reasons that liberals are curiously reluctant to investigate. And now the Palestinians belonging to the “moderate” faction will not agree to sit face-to-face with the Israelis.
It’s not possible to dismiss this brute situation by calling it a “moral argument”. If there is not mutual recognition then there is no capability for a peace agreement.
Obviously the sides are currently too far apart to make a breakthrough, so the goal is to establish the least bad modus vivendi that does not involve a peace agreement.
June 10, 2010, 6:32 pmStrict says:
“One way to restate what I take to be Judt’s message is that neither side clearly has the moral highground”
Unfortunately, his point was not very clear. I thought it was closer to “the blamegame shouldn’t be played because it’s unproductive,” not because one side couldn’t win. Arguing about who is to blame doesn’t solve problems like this. It can be counterproductive because it may unnecessarily open up old wounds.
He then lists some bad things Israel has done and says that the Palestinians haven’t made such comparable blunders. Which is strange because that simply begs for a list of comparable blunders [e.g. Munich, Maalot, Coastal Road, rockets from Gaza, Intifadas, airplane hijackings, HAMAS Charter, Fatah-HAMAS schism, rejection of certain peace offers, etc], which of course is unproductive blamegame all over…
June 10, 2010, 6:35 pmblender says:
Honest question for DB: do you actually have a grand solution? Amateur opinion or not, I suspect such a post would make for a much better use of our time than your above post.
June 10, 2010, 6:36 pmSteve says:
The suggestion that America is “intolerant of dissent” because the President occasionally makes a snarky comment about Fox News is so funny that it makes the entire thread worthwhile.
June 10, 2010, 6:38 pmEngineer says:
The suggestion that America is “intolerant of dissent” because the President occasionally makes a snarky comment about Fox News is so funny that it makes the entire thread worthwhile.
Judt’s comment about dissent in Israel is about as ridiculous, but the clueless leftys who read the NYT end up believing it.
June 10, 2010, 6:46 pmSuperSkeptic says:
I’m pleased that there is focus on Gaza’s democracy. This is a point which I was concerned with in a recent post. I had not known that Hamas had “boycotted” or otherwise cancelled elections subsequent to being democratically elected in 2005, and such action does undercut claims to democratic legitimacy. But, so does an entrenched two-party system with laws favoring their incumbent status. I think the rush to declare them undemocratic to de-legitimize them proves a bit too much. It’s 2010, so 2005 is only 5 years since an election. Our system has some more regular elections and some less (for congress-people and senators, respectively). So five years perhaps isn’t that bad, and doesn’t necessarily forfeit all their claims of democracy – particularly with their current situation. Our republic could have easily been set up differently, with no elections for, say, 10 years at a time at the federal level, and this would not necessarily ruin our claims to be a “democracy.” Historically, Athens declared dictators in times of crises without forfeiting its claims to democracy.
June 10, 2010, 6:47 pmnot a Palestine supporter says:
Back on it again, eh professor?
“A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as [unabashed supporters] of Israel”
Without questioning your academic vigor or age or reinvention, the rest of the sentence seems to accurately describe your ongoing series on why Israel is all-things-holy and above any reproach. Yawn.
I really must question the utility of any post where, upon reading the author’s name, the tone/presentation/conclusion of the post is already foregone.
June 10, 2010, 6:49 pmAnderson says:
“There were two invasions of Lebanon — not 3″
1. 1978.
2. 1982.
3. 2006.
How many invasions does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.
June 10, 2010, 6:59 pmAriel says:
Even during WWII and the Civil War, we still had elections every two (Congresspeople), four (Presidents), and six years (Senators).
The term of the Palestinians has expired. You may think five years is a reasonable term, and you may well be right, but it is not the term to which they were elected.
Moreover, there are many other ways in which their elections were flawed, as mentioned above.
June 10, 2010, 7:00 pmeyesay says:
Tony Judt sloppy reasoning: “It is a democracy dominated and often governed by former professional soldiers: this alone distinguishes it from other advanced countries.” So the United States, presided over by Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army George Washington, General U.S. Grant and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, or the United Kingdom, prime ministered by Lt. Colonel Winston Churchill, or France, presided over by Leader of the Free French Forces Charles de Gaulle, must also be distinguished from other advanced countries. Right?
June 10, 2010, 7:05 pmJJ says:
I think this was one of the points DB made with regards to the predictability of Judt’s post/op-ed.
June 10, 2010, 7:10 pmDavidBernstein says:
The sorts of things you are debating are what I referred to as “(at best) tendentious contentions.” For example, there were arguably three invasions of Lebanon, and arguably they were all disastrous, but arguably none of them were disastrous, and it’s really hard to see why the 1978 mini-invasion was disastrous. Similarly, Israeli military people have more influence than in other Western democracies, but then again Israel has a more precarious security situation than other Western democracies, and it does seem at least tendentious to suggest that the country’s politics is “dominated by professional soldiers,” when six of the last eight people to serve as prime minister were not professional soldiers.
June 10, 2010, 7:10 pmColin says:
Right, that’s the point that I/others were making. They’re tendentious contentions. They’re arguable points, not factual errors.
Without taking up a side on the matter, to call the professional soldiers thing a ‘factual error’ as the linked author does seems misleading, and veering into the category of labeling one’s own opinions as facts.
June 10, 2010, 7:16 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Judt, does, however, present them as facts. That doesn’t make them factual errors, though.
June 10, 2010, 7:22 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I take it that you never read any blog post by Juan Cole, Steven Walt, Andrew Sullivan, among many others, that relates to Israel, then.
June 10, 2010, 7:23 pmSuperSkeptic says:
That’s true. And it certainly bolsters our democratic credentials relative to Gaza’s. But you say:
Okay, in the U.S., third party candidates aren’t “summarily shot”, but they sure are limited in a lot of ways relative to party A (democrats) or party B (republicans). So your hypothetical (aside from the shootings, which is no small aside, I realize) “is actually pretty close to what happen[s]” in the United States when third party’s are dissuaded by law to compete. Not the same degree of democratic antithesis, but it’s present here too.
We also have freedom of speech issues, times when politicians stay in office way too long, and a history of rebellion, as you know, where one side refused to let the other participate. No, I’m not trying to argue that it is anywhere close to the degree of anti-democratic practices of recent Gaza. My point is merely that neither they nor we are some ideal “perfect” democracy; neither are we both completely non-democratic, although they might seem that way relative to us.
* * *
June 10, 2010, 7:26 pmBut I’m not wedded to their democracy in any way, just concerned about the implications of middle-east democracy (or the lackthereof) and our reactions to it and interactions with it in this war & peace process.
Colin says:
DB: Actually, I have started skipping over the Sullivan blog posts on Israel in my RSS feeder. And that’s as someone who largely agrees with him. It’s just that once you’ve read a few, you’ve pretty much read them all.
June 10, 2010, 7:30 pmzuch says:
Why? I’m serious. In a true democracy, for instance, where all matters are decided by the populace en masse (i.e., not representative democracy), you don’t need officials nor elections of such (while you might vote on matters at issue on a scheduled or ad hoc basis).
And for the likes of the U.K., some types of elections are not scheduled (something that allows them to have the likes of 1 month campaigns and saving a lot of campaign money, unlike our “perpetual election cycle” society).
So, once again: Why are scheduled elections necessary to democracy?
Cheers,
June 10, 2010, 8:23 pmtim says:
“The “strategic liability” phrase is just acceptance of the cliche that the Palestinian cause is the source of Arab violence and hatred against the US.”
Actually, the “strategic liability phrase” is the words of one Anthony H Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the CSIS:
http://csis.org/publication/israel-strategic-liability
June 10, 2010, 8:26 pmzuch says:
I didn’t use the term “argumentum” anywhere. Glad to see you read on past the assigned material and educated yourself, though.
If you have a different idea of the “fallacy of bifurcation”, out with it. In the meanwhile. there’s this:
Classical fallacy of bifurcation. Both, neither, or something else could be a democracy, depending on other circumstances, but Scattergood limits the choices to one or the other.
Other comments on the necessity of elections here.
Cheers,
June 10, 2010, 8:28 pmHarryEagar says:
My thought as well.
And I’d like Zuch to list all the democracies that don’thave scheduled elections.
June 10, 2010, 8:32 pmzuch says:
The other possible answer is that “democracy” (however defined) might not be the sine qua non as to what you would consider to be a well and justly run country….
Cheers,
June 10, 2010, 8:35 pmTGGP says:
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Judt has demonstrated his ignorance on topics closer to his forte without repercussion. People say “Postwar” is good though.
I was also surprised to hear Israel has no written constitution. I had always heard they had one of the most powerful supreme courts outside the U.S, and its surprising they are given such leeway without even a written constitution to legitimize their decisions.
I actually agree with the Flemish & Basque (and Quebecois and…) separatists. Call me ostrich.
“From French Algeria through South Africa to the Provisional I.R.A.”
June 10, 2010, 8:38 pmI’ll grant the third example, but would Israelis really find the first two to be a good precedent?
Ariel says:
There are matters of degree, and matters of degree. This is like saying apples and planets are both spherical. To a first approximation its true, but if you wanted to understand gravity (or governance, in our parallel), there’s quite a difference based on which one you’re looking at. I know that you agree to some degree, but I really think you may be understating the differences.
We have freedom of speech issues, but not to the same extent. Sure, you may be called a racist. Or you may not be allowed to contribute the amount of money you’d like. But you will not be taken out (quite literally) if you espouse the wrong views.
While our politicians do stay for too long – I’d gladly support term limits – they still do nominally face the voters at set periods. Politicians also choose their voters in the US, which is a problem.
I think the important point is not that we are or are not perfect, and so therefore should not cast the first stone. The important point is that what we are, and what they are, have so little to do with each other that they do not deserve the same label.
June 10, 2010, 9:09 pmanon says:
tim says: ‘Actually, the “strategic liability phrase” is the words of one Anthony H Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the CSIS’
Have you ever read Cordesman? He pretty much says that Israel has been a ‘strategic liability’ since its inception in 1947. Mr. Judt claims that Israel has JUST NOW become a ‘strategic liability’. And in both cases neither of them can properly support that conclusion.
Except to state it is true.
A small country that has managed to kept some 23 countries with a highly militantized population totaling more than 50 times its own size from successfully destroying it is somehow a strategic failure?
Such a conclusion is absurd.
But it is a conclusion to which seemingly the vast majority of academic types blindly adhere. And those same academics are unable to understand why most of the public considers them to be idiots?
[ of course most of the current crop of 'academics' never
June 10, 2010, 9:22 pmstudied greek ( or latin; dead languages both ) and so are
unable to determine the root of the word idiot ]
Ariel says:
I didn’t say that it was. You can have a well and justly run country that’s an absolute dictatorship, at least in principle.
June 10, 2010, 9:27 pmRandomEngineer says:
After reading all the back and forth on the issue raised, I’m left wondering how some of the usual suspects here would have reacted if George W. Bush had made such a public misstatement about Israel’s constitution. I have my doubts that everyone would be so forgiving.
June 10, 2010, 10:05 pm22dux says:
“After reading all the back and forth on the issue raised, I’m left wondering how some of the usual suspects here would have reacted if George W. Bush had made such a public misstatement about Israel’s constitution. I have my doubts that everyone would be so forgiving.”
That’s especially puzzling since Bush demonstrated his intelligence and insight over the decades in the business world.
June 10, 2010, 10:44 pmJohn Eugene Haas says:
While I couldn’t agree more that a scholar betraying fundamental ignorance about his subject matter fatally compromises his positions, I’m loath to deem this such an example.
The edit Judt made relates to this (original) sentence: “[t]his is largely true: the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.” Compare that with the updated version: “[t]his is largely true: the country has an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.”
It becomes clear that the revision serves more to clarify than retract—Israel possesses no constitution in the sense understood by most Times readers, an impression given by the original. (That is, an American-style founding charter taking preeminence over other sources of law.) But that doesn’t mean the original was incorrect—indeed, Israel has every bit as much a constitution as the United Kingdom, just not the sort familiar to an American audience.
June 10, 2010, 11:09 pmBob from Ohio says:
Its not original with Cordesman. Mearsheimer and Walt have a whole chapter in their book discussing the “question”, for instance.
It is still just the acceptance of the false idea that Iranians, for instance, give a damn about the Palestinians and hate the US because of Israel.
Abandonment of Israel would just prove that we are a “weak horse” and an unfaithful friend. Fortunately, that is not about to happen.
June 10, 2010, 11:31 pmLitigator London says:
I can understand that that some on this blog will be outraged by Judt’s article. After all Professor Judt rather epitomises the sort of Jewish academic that the US right wing and those of an “Israel right or wong” persuasion love to hate.
Judt was born in London’s East End of immigrant parents at a time when East End Jewish Community had vivid memories of the Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. As a consequence, at that time, the British Jewish Community had very strong links to the British Labour Party which in turn had stong links to the Israeli Labour Party and, as might be expected from his background, Judt has always been on the left of politics. He was educated at Emmanuel School which was founded in 1594 by Lady Dacre and Elizabeth I. The foundation is Anglican and it is one of a very select group of schools for the poor where the quality of education is such that the pupils consistently get the grades to access the elite universities. Professor Judt was no exception, with a BA and PhD from Cambridge and now a Professorship at NYU. In his early life he was a Zionist, worked on a a kibbutz in his gap year but as with other notable British Labour party zionists, such as the Rt Hon Sir Gerald Kaufmann MP, Judt became disillusioned.
Professor Bernstein’s commentary begins with the introductory remark:-
“A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as prophetic critics of Israel, despite a lack of real knowledge of the relevant subject matter. Mearsheimer and Walt are two; Tony Judt, whose academic specialty is European history, is another.”
Judt was born in 1948 so he is 4 years younger than I am and hardly in his dotage. With all the arrogance of his youth, Professor Bernstein perhaps does not appreciate that in both history and the practice of law, advancing age usually results in increasing wisdom. Both trial lawyers and historians are professional observers of the human condition, lawyers at the micro-level and historians at the macro level. Lawyers (proper ones, less so academics) learn about human nature every day from our dealings with our clients, our observations of the witnesses under examination and the reactions of juries to testimony and of judges to forensic argument. It is a knowledge which only comes with experience.
Likewise with history, long study makes for better judgment of events. That is why Mr Gibbon’s 1776-88 magnum opus The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is still of relevance today. Gibbon was no lover of religious intolerance. He excoriated Christianity for “the outrage of religious intolerance and warfare”
The 2003 US reaction to Judt’s criticisms of the state of Israel as becoming a becoming a “belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state.” does not detract from the fact that these criticisms were are absolutely justified then in the view of many Jewish and non-Jewish observers of Israeli politics in Europe and, indeed, of some in Israel itself. And the criticism seems to me to be just as valid today.
Then, in 2006 he wrote an article calling for the conversion of “Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one” which would include all of what is now Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. This proposed new state would have had equal rights for all Jews and Arabs living in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The article generated great controversy with many letters accusing him of being an “anti-semite” and a “self-hating Jew”. There was further controversy over his criticisms of the impact of the US Jewish lobby on US policy to Israel.
Any Jew who advocates equal rights for Jews and Arabs is bound to be a marked man these days. So, no wonder Professor Bernstein is dismissive of Judt’s qualification to express a view and nitpicks over a small (and corrected) error about the fact that Israel does not have a written constitution.
What Professor Bernstein does not elaborate on is why it doesn’t: the deadly conflict between secular and religious Jews, the former wanting a state of “hok”, not a state of halakhah. It was that conflict which deadlocked the Constituent Assembly of 1949 with the religious Jews objecting to the adoption of any secular document which would be regarded as having higher authority than their view of religious law as set out in the Taakh, Talmud and Shulkhan Arukh, and led to the expedient of piecemeal enactment of the so-called “basic-laws”.
And this conflict between secular and religious Jews is coupled with the fractured electoral system which results in disproportionate influence of extreme parties. Present Israeli Governments cannot negotiate in the peace process with the strength of majority parliamentary support but only out of weakness ever hostage to the views of the settlers and the proponents of Eretz Israel. That’s why Israel now has the embarrassment of finding someone like Avigdor Lieberman becoming Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister, a man whose party wants any settlement with the Palestinians to result in separate national identities with the majority of Arab Israeli citizens losing their citizenship.
Judt’s s own past experience of condemnation by the “Israel Right or Wrong” lobby in the USA is reflected in this passage:-
“But criticism of Israel, increasingly from non-Israeli Jews, is not predominantly motivated by anti-Semitism. The same is true of contemporary anti-Zionism: Zionism itself has moved a long way from the ideology of its “founding fathers” — today it presses territorial claims, religious exclusivity and political extremism. One can acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and still be an anti-Zionist (or “post-Zionist”). Indeed, given the emphasis in Zionism on the need for the Jews to establish a “normal state” for themselves, today’s insistence on Israel’s right to act in “abnormal” ways because it is a Jewish state suggests that Zionism has failed.
We should beware the excessive invocation of “anti-Semitism.” A younger generation in the United States, not to mention worldwide, is growing skeptical. “If criticism of the Israeli blockade of Gaza is potentially ‘anti-Semitic,’ why take seriously other instances of the prejudice?” they ask, and “What if the Holocaust has become just another excuse for Israeli bad behavior?” The risks that Jews run by encouraging this conflation should not be dismissed. “
The op-ed is well reasoned and merits serious consideration.
June 11, 2010, 12:45 amreally says:
“Someone managed to find the original version”
So you wrote a post condemning this guy as an ignoramus without knowing what he actually wrote?
That doesn’t lend much credibility to your opinions.
June 11, 2010, 12:57 amonion says:
There’s irrelevant academics and then there are irrelevant academics who teach at third-tier universities.
Which are you, Mr. Bernstein?
June 11, 2010, 1:00 amneimoller says:
wow. so you launched into yet another nasty personal attack without being certain of the facts, and can’t even find it in yourself to apologize for your gross error.
one more reason not to pay attention to your hate filled rants, going by your own standards.
June 11, 2010, 1:32 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
When I saw this post in the morning, I was unusually sympathetic to Bernstein’s belief. Saying Israel has a written constitution would be enough to zero out the value of an op-ed, even if I were in agreement with its conclusions. The “correction”, however, seems to me inconsistent with the original wording. Like Great Britain, Israel has an unwritten constitution, simply not codified in one particular document.
June 11, 2010, 1:57 amLitigator London says:
On the democracy point:
When referring to Gaza, Professor Judt carefully put the word into quotation marks. He makes the point that not every state claiming to be a democracy is one.
Some of the most mature democracies in the world are actually monarchies (eg the UK, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands). The “Peoples’ Democratic Republics” of Eastern Europe were hardly democratic under their Soviet puppet masters. North Korea still entitles itself a “Democratic Peoples’ Republic” which makes the point perfectly.
Given that political institutions are devised by humans, they are all necessarily imperfect. The degrees of imperfection vary, but what one might describe as “the mature democracies” are relatively few.
The Economist compiles a ranking of states Democracy Index 2007. There are 7 constitutional monarchies in the top 10. The USA ranks 17th and the UK 23rd both dragged down by low levels of participation. Israel doesn’t even make it into the “full democracy list”, At No 47 in the world it qualifies only as a “flawed democracy”.
Why? As the compilers of the table explain: “All democracies are systems in which citizens freely make political decisions by majority rule. But rule by the majority is not necessarily democratic. In a democracy majority rule must be combined with guarantees of individual human rights and the rights of minorities.”
It is equally worth pointing out that just about all the Arab nations come well down the lists as “Authoritarian Regimes”. So while it takes time and very high standards to get onto the full democracy list, and Israel hasn’t yet made it, it is still doing better by far than its neighbours.
But that is a reason to hold Israel to higher standards. One would like to see it go still higher up the list.
June 11, 2010, 4:11 amDavid Bernstein says:
I’ll remind some of our more, umm, aggressive commentators, that the New York Times editors wrote, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Israel has a written constitution.”
June 11, 2010, 8:03 amDavid Bernstein says:
I’m supposed to think his views on Israel are especially valuable because he lived there briefly, over forty years ago, and spent a few years as a “Zionist enthusiast,” only to grow “disillusioned” when he volunteered in 1967 and discovered that Israelis weren’t actually the socialist supermen of his adolescent fantasies?
June 11, 2010, 8:37 amDavid Bernstein says:
This is kind of amusing, given that “low levels” of participation in the U.S. are in part because we don’t force people to vote, unlike those other “human rights” respecting democracies.
June 11, 2010, 8:41 amSC says:
The English still view themseleves as having an independent judiciary. What’s odd is that you think only you know the meaning of such a broad term.
June 11, 2010, 9:23 amhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_the_judiciary
David Bernstein says:
I didn’t say they don’t, I said the pairing of “constitution” and “independent judiciary” suggests a discussion of a judicially enforceable constitution.
I think it would be odd for someone to write that the English “have a constitution, an independent judiciary,” not because both clauses aren’t true, but because they are unrelated.
June 11, 2010, 9:33 amAriel says:
Of course, it’s very important to hold Israel to higher standards. In fact, why don’t we hold them to standards that no other country on the list has ever achieved? That way we can always say how bad they are.
Antisemites are kind of funny. First, they criticize you for saying you are the “Chosen” people, because that implies you are better than them. (Of course, this is a misreading of what Chosen means.) Then, if you say, no, you just want to be judged by the same standard as everyone else, they say you have to be judged by a higher standard. Which is it? The real answer, of course, is that it’s neither – Israel always loses.
June 11, 2010, 10:35 amBill says:
This special pleading for Israel never counts as anti-semitism though, especially when they play the “Jew card.” Even when British boycott advocate Tom Hickey wrote a piece for the Brit Med Journal explicitly said that he was in favor of boycotting Jewish Israelis over Chinese PRCers or the African Sudan because Jews were into academics (the global nerds, so to speak), I’m sure he felt that he wasn’t doing anything wrong but would have fired anyone in a New York minute if someone applied the same thinking to anyone else. Heck, even in itself, it was racist as hell against The Other others he couldn’t hold to the same standard.
June 11, 2010, 11:52 amzuch says:
He got re-elected in 2004 after it was quite clear he’d gotten the facts in Iraq horribly wrong (and this is far from the sum total of his eedjitcy)….
Cheers,
June 11, 2010, 12:09 pmMike B. says:
Mearsheimer and Walt, otherwise irrelevant? That’s news to me. That seems to be the glaring error in this post that will give me the green light to continue to disregard your rants.
(okay, obviously I don’t disregard them if I read them enough to challenge them).
June 11, 2010, 1:07 pmLitigator London says:
if, as Mr Niemoller asserts above, the original phrase was: “Israel has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections” that would make perfect sense to me. Of course the clauses are related. A democracy must have a constitution otherwise it is not a democracy but a tyranny or an oligarchy. Likewise a democracy must have an indepedent judiciary and also elections.
I would have thought that the connection of the three elements would have been blindingly obvious to someone who teaches constitutional law.
Professor Judt is writing in his native language which is English, and it may be that American usage (aka “Murkin”) differs and that the change was a consequence of the NYT editing process.
June 11, 2010, 1:28 pmGW says:
“given that civil libertarians in Israel are constrained by the lack of a constitution”
I believe you mean civil liberties.
June 11, 2010, 2:53 pm78 Packers says:
“I’ll remind some of our more, umm, aggressive commentators, that the New York Times editors wrote, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Israel has a written constitution.””
So you believe that what you read in the NYT is factual, now?
June 11, 2010, 10:03 pmLitigator London says:
See Professor Bernstein’s latest update:-
“Second, it would be very odd to praise Israel, or even damn Israel with faint praise, regarding democracy and civil liberties by mentioning its constitution, given that civil libertarians in Israel are constrained by the lack of a constitution. If anything, one would think Judt would have written, “the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though, in part because it lacks a constitution guaranteeing minority rights, it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.”
Professor Bernstein:-
I don’t see why Professor Judt would have written that. The wording you postulate contains a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
(1) Protection against discrimination can be achieved perfectly well by legislation, as we have done in the UK.
(2) People do not discriminate BECAUSE a constitution permits or prohibits it, but because they wish to discriminate. Blacks were not discriminated against in the USA because of the presence or absence of a constitutional protection but because there were people who wanted to discriminate. I believe there are country clubs and the like in the USA which still do not admit blacks and jews to membership because the members wish to discriminate.
(3) Discrimination can be brought to an end irrespective of legislation if people are educated and it becomes socially unacceptable, but of course things may move faster if it is also prohibited by legislation and penalties imposed.
However, I am pleased that you seem to accept that there is discrimination against non-Jews in Israel. How do you think that should be remedied?
June 11, 2010, 11:11 pmSammy Finkelman says:
The problem with the article is really almost everything he wrote.
It’s fundamentally dishonest – and when you are being dishonest and making an argument you get caught up in mistakes. He was actually being a little bit favorable to Israel at this spot.
The point he was trying to make here was that whether or not a country is a democracy really doesn’t matter. For this purpose, he concedes here how good a democracy Israel is in some respects.
And look at the first sentence of that paragraph:
Democracy” is no guarantee of good behavior: most countries today are formally democratic — remember Eastern Europe’s “popular democracies.”
???!!! Nobody who says that democracy is a guarantee of good behavior, includes the old Communist countries of Europe as examples of democracy!
And people did know the difference. I don’t know if Tony Judt did. That could be researched.
Leave that comment aside. Let’s say he acknowledged that at the time. Then I have a question:
Yes, ever since the time of Woodrow Wilson many dictatorships have pretended to be democracies. So what? Does it mean that we don’t know what’s what. Apparently, according to Tony Judt, it does.
What he says is like this: We have countries that are formally democracies (He could have cited Mussolini’s Italy too) We have Israel – very much a real democracy – but it doesn’t do everything right. And even Hamas has some claims to being a democracy. So, says Tony Judt in effect, the question of which side in a international dispute is a democracy is one of those cliches or arguments that we should ignore.
Anybody here really believe this?
By the way, falsely claiming to be a democracy started really I think with Mexico and other countries in Latin America. It was then adopted by the Lenin, who constructed a dictatorship that was a blend of the worst aspects of Czarist Russia and Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico – I mean the fake elections.)
June 13, 2010, 2:10 pmSammy Finkelman says:
John Eugene Haas: The edit Judt made relates to this (original) sentence: “[t]his is largely true: the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.” Compare that with the updated version: “[t]his is largely true: the country has an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.”
What he could have – but never would have – said is:
“The country has free elections and a liberal, very activist independent judiciary that isn’t constrained from creating rights by the absence of a constitution to interpret, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.”
June 13, 2010, 2:14 pmSammy Finkelman says:
Actually civil libertarians and the Israeli Supreme Court is NOT constrained by the absence of a constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharon_Barak
“During his time as President of the court Barak advanced a judicial activist approach, whereby the court was not required to limit itself to judicial interpretation, but rather was permitted to ‘fill the gaps’ in the law through ‘judicial legislation’ at common law. This approach was highly controversial and was met with much opposition, including by some politicians. The Israeli legal commentator Ze’ev Segal wrote in a 2004 article: “Barak sees the Supreme Court as a [force for societal change], far beyond the primary role as a decisor in disputes. The Supreme Court under his leadership is fulfilling a central role in the shaping of Israeli law, not much less than [the role of] the Knesset. Barak is the leading power in the court, as a key judge in it for a quarter of a century, and as the ‘number 1 judge’ for some 10 years now.”
On September 14, 2006, upon reaching the mandatory retirement age, Barak resigned from the Supreme Court. Three months later he published his final judgements, among them a number of precedents regarding damages in tort for residents of the Palestinian territories, Israel’s policy of targeted killing and preferential treatment for IDF veterans.”
June 13, 2010, 2:18 pmSammy Finkelman says:
That is the entire purpose of the Op-ed piece.
TJ> No. 1: Israel is being/should be delegitimized
Well, it is.
TJ> Israel is a state like any other, long-established and internationally recognized.
That’s true, but it’s legitimacy is also very seriously denied.
TJ> The bad behavior of its governments does not “delegitimize” it, any more than the bad behavior of the rulers of North Korea, Sudan — or, indeed, the United States — “delegitimizes” them.
He is right and wrong. The (alleged) bad behavior demonizes israel. Demonization is not the same as delegitimization – except that in the context of who is responsible for war is it very close.
The whole article is a list of things we shouldn’t continue to say. These are all ways in which Israel is better or more trustworthy than its enemies.
Actually these are basically true and pretty good points. Maybe not all of them – I would not cite some of these points he says should not be part of the debate.
According to Tony Judt the things we shouldn’t say:
No. 1: Israel is being/should be delegitimized
No. 2: Israel is/is not a democracy
Ah – let’s get rid of this is/is not. That’s another part of Tony Judt’s dishonesty.
No. 3: Israel is/is not to blame
I had to leave that in. That one is argued both ways. It is actually the MOST important question in the Middle East and canot be shoved under the rug.
No. 4: The Palestinians are/are not to blame
No reason for Tony Judt to include that except a false parallelism. the Palestinians actually aren’t independnet and can’t go against the Arab League.
No. 5: The Israel lobby is/is not to blame
Here he argues that yes, there is a too influential pro-Israel lobby.
But it only controls policy about Israel – it doesn’t mean that Jews are “running the country.” And anyway, the gun lobby, the oil lobby and the banking lobby have all done far more damage to the health of this country.
Any Arab lobby I guess he forgot about even though he does mention an oil lobby.
No. 6: Criticism of Israel is/is not linked to anti-Semitism
Of course if it isn’t exactly anti-semitism, it is its second cousin.
What do you think anti-semitism is?
Anti-semitism is false accusations of evil against Jews, especially when tied to groups that advocate or attempt the harming or killing of Jews.
If that doesn’t describe what’s going on with Israel and its enemies, I don’t know what does.
It isn’t always necessary to say that the Jews are (always) evil because of something having to do with their Judaism but that happens a lot in the Middle East anyway.
June 13, 2010, 2:51 pmLitigator London says:
But on the other hand what is an observer to make of this Haaretz – A Nightmarish Experiment – Sefi Rachlevsky ?
In particular:-
“It’s self-evident that the education provided to children be based on democracy and equality. And yet in Israel, 52 percent of first-graders defined as Jews study in various religious school systems that teach students things like “You are considered a human being and the other nations of the world are not considered human beings.”
They are taught that a non-Jew is not a human being, and that anyone who kills a non-Jew is not supposed to be killed by human hands; that women are inferior, and it is an obligation that males and females be separated; and that secular people, or anyone with secular family members, cannot enter these schools.
It is self-evident that racist education cannot be funded by the government and is illegal. And yet most of the country’s first-graders receive such “compulsory education” from their government.
The results of this nightmarish experiment are self-evident. In the most recent elections, 35 percent of voters defined as Jews cast their ballots for avowedly racist parties – Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, National Union and their friends.”
If those allegations about teaching in religious schools are true, isn’t it worrying?
June 13, 2010, 5:33 pmDavid Bernstein says:
There may be some bizarre extremist school that teaches such a thing, but this is so far from normative, mainstream, Judaism, even ultra-Orthodox Judaism, that the implication that this is the sort of thing typically taught in Israeli religious schools is worse than nonsense.
By the way, LL, you seem to get all your information about Israel from the Israeli perspective from Ha’aretz. This would be like getting all your info on Britain from the Guardian, or on the U.S. from The Nation. It represents a small fraction of far-left opinion, and if that’s the only source you’re reading, you’re getting a very distorted view of Israel and Israelis.
June 13, 2010, 9:04 pmDavid Bernstein says:
It’s a big problem, because the ideal would be to try to integrate the Arab population more, but the right doesn’t want that for nationalist reasons, and the left thinks that it’s too un “pc” to talk about assimiliation and whatnot instead of just “minority rights.” The Arabs themselves want equal rights, but have no interest–or at least their leaders have no interest–in them taking on equal responsibilities, like national service; so long as they avoid national service, it’s rather easy to dismiss their claims for full equality, and also to assume that they are a hostile potential fifth column. Nor do the Arabs seem to want to make Hebrew their first language, or otherwise integrate more directly. So, I don’t have an easy solution, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. But I can’t think of any population that’s been treated as a “national minority,” even one with full legal rights, that hasn’t faced significant discrimination from the majority, and that’s without the added pressures of the national minority being tied by family, culture, language, etc to the majority’s enemy.
June 13, 2010, 9:14 pmDavid Bernstein says:
The good news, though, is that statistics I’ve seen suggest that Arabs in Israel do better relative to the majority than, e.g., the Arab minority in France, even though there are fewer inherent tensions between the majority and minority there, e.g., no ongoing war between France and Morocco/Algeria.
And the situation is far from hopeless, I suppose, given that Arabs in Israel are far better off relative to the majority in ever possible way than, say, African Americans in most of the South circa 1960.
June 13, 2010, 9:18 pmLitigator London says:
If there are any “bizzarre extremist schools” at all teaching that kind of hatred then why are they allowed to do so at all, state funded or not? Are there adults around who express that kind of belief?
There is much to be said in criticism of the curriculum in schools in some Arab states and for any number of extremist preachers, but any failure properly to regulate the teaching of the very young really rather debars Israel from being in a position to advance such criticisms. I remember that the first colour film (movie) I saw was Rogers & Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” and the song that stuck in my memory was not “Some Enchanted Evening” but:-
“You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
Why on earth should any non-Jew want to make Hebrew their first language? Mandate Palestine had Arabic, English and Hebrew as official languages, Switzerland has, I think, 4 official languages, the EU works in all the EU languages and guarantees all EU citizens the right to right to the Commission in their own language ad have a rely in that language – which at least means that thee are plenty of employment opportunities for linguists. Integration is not to be confused with assimilation.
I look at on-line versions of the Jerusalem Post as well as Haaretz as well as the Jewish Chronicle in London. Obviously articles criticising government policy from within Israel are more likely to find there way into Haaretz than into the Jerusalem Post.
June 14, 2010, 4:46 amDavid Bernstein says:
I don’t know, you quote some random leftist who provides no source for his quotation, and yet somehow attributes it to 52% of what Israeli schoolchildren are learning. The Israeli gov’t doesn’t have monitors sitting in every classroom, so of course some schools could have extremists who say crazy things. Canada has had several prosecutions of public school teachers who used their classrooms as anti-Semitic fora, does that mean that there’s something wrong with Canada? Israel’s educational system is somewhat dysfunctional, in part because the religious parties have too much power, given Israel’s ridiculous electoral system. But to go from that to the absurd charges the author made is quite another story. As for “state-funded or not,” given that Israel is a liberal democracy, if some crazy adult says something at a private school that is his interpretation of the Bible, on exactly what basis would the government intervene if it’s a private school with no government funding? You have Israeli Arab leaders who are free to say they support Hezbollah, too; that’s what happens when you have freedom of speech.
If you live in a majority Hebrew speaking country, where the business, educational, media, etc., elites all are native Hebrew speakers, it would make sense to do so, if your goal is integration. If your goal is not integration but cultural autonomy, then you wouldn’t, but then you wouldn’t be surprised if your group is not well-integrated. But then, I’ve always been amazed that there are Quebecois, surrounding by 330 million English-speakers, who not only don’t adopt English as their first language, but don’t know English at all.
June 14, 2010, 7:31 amSammy Finkelman says:
London Litigator quoting what turns out to be a genuine article in Ha-Artez:
And yet in Israel, 52 percent of first-graders defined as Jews study in various religious school systems that teach students things like “You are considered a human being and the other nations of the world are not considered human beings.”
Not so simple. This is actually a somewhat well known attack on the Talmud. Taking that fragment all by itself, it is a semi-understandable misunderstanding and mistranslation, but it is ripped out of context of the surrounding words, and a totally false context is assigned to it.
What you have to understand is there is anti-religious stream in Israel that is an echo of things from 125 or more years ago, that today survives only in Israel. You see here a vitrilic and false attack on religion. He can write this because he has absolutely no idea what really is taught.
Now as for what that really is.
It is NOT:
“You are considered a human being and the other nations of the world are not considered human beings.”
But
“You are called Adam ( a word for Man) and the other nations of the world are not called Adam.
And the reason they said that was in order to make the laws of defilement, especially from a corpse, only apply to a Jewish corpse. It would create more difficulty if it applied to anyone.
This was used to interpret verses like Leviticus Vayikra 13:2, or Numbers 19 :14
Here is a religious commentary on that:
http://www.torah.org/learning/ravfrand/5766/tazria.html
June 15, 2010, 5:22 pmSammy Finkelman says:
Here is what rabbi Rabbi Yissocher wrote on the web page referreed to above:
“I saw an interesting observation from Rav Shlomo Ganzfried. In his commentary on Chumash (Aperion), Rav Ganzfried wonders why the Torah chose the term “Adam” to describe a person at the start of the laws of Tzara’ath (rather than the more common “Ish”). Rav Ganzfried suggests that Adam is a connotation for a human that has no plural form. (The plural of “ish” is “anashim”, but the plural of “adam” is not “adamim”!)
With this principle, Rav Ganzfried explains a famous Gemara that is troubling to many people. In a number of places, the Talmud says, “You are called Adam, but the nations of the world are not called Adam” [Yevamos 61a; Bava Metzia 114b; Kerisus 6b].
The simple meaning of the above-quoted Talumudic passage would be that the connotation of the specific word ‘Adam’ is only appropriate to use about Jews. However, the meaning of this statement is certainly not that only Jews are considered human and non-Jews are considered sub-human. Heaven forbid! That is not the meaning of the Gemara.
Rav Ganzfried explains as follows. The Hebrew language is extremely precise in terms of the different connotations of apparent synonyms. The singular term “Adam” fits the Jews. All Jews are considered as a single entity. There is no dichotomy. We are all in this together. The reason why the word “Adam” is employed referring to Jews is because this is the only term for humanity that has no plural and the Jewish people are a singular people. Their one-ness is most appropriately expressed by the word “Adam.”
With this introduction, Rav Ganzfried adds, we can appreciate why the section of leprosy begins with the term “Adam.” As Chazal tell us, Tzara’as comes as a result of speaking Lashon HaRah [slander]. Homiletically, the word Metzorah is linked to the expression Motzi Rah [one who speaks evil]. The pasuk is teaching that when one speaks Lashon Hara, the divisiveness attacks and destroys the singularity of the Jewish people, endangering our status of “Adam.
This idea serves as the introduction to the whole section of Tza’raath laws. We have to remember that we Jews are called “Adam.” We must view ourselves as one big body. We are all in this together and dare not slander one another.
I read an incident dating back to the Beilus blood libel. In 1912, in Russia, Mendel Beilus was accused of killing a Christian child and using his blood to bake Matzahs. This slander or variations of it were unfortunately prevalent in Europe for many, many years. They were known as blood libels. Beilus’ lawyer was afraid that to buttress their case, the accusers would make the argument that Jews considered non-Jews less than human. He was in fact afraid that they would cite the above-quoted Talmudic reference to prove this very point.
The lawyer therefore visited the Chortkever Rebbe and asked him how he could respond if the opposing lawyers would throw that Gemara at him. The Rebbe said as follows: If an Italian was seized and put on trial, we would not witness a scenario where all Italians were congregating in their churches to pray for this one Italian. The same can be said about the French for a Frenchman, and so too about all other nations. However, when a Jew is seized and put on trial, the solidarity that Jews have toward each other will make every Jew throughout the world stop and pray for the welfare of that other Jew.
We do not have to go back to the Beilus trial to see the accuracy of this observation. In our day and time, we have witnessed many examples of such solidarity. If a single Jew is seized or held hostage, Jews all over the world congregate and pray for that one fellow Jew. Who is like your nation Israel -– one nation in the land? Is there another nation where everyone feels a sense of responsibility and one-ness with each other?
This is how the Chortkever Rebbe explained the Gemara “You are called Adam.” Only you are considered a single unit, whereby it is impossible to speak of the plural of Adam. This is not a racist interpretation. It is not bigoted. It is an attribute of the Jews that has been demonstrated time and time again in both recent and ancient times.”
June 15, 2010, 5:33 pmLee Kane says:
For those more interested in human rights than Judt, I think the important phrase to be considered is this one, “…it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.”
If this is an accurate depiction of Israel (as I believe it is), then it is to our shame that such a wide variety of politicians, academics and intellectuals here continue to defend the nation’s treatment of non-Jews. Yes, the US gives money to all sorts of unsavory, discriminatory and criminal nations. But those who defend their policies rather than pushing for universal human rights inhabit the same distasteful and dubious realm of history’s oppression-rationalizers (particularly those who blame the oppressed as not deserving of rights).
July 14, 2010, 3:06 pm