The Twilight of the Western Settler Colonialist Project in Palestine

 

“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it” (Frantz Fanon)

In October 2003, late New York University professor and internationally renowned historian Tony Judt wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books (NYRB) entitled “Israel: The Alternative”

The reaction to this outstanding article was swift and vicious and, in the case of the American response, verged on hysteria.

In effect, within a week of its publication, the editor of NYRB had received several thousand letters on Judt’s essay – more than on any in its history – and the Jewish Professor, who, up to then, had been widely respected for his core commitment to justice and intellectual honesty and loudly acclaimed for his lucid studies of 19th and 20th century social history, in particular his panoramic study of Europe after World War II, became, almost overnight, the object of great furor, defamation and ostracism. 

Readers, among whom numerous renowned scholars and heads of Jewish organizations, accused him of belonging to the “Nazi Left”, of hating Jews, of denying Israel’s right to exist; distinguished professors at American universities canceled their NYRB subscriptions;

Andrea Levin, executive director of the “Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America” accused him of “pandering to genocide” and being “party to preparations for a final solution”; Alan Dershowitz of Harvard made the analogy with Adolf Hitler’s “one-state solution for all of Europe”, and David Jeffrey Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, charged him with advocating “genocidal liberalism”.  

Judt’s essay opened with the sentence:

“The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed”, followed by the notion that “The president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line”.  (more...)

The Twilight of the Western Settler Colonialist Project in Palestine