Israel's immaturity by Tony Judt

Here's an opinion piece by Tony Judt in Ha'aretz. thanks to Dizzy in the comments for pointing it out to me. It's quite a long article - eight pages of A4 but well worth a read.

Collective cognitive dysfunction

But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."

Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.

As I said there's a whole lot more so please read the whole thing.

Just as an aside here. Linda Grant saw fit to play the holocaust card just recently in the Engage comments to an article by Irene Bruegel. She declares anti-zionists to have lost the argument over the rights and wrongs of zionism on account of this recording. Frankly I haven't listened to it yet but if anyone wants to give it a liosten and point out how a tape recording can justify colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and an array of racist laws and policies to maintain the resulting "demographic balance" please free free to do so. I'll turn the moderator off while I go and visit my mum. If there are any antisemitic comments I'll delete them when I get home. They're usually from zionists trying to "prove" what a nasty bunch my blog attracts.