March 29, 2010

Tony Judt on NPR's "Fresh Air"

Interviewed by Terry Gross, March 29, 2010:
Gross: . . . we were talking about how he lived in Israel in kibbutzim and was Zionist when he was a young man. But he later rethought many of his views about Israel.

In the past few years [technical difficulty] think that Israel should actually be one state with the Palestinian territories and that in one state everybody should have an equal vote which really outraged a lot of your readers...

Mr. Judt: Right.

Gross: ...because it would mean Israel would cease to be a Jewish state and the majority voting population would be Palestinian. So what was it like for you to alienate so many of your readers to outrage? So many of your readers.

Mr. Judt: Well, my wife, who is not Jewish, was amazed. She said that why can't people see how reasonable your essay was? I said look, what I did was break outside of a very big circle - the circle of Jews who believe in Israel and speaking as a Jew, stood outside it and said the emperor has no clothes. And that is not calculated to please people. But I would say, by the way, that although I made a lot of enemies, some of whom probably still see themselves as my enemy, they were nearly all in the United States.

My essay was republished all over the world. The essay on what was called "The Alternative to the Present Situation," in Israel it aroused a lot of political commentary but also a lot of approving commentary. . . .