Remembering: Tony Judt and Mahmoud Darwish

Tony Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010)

Over the weekend the news began to circulate about the passing of Tony Judt. Judt was an extraordinary historian and essayist who was diagnosed with ALS in recent years. Despite the diagnosis he continued to write and lecture. He was known for different things to different people. Some will remember his criticisms of French intellectuals, other will remember his embrace of Social Democracy. Many, however, will also remember him for his stance on the questions of Palestine.

Judt, himself Jewish, was enthralled by Zionism in his youth. But in recent years, Judt became one of the foremost intellectual critics of Zionism and Israel's policy in occupied territory. Long before Mearsheimer & Walt and President Jimmy Carter, Judt published a seminal and thought provoking essay on Zionism and the Future of Israel in the New York Review of Books entitled "Israel: The Alternative." An excerpt is below:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

Judt, who later defended Mearsheimer and Walt, also ran into "a firestorm of vituperation and refutation". In 2006, for example, a lecture he was supposed to give was abruptly canceled. It later became known that pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee was behind the cancellation.

This article in the LA Times today get's it right on Judt. Toward the end, it quotes him:

I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else ... but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. ... It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent.

It is undoubtedly his belief in the need for equality which drove his views on Zionism, Israel and Palestine.


Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008)

We also pause to remember the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who passed away two years ago today but has left with us an immortal body of work on the land of Palestine and the plight of its people. The prose of Darwish became lyrics for a number of songs by the Lebanese musician and composer Marcel Khalife.

An example is captured in the video below. The poem "أحن الى خبز امي" or "I long for my mother's bread" is about life in exile, a signature topic for the famed Palestinian poet.

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