The Reemergence of One-Statism

the Jordan and Mediterranean, so what would emerge from Judt’s “binational” polity would be another Arab nation-state. “This is the explicit goal of Palestinian nationalists, and the recent history of the movement hardly suggests that they have given it up.”

Walzer wrote that Judt would have the citizens of his binational state rely on “international forces” for their security. But what people in their right mind would rely on such forces for their security? Rather, “the truth is that the Jews,” or at least those who could, would rapidly depart from Judt’s imaginary postnational state, which would resemble nothing more than “post-Habsburg Romania.” (Judt had compared contemporary Israel to Romania.) Walzer added, bitingly: “I suspect that Romania would be an upscale reference.”

One noteworthy response was published outside the New York Review, by Leon Wieseltier, in the pages of the New Republic. He wrote that Judt (“and his editors”) had “crossed the line” from “criticism of Israel’s policy to the criticism of Israel’s existence”; the “alternative” in their title was not “for Israel” but “to Israel.”

Wieseltier pointed out that Judt failed to describe the character of his desired polity, which would quickly devolve into an Arabmajority state with a diminishing Jewish minority. It would be a terrorist state, not a democracy (look at the other Arab states, look at Gaza), in which an ethnic cleansing of the Jews would be more than likely. “Why is Greater Palestine preferable to Israel?” asked Wieseltier. “The moral calculus of Judt’s proposal is