Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum Page A

still grander scale, the Poles and the Ukrainians, whose mutual crimes in the 1940s surpassed anything that has taken place between Arabs and Israelis.
    That is the gist of his essay, at least ostensibly, and it seems to me unexceptionable, if perhaps a little one-sided.
    V.
    But the remarkable aspect of Judt’s essay is not the ostensible argument. It is the set of images and rhetorical devices and even the precise language that he has chosen to use. His single most emphatic trope is a comparison between Israel and French Algeria, and between the current fighting and the Algerian War. A discussion of French Algeria begins the piece, and French Algeria pops up repeatedly, and its prominence in his argument raises an interesting question, namely, Does Israel have a right to exist? The Algerian War was fought over the proposition that French Algeria, as a colonial outpost of the French imperialists, did not, in fact, have a right to exist. Most of the world eventually came to accept that proposition. But if Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France’s imperialism?
    That particular question can be answered with a dozen arguments—the nativist argument (Zionism may have been founded to rescue the European Jews, but in the past fifty years it has mostly ended up rescuing the native Jews of the Middle East instead), the social justice argument (the overwhelming majority of Israel’s Jews arrived essentially as refugees), the social utility argument (if not for Israel, which country or international agency would have raised a finger on behalf of the supremely oppressed Jews of Ethiopia and many other places?), the democratic argument (democratic states are more legitimate than undemocratic ones), and so forth.
    But it has to be recognized that, starting in the 1960s, ever larger portions of the world did begin to gaze at Israel through an Algerian lens. Arafat launched his war against Israel in 1964, in the aftermath of the Algerian War but well before the Israelis had taken over the West Bank and Gaza, and his logic was, so to speak, strictly Algerian—a logic that regarded Israel as illegitimate per se. The comparison between Israel and French Algeria has served as one more basis for regarding Zionism as a doctrine of racial hatred—a doctrine, from this point of view, not much different from the old French notion that France had every right to conquer any African country it chose. Judt cannot share that view of Zionism, given his expressed worry about Israel’s survival. Someone who did share the view would regard Israel’s demise as desirable.
    Still, his essay emphasizes the Algerian analogy. And then, having underlined that comparison, Judt moves along to the argument that in recent times has tended to replace the one about French Algeria, now that the Algerian War has faded into the past. The newer argument compares Israel to the white apartheid Republic of South Africa, where a racist contempt for black Africans was the founding proposition of the state. Back in the days of apartheid, friends of social justice around the world had good reason to regard the white Republic of South Africa as illegitimate.
    Judt, on this note, observes that, “following fifty years of vicious repression and exploitation, white South Africans handed over power to a black majority who replaced them without violence or revenge.” And he asks, “Is the Middle East so different? From the Palestinian point of view, the colonial analogy fits and foreign precedents might apply. Israelis, however, insist otherwise.” But are the Israelis right in their insistence? He says, “Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness”—his point being, presumably, that the Israelis are wrong. But then, if Israel does in some profound way resemble apartheid South Africa, would it be right