As Greece falls and Europe dissembles, it, and not Israel, is the ‘anachronism’

Back in 2003, as some readers will recall all too clearly, the noted historian Tony Judt penned a searing critique of Israel in the New York Review of Books. Titled “Israel: The Alternative,” Judt, whose impressive scholarship was largely focused on Europe, depicted the Jewish state as a reactionary outpost of 19th century nationalism that bucked the trend elsewhere — exemplified most of all by the European Union (EU) — toward “individual rights, open frontiers, and international law.”

Judt’s argument struck a wide-ranging, resonant chord. Its most memorable and damning line read as follows: “Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

That line sounds ridiculous in 2015, but it was equally flawed in 2003. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s Nazi-like Ba’ath regime was battling for survival, the Taliban was wreaking havoc and terror in Afghanistan, and North Korea dumped the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In those countries, and in many others, “individual rights, open frontiers, and international law” might as well have been concepts from another planet.

Yet there was one important difference: Judt was writing at a time when the EU as an institution, along with its underlying post-nationalist political vision, was very much in the ascendant. One year after his article was published, the EU expanded its membership with 10 new states, from Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Then, in 2007, Romania and Bulgaria joined the roster. In 2013, Croatia entered in the EU, just 20 years after the devastating war in the Balkans that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Most of all, the deepening and strengthening of the Union was exemplified by the adoption, and subsequent expansion, of the Euro single currency in 2002, which resulted in established currencies like the German mark and the French franc being consigned to the history books.