ABSTRACT
Israel's new security fence, Tony Judt adds, like the late Berlin Wall, merely "confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect". Judt mistakenly assumes an inherent contradiction between the Jewish identity of the state and its democratic character. The faith in Judt's case, however, is a counter-faith, and it takes its nourishment from that oldest of counter-faiths: classical Christian anti-Judaism. Both Christian and Judtian catholicism call into question Jewish "difference" and exceptionalism by calling upon Jews to shed particularism. More deeply, however, Judt's insistence on the Jewish state's "anachronism" seems to edge close to a secular version of Christian supersessionism. The United States, Judt writes, "had no direct experience of the worst of the twentieth century—and is thus regrettably immune to its lessons". From the twentieth century, many in Europe absorbed a mistaken lesson concerning the dangers of unbridled nationalism: national belonging, it was deduced, begets violence.
