Despre egalitate în lumea inegalităţilor

London Review of Books publică în ediţia sa electronică un interviu cu istoricul Tony Judt, în care subiectele, fie că este vorba de SUA, de Israel, de Europa, sunt abordate fără prejudecăţi şi cu o luciditate pe care nu o găseşti pe aceste meleaguri, unde ipocrizia este a doua natură a "intelectualului".

Tony Judt este evreu. Şi nu am văzut mulţi evrei atât de critici cu statul Israel:

"It’s been doing this for a long time in the case of Israel and Palestine, expressing disapproval of the occupation but doing almost nothing to bring it to an end. Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.

Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes.

If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem."

Despre asta este vorba: Israelul trebuie să devină un stat normal, cu fix aceleaşi drepturi şi obligaţii ca restul statelor normale şi democratice ale comunităţii internaţionale. Lucru pe care, într-o anumită ocazie, l-am spus şi eu. Nu am fost prea bine primit, ca să zic aşa, şi nici nu mi-am atras prea multă simpatie. Dar asta e: mai devreme sau mai târziu, Israelul asta va trebui să facă. Sigur lui Judt nu i se va ierta poziţia asta. Dar, ţinând cont de circumstanţe, nici că-i mai pasă.

Tony Judt este în acelaşi timp un om de stânga. Şi ca om de stânga le reaminteşte celor care se reclamă de la acest curent de gândire valoarea de bază a stângii: credinţa în egalitate.

"You’ve written that an idea of radical progress crumbled with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. If we can no longer believe in the inexorable laws of history, or the certainty of a socialist future, on what basis can a progressive politics be established?

I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, 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. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? We can’t come together on the basis of 19th or 20th-century ideas of inevitable progress or the natural historical progression from capitalism to socialism or whatever. We can’t believe in that anymore. And anyway, it can’t do the work for us. We need to rediscover our own language of politics."

Citiţi-l! Merită! Şi meditaţi la spusele lui. Sunt lucruri care ne privesc în cel mai înalt grad, dar pe care nu le discutăm. Noi avem alte "priorităţi".