Tony Judt on Israel

The problem of Israel is that it has arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international laws. The very idea of a Jewish state - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel is, in short, an anachronism.