Tony Judt’s despicable and by now notorious essay Israel: The Alternative, a text preaching the destruction of the Jewish state that was published in the New York Review of Books, has been criticized from almost every possible angle.

But there are still many things to be said about it. First and foremost that, coming from a historian, it is bad history, and that’s not only because the facts he presents are usually wrong or twisted, but because even those he gets right are framed in a misleading way.

Here is his most misleading affirmation:

“The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late.”

This represents a total lack of understanding and an almost scandalous misreading of several facts that have to do with the birth of the modern nation-state and nationalism according (not only) to the European pattern...