The job of an intellectual is to listen to the history that is being made all around you and to respond in new ways by re-assessing your previous beliefs. This is what the founding generation of Zionists did; this is what Nelson Mandela and the ANC did. Far from hewing to static master projects, they were forced, time and again, to accommodate themselves to shifting realities. This is what a thinker like Fred Halliday, who went from being a Third World anti-colonialist to being a Left universalist grounded in human rights, could do; this is what a thinker like Noam Chomsky, whose solution to every problem is to castigate U.S. imperialism, can’t do. The one-state Left, the boycotters, the decolonialists drone on, as all dogmatists do; they reject Arendt’s concept of bringing newness into the world, which she saw as the essence of politics and the essence of freedom. It’s as if they can hear only what’s in their own heads. But there’s a whole world outside, and that’s where history, and the future, are being made. You can deny the reality principle, but it won’t deny you. It will always catch up.
–Susie Linfield, interviewed by Robert Boyers, in “From the River to the Sea Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong,” Salmagundi, She is the author of The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky.
