Legal Commentary

Tony Judt, Israel Expert

By David Bernstein

A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as prophetic critics of Israel, despite a lack of real knowledge of the relevant subject matter. Mearsheimer and Walt are two; Tony Judt, whose academic specialty is European history, is another. Judt has a rather predictable op-ed in today?s Times, replete with (at best) tendentious contentions (Hamasistan Gaza is a democracy? Really? When are the next elections scheduled?). Most interesting to me, though, was the following addendum:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 10, 2010

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Israel has a written constitution.

If you don?t know enough about Israel to know that it doesn?t have a written constitution?a very significant omission that comes up all the time in debates over a vast array of Israeli policies?and, indeed, are so confident that Israel does have a written constitution that you don?t, say, bother to even check Wikipedia before you submit an op-ed to the Times, you have no business writing such op-eds, and no one should take your views about Israel seriously.

UPDATE: To give you a sense of why Judt?s error is so egregious, imagine that Judt had been writing a series of controversial essays critical of the U.S. and its system of government, and had mentioned that the ?U.S. has no written Constitution.? 

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on June 10, 2010 (boomark / email).