Tony Judt is a man whose name became a trigger for insta-hate in the revisionist nests of right-on Israel supporters. A British-born historian who had led a generally unremarked and probably blameless life in his New York University, Judt set the dovecotes aflutter in 2003 with a trenchantly argued article in the New York Review of Books which called for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
All manner of odium was heaped on Judt's head at the time: it was the first time he had written publicly about the issue, but it was not destined to be the last. The difference between Judt and kneejerk Israel-haters, however, was that Judt genuinely knew of what he spake: he was a leading member of Hashomer Hatzair in the UK, made aliya, lived on kibbutz, spoke fluent Hebrew, spent time with the army.
And then he fell out of love. Grown-ups among us will recognise that people do fall out of love from time to time, and that not everyone, however much we may dislike it, can be a little friend of all the world.
Judt came to London in 2004 and I interviewed him. It was a challenging, stimulating, combative interview and while I did not agree with him, I really enjoyed doing intellectual battle with him. Right at the end, I asked him how long it had been since he had visited the country which he took such fierce pleasure in scourging, and there was a long pause before he admitted that it had been 28 years.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying how terrible is the blow dealt to Judt. In Saturday's Guardian, Ed Pilkington wrote a beautiful interview with Judt, who is now suffering from an advanced form of motor neurone disease, and is effectively quadriplegic. Now in a wheelchair and wired up to breathing apparatus, Judt says his life now, only a life of the mind, is "like being in a prison which is shrinking by six inches each day." I don't think any of us can imagine the dreadfulness of this kind of existence.
But Tony Judt is determined not to be beaten. He is writing - or dictating - a series of essays for the New York Review of Books. The Guardian reprinted one, Night, in which he describes the minutiae of his life. Read it and weep; and then let us celebrate a free society where, no matter how much we may disagree with Tony Judt, we have the humanity to sympathise with his torment, and admire the hell out of his spirit.
