If, for the moment, support for the State of Israel, including its desire to retaliate against Hamas, seems almost unanimous, it is obvious that the days to come will see it crumble. Innocent people will have died, it will be judged that the response will not have been “proportionate” enough. The specter will then resurface which, consciously or not, is for many people – and even, let us insist, Jews – the original sin of this State, namely its illegitimacy. I therefore write these lines for those who, deep down, doubt the legitimacy of Israel, who cannot help but think that the horror of last week, as monstrous as it was, in some way constitutes comes out the ultimate consequence of the injustice of 1948. And I do not write to convince them that there was no injustice then, but rather that injustice or not, fundamental illegitimacy or not, in the war to the death which began on Saturday October 7, our support for Israel must be unconditional. Our: to us, French, Europeans, Westerners, human beings. And, of course, for those like me, the support expressed by the Jews. Because it is no longer a question of knowing who is “legitimate” or who is not, but where absolute evil is located – and this evil exists.
I frequent Jewish and non-Jewish circles, privileged in a sense, where the legitimacy of the State of Israel is not obvious. I do not think that every anti-Zionist is anti-Semitic, in fact I am even convinced that this equation is absurd: many Hasidim are anti-Zionists, the Bundists were, Franz Rosenzweig and George Steiner were. Moreover, in Israel, the last few years have almost completely cut off intellectual, artistic and idealistic youth from its national mythology: I suppose that many of the victims of Hamas could also call themselves anti-Zionists, I know such Israelis, and I do not I do not want the memory of these tortured consciences to be obliterated by any ideology whatsoever, even that of the State which will now, I hope, avenge them. Moreover, the contours of Zionism, like those of anti-Zionism, are much more fluid, or porous, than one might believe. Buber or Ratosh would be considered anti-Zionists today while both called themselves, very differently, Zionists. Finally, I understand perfectly that a Palestinian (I happen to know some and count one among my friends) sees in Jerusalem more the city that his grandparents left, robbed of their home and their history, than the historical and spiritual capital of the Jewish people.
Still, the problem is neither that of Israel’s legitimacy nor that of the form of this State – nor even that of its current policy. Let me cite just one perfectly legitimate State. The United States was born of plunder, slavery and massacres: would you have behaved in 1941? Would you have done so with Stalin’s Russia? Turkey, which today gives its moral lessons to the whole world: its very name translates theft and invasion, since the Turks, coming from Central Asia, conquered Anatolia and Greece at the end of the Middle Ages. Age. And if they are still very proud of it, on the other hand they do not recognize and will never recognize the persecutions and genocides of which they were guilty from that moment until the dawn of the last century. Algeria? It won its independence, not only in blood but by erasing Berber and Jewish cultures, and by driving thousands of European proletarians from its soil – forgetting in the process the barbarity exercised until the 19th century on the European coasts by its “Barbary” pirates. Should we mention the atrocities of the Mau-Mau? The absurd and unjust, criminal and even genocidal construction of so many postcolonial African states towards their ethnic and religious minorities? Should we talk about communist China and Tibet? From Japan which, believing itself for so long to be a country of gods, tried to convince the rest of Asia of this through servitude and torture? Or of France whose unity began in the blood of the Albigensians? And just as the United States, in 1941, practiced segregation, our country had on the eve of its entry into the war a vast colonial empire, where injustice and cruelty also reigned. There is no legitimate state, for the reason that those who contest Israel’s right to exist should know, that they would know if their thinking was coherent – but anti-Zionism is, for them, a perfectly cosmetic obsession. , which precisely exempts them from thinking in depth. This reason is that every State is a construction, and that to make reality correspond to such a construction, very often, we must shed blood, that is to say, immolate this reality to the myth that we impose on it as an ideal. .
We could add, to conclude on this point, that “legitimacy”, when it exists or, rather, seems to exist – for example if those who claim it rely on history – is in no way a guarantee of justice: the Nazis rightly pointed out that the Sudetenland had always been German and that Silesia had never been Polish. Likewise, Putin rightly invokes, so to speak, Kievan Rus. This in no way justifies their crimes, and I am well aware that my reasoning could be extended to Zionist – in fact Jewish – claims to the land called Israel by some, Palestine by others. The Bible itself says it: according to the myth that it has shaped, and which is unlike any other in Antiquity – which is, let us say, more honest than the myths of autochthony – this land is given to the Hebrews because of the faults of its first inhabitants. The legitimacy of the Hebrews is therefore in no way engraved in stone: on the contrary, they are foreigners, who think of themselves as such, and they are constantly warned that their own faults could cause them to be expelled like the Canaanites before them. What matters is what we do with our legitimacy, or even the legitimacy we invent for ourselves. Consequently, once this futile question has been resolved, all that remains is to support, morally, politically and financially, the Israeli army, “legitimate” or not: today, this State, shaky like any State, is fighting against absolute evil. Not the evil, quite common, which undermines him as it has undermined France or the United States from the beginning – as it undermines each of these constructions that we call nations and States. Total, radical evil, an evil that we can dream of eradicating but with which we cannot negotiate. Wilson was racist and imperialist, but Hitler is not Wilson – and certainly not Roosevelt.
To deepen this argument, I would say that many Jews cultivate a nostalgia that non-Jews also have, much more strangely, towards them – a bit as if everyone recognized, apart from themselves, the uniqueness of this people, and the exemplarity which should be the corollary: the nostalgia for a kind of Jewish purity which would have belonged to the lost worlds of the shtetl and the mellah, in the times of persecution. At that time, it is believed, the Jews were innocents, hated by a crowd as powerful as it was perfidious, unjustly hated. Even the great Leibowitz was wrong, who wrote after the Qibya massacre (1953) that the Jews now knew themselves capable of the same exactions as the others. However, the Jews are not purer than others, and were not purer before Qibya. This “impurity” is not the work of Zionism. History is a field of complex and ambiguous forces, where no one is perfectly good – although there are people who are perfectly bad, including among those whom suffering excuses in the eyes of the vapid. In a word, if you think that Zionism and 1948, not to mention the miserable situation in Gaza, justify or even explain what happened on the morning of Shemini Atzeret [NDLR : la fête juive d’automne au matin de laquelle l’attaque du Hamas a eu lien], so look to the past a little more carefully. One of the bloodiest pogroms in history (sometimes speaking of 20,000 deaths) took place in 1648 in what was then the Kingdom of Poland: the revolting Ukrainian peasants made the Jews pay for their alliance with the Polish nobility and the suffering that the latter, with the complicity of the Jewish managers, inflicted on them. Yes, this pogrom also had national liberation and even “justice” as a pretext. It is, likewise, the memory of the role of Jews (communists) during the Holodomor which armed other Ukrainian consciences in the service of the SS: if the massacre of Reïm [NDLR : massacre ayant eu lieu le 7 octobre 2023 lors d’un festival de musique près du kibboutz de Réïm, au sud d’Israël] is somewhat justified or even explainable, then Babi Yar [NDLR : le plus grand massacre de la Shoah ukrainienne mené par les Einsatzgruppen en URSS, où 33 771 Juifs furent assassinés] is too. Breaking with this kitsch of purity does not amount to slandering the Jews but on the contrary to better understanding what is happening today. To quote Primo Levi, “we are pieces of very ordinary humanity”, and it is this ordinary humanity, both good and bad, that for reasons belonging more to metaphysics than to logic, we have sought for three thousand years to annihilate. Nothing has changed and it is therefore appropriate, today as yesterday, to defend ourselves at all costs. Let the perfect ones (but only them) throw the first stone at us!
Moreover, it would not be a question of making the Israelis, who have no longer occupied Gaza since 2005, the only ones responsible for the misery of this territory. This was largely orchestrated by Hamas – whose leaders knew how to take advantage of the pleasures of this world, in Doha for example, where the misery of Asian slaves did not move them that much. But it is true that evil arises from more ancient causes: this does not prevent us from fighting it, and even if necessary, from allying ourselves with our former enemies. That the responsibility of the Israeli right is heavy is also proven: overprotection of the settlements, including during those hours when Hamas, a few kilometers from the West Bank, was massacring innocent people in the ignorance of the army; cynically organized divorce with the Western world and in particular the Jewish diaspora, these are two examples of faults, in my eyes, inexpiable. The political question, however, becomes futile when it is the very meaning of human existence that is at stake: babies decapitated, girls raped to death, families burned alive. This evil is absolute. We do not negotiate with it, I repeat, we eradicate it. I prefer Dollfuss to Hitler and even Stalin to Hitler – and likewise, Zemmour – whom I fight – to Daesh, and Ben Gvir – whom I would fight even more than Zemmour if I were Israeli – to Hamas. The day could come when we would have to welcome Israelis fleeing the theocracy that some want to impose on them. But today, they are not fleeing, they are fighting for their lives, together, against an absolutely inexorable enemy. Didn’t the French Resistance include socialists, conservatives, communists, monarchists, and even fascists and anarchists? There are times when all this pettiness falls away. Now if France does not understand this, let it already know that a defeat for Israel will also be its defeat: Reïm, tomorrow, will be Paris.
* David Haziza is a doctor in French literature (Columbia), researcher and essayist. He teaches European history at Yeshiva University.