Gérard Larcher, Abnousse Shalmani, Elie Barnavi, Anne Hidalgo, Sylvain Tesson, François Zimeray and Eric Ciotti… There are 80 of them who stood up against the erasure of a crime which, despite its excessive media coverage, has already practically evaporated. Far from being understood as a crime against humanity, in the tradition of Srebrenica or Darfur, October 7 has, according to these authors, ceased to exist as an event. Why did these massacres gradually become invisible? Why was sexual violence, although proven and attested, recognized so late? Without us being careful, an “atmospheric negationism” has set in, warns Sarah Fainberg, research director at Tel Aviv University, specialist in defense and security issues, and coordinator with David Reinharc of this collective work, October 7. Manifesto against the erasure of a crime (Descartes & Cie/David Reinharc Editions, to be published on June 17. Interview.
L’Express: In the weeks following the October 7 massacre, you say, an “atmospheric negationism” took hold. What do you mean ?
Sarah Fainberg: In reality, this process was long, gradual and so insidious that it was realized that post-factum. A day and a half after October 7, while in Israel we had not yet grasped the scale and intensity of the massacre, an interpretative framework was put in place in Paris, Washington and Columbia. A word then appeared and became the key word of the reading on October 7: the word “context”.
What is astonishing, when we analyze the crimes of the 21st century, is that none of them was, from the outset, contextualized like the October 7 massacre. Neither Srebrenica, nor Darfur, nor Boutcha have been contextualized. Worse, on October 25, 2023, the UN Secretary General used these words: the crimes of October 7, he said, did not occur in a vacuum. Then he launches into a diatribe explaining that it all started with seventy-six years of Israeli occupation and that, obviously, “in this context”, there was a “failure” which was in reality part of a logic history of occupation and resistance.
Then at the beginning of December, there were the famous interventions by the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. This contextualization was taken up very early in France because the French university environment, CNRS, Normale sup and Sciences Po, has long nurtured a form of elective affinity with these discourses with Maoist and Wokist overtones. I myself found myself in a rather lively exchange with a CNRS researcher on France Culture just after the massacre. While she explained to me that this massacre was the expression of a political impasse for the Palestinians, the body of Liel Hetzroni, a 12-year-old girl from Kibbutz Be’eri, had just burned alive with that of her twin brother Yanaï, his aunt and his grandfather. Eight days later, I went to the scene of the massacre, as well as to the Choura camp where they were trying to identify the bodies, and I found myself faced with an abysmal cognitive dissonance that made me think of what Vassili Grossman wrote about the gulag.
Very quickly, we entered into a contextualization that was all the more pernicious because it did not deny the crimes. If that had been the case, it would have been enough to prove the facts. But there, she watered them down, she relativized them, she obliterated them, she indulged in a form of obfuscation [NDLR : obscurcissement] memorial. However, contextualizing a crime does not only mean putting its intensity, its importance or its historical significance into perspective, it means erasing the identity of the victims, the face of little Liel, but also the identity of the executioners. Our work is thus intended to be a manifesto against the erasure of crime as much as a memorial honoring the singularity of each missing person: each copy of this book bears on the cover the name of one of the 1,160 victims of October 7. Because our commitment and our mourning are one.
How do you explain this erasure?
After the Israeli intervention in Gaza, crime was reduced to its legitimate response. From that moment on, we have not managed to include it in the history of crimes against humanity with genocidal intent in the 21st century. This massacre nevertheless has all the legal criteria, in the opinion of the greatest jurists in the United States and Europe. Very quickly, with a left that is well established, and incessant and massive demonstrations in Paris, in London, in Washington, we witnessed an a posteriori justification of the crime.
As proof of this, I cite the decision of the International Criminal Court to place Hamas and Prime Minister Netanyahu with the consent of France, to the great dismay of other European countries. Netanyahu was therefore portrayed as a genocidal Nazi in the implacable logic – initiated by Soviet propaganda of the Brezhnev era, conveyed by Islamist movements and blindly taken up by contemporary Western doxa – of the Nazification of Israel. In reality, we are faced with a crime which deeply echoes the Shoah in its mode of operation, but which also presents astonishing innovations in relation to it.
What are they ?
The first innovation is that we witnessed the first “pogrom TikTok” of History. The desire of the terrorists was to broadcast it immediately, instantly and live. Hence the central question of our book: how is it that the most publicized crime of the 21st century is found so quickly watered down and erased? Not only is there silence on this crime, but in addition, people censor themselves and do not dare to speak about it. The only one who speaks openly on this subject is the National Rally. for reasons of political exploitation.
The second innovation is that we witnessed a combination of operating methods used by the Einsatzgruppen [NDLR : unités d’extermination nazies], but also Daesh. For example, as during the “Holocaust by bullets”, we saw on October 7 the participation of civilians in the massacre. And here too, the active part of Gazan civilians in this crime is surrounded by an immense taboo in the West. However, it is documented that the most atrocious crimes were committed by Palestinian civilians who lived alongside the pacifist inhabitants of the kibbutzim – many of whom were committed to peace and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. As during the Daesh raids, the bodies of the victims of October 7 were cut up, dismembered, the babies decapitated, the women then the corpses raped, practices which were not those of the Nazis.
Following this, there was immense difficulty in Israel in identifying the bodies, which were rendered unrecognizable. Did you know that Israel had to call in archaeologists to examine the ashes and remains of the victims? It took six weeks to identify the ashes of little girl Liel Hetzroni, who was burned alive on Kibbutz Be’eri. This was all part of the logic of the massacre. It was not only about killing, but about creating a genocidal desecration on Israel’s land of refuge. This disappearance of the bodies, many of which were reduced to ashes or became unrecognizable because they were dismembered with incredible determination, contributed to the erasure of the massacre, just like the sexual violence, which was erased. Most of the raped women were unable to testify because they were massacred, as shown in the courageous film, Screams Before Silence by Sheryl Sandberg. It took four and a half months for these mass rapes to be recognized by UN Women. Finally, last deletion: the hostages. Those who are still alive are subjected to unthinkable abuse. And we hardly talk about them anymore. The silence is deafening. Finally, Gaza erased the hostages and their detention and torture were justified. And we find this erasure within La France insoumise, but also at Columbia, at Sciences Po and in the streets of Paris, London or New York where their portraits are angrily torn down…
You mention a form of self-censorship. For what ?
When we are no longer able to think of a massacre for what it is, there is a huge problem in our democracies. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the emergence of a terrible thing in contemporary democracies, it is a new soft and diffuse totalitarianism which is that of not speaking, of not saying, when certain words are not admissible in the intellectual and social environment in which we find ourselves, because there is a price, that of the gaze, that of a career. In all international organizations, particularly the United Nations, this form of soft and diffuse totalitarianism has played, in my opinion, a very strong role.
Elie Barnavi, the former Israeli ambassador to France, writes in your book that October 7 is closer to the massacre of Saint-Barthélemy than to a pogrom and that the Western mind has difficulty imagining that the religious fact alone is a driving force in History, because it has “emerged from religion for five centuries”, as the historian Marcel Gauchet wrote. Is this an element of explanation for this erasure?
This interpretation is very interesting. I think that indeed, we are in a moment “lost in translation”. On the one hand, in Israel, we are in a form of commotion; we are experiencing a second Shoah on the very earth which was supposed to put into practice the “never again”. And in the West, we read this event with the framework of the resistance movements of the 1970s and postcolonialism. The West, says Elie Barnavi, is incapable of taking the measure of this messianic rage, just as it refuses to think in terms of religious war. However, this genocidal attack was well justified and made sacred by a fundamentalist vision of the world. Thus, the West’s refusal to see October 7 for what it is – a crime against humanity with genocidal intent – contributes to its failure to take the full measure of the savagery of the world.
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