The pro-Palestinian mobilization at Sciences Po ultimately did not lead to an evacuation by the police, but to an agreement announced on the evening of Friday April 26. Provisional administrator Jean Bassères pledged to “organize a townhall with the management and other members of the institution open to all Sciences Po communities by next Thursday”. The questioning of the school’s “partnerships with universities and organizations supporting the State of Israel” – one of the movement’s demands – could in particular be discussed there.
For Gilles Kepel, long-time professor at Sciences Po and author of the recent Holocausts (Plon), the leadership capitulated to the ideological demands put forward by pro-Palestinian activists and La France insoumise. “The taking hostage of an institution supposed to train the elites of the Republic seems to me to mark a dark day in French universities” he believes. The Middle East specialist also explains how Sciences Po, like major American universities, has become the preferred field of expression for those who dream of opposing the global South to a North judged guilty of all crimes.
The pro-Palestinian mobilization at Sciences Po led to an agreement. In a press release, the management of the institution announced in particular the holding of a “townhall”. What do you think ?
Gilles Kepel: It is a text of capitulation signed by management, and written in woke newspeak translated from English. There I discovered the neologism “townhall” which comes straight from the United States. It’s amazing when we know that Sciences Po has always been the rhetorical school of the leaders of the Republic.
Above all, we have the impression that this text was written under the dictation of La France insoumise. The management of Sciences Po is ready to review all agreements signed with Israel. This is the line of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. When you are a student, you have the right to be in favor of BDS. But that Sciences Po is getting involved in this shows the extent of the intellectual, and now moral, bankruptcy of an institution whose governance, in deep crisis, has just been marked by the departure of a third director in one short time, for not very glorious issues.
I was a professor at Sciences Po for more than thirty years, I held a course there on the Middle East in the Boutmy amphitheater, now called the Gaza amphi, and perhaps tomorrow the Mélenchon amphi since it has become the tribune par excellence. I had constructed an analytical account of what was happening in the region, nourishing it with knowledge, regularly updated, and a global perspective of the facts. My students could then do whatever they wanted with it. But the goal of the university is to transmit knowledge, and not to produce ideology. However, today, we have the impression of an intellectual capitulation in the open countryside. The students left the area because the pro-Palestinian activists got everything they wanted. The most extraordinary thing was the presence of the LFI deputies with their scarves, who played the role of arsonist firefighters. The taking hostage of an institution supposed to train the elites of the Republic seems to me to mark a dark day in French universities. One might wonder where the Minister of Higher Education has gone…
Is this mobilization a pale copy of the much more violent movements taking place in major American universities, such as at Columbia?
The French version of the press release from the management of Sciences Po obviously seemed to be a translation of an English version which accompanied it. This is proof of the cultural collapse of France. But it must be said that at Sciences Po, most of the teaching is now done in English.
“What I saw on rue Saint Guillaume was pure hatred, separated by CRS cordons, between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians.”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strategy clearly consists of investing in universities and making Gaza the axis of his electoral campaign for the European elections. How do you analyze it?
We must understand that what has happened since October 7 is part of a global reconstruction of the moral foundations of the world order. The American-Soviet antagonism, which was expressed by the geographical metaphor of the West against the East, is today being replaced by new cardinal points, with a “global South”, of which Melenchonism is the champion, against a North loaded with all vices. October 7, 2023 and its aftermath also mark the culmination of Faurissonian negationism, which aimed to cast doubt on the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. Today, we have a toned down version which explains to us that deep down, the Shoah is an old story which only concerns Europeans and white people. Jean-Marie Le Pen, for whom the Shoah was a “point of detail”, must be very surprised, as he leaves the stage, that his heirs are perhaps more in Woko-Mélenchonism than in Jordan Bardella.
Because, in 1945, despite the conflict between the Soviets and the Americans, there was a consensus of “never again” following the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. The Nuremberg tribunal was based on this, and this is what allowed the UN, with Soviet support at that time, to decide on the creation of the State of Israel as a refuge. For a long time, the paradigm of the horror of the modern world was the Final Solution wanted by Hitler. But today, what South Africa has argued before the International Court of Justice is that the real genocide in the history of humanity is not the Shoah, especially since the people genocided would have become genocidal in Gaza. The real major crime of our time is colonization, apartheid and the slave trade, of which Gaza is the paradigm.
This desire to consider that the Global South is the heir of the victims of colonization, who replace the victims of the Shoah, and that it must therefore be exalted in the face of a universal criminal North, involves the expulsion from France and of the United Kingdom, heirs of the colonial empires and the declining population, of the UN Security Council. The Global South represents almost half of humanity, the G7 a tenth.
This is why October 7 is an even more important event than September 11, 2001. At the time, Jean-Marie Colombani’s Le Monde had the headline “We are all Americans.” Today, we see a fault line even within the “Northern countries”. It is in American universities, up to Sciences Po which has become a sort of appendage, that this chaos is established. It’s no small thing to have broken Harvard in two, and to have brought Sciences Po to its knees. This is a very important symbolic victory for the defenders of the Global South.
However, you are very critical of this notion of the Global South…
This is a very problematic notion, confusing States and societies. It ignores the fact that a large majority of the states of the Global South are authoritarian, undemocratic and corrupt, and that a significant part of the populations there only dream of going to the North, for example. all means, to try their luck and participate in the prosperity and democratic life of Western countries.
Will this occupation of Sciences Po have consequences at the national level?
What I saw on Rue Saint Guillaume was pure hatred, separated by CRS lines, between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians. Instead of creating a society, considering that what we have in common is more important than what divides us, we are fueling divisions that are no longer just political, but identity-based, based on ethno-religious considerations. Wokism multiplies the narcissism of small differences, which means that there is no longer any society possible, but that we end up with the balkanization, or Lebanization, of the social body. It is a mortal danger for democratic societies. On the one hand, Melenchonism reinforces this ideal, but on the other hand, it worries a large part of our fellow citizens who, as a result, are inclined to vote for the extreme right.
What future for Sciences Po?
The collapse, the dereliction of this institution, embodied by this “Canossa” document, is a distressing symbol. There is no longer any authority in the eyes of the students. We can wonder what the fate of Sciences Po will be, given that the European elections are coming up in a few weeks, and that they are caught between Mélenchonism and the National Rally.
The impact on French society of October 7, with the massacre of Israelis in the Hamas raid, then the indiscriminate bombing by Benjamin Netanyahu of Gaza which caused tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, indicates that our institutions do not were not able to think of this challenge. Studies on the Arab world have today been generally liquidated both at Sciences Po and at the ENS, to preach to students about the Global South. When we allow woke ideology to dominate campuses, we reap what we sow…
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