Criticizing the policy of a government at a moment M or on a file D, or even on its intrinsic composition, is perfectly legitimate. We can even extend the criticism to any multi-year government policy beyond successive teams. In a democracy, the citizen’s critical view of political power is not only legal but necessary.
The Israeli coalition resulting from the election of November 1, 2022 is, in fact, highly criticizable: partial questioning of the prerogatives of the Supreme Court, budget cuts in social budgets (except for the ultra-Orthodox community whose deputies sit in the coalition!), lack of desire to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, impunity granted to violent anti-Palestinian activists, racist and inflammatory comments from two prominent far-right ministers, nature of the response to the October 7 massacre, etc. In passing, we will remind the compulsive detractors of Israel that its citizens did not wait for them to protest in the streets by the hundreds of thousands or through polls and social networks. A reality which illustrates a high level of civic awareness and freedom of expression which only very exceptionally prevails in the region…
But since when has the policy of a government delegitimized the right to existence of the State over whose destiny it presides? Since when have we called into question the philosophical or spiritual foundations of this State under the pretext of a policy, however execrable it may be? Netanyahu could well be the worst Prime Minister, by virtue of which should Zionism and its political fruit, the Jewish State, be tarnished in itself? The question is all the more necessary here since the first ten decades of this political ideal born in the 1860s-1870s were part of the secular left and not at all the (pro) religious nationalist right which corresponds to the current coalition in power! Should we abolish states whose governments behave badly? Outside of Iceland, Luxembourg and Vanuatu, there would be very few left…
The Jewish people have the right to their state sovereignty
In truth, the legitimate rejection of the Netanyahu government is exploited by certified anti-Zionists for whom the very notion of a Jewish people does not exist. If this is the case, the French or Palestinians do not embody any more. Or else, we would have to admit that only the Jewish collective cannot decide on the nature of its collective identity, thus assuming blatant discrimination. And discrimination against Jews bears the criminal name of anti-Semitism.
A people is above all a representation and the Jews of Israel overwhelmingly represent themselves as belonging to a people, in this case returning to their ancestral land. This is the quintessence of Zionism, and not a “desire for refuge”, which had no meaning before at least the 1930s in Germany (1).
Do we seriously believe that the young Zionists of Bilou, in the decade 1880-1890 – well before the Shoah – will flee the pogroms of the Tsarist empire by taking refuge… in Turkish Palestine, this abandoned semi-arid piece of land? by the powerful Ottoman Empire hostile to the project (and already mass murderer of Armenians), infested with malaria in the arable lowlands, crossed by Bedouin bands carrying out raids, and populated mainly by Arabs who are likely to destroy them. welcome freshly? This, a refuge? Ridiculous ! The first Zionists were idealistic but not stupid; in reality, Zionism was a political (anti-religious) movement of national emancipation, advocating a shift from the almost two-thousand-year-old diasporic religious dimension to the ancient national one of King David and his successors for ten centuries, under Late Antiquity.
Like the Palestinian people, the Jewish people have the right to their state sovereignty. Any other moralistic and external posture of rejection is ineffective and deadly. As we have already written in these columns, there are indeed two national consciences, and it will therefore be necessary to have two sovereign States, as recommended in 1947 and recalled since the UN, like several Israeli governments and the PLO, then the Palestinian Authority, accepted it. Two nation states. Including Israel.
[1] I refer to my work Geopolitics of ZionismArmand Colin (2nd ed.), 2009.
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