Words from Ecclesiastes: “There is a season for everything, and everything has its time under heaven. […] A time to cry and a time to laugh, a time to lament and a time to dance.”
Jews with their white shawls, liturgical melodies accompanied by little children’s faces with their bursts of laughter, begging from time to time for their favorite sweets, the faithful arriving in dribs and drabs before the reading of the weekly pericope: the time of Sabbath is that of tranquility. So the Jews put into practice every week this utopia that some call the “right to be lazy”. Even more singular than usual, the last Sabbath was concomitant with the closing of Sukkot, the “feast of the booths”, rejoicings spread over two days which conclude the New Year celebrations. “The time of our joy” , as named in the rabbinical liturgy, was unfortunately upset by the noisy alarms of the news.
As I arrive at prayer on Saturday morning, a man stands in front of the congregation. His language is heavy, his words concise, his voice serious and emotional: “Israel is in a state of war. […] We don’t let children out, if you see someone suspicious, enter the building immediately. […] I will keep watch downstairs,” he concludes. Due to non-working days, we spend the weekend unable to consult the information, but when we leave the synagogue the next evening we notice a police patrol on surveillance in front of the building. It’s been ten years since we last saw them. Since then, the air has been suspicious. A subtle paranoia suggests we pay attention to the slightest suspicious behavior around synagogues and places of Jewish life.
Then came the horror of the news. Hostage taking. The corpses. Kidnapping videos. Photos of grandmothers. Those of the children with. We learn about rapes. Corpses, again. Some are waiting for news from their loved ones. Others will no longer have them.
That this personal story can bear witness to a truth so simple, and yet so denied by so many ideologues: we cannot dissociate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. Events taking place in the Middle East have an immediate impact on Jewish life in Europe and elsewhere. During the upsurges in violence in 2021, the Jewish News there was a 600% increase in anti-Semitic acts in the United Kingdom. We remember, at the time, this video, filmed in the Jewish neighborhood of Finchley Road, in which activists paraded in cars, Palestinian flags on the hood, broadcasting the following message via loudspeakers: “Fuck jews! Rape their daughters !” Sunday October 8, an anti-Semitic tag was found at the Jean-Claude-Mazet stadium, in Carcassonne: “Killing Jews is a duty”. Gérald Darmanin is already talking about several legal proceedings for acts of anti-Semitism. In Sydney, a large pro-Hamas rally shouts in the public square: “Gas the Jews!” Jews are the systematic and privileged targets of all anti-Zionist excesses.
The Jews will therefore, in the coming days, be on alert. This data should call for general caution. However, it was with eagerness that part of the political class threw itself into the prose of the abject. Comrade, abjure all allegiance to Israel: that is the slogan. So we suspend all forms of elementary morality. There are no more women raped, then dead, there are no more children defined by the condition of innocence, there are no more hostages whose muffled screams and fear are heard. to hear even in Paris and elsewhere, there are no more grandmothers, there are no more corpses which impose on us respect for the dead: there are colonists, and the matter ends there.
Blindness is everywhere. The indignity with it. But not this counter indignity, the one that we invoke superficially to disapprove with disdain of this political opponent who faces us on a television set: I am aiming here for indignity in its pure state. “A good part of the left seems to believe that, because a conflict is asymmetrical, the party with the least military capabilities necessarily leads a just war,” says researcher Memphis Krickeberg. And for many on the left, any political analysis is nothing more than an alibi for ideological absolutism. It doesn’t matter that it’s Hamas, a terrorist organization, it doesn’t matter that it’s the biggest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, it doesn’t matter that we witnessed, let’s not mince words, a pogrom . If we condition justice on a piece of land, if we limit the scope of dignity to a nationality or an ethnic group, then it no longer exists. But without dignity, there is nothing. This entire rhetorical operation aims at a deleterious reversal of values: making the terrorist an oppressed person in struggle. Propaganda from a collaborator who would undoubtedly look favorably on the celebrations taking place in certain Palestinian villages (probably a reflex of resistance). There are countless euphemisms to justify the equivalence between barbarism and “struggle for emancipation”.
In the name of the imperfections (real indeed) of Western societies or those close to them, such as Israel, this discourse in reality serves the soup to all authoritarian groups and regimes. It is not only Hamas, but also Iran and Russia, which, it seems, are no strangers to this terrorist military operation.
Caught in a form of relativism and passivity which, without going so far as to legitimize the attacks, failed to distinguish between the attacked and the aggressor in its initial press release, La France insoumise (LFI), through the voice of Manuel Bompard, wished to correct the situation by evoking “acts of war”. But, entangled in his electoral strategy and the need to multiply his public displays of virtue, the leader of LFI recalled that he would not go to the demonstration in support of Israel, denouncing in passing a press release from French diplomacy not calling for a ceasefire. Should we therefore make peace with the terrorists? Would Israel not have the right to respond to a pogrom?
The worst is yet to come. Hopes for peace have never been so evanescent. There will remain the pain of Israeli and Palestinian families, ever more numerous to be bereaved. A mourning which unfortunately the war will feed on for a long time to come.
*Rafaël Amselem is a public policy analyst.