“We should first study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the literal sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to greed, to violence, to racial hatred, to moral relativism, and to show that, each time there is in Vietnam a head cut off and an eye gouged out and that in France they accept, a little girl raped and that in France they accept, a Malagasy tortured and that in France they accept, there is an achievement of civilization that weighs down with its dead weight, a universal regression that occurs, a gangrene that sets in, a source of infection that spreads and that at the end of all these violated treaties, all these lies propagated, all these punitive expeditions tolerated, all these prisoners tied up and interrogated, all these patriots tortured, at the end of this racial pride encouraged, In this boasting spread out, there is the poison instilled in the veins of Europe, and the slow but sure progress of the savagery of the continent.
You will excuse the length of the quote. This monumental sentence contains in itself an entire thesis, a punch in the face of the world that still has the power to take our breath away today. Aimé Césaire published it in 1955 as the opening of his Speech on colonialism.
1955 is the pivotal year that marks the end of the Indochina War and the beginning of the Algerian War, while a large part of the world is still under European control. We understand the context, the time from which Césaire’s words reach us. We would have liked the writer’s thesis to gather dust over the years, for “progress” to smother its flame. But no.
Earlier this week, a crowd stormed the military court in Beit Lid, Israel, to denounce the arrest of nine soldiers for allegedly torturing and raping a Palestinian prisoner. Specifically, the army reservists face charges of aggravated sodomy, aggravated bodily harm, aggravated infliction of physical harm, and conduct unbecoming a soldier.
Following this arrest, hundreds of protesters from the Israeli far-right stormed the Beit Lid military base, forcing confrontations with soldiers. The scene is reminiscent of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington. The resemblance to American political decay is further amplified when we understand that elected officials, and even Israeli ministers, participated in the mobilization and encouraged the protesters. Both in the crowd and among the most radical politicians, there was outrage at the “ingratitude” towards the soldiers thus accused. Others, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and more progressive elected officials, strongly condemned the crowd movement.
The questions underlying this extraordinary sequence of events are weighty. Why should a “terrorist” have rights? What are sufficient grounds for bothering men who bravely serve the Nation, confronting its Enemy? Are torture, sodomy, adequate charges to bother Heroes? Why get tangled up in morality when we are at war? Could these be, implicitly of course, the issues that are deeply dividing members of the Knesset this week, to the point of becoming a real political cleavage?
The horrors have continued to unfold in Gaza in recent weeks, or rather months. As if that were not enough, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza itself overshadows the assassinations, arbitrary arrests and accelerated colonizations in the West Bank, and the mistreatment of many Palestinian prisoners in Israel itself. And then there is the conflict with Hezbollah that has resumed with renewed vigor on Lebanon’s southern border. The latest Israeli attack on Beirut raises fears of an acceleration of the conflict and direct involvement by Iran, or even the United States.
It’s been a while since I last wrote about Gaza and Israel. Not because the horrors have stopped, but because we’re exhausted. We don’t know what else to say. I know I’m not alone here.
Except that the Beit Lid riot crystallizes, symbolizes something particularly important, which must be named. And this, even if the questions of mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners are far from new, and have been widely documented by several human rights organizations, both foreign and Israeli. That accusations of sexual violence can spark a debate — yes, really, a debate — between political representatives says a lot about the current state of law, institutions and perhaps especially morality in this famous “only democracy in the Middle East.” After nearly ten months of war, certainly, but also after decades of illegal colonization of Palestinian land.
So I come back to the opening of the Speech on colonialism by Aimé Césaire, who was working on my body while I absorbed the latest news on the state of the world. Césaire spoke of “decivilization.” This is a word that resurfaces in all its relevance to speak of public debate in the era of Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars and Donald Trump’s escapades, whose criminal record also trivializes the issue of sexual violence in the political arena; in the era of too many imitators still. An era where we must ask questions that are absurd with the utmost seriousness.
Rape, is it so serious? Really, yes, we are in the absurd. The theater of the absurd, moreover, is also an artistic movement that took off at the same time that Césaire wrote his Speech — a way of keeping one’s humor, and therefore one’s humanity, in a world that had lost its mind. Clearly, to make sense of the political degradation that surrounds us, we will have to reconnect with several classics.