For a long time I have been looking for the right moment to correct the simplistic shortcuts in the anti-Israel slogans launched by certain activists of the Palestinian cause since the attacks of October 7. That I am myself a sympathizer of the Arabs displaced in 1948, then in 1967, by an expansionist Jewish state and often ruthless towards its neighbors changes nothing. The journalist trained in history that I am can only be heartbroken to hear phrases like: “Zionism is racism”, “Israel is an apartheid state”, “Israel is engaging in genocide in Gaza » or even “Israel is a colonialist state”.
The first sentence is illogical. Any people, especially a historically persecuted people like the Jewish people, may prefer to live among their fellow human beings without necessarily hating others. The more cosmopolitan and heterogeneous life chosen by millions of Jews in the United States, Canada and France is the result of a choice, not a proof of tolerance. Although the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, championed a charter that would have permitted the deportation of Arabs to Palestine, his wish, according to George and Douglas Ball in The Passionate Attachment, would have been to claim “the same powers if the new Jewish homeland had been in Argentina, Kenya or Cyprus”. His predilection for ethnic homogeneity therefore had nothing to do with “racism” as such.
The accusation of apartheid is also twisted. With two million Arab citizens, Israel is not a state like South Africa was before 1991. There are Israeli trends toward segregation between Arabs and Jews, as well as informal discrimination against Arabs, but the political system is not legally based on a separation of races.
As for the genocide, Little Robert is clear: it is about the “Methodical destruction of an ethnic group. Extermination.” The Israeli army is currently killing many Palestinians in Gaza in a random and reckless manner. This does not displease Jewish extremists, who would like to be able to hunt or even kill more of them in order to seize their land. However, neither the current massacre nor a possible expulsion constitutes genocide. As far as I know, there are no Jewish ideologues who want the purge of the Arabs for pseudo-scientific reasons, as the Nazis wanted for the Jews. Truth be told, the “Eretz Israel” project is not that different, in principle, from America’s “Manifest Destiny” inflicted on Indigenous people. Even if this were to result in a mass expulsion, we are not considering the elimination of the Arabs here.
As for the idea of a “colonialist” Israel, there is a clear contradiction there, which cannot be passed over in silence. One of the driving forces of the Israeli “war of independence” was the anti-colonial terrorist acts carried out by the Irgun and the Stern gang, the Jewish paramilitary groups which, with the agreement of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency, destabilized “the British ‘occupier’ in the 1940s. The July 1946 attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem dealt an emblematic blow to the colonial icon based in London, then the imperial capital of the world. Ninety-one people died in the explosion, the vast majority civilians.
It is true that Israel conspired with the United Kingdom and France, two colonial powers, in 1956 during the Suez Crisis against the ambitions of Egypt and General Nasser, but this was an opportunistic move — Tel Aviv wanted to expand its borders and not colonize the Arabs. President Eisenhower, ironically, put an end to this neocolonial adventure. Today, Israel is the occupier of the West Bank and Gaza, and the country would be happy if the occupied Arabs left.
However, I will stop there, even if I like to criticize my own camp and its ill-informed activists. As much as I enjoy discussing the Holocaust and my (non-Zionist) support for the creation of a Jewish state, the horror I feel for the fanatical project of Adolf Hitler — who did not of equivalent in human history and which greatly accelerated the founding of Israel — will never prevent me from saying how disgusted I am by the fanatical project defended by certain right-wing Israelis and by the arrogance of Benjamin Netanyahu ready to do anything to stay in power.
There is no equivalence, obviously, between the Nazis and Jewish extremists, but neither is there between the leaders of Hamas and those of the Third Reich. Like the Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, towards the “residents of Gaza”, Hamas wants to “encourage the migration” of residents of Tel Aviv. Hamas employs inhumane terrorist methods (murder and hostage-taking of children, in particular, as well as rape), but these acts are more reminiscent of the American army at My Lai in 1968 than of the terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, in 1946.
Netanyahu, in any case, distorts history by invoking the survival of Israel to justify the killing of more than thirty thousand civilians and the mutilation of hundreds of children. It’s as if Yahya Sinwar had the Wehrmacht behind him (watch the BBC for a week if you don’t believe it)! What an absurd statement from a head of state in possession, as my colleague Jean-Philippe Immarigeon reminded us, of “600 combat planes, 1000 modern tanks and above all a hundred nuclear warheads, including part mounted on Jericho III missiles”. Since we still hope to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza, could we take advantage of this to declare a truce in the war of false slogans?