At the start of this new Israel-Hamas war, the bookseller that I am was wondering what titles to offer to readers, which immediately raises the question of what literature can offer at a time like this.
The day after the pogrom that Hamas committed on October 7, I thought about this passage from the novel The enchanters, by Romain Gary: “Time has its own ways with the Jews: it bleeds rather than flows, and this drop by drop escapes the honest rules of duration. » For the first time since 1945, drip irrigation was indeed resuming. This awakening of extraordinary brutality was unexpected, despite the episodic “classic” wars, the failure of the Oslo Accords and the ever-fading hope of a two-state solution. However, there were Israelis here and there who predicted the awakening of the beast, first and foremost the former directors of the secret services, the Shin Beth, in a documentary that must be seen again, The Gatekeepers (2012), where they expressed their unanimous conviction that the status quo was untenable and that a two-state solution was necessary.
The Hamas pogrom suddenly united the entire Israeli society, until then deeply divided around the extreme right-wing of its government and its desire to reform the judicial system. The sanctuary state created to put an end to millennia-old abuses against the Jewish people has, for the first time, failed to protect its citizens, not from war, but from anti-Semitic massacre. For Holocaust survivors and their families, the trauma is enormous, and knowing that survivors over the age of 80 were kidnapped by jihadists is intolerable for all Israeli Jews. This week, the Franco-Israeli historian Vincent Lemire no less warned Israeli society and the states responsible for the creation of Israel by the UN vote of November 1947 that it was their moral responsibility to remind the Israeli government of national unity to know how far not to go too far, to maintain reason so as not to commit the irreparable in its turn. He partly took up arguments developed by the novelist Amos Oz, in Help us get divorced (republished in the collection Dear fanatics, Gallimard). Hey, another novelist.
Literature can help us think about the long term, the drip by drop of this story. On Israel and Jewishness, Romain Gary, again, and this, even before the Six Day War of 1967, had written The Dance of Genghis Cohn, a delirious novel to respond to the hysteria of History, a sort of masterpiece where the author does not hesitate to provoke via the darkest humor: “Besides, if there is there is still a little anti-Semitism in the world, it is only out of love for the sacred. I even wonder if it won’t go further. I fear the worst ! I fear fraternity. » Did Jonathan Littell not begin his novel The benevolent ones by a quote from a verse by Villon: “O you, human brothers, who live after us” said by a Nazi leader? What Gary expressed through this fear of brotherhood was that by establishing a nation-state of its own, the Jewish people would join the bloodthirsty brotherhood from which it had hitherto been excluded, that of the Chivalry of the Crusaders, the Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin: “Is our experience still vivid enough in our memory and in our flesh to help us resist temptation? Or will we in turn become conquerors? » However, Gary is not fooled by the old anti-Semitic roots always ready to resurface. He adds, for the reader who is a little too quick to condemn Israel: “You like the Jews to conform to the image you have assigned to them over the centuries. […] Israel, it bothers you a little in your little habits. » In the early 1970s, when asked if “the Israel problem” was reviving anti-Semitism, he said he did not believe it, or if it was, he said, it is that the Israel-Hamas war “opens a wound that has barely closed and the pus was already there, inside. […] It is true that if this comes back, we will do as in 1940: we will take the machine guns.” (Judaism is not about bloodHerne)
At a time when only worst-case scenarios seem possible, we must read or reread Gary, Oz and also Sayed Kashua (Arabs dance tooOliver/Replay) or Joshua Cohen (The NetanyahusI read) and so many others, give yourself the time necessary to move away from the drip, the white and the black, the slogans and the thought/sign.