It always starts with words. Talking about gastronomy with the words of McDonald’s and philosophy with those of psycho pop is an exercise doomed to failure. No more than you do embroidery with a knife and fork, it is not wise to talk about what is happening today in Palestine with the words of Hamas.
For the past month, however, a whole host of activists has not hesitated to take them up like a mantra. Is it out of dishonesty or intellectual indigence? The fact remains that this vocabulary ends up imposing itself by dint of being repeated, when all it does is impose narrow concepts on reality.
In certain circles, it has become customary to call Israel a “colonizer”. The history of this territory, however, has nothing to do with the colonization that European countries were able to exercise in America, Africa or Asia. First, Jews have always inhabited Palestine, of which they were the only ones to use the name until the creation of Israel. Then, Jewish immigration to this region was never intended to exploit human or material resources for the benefit of a metropolis. Which one would it be, anyway?
Historically, Zionism is part of this awakening of nations (Kurds, Armenians, etc. Quebecers) which, in the 19the century, allowed the appearance of a secularized Jewish identity, no longer gathered around the Torah, but the revival of Hebrew, for example. A large number of these Jews were refugees fleeing both pogroms in Europe and the persecution to which they were subjected in the countries of the former Ottoman Empire. At the time, all of Israel’s neighbors practiced a clan regime where Jews and Christians had the status of dhimmi, therefore a second-class citizen. With the result that today there are practically no Jews (nor Christians) in Arab countries.
For the historian Georges Bensoussan (The origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict, 1870-1950), this incapacity of Islam to accept the emancipation of the Jew – and even more so a Jewish State – “on a land that Islam has decreed Muslim for eternity” is one of the most powerful anthropological blockages of the conflict Israeli-Palestinian.
Let us also remind those who constantly speak of “occupation” that the Gaza Strip was no longer occupied since Ariel Sharon withdrew from it in 2005. If the pogrom of October 7 could have occurred, it is precisely because Hamas was able to accumulate an arsenal there, notably by diverting international aid. Without forgetting the indirect help of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who believed he could “gentrify” these madmen of God with whom he shared the desire not to see the birth of a Palestinian state.
Certainly, Jewish “settlers” in the West Bank, encouraged by the extremist fringe of Netanyahu’s government, are an insult to the Palestinians’ right to their land. But Israel cannot “return” these territories either (to whom?) without a peace agreement, which Hamas will never accept, whose aim is to throw the Jews into the sea. The lifting of the Gaza blockade , intended to control the entry of weapons, and unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank would condemn Israel to a permanent war on its borders.
To describe the situation in Israel as “apartheid” is also a serious error. Firstly because nearly two million Palestinians live in Israel, where, with the exception of military service, they have exactly the same rights as their Jewish compatriots and are even represented in the Knesset. It is not known that in South Africa, blacks made up half of the national football team or that they studied with Afrikaners at the same universities. As for the real segregation that reigns in the West Bank, it is the result of a situation of territorial occupation as found in any war.
We may find that the IDF offensive to eradicate Hamas has an exorbitant human cost, but it has not the slightest connection with what has always been called a genocide. A word that one should only pronounce while trembling. Nothing resembles the slit throats of babies, raped women and other horrors of October 7 witnessed by our colleagues who watched the videos filmed by the jihadists. In Nuremberg, the mobile extermination units (Einsatzgruppen) had also tried to trivialize their crimes by invoking in their defense the 35,000 civilian deaths from the Allied bombings of Dresden. “A city is bombed for tactical purposes […] Inevitably, non-military people are killed. This is an event, certainly serious, but which is an inevitable corollary of combat action. Civilians are not targeted individually,” the judges replied. Words that retain their full meaning.
If we no longer know how to recognize what colonization, apartheid and genocide are, it is perhaps because the confusion is even deeper. In Germany, a daycare center named Anne Frank now wants to change its name. As if the memory of this young Jew exterminated like millions of her compatriots was too heavy to bear, that it was no longer bearable. As if this common memory which had allowed us to give a little meaning to the tragic history of the 20the century was no longer shared, that it had cracked.