Bosnia… Sarajevo… the Bosnians… Who, among us, was uttering these words twelve or fifteen months ago? It took terrible images, detonations, pools of blood on stadium tracks and city sidewalks, for the unbelievable reality to dawn, little by little.
Calmly, quietly, a few hours’ flight from Paris, a population is being massacred. It seems like nothing — figures that drop each evening on the television news: yesterday it was 22 dead, today around thirty, and tomorrow, how many? And now there is even talk again of that inadmissible ethnic cleansing.
So then, a duty to interfere — what does that mean, at our humble level as individuals, we who revolt while sitting in our armchairs?
You wonder, with all the guilt that a truly clear conscience implies, whether the duty to interfere does not necessarily entail our own participation in some military expedition — which, moreover, is not even on the agenda. Obviously, when we speak of a “duty to interfere” in the columns of our review, we are not talking about gunboat diplomacy, which has no currency today. Of course, I can remember that very recent past whose name is “Beirut,” that city, itself a martyr for many long years, which the world — said to be civilized — allowed to collapse street after street, life after life. I can remember our powerlessness, our anguished questioning: what can we do? Yes, Beirut, today, despite the Syrian grip, has at last entered into a fragile peace, and the pulse of life has reclaimed its rights there.
But in the case of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, this duty to interfere, for us Jews, is a matter not only of the action in which every democrat ought to take part, but also of a stance I would call ethical.
Remember — it was only yesterday. By yesterday I mean the 1940s, which for us are always the years of yesterday. Remember! Sealed trains converged from all of Nazi-occupied Europe toward cities that lost their names as cities to become words synonymous with horror. Remember: the Jewish resistance of Poland, the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), and the French Resistance too, had managed to send genuine SOS messages to the Allies, to Winston Churchill for instance. These messages indicated with precision the schedules and routes of the death trains, the location of the extermination camps. Bombing those rail lines would have prevented the convoys from passing for several days, and would probably have saved the lives of several tens of thousands of Jews. Bombing this or that concentration camp would, it is true, have cost the lives of a few hundred deportees, but it would have slowed, even slightly, the terrible workings of the one and only Nazi death machine. At that time, the duty to interfere should have driven Winston Churchill to give that bombing order, which might have jammed somewhere, if not braked, the well-oiled machine of the executioners. The English Prime Minister did not deem it “profitable” to give that order.
The dead Jews of Warsaw, of Birkenau, of Treblinka, of Majdanek would not have risen up against the duty to interfere. I should say: they continue today not to rise up against this duty, for we are their legatees.
I know full well that History does not repeat itself, but following the example of the State of Israel, which offered visas to Bosnian and Muslim refugees, we French Jews — whether secular or observant, we Jews who carry the memory of the tragedies we have suffered but also that heritage of humanism which alone allows us to work toward a more fraternal world — we must, each time the possibility offers itself, show our support for this besieged population, our revolt before these nauseating cleansings; in a word, but what a word, we must proclaim our brotherhood.