An interview with André AZOULAY, Founding President of Identité et Dialogue, Adviser to His Majesty the King of Morocco.
Izio ROSENMAN (I.R.): André AZOULAY (A.A.), you are the founder, and until recently were the President, of Identité et Dialogue (I et D), a group that has profoundly shaped relations between Arabs and Jews, and in particular the Jews of North Africa. You have been a peace activist for a long time. Could you give us the history of your endeavor and that of your group? In a second part, we might speak about Judeo-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian contacts.
A.A.: Identité et Dialogue (I & D) will be twenty years old in a few weeks. With two or three Jewish Moroccan friends like myself, one day at the end of 1974, on returning from a conference in Israel, we found ourselves in Paris deeply depressed by what we had just experienced in Israel — in our families, among our cousins, among political friends — and what we had just experienced came down to a fairly simple equation: We Moroccan Jews belong to a community that, in Israel, probably represents the most homogeneous social group and one of the most important in Israeli society, more than 500,000 people. We had just met them and left them in a state of disarray, of alienation, that we could neither understand nor accept. So the first element that led us to consider political action was, first and foremost, the situation of Israelis of Moroccan origin. In 1974, we were still at this caricatural equation: Israelis who had come from Morocco and who masked, who concealed their own identity. It was the moment when one often met Israelis born in Marrakesh or in Essaouira who, in order to be good citizens in Israel, preferred to say they had been born in Marseille or Aix-en-Provence, and who changed their names. Many other Israelis did this, but it was out of a concern to recover their fully Jewish identity or their Israeli citizenship, understood in the formalization of the name. In our case, it was a matter of concealing — including in the name — what they themselves were. For me, there can be nothing more tragic than to deny oneself, to cut the thread with the father.
So this discriminatory context was unacceptable, unjust, and dangerous, and in the long run it carried all the ferments of a social explosion in Israel. Because we were at peace with ourselves, with our history, our culture, and because we did not want this explosion that endangered Israel from within, we had to act. This was the Identity chapter.
The second chapter, that of Dialogue — which is not opposed to the first, and which gives its meaning to I & D — likewise proceeds from memory.
I belong to a Judaism more than a thousand years old, and I had a very precise memory of what the Jewish presence in Morocco had been. A very living memory of my culture, my language, my music, my sensibility, and my relationship with the other; and the other was the Arab. Israel being in the Middle East and not in Alsace-Lorraine or Poland, and Israel having no future or destiny except within the Arab world, I too had to bring my testimony. This was the somewhat historical basis that led us to come together and that brought us to act. And so a framework had to be created and a definition found. And we immediately came upon this name, which I find magical, Identité et Dialogue, because it sums everything up. There was this quest for our own personality, and there was this militant will to be an actor for something better than confrontation.
We tried to say things very simply at the time to the Israeli leaders, to the French communal leaders, since we were living in France. And then to those whom we were bringing onto the stage alongside us, even if they did not yet know it — Morocco and the Moroccans. And I believe that at these three levels, in these three spaces, it would be interesting to dwell on what the spontaneous, immediate reaction was.
In Israel, it was a kind of autism. We were heard, we were listened to, but we were not understood, we were not answered. We were utterly atypical, rather disquieting, suspect. A composite portrait of the Moroccan had been installed in Israel, associated with the unchanging profile of the Jew originating from the Arab world — that of the refugee, who was supposed to wipe his origins clean in order to lay claim to a normal citizenship. So, for long months, for years, there was a reaction of hostility from the whole of Israeli society, very little listening, very little understanding, many attacks. In the French Jewish community — at least in its institutional representation — we were greeted, at best, with indifference, and often with hostility.
In Morocco, I must say objectively that at the level of the political system — with the political parties in power or those in the opposition — we found ourselves on an immediate consensual basis. It should be recalled that until then, in the ministerial cabinets or in the Royal Palace, it was accepted in secret that we affirmed ourselves fully as Jews; it was even accepted that we expressed our solidarity with the State of Israel, even if it was complemented by the necessity of reaching peace — but all of this was inscribed within a muffled, confidential, and closed dialectic.
I.R.: All in all, you were heard much more quickly in Morocco than in Israel or in France.
A.A.: Quite so. But to be more precise, I would say that elsewhere in the Arab world, the reaction was also rather caricatural. I remember Maghrebi or Middle Eastern newspapers that said we were simply an instrument of the Mossad. And at the same time, Israeli newspapers saw in Identité et Dialogue only a kind of manipulated and disguised approach by the PLO through a few co-opted or manipulated Jews. Obviously we were neither one nor the other — the facts proved it.
In those first years of difficult militancy, the pressures from one side and the other could have led us to change or to give up. But we held firm.
We conceded nothing of our identity; on the contrary, we recovered it, and I believe that no one in the diasporic Jewish communities or in Israel can any longer disregard Moroccan Judaism in Israel, or the Sephardic dimension within the communities. We have, in any case, shattered a certain number of certainties, and we have emerged from ignorance, from oblivion, and from stereotypes. The Identity chapter was won more quickly, even if everything is not yet finished. Obviously the Dialogue chapter was much longer and more difficult.
I.R.: Do you think these differences in reaction did not also stem from the fact that this group, Identité et Dialogue, had been formed from people who already occupied a certain intellectual and social position in Morocco, which meant they could be heard by the Moroccans, since they were senior figures or former senior figures among Moroccan Jews? Whereas in Israel, but also in France, they came to contradict stereotypes?
A.A.: I believe greatly in the virtues of pedagogy, and as a Moroccan Jew I am in the habit of saying, when I am faced with a friend — a Jew originating from France, from Poland, from the United States — that I know his history far better than he knows mine. I know his philosophers, I know his writers, I know his musicians. As a rule, he has only a very limited perception, when he has one at all, of who my philosophers are, of who my Rabbis are, of what my music is, of what my culture is — and obviously this necessarily creates a gap. I believe we did a work of cultural intermediation there that was useful. What is certain is that we have, in Israel at any rate, contributed to giving this community of Moroccan origin, through this virtue of discourse and example, another legitimacy.
We were often subjected to this accusation: “you are the bourgeois of this community, you are the elite.” That is true, and it was as such — responsible and in solidarity — that we spoke. Nor were we to engage in the demagogy of pretending that we were the proletarians of this community. We were what we were. So I felt no shame in owning my social condition, as I was, and in holding this militant discourse. It was out of the question for me to disguise myself as a rank-and-file activist in order to put this discourse across. Very often, unfortunately — notably in the French Jewish community — to be accepted into the establishment, one simply had to fit into the costume cut in advance for the traditional Jew, and if possible a silent one.
I remember something that humiliated me greatly. It was in our early days, and I believe it must be said with historical hindsight. When we applied to join the CRIF [Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France, the umbrella body of French Jewish institutions], we were made to swear an oath. I do not know whether all candidates to the CRIF must swear on the law of Jerusalem; for us, that was the case. We had to take an oath that, on the faith of the oath, would demonstrate that we were good Jews, good Zionists. So we were a priori suspect. Suspect of what? Suspect of being ourselves, of being activists concerned with Israel’s security and fighters for peace? I have not forgotten it.
Violette ATTAL-LEFI (V.A.L.): Was that exceptional?
A.A.: I have not verified it, but this episode was a humiliation that marked us, that made us even more determined — not only to change nothing of our commitment, but to continue being even more radical in our movement.
I.R.: To demonstrate that one can be in favor of Judeo-Arab dialogue without being traitors for all that.
A.A.: The need to make this demonstration was in itself a provocation and an archaism that did indeed have to be fought. As a militant Jew, I have always striven to explain that my Judaism has nothing biological about it. I am not a Jew by blood.
I am a Jew through my absolute adherence to all the values that make up the cultural, religious, and philosophical reality of Judaism — values that are called freedom, tolerance, dignity, and progress. I would add that the way in which, in Morocco, my parents taught me to be a Jew consisted in ensuring that the other — and in Morocco the other was my Arab neighbor — should benefit from and enjoy the same values.
It is these choices that determined my commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and that make me fight still today for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist in mutual respect and recognition.
I.R.: It seems to me that you are evoking something very important for us humanist Jews, the importance of the Other. I was thinking of the ideas so often developed by Lévinas, which you illustrate; first there is responsibility toward the other; and the other is indeed, for the Jew, sometimes the Arab, sometimes the Palestinian.
A.A.: Yes, this responsibility toward the other was the strongest ideological basis of Identité et Dialogue’s endeavor. In Morocco, we did not know that there existed differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. We had never been taught it. It was here that I discovered that there were communities, so many ways of being Jewish. For me, Judaism is something unique precisely because it is based on those very values that transcend all borders. On this point, when we affirmed ourselves as Sephardim and Moroccans, we never did so in opposition to others. We did it in order to add our own sensibility to those of others, and we never wanted to enroll ourselves in that demagogic and artificial antagonism in which people sought to confine our reflection and our action. On the other hand, I did not accept that my history, my identity, my culture be defined by the gaze of the other, by the voice of the other.
I.R.: Could you evoke the great dates of I. & D., beginning perhaps precisely with that colloquium organized by I. et D. — one of the first, no doubt — on the history of Moroccan Judaism.
A.A.: Yes, that’s true, it was in 1978 in Paris, and this colloquium was indeed called “The History of Moroccan Judaism.”
We had already made considerable progress on the Identity chapter, and we used the history of Moroccan Judaism as a pretext to go still further in dialogue and reflection, since this colloquium was the first open-door colloquium between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. We had, on one side, 60 Israelis and Jews; on the other side, 60 Moroccan, Palestinian, and other Arabs. It was also the first time that a colloquium saw the Ambassador of Israel and the Ambassador of Morocco side by side.
For me, this colloquium was probably one of the strongest moments of our association. They were days of very great intensity, of very great intellectual richness. But above all, it was a kind of electroshock. These Israelis come to meet Arab officials for the first time. Many Israelis of Moroccan origin who had likewise been deprived of this thread that had been cut, and who suddenly found themselves conversing freely, serenely, with their difference, with their point of view that was often very radical, with Moroccans of very high standing who likewise stated their position with very great calm. Sixty Israeli delegates who came to the Embassy of Morocco. It was a moment of very great emotion. It was in 1978, sixteen years ago.
Thanks to the media relays we had managed to interest, it was millions of people who discovered, in the course of our debates, that something other than confrontation was possible between Jews and Arabs.
I.R.: That Jews and Arabs were not necessarily at war.
A.A.: Exactly, we were no longer condemned to this fatality.
I.R.: It is the political implication of an event that presented itself a priori as a cultural event. On that note, could you evoke the more specifically political actions in the Dialogue part — and first of all, were there many of you?
A.A.: 4 or 5 people at the start. Afterward, the ranks swelled, but we always had a kind of hard core of 4 or 5 people. A real hard core. Each of our events drew between 200 and 1,000 people. It is true that we remained labeled as a somewhat closed and elitist group. We exaggerated the trait a little, because in reality we did, all the same, I believe, have a fairly broad impact. We never had the pretension of being a popular organization. That is neither our sensibility nor our will; we do not have the means for it. Nor did we ever wish to marginalize ourselves. We gave priority to effectiveness, and that ran through this restricted team.
Another of the strong moments was the meeting with Sartaoui, because, militant as we were, daring as we were, the taboo of the PLO existed for us too. Obviously, we had been invited on several occasions to meet the leaders of the PLO.
I.R.: Which was a major transgression.
V.A.L.: In the 1980s?
A.A.: In the 1970s. We didn’t do it. We did it much later, and we did it first through one man, Issam SARTAOUI.
I.R.: Perhaps you could evoke him. I believe people have already forgotten, or never knew, who Issam SARTAOUI was.
A.A.: Issam SARTAOUI is a man for whom I have great respect. He is no longer here to see peace. He is one of its architects, one of its founding elements.
Issam SARTAOUI was a militant, a hardline leader. At the head of a fighting unit, he had killed many Israelis. He had led many very bloody actions in Israel.
He had explained to us that he had gone all the way down the path of armed struggle, that he had at the same time measured its uselessness, and that at a certain point his own reflection had led him to understand that, in any case, armed action would lead neither to a Palestinian State nor even to advancing the cause. And he had decided, at that moment, to invest himself in political action, in the search for a political solution. I believe he did so by informing the leaders of the PLO. This information was poorly received. He never left the PLO; he was regarded as someone apart. I learned that from the very start he was working with someone who today holds high the torch of peace within the PLO, Abou Maazen, his superior from that moment on.
And already, that had made me perceive that the Palestinian kaleidoscope was far more contrasted, far more complicated, than the generally accepted equation of the armed and exclusively terrorist group.
I met SARTAOUI for the first time on a small beach in northern Morocco, in a completely secret place, thanks to the mediation of the Moroccans and at their invitation. It was a moment of very great emotion. I remember that in the first hour after we met, we shared a piece of bread together. There is a proverb among us in Arabic that says that when one shares bread, part of the road between enemies has already been traveled. We shared this piece of bread; it was our first meeting and our first shared commitment. And during the eight years that followed, it was a regular relationship. What I take from it is that he made us perceive the reality and the complexity of the Palestinian national movement. I believe that we too, at Identité et Dialogue, completed his formation and his information about what the reality and the contrasts of the Jewish world were, in its Israeli or diasporic components. There was this mutual exchange that was, for me, the most important thing — pedagogy. And there was, of course, alongside that, political action with him; we with him and he with us, in contacts with the Israelis, in contacts with others. I owe him, in any case, for having enlightened me — for having enlightened us at Identité et Dialogue — about the Palestinian movement.
V.A.L.: So he was as much a seeker of this rapprochement as the people of Identité et Dialogue.
A.A.: He knew that we were not entirely in agreement with him. We knew, obviously, that we were different. There were Saïd Hamami, Kalak, Naïm Kader, and many others who died for this cause. Issam Sartaoui and Emile Grunzweig — I have always associated these two names in my memory. Grunzweig, that militant of Shalom Ah’chav [Peace Now], who was killed by a grenade thrown by another Jew in a street in Jerusalem, because he was quite simply telling the other Israelis of his love for peace.
I.R.: Could you evoke the contacts that Identité et Dialogue maintained with the Palestinians, since we are somewhat in the history part?
A.A.: I do not know whether the moment has come to make an exhaustive inventory of all this action. What is certain is that, as regards the role played by Morocco in the peace process with the Palestinians, with the Israelis, with other Arabs (Egypt…), Morocco played a decisive role at every key moment of this evolution. I. & D. was indeed present at every stage, and above all — and this is the least known part and yet perhaps the most important — I. & D. was present to ensure that the steps, the contacts, the journeys that we were able to organize at that time fit as far as possible within the consensus of Jewish and Arab public opinion. I mean that when RABIN, before Moshe DAYAN, came to Morocco…
I.R.: RABIN had come to Morocco before Moshe DAYAN?
A.A.: Indeed. Rabin came to Morocco before the others. He was followed by Moshe DAYAN, then by Shimon PERES, and apart from the great leaders, there were many figures who came, who worked a great deal. Alongside this, we were conducting a whole series of actions to bring to Morocco Israelis who were opinion-shapers — professors, journalists, by the dozen, over the years. We simply told them: open your ears, open your eyes. It was absolutely essential that they recount, on returning home, what an Arab country at peace with the Jews could be. One must not forget that in those days, everything was demonized, everything was caricatured.
V.A.L.: Hence the importance of direct contact.
A.A.: Of education, of formation, and of de-dramatization. There was a negative myth of the Arab world in Israel. In Israel — a country where reading is fundamental, where knowledge is far more advanced than anywhere else — there was nonetheless a phenomenal ignorance of daily life in an Arab country. The Israelis discovered, through these journeys, these cities, these Moroccan houses they entered with us, that there was a history, that there was an architecture, a music, a language, a script. It is concepts such as these, gradually distilled over the years, that fractured this formidable pressure, the negative image that had been fashioned, installed, and that was of course legitimized, consolidated by the reality of the conflict. All of this within a dialectic based essentially on confrontation, exclusion, violence, death. We have just lived through half a century of violence, hatred, blood. An Arab — whether Egyptian, Moroccan, or still more Palestinian — who is today twenty or thirty years old has retained, of the Jewish world, only this confrontation.
V.A.L.: It seems there was, in the Arab countries, no peace movement corresponding to Shalom Ah’chav, the Israeli peace movement. What is that due to?
A.A.: I had observed it throughout our militant action, and it was a formidable handicap. It is true that there existed no Identité et Dialogue on the Arab side.
V.A.L.: Each was waiting for the recognition of the other.
A.A.: It was at the same time fairly explicable, and my responsibility — because I identified with Israel — was that Israel was bound to provide an answer to the Palestinian national problem. It was normal that I should be more active, more imaginative, and possibly more present, more militant, than the others, the Arabs.
I believe one must indeed take into account the fact that our responsibility was naturally more engaged in the search for dialogue than that of the Arabs.
I.R.: You evoke the search for dialogue. Perhaps this is the moment to evoke the group Dialogue, Arabes et Juifs en France.
A.A.: That is entirely consistent with what we have just said. We observed that we were precisely failing to find these partners, these Arab fellow travelers, in our endeavor, since we had defined ourselves at I. & D. as a Jewish group from the start. On the basis of this observation, there came the conjunction of two circumstantial elements that accelerated the process leading to the creation of Dialogue. First, the rise of racism in France. The second was, a few years later, the Gulf War. I remember that at the CRIF and in other circles, I tried to share this elementary observation that France is, along with Israel, the only country in the world where every single day that God makes, several hundred thousand Jews and Muslims wake up on the same soil, the same geographical space. Every day, thousands of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Muslims rub shoulders.
And it seemed to me utterly culpable and irresponsible not to take this factor into account and not to make of it, too, a platform, a lever, a tool of pedagogy for peace; all the more so since, as we know, the Arabs who are here, like the Jews who are here, are a kind of mirror, one reflecting toward Israel, the other toward the Arab world. I also said that, in addition to the demographic factor of the existence of these communities, there was the fact that a very large part of the Jewish community, and of this Arab community, shared the same memory, the same sensibility, since they came essentially from North Africa.
There was here the conjunction of a whole series of factors that made indispensable the creation of a movement bringing together the two communities; that is how Dialogue was born. It was not solely in reaction either to racism or to the circumstantial problems linked to the Middle East — whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the Israeli-Arab conflict, or the Gulf War — there was, at its base, first of all this given, which was an objective and often positive given. So Dialogue today, now that peace is taking shape, coming about, is even more important, because one cannot erase or conceal the fact that we are emerging from one of the longest conflicts in history, one of the most impassioned conflicts. I believe more than ever in this common discourse for healing the wounds in heads or in hearts. And then so that peace is not merely a treaty one signs, so that it is also the peace of men and women. This peace is not made solely by the reading of the accord signed in Washington; it is made in the creation of new reflexes. It is made in the evocation of another history. And it will be a long road to overcome those long years in which hatred, violence, and tragedy conditioned our reflexes…
V.A.L.: Perhaps Dialogue could play a media role, making known certain initiatives of encounters that exist and that are not well enough known. When they are brought to people’s attention, they then react positively and rally far more easily to initiatives that already exist.
A.A.: That’s true. For Dialogue, for I & D, as soon as we went out into the street and as soon as we shared these reunions, there was no difficulty in getting Jews and Arabs to join. I believe that is essential. And at the same time I believe we must own this capacity for exemplarity and share it with as many people as possible.
What I also retain with emotion is the action of Dialogue during the Gulf War in France. While all the sorcerer’s apprentices were predicting confrontation, clash, I keep very present in my memory the speed and effectiveness of the action of our two associations, which managed to command the respect of one and the other.
I.R.: You spoke of exemplarity. This is perhaps the moment to develop this concept more concretely: those series of televised interventions where one saw a Jew and an Arab, or a Jewish woman and an Arab woman — sometimes you, sometimes others — in dialogue. I believe that was an extraordinary pacifying example that received considerable echo in the public.
V.A.L.: A joint debate at the National Assembly, a joint approach to the ministries…
A.A.: And also to the Prime Minister at the time, Michel Rocard, very attentive to our request — a debate at the National Assembly with Abdellatif LAABI (Editor’s note: Moroccan poet) and numerous Jewish and Arab intellectuals. It was in the midst of the crisis.
I.R.: I believe it is important to evoke these things, even in detail, because people forget.
A.A.: Neither one side nor the other had any complex, any block. Because the SCUDs at that moment were falling on Israel, I remember indeed having gone with Abdellatif LAABI onto Antenne 2 [French public television channel], on Envoyé Spécial, to state my solidarity with the mothers of Tel Aviv, and I wanted Abdellatif LAABI to be there to hear it, and he said that he too was concerned by the threat weighing on Israel. In the same way, I said on screen that it was unbearable for me to see those Iraqi children deprived of everything, some of whom were dying under the bombs. It had to be said without concealing any of our respective positions. I thought that Iraq’s behavior had to be sanctioned. Abdellatif might have a different sensibility, but we respected each other, and we found ourselves very strongly in solidarity, united, with the same words to voice our anxiety, both for the Iraqi children and for Israel. And that was new. It was important that millions of people share with us this common commitment and this common respect, because we were supposed, on the contrary, in the popular imagination of the moment, to be at each other’s throats. And I believe that this initiative, with others, did indeed enjoy a tremendous reception and was a great moment of truth and shared emotion.
I.R.: Now that the peace process is on track, that one sees peace
beginning to dawn, one nonetheless has the feeling that the French Jewish community is very gloomy. It seems reserved, instead of welcoming this thing that has been awaited for 100 years — as RABIN said, the end of this hundred years’ war?
A.A.: This timidity is not that of the Jewish street. Our community adheres very broadly and very deeply to peace, because it has understood that Israel’s true security passes through an accord with the Palestinians, and that this accord will inevitably have a dynamic and positive effect with the other Arab States. The Jews of France adhere to peace also because they will at last be able to reconcile with themselves, with their values, and because they will thus recover their historic status as a community mobilized alongside those who fight for their freedom, their dignity. It is a struggle that cannot be divided, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had singularly complicated and handicapped this ideological and philosophical vocation, without which being a Jew would lose much of its substance.
As for the Jewish institutions of France now, it is true that they were not, far from it, at the forefront of the struggle for dialogue. Yet here one must recall the courageous role and the pioneering action of Théo Klein, in his capacity as the foremost leader of the CRIF and after his mandate. But generally speaking, the institutional and representative apparatus of French Judaism oscillated between unconditional adherence to the policies of the various Israeli governments and, in certain cases, was reserved or even opposed to the openings that were emerging with the Palestinians and other Arab countries. Today this debate is happily, to a large extent, archaic, even if certain stragglers still dream of doing battle from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The reality on the ground between Israelis and Palestinians will soon enough marginalize them.
I.R.: One last question — how do you currently see the tasks of the Jews in France? What seems to you fundamental in the commitment of a Jew?
A.A.: Our community must rediscover and recover, in all its components, the virtues of openness, of dialogue, and of tolerance. We must put an end to those reflexes of the besieged, which some have made into a system, in order, on the contrary, to reinstall the Jewish community in the humanist word and action that are its true vocation, and that are also the real common denominator between the religious and the secular.