A not inconsiderable part of the Zionist movement’s energy came from its will to make the Jewish people a people “like the others.” Starting from the observation of a damaging gap between the situation of the others—the norm of what a people ought to become—and the situation of the Jewish people, the task was to reduce this gap in the terms of a normalization. Normality being a term originally belonging to the medical vocabulary, it covered, in more than one Zionist, an appraisal of Jewish life in the Diaspora as pathology. Zionism would then have as its goal to cure this sickly existence cut off from any direct relation to nature, by modifying the social structure of a people of peddlers, merchants, and intellectuals so as to make of it a normal people of peasants and workers, harnessed to the mastery of natural forces.
The “like” in the expression “like the others” aimed above all at a content. On this path, Zionism committed itself to an often-denounced contempt for diasporic Jewish existence, akin to a contempt for the Jews tout court. But other orientations were also legible in the formula “becoming a people like the others,” which has the merit of presenting itself according to a comparative structure that forbids envisaging the destiny of the Jewish people in isolation and places it from the outset in a relation with the other peoples.
The development of antisemitism in the nineteenth century, despite the promises of emancipation, threatened at its very foundation the existence of the Jews as a people.
The diagnosis of abnormality was not necessarily a judgment on a way of life that had to be revolutionized; it was also, and first of all, a judgment on the place of the Jews in the world, at a time when peoples were constituting themselves into nations claiming a political existence in the form of a sovereign State. Such a claim drew its authority from a universal right of peoples to self-determination, which made the non-recognition of this right appear as an injustice. “Like the others,” in this case, did not aim at a content but claimed a place. The development of antisemitism in the nineteenth century, despite the promises of emancipation, threatened at its very foundation the existence of the Jews as a people. To become a people like the others meant then to become a people among the others, whose place could not be guaranteed by morality alone but by the concreteness of an autonomous political existence.
At the base of Zionism, then, there is the observation of an injustice that demands reparation and, from there, the determination to act in the world so that justice be done. Let us note that, whatever the internal political tendencies of Zionism and the minority existence of a religious Zionism, whatever the unconscious influence of the religious categories that had steeped the childhood of a great number of pioneers, it was not a matter of putting an end to exile so that, at last, the Halakha might also be the political law of the people.
The language of the Zionists was a profane language: “national home,” “State of the Jews,” “Jewish working class.” The right to which they referred was not that of the fulfillment of the millennial promise made by God to Abraham, but a right to self-determination of recent formulation. It is therefore in the language of modern law that the cause of Zionism could appear as a just cause. And yet no reckoning with the history of Zionism can ignore that one of the results of this enterprise was the wrong done to another people, its partial expulsion from the territory where it resided, and then, following the war of 1967, its direct oppression by a military occupation. Our purpose here will not be to consider these facts as the revelation of the hideous hidden truth of Zionism: the presence of the ideal of justice is not the mask of a libido dominandi (lust for domination) camouflaged behind universal ideals. Conversely, it is insufficient to confine oneself to the usual lamentations over the inevitable injustice committed by the one who fights for a just cause considered a priority. One of the elements of the problem seems to us rather to reside in the very form that the Zionist claim of justice for the Jewish people took at the outset. On reading the fundamental texts left by the actors of Zionism,1 one realizes that this claim found several formulations, the major difference among them being the importance accorded to the
taking into account of the justice owed to the other people: was this recognized as a requirement, certainly laudable, but to come second—or was it present in the very formulation of the requirement of justice for oneself?
Ethics is not opposed to the political but constitutes, for the actors, a marker for discerning a directly political problem.
Another thing is remarkable: the formulation of the principle of justice does not engage only a moral posture. Ethics is not opposed to the political but constitutes, for the actors, a marker for discerning a directly political problem. It is thus possible to establish a link between the very way in which the claim of justice was formulated and the reflection on the political form that Jewish autonomy in Palestine was to take. Did it go without saying, for example, that the nation-State was the most adequate political form for the Jews’ access to political autonomy? Was it not necessary to open one’s eyes to the world—and to the experience of the Balkans after the carve-ups of the Treaty of Versailles—in order to take some distance from the obviousness of this political form that had imposed itself on the movements of national liberation since the springtime of peoples of 1848? In the end, the singularity of the situation in the Near East may engage us in a reflection on the dangers of any conception of justice that would draw its authority from the claim of a right considered absolute. Must not every right to something—and in particular to a territory—even the legitimate right of the Jewish people, always be considered a right encroached upon from the outset by the existence of the other? To orient ourselves in these questions, we shall rely on certain aspects of the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas, guiding ourselves by the recent reading Jacques Derrida has given of it.
The singularity of the situation in the Near East may engage us in a reflection on the dangers of any conception of justice that would draw its authority from the claim of a right considered absolute.
The claim of justice for the Jewish people is found in most Zionist discourses, from Gordon to Jabotinsky by way of Ben Gurion. The particularity of the history of Zionism was that this claim, and the decision to make it concrete, occurred on a territory other than the one where the Jews resided. The Jewish people being a dispersed people without a homeland, its constitution into a
national home implied not only the establishment of an autonomous political structure but also an ingathering on a part of the earth.
The originality of the Zionist claim, in relation to other movements of national liberation, was that it comprised at the same time a demand, for the Jewish people, to be welcomed somewhere as a people. The difficulty of the situation being that, the injustice emanating essentially from the political organization of Europe, the demand for justice was addressed first to the world the Jews had left, Europe, whereas its realization was to take place on a territory other than the European territory.
Likewise, if the principle of justice could be considered universal, the concretization of the claim of justice had to be addressed to a precise recipient, which raised the question of knowing who had sovereignty over these territories, who had the power to welcome. In this direction, the first protagonist of the claim was, after the Turkish sultan, Great Britain. A stakeholder in the history of Europe, it could—on condition that this went in the direction of its imperialist interests—recognize the establishment of a Jewish national home as reparation for a right not yet recognized to a people of Europe. From then on, by their absence of power, the Arabs appeared strategically as a secondary datum of the situation, even as they intruded more and more into the reality of the relation the Jews maintained with the interlocutor they had chosen for themselves. Under these conditions, one can detect within Zionism a division between two positions, between two formulations of the claim of justice.
Take for example a text by Ytshaq Ben-Tsvi, companion of Ber Borochov and founder of the Poale Zion movement, which has the merit, as early as 1913, of taking into account the Arab question from the point of view of the Jewish workers.2 Ben-Tsvi seeks to answer those among the worker militants who cannot reconcile the principle of international proletarian solidarity, which forbids taking the place of foreign workers, with the national principle, which enjoins the Jews to constitute themselves into a national working class. This latter principle is invoked on the basis of the observation of the abnormality of Jewish life, leading to the right of the Jews to constitute themselves into a normal people—that is to say, from the socialist point of view, into a normal working class. What takes precedence in this case is the injustice that was done to us. From then on, the obstacle to the principle of international solidarity appears as secondary. To be sure, it is recognized at the level of general principles; likewise
one affirms that there is no question of totally driving back the Arabs, or even of not recognizing their rights. But these considerations cannot be taken into account at the same time as the claim of justice for oneself.
From this comes a posture that one will find in more than one text—socialist or not: the moment has not come to concern ourselves with the others. We must first constitute a force that the others will be compelled to recognize, that is to say, become the majority. Then, and then only, will it be time for us to take into account the rights of the Arab populations. The chain of thought is therefore the following: the principle of the equality of peoples is situated at the level of a respectable but abstract principle, whereas the demand for justice for oneself must take precedence. One must first conquer a position of strength, justified as the concretization of justice for oneself. It is only from such a position that one can, without danger to oneself, take into account justice for the other. Mutatis mutandis, one finds—radicalized—such a chain of reasoning in Jabotinsky. “Zionism,” writes Jabotinsky, “is a moral phenomenon that has justice on its side.” It is not just that a people should have no homeland; “to establish a home for a wandering people is an act of simple justice.”3 In the name of this, everything must be set to work to obtain reparation.
The more the fate of the Jewish people took a dramatic turn, the more there imposed itself the invocation of an absolute right for the Jews to claim the land of Palestine, and thereby the idea of an inequality of rights between the Arabs and the Jews.
Access to action, for the Jews, signifies for them the assumption of violence and the imposition by force of a right that could not be recognized otherwise. There, in the end, the claim of normality fails: to become a people like the others means not to hesitate, like the others, to resort to violent means in order to impose one’s ends. Alongside this, Jabotinsky can quite well concede that it is not a matter of totally ousting the Arabs from their land and that they too have national rights. For Jabotinsky, the open struggle against them has precisely the meaning of recognizing the seriousness of their national claim, preferable to the condescending discourses of those who hope to deceive the Arabs by dangling before them the cultural and economic advantages they would derive from Jewish colonization.
The more the fate of the Jewish people took a dramatic turn, the more there imposed itself the invocation of an absolute right for the Jews to claim the land of Palestine, and thereby
the idea of an inequality of rights between the Arabs and the Jews. If the absolutization of this right became more and more self-evident with the Shoah, its evocation was already in place well before, when one argued, for example, that the Arabs had immense territories at their disposal whereas the Jews as a people had only the territory of Palestine, or again—in order to justify total sovereignty over Jerusalem—that the Muslims had many other sacred places whereas the Jews had only Jerusalem. From this there dawned the idea of a secondarization of the rights of the Arabs and the justification of the use of force to bring about the right of the Jews.
If such orientations became dominant within the Zionist movement, a minority of Zionists never adhered to them. Not that they renounced the requirement of justice owed to the Jewish people, but from the outset it appeared necessary to them to take the other people into account in the claim of justice for oneself, so that, as Judah L. Magnes wrote, “the injustice of the world done to the Jews” should not be “used politically by the Jews as an excuse to commit injustice.”4 Like Martin Buber, Magnes always refused the argument of the lesser injustice, which invoked for the Jews a superior justice with respect to which they would be authorized to commit a “small injustice.”
For Buber and Magnes it was always evident that the Jews could not claim justice for themselves without at the same time associating with it the rights of the Arab population.
The conventional attitude toward men like Buber and Magnes is often—after having first expressed great admiration for their moral integrity—to deplore thereafter their idealism, or even their naïveté.5 For us, on the contrary, the fact that it was always evident to them that the Jews could not claim justice for themselves without at the same time associating with it the rights of the Arab population, historically a stranger to the injustice that had been done to them, is the sign of a greater political perspicacity. For such a formulation of the ideal of justice was defended only by those who did not consider that the last word of politics resided in the conduct of States but in that of peoples, independently of the actual distribution of State sovereignty.
For Robert Weltsch, another eminent member of the Brit Shalom, the fundamental political fact was the presence of two
peoples on the land of Palestine: “There is a people without a land, but there is no land without a people (..) Palestine has a population of 700,000 souls, a people that has lived for centuries in this country and that rightly considers it its homeland and its home. We must take this fact into account (..) Palestine will always be inhabited by two peoples, the Jews and the Arabs.”6
What the members of the Brit Shalom understood was that, independently of Realpolitik, those who were in a real position to welcome the Jewish people, those to whom one fundamentally had to address oneself, were not the English, who held the visible power, but the Arabs of Palestine, residents without power, unnoticed interlocutors not yet constituted into an organized political force. Under these conditions, the order of precedence was reversed. To be sure, one had to take the English into account, but if their power was pressing at the moment, from the point of view of the long-term Zionist project it was secondary, so that it was the Arab question that became the true touchstone of Zionism.
From then on, the problem that arose was to know how to address the Arab residents of Palestine so that they would recognize the well-foundedness of the Jewish people’s claim of justice, when they were in no way responsible for the injustice done to that people and were not in an institutional position to grant anything to anyone, so that their political manifestation came first through direct violence against the Jews.
But, formulated thus, the requirement of justice gave access to the essential problem of the kind of political organization that had to be aimed at and that would be adequate to the situation of Palestine, where two peoples lived and not one. Thus Hugo Bergmann, having in mind the contemporary impasses of the Balkan countries, takes his distance from the doctrine of the nation-State, which supposes that to one State corresponds one “people of the State,” necessarily constituting the other people into a minority. In this way he calls into question the Zionist claim that the Jews become a majority, the problem for him being to think a political organization that would not be founded on the mere numerical consideration of peoples.7 The important thing for the Jewish people, desirous of normalizing its situation in the world, being not to become at last the majority in a region of the earth, but to accede to a political representation on the same footing as the other peoples. From this come the proposals of a binational State or of a federation. It is in this direction that one must understand Hannah Arendt’s opposition to the Biltmore Program, by which—under the impetus of Ben Gurion—the
Zionist movement publicly assumed the claim of the creation of a Jewish State of the nation-State type. A reflection on the recent history of the Balkans led her, on the contrary, to consider that
“the attempt to solve the national conflicts by creating small sovereign States on the one hand, and by granting minority rights in empires composed of different nationalities on the other, has met with so spectacular a defeat in recent history that one could reasonably expect no one to try to embark in this direction any longer. There is no reason to hope that the national problem we are facing in Palestine can be solved by following the ways of national politics.”8
However, the very singularity of the situation in which the Jews were led to claim a political autonomy within the frameworks of the nationalisms of the nineteenth century may engage us in a more precise reflection on the very formulation of the requirement of justice. As Judith Shklar remarks, the requirement of justice proceeds first from a sense of injustice corresponding to a feeling experienced by victims.9 It was such a sense of injustice that was at the foundation of the Zionist claim that the Jews become a people among the others.
But—and such was the singularity of the situation—this claim, addressed to the Western world within which the Jews wished to take a place, immediately encountered the question of the other people, the one to whose detriment the political insertion of the Jews into the world risked occurring.
In the history of the Near East, the Arabs from the start disturbed the face-to-face of the Jews with the Western world, with which the essential of the problems posed itself. This could only trouble the consciousness the Jews could have of the absolute rightness of their claims, whose origin was the persecutions of which they were the victims. From then on, the Jewish national consciousness had to assume a contradictory position: the legitimacy it drew from the situation of oppression and persecution characterizing the situation of the Jews in the countries of Europe was immediately encroached upon by the very conditions under which this legitimacy came to be recognized, which burdened this legitimacy from the outset with a suspicion of illegitimacy. One could rid oneself of such an ambiguity by reducing it to the diasporic mentality of the Jew ashamed of himself, scrupulous to the extreme to the point of impotence. One could even devalue such a scruple by showing how, in the present situation, only the Jews
experienced it, whereas the Arabs never put themselves into question. On the Arab side, one could also ridicule this unease by making of it a mere bad conscience that did not prevent the depredations and that was there only to mask the objectivity of the situation: a conquering imperialism.
Setting aside these attitudes, one can choose, on the contrary, to draw on this unease and to consider that it opens onto an essential aspect of the very formulation of the requirement of justice when it refers to the respect of a right. Can one not seek a meaning in the fact that the search for justice undertaken by one of the most persecuted peoples in human history took place under conditions such that they rendered problematic, from the outset, the relation to right considered as an absolute? Does such a situation not reveal, in the end, the impossibility for anyone—even when he is the victim of injustice—of relying on an absolute to bring about justice in a world that is necessarily plural, a shared world that always harbors the unforeseeable, thwarting the initial projects?
It has often been remarked that the meaning of Zionism, for the Jewish people, consisted in having done with a millennial status of political innocence. “For two thousand years,” writes Emmanuel Lévinas, “the Jewish people was only the object (of human history), in a political innocence it owed to its role as victim.”10 But, he adds, such a position does not suffice for its vocation; this is why the creation of the State of Israel has the meaning of being the occasion at last offered to accomplish “the social law of Judaism,” which is made concrete in “the sordid questions of food, work, and lodging.”11 Like any State liable to become tyranny as soon as it forgets its primary mission of safeguarding justice, but in an exemplary manner insofar as it would be in direct continuity with the prophetic message, the State of Israel would not be a State like the others.
Lévinas envisages this orientation toward justice—which is for him a promise, a possibility of political invention more than an actuality—from a point of view internal to the State of Israel. When he envisages the relation of Israel to its immediately surrounding world, Israel always appears as surrounded by enemies, contested and threatened from its creation by its neighbors.12 Such would be the “real state of things,” more fundamental than the apparent military force of Israel in the face of the disarmed Palestinian people. The struggle of the State of Israel for its existence is the perennial one, that of the struggle of the Warsaw ghetto, that of the heroes of
Masada.13 Are these the kind of remarks to which Jacques Derrida confesses he does not subscribe?14 However, his reading of Lévinas’s thought, the dissociation between the statements to which he engages the reader—according to which there is no mechanical passage from the ethical schemas to the intra-political analyses of real situations—can be a guide to help us think the idea of a right encroached upon from the outset by the other. Whereby Lévinas’s themes—which, despite philosophical divergences, remain close to Buber’s themes—might have an orienting capacity in the direction of the real, whatever Lévinas’s own political analyses may have been. The difference between J. L. Magnes, M. Buber, and Lévinas being that Lévinas never personally engaged in a political action.
On innocence and the exit from innocence first. There are several ways of conceiving it. One would formulate itself in Weberian terms of a passage from the ethics of conviction to the ethics of responsibility. Such is the perspective of Yeshayahou Leibovitz, criticizing the intellectuals of Brit Shalom. For him, the exit from political innocence for the people consists in assuming the use of violence, the whole problem being to know within what limits.15 A text by Lévinas on the cities of refuge might perhaps allow us to conceive the problem otherwise, or more exactly to situate it at the level of the Zionist enterprise at its origin. This text explores the ambiguities of innocence. The city of refuge is that place which protects the man guilty of an involuntary fault—who is not liable to be prosecuted before a tribunal—from the vengeance of the avenger of blood, a close relative of the victim, “redeemer of the spilled blood.” If this semi-guilty man must be protected from the violence of the resentment of the one who has been wronged, a certain right, that is to say a certain legitimacy, is recognized to this vengeance, insofar as the city of refuge is also exile, that is to say punishment for the involuntary murderer.
The city of refuge is that place which protects the man guilty of an involuntary fault.
Meditating on this teaching of the Talmud, Lévinas extrapolates it to the contemporary situation of the cities where we dwell and that are more and more the prey of delinquency, and—from there—to the whole West, whose material advantages are, “by one thing leading to another,” the cause of “wars and slaughters,” of “some agony of someone somewhere.”
The inhabitants of modern cities, the whole West, have no intention of starving or killing. And yet, in seeking well-being for oneself in all innocence, one may very well be responsible—without willing it—for the misfortune of others, which comes back to us in the form of “popular anger, spirit of revolt, or delinquency in our suburbs.”16 All these analyses refer back to the Levinasian theme of the putting-into-question of the right to be, of an originary fear for “all that my existing, despite its intentional and conscious innocence, may accomplish of violence and murder.”17 My responsibility always exceeds the domain of what I have willed.
I am engaged also by the harmful consequences that flow from my perseverance in being, whose being does not suffice for its justification. But one cannot help reading these lines written about the cities of refuge without referring them to the relations between Jews and Palestinians. Before the question of the necessary use of force when one seeks to create a State, this text perhaps indicates a problem internal to the conditions under which the Zionist ideal was realized.
In settling on the land of Palestine, the Jews had no intention of dominating, of harming, or of exploiting the Arabs. Yet their innocence is only a half-innocence; as such it perhaps did not cause the agony of anyone, but at the very least the action of the Jews incontestably had as its consequence the uprooting of another people.
In the relation with the Palestinians, it was not a matter of a relation with an armed State against which one had to defend oneself. This is why the War of Independence, like the war of 1967, is only one part of the problem. A wrong was done to a people without a State, and its irruption sometimes resembles that of the “avenger of blood.” So that if the author of the involuntary fault must be protected, the vengeance of the avenger of blood is not totally without legitimacy. It was those who from the start had recognized this half-innocence or this half-guilt who were in a position to formulate the right of the Jews to Palestine as a right encroached upon from the outset by the presence of the other people. Let us turn, for example, to what Martin Buber wrote after the tragic events of Hebron and Safed, at the end of which 133 Jews were killed and 440 wounded by Arab rioters. Instead of drawing the conclusion that henceforth relations with the Arabs could take place only under the sign of force, one may say that he interpreted the Arab action, in a certain way, as that—eminently condemnable in its methods—of the avenger of blood.
He prompted one to ask what these acts revealed to the Jews about the way they conceived their settlement in Palestine, and that nothing would be more dangerous for them than to drape themselves in the eternal role of the besieged innocent, which did not correspond exactly to their place in relation to the Palestinian Arabs:
“I believe I can say…: it is certain, we cause wrong. To live is to cause wrong. To breathe, to nourish oneself, to grow, all the vital organic functions imply that one causes wrong. The whole meaning of human life is to be placed at every hour before the following responsibility: I do not want to cause more wrong than I must in order to live. We therefore cause wrong. Imagine that we are in Palestine and that the others come to us; you will understand what that means. But we do not want to cause more wrong than is necessary to live… This is why we must take upon ourselves as much wrong as is necessary. That is much more difficult than wanting to be innocent.”18
In the lineage of such a concern, one can no longer formulate the right over Palestine as a land as an absolute right. This other formulation of the right can also orient itself according to Lévinas’s reflections. Derrida shows how Levinasian ethics is an ethics of hospitality. The human subject is first of all a host, a welcoming of the other, but the host who receives is not the assured proprietor of his footing in the world. The host is himself received in his own house by the feminine being; the proprietor is a tenant. The one who welcomes is first of all welcomed. Not without commenting at length on the feminine character of the one who welcomes, Derrida makes a connection between these formulations and a verse of Leviticus 25:23, cited both by Franz Rosenzweig and by Lévinas: “No land shall be alienated irrevocably, for the land is mine, for you are but strangers, domiciled with me.”19 In other words, the establishment of a State, or of a political autonomy, could not take place in the name of a property of the land. To attribute the property of the land to God is to attribute it to no one, that is to say to no man, to no people. We are all residents and not proprietors: “The soil or the territory has nothing natural about it, nothing of a root, even a sacred one, nothing of a possession for the national occupant. The land gives above all hospitality, a hospitality already offered to the initial occupant, a provisional hospitality consented to the guest, even if he remains a master of the place.”20 From then on, the Palestinians, who were in the position of initial occupant, could be addressed as guests—they and not the
English—not in order to settle as occupants in their place, but in order to find, on this corner of the earth, a place among the peoples of the earth.
Incontestably, the arrival of the Jews destabilized the spontaneous relation of the Palestinians to their land. The extreme complexity of the situation also came from the fact that, owing to English imperialism, the Palestinians as welcomers did not have a sufficient footing or security for themselves to be able to be placed in the position of hosts. Moreover, one of the disastrous effects of the Balfour Declaration was that they could not see in the Jews arriving in Palestine persecuted people fleeing antisemitism, but colonists supported by English imperialism.21 It was then a matter of assuming that the settlement of the Jews in Palestine could not but destabilize the relation of the Palestinians to the land where they resided. Such was—in the real conditions of the world—the consequence of the Jewish will to accede to political autonomy, that is to say to a recognized place among the peoples of the world.
For this destabilization, the Jews had—and still always have—to publicly assume responsibility. What legitimacy could they invoke in the direction of the Palestinians? We can here partially follow the proposals of Avraham B. Yehoshua, who situates the Zionist enterprise on the basis of the new international order founded on the nation-States emerging from the nineteenth century onward. In such an organization, the situation of peoples without a land—Jews, but also Armenians and Roma—became particularly dangerous. There would thus be a “right arising from distress,” in the name of which a people without a land would have the right to claim a sovereignty over a part of the earth, even at the expense of the sovereignty of another. The situation is comparable, according to A. B. Yehoshua, to that of an individual with no fixed abode who would “squat” a part of the house belonging to another. But, he adds, all this holds only if the intruder seizes only a part of the house and not the house in its entirety, depriving the proprietors of shelter and condemning them to wandering. In other words, the Zionist claim delocalizes the Arab national consciousness and interrogates it as a stakeholder in the world in its entirety. But it is legitimated in this only if the right of the Jewish people invokes no exclusive relation to the land of Palestine.22 The problem, to our mind, is that A. B. Yehoshua takes up on his own account the political formulation of the nation-State as flowing immediately from this right arising from distress, whereas in its principle,
as H. Arendt recognized, this formulation supposed the homogenization of the population and the territory and therefore the expulsion of the other people. Now, as the title of Martin Buber’s book indicates, what structurally constituted an obstacle to the establishment of a nation-State on the model of French-style sovereignties was that one was not in the presence of a land and a people, but of a land and two peoples. In Martin Buber’s view, the political form corresponding to a conception of justice that would be justice both for oneself and for the other could not be the nation-State but a binational State.
What remains today of these minority voices, of these possibilities in germ in the situation of origin that the ways of history will not take, since the nation-State imposed itself as an obviousness of an unstoppable force on all the movements of national liberation? The current political debate has evacuated—not only in the Near East—any alternative in terms of a federal State. In Israel, the voices of those who draw their authority from Jewish tradition to claim a carnal and exclusive bond to the land grow more and more clamorous. Their nationalism is more and more arrogant and destructive. The partisans of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian and Israeli, wish for the existence of two nation-States, Israel and Palestine. But for one to arrive at this point, was it not necessary that finally, after so much blood spilled, it should be the affirmation of an encroached-upon and no longer absolute right that orients the approach of those who—against all odds—want peace, retrospectively vindicating the naïve and the dreamers of the Brit Shalom?
What can we do today so that these principles, with difficulty returned to the forefront of the stage of history, do not collapse once again under the blows of stupidity, of blindness, and of exclusive confidence in force?
We shall rely in particular on texts drawn from a work to appear in 1998 from Albin-Michel, Sionismes. Textes fondamentaux (Zionisms: Foundational Texts), ed. Denis Charbit (hereafter STF).↩︎
Y. Ben-Tzvi, “Protection des interdits nationaux et point de vue prolétarien” (“The Protection of National Prohibitions and the Proletarian Point of View”), Haachdout (Unity), no. 16, 1913, STF↩︎
Zeev Jabotinsky, “La muraille de fer (Les Arabes et nous)” (“The Iron Wall [The Arabs and Us]”), 1933, STF↩︎
Judah L. Magnes, “Zionist politics” (1921) in Like all the nations?, Herod’s Gate Jerusalem, 1930, p. 58↩︎
See for example Walter Laqueur’s judgment on Magnes: “his naïveté seemed to make him incapable of doing politics—not without reason, Ben Gurion said of him that he was politically a child,” Histoire du sionisme (A History of Zionism), trans. M. Carrière, Calmann-Lévy 1973, p. 295↩︎
Robert Weltsch, “A propos du XIXe congrès sioniste, l’enjeu” (“On the 19th Zionist Congress, the Stakes”) (1925), cited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Introduction to Martin Buber, Une terre et deux peuples. La question judéo-arabe (A Land of Two Peoples: The Jewish-Arab Question), Lieu Commun, 1985, p. 26↩︎
Hugo Bergmann, “A propos de la majorité” (“On the Majority”), STF↩︎
Hannah Arendt, “La question judéo-arabe peut-elle être résolue ?” (“Can the Arab-Jewish Question Be Solved?”), Auschwitz et Jerusalem, trans. S. Courtine-Denamy, Tierce, 1991, p. 61↩︎
Judith Shklar, The faces of injustice, Yale University Press 1990↩︎
E. Lévinas, L’Au-delà du verset (Beyond the Verse) (hereafter ADV), Minuit 1995, p. 228↩︎
E. Lévinas, Difficile Liberté (Difficult Freedom), Albin-Michel 1976, pp. 281–282↩︎
For an analysis of this central schema in Zionist and then Israeli consciousness, cf. Uri Eisenzweig, Territoires occupés de l’imaginaire juif. Essai sur l’espace sioniste (Occupied Territories of the Jewish Imaginary: Essay on Zionist Space), Bourgois 1980↩︎
E. Lévinas, ADV, pp. 226–227↩︎
Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas (Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas), Galilée 1997, pp. 201–202↩︎
Y. Leibovitz, “L’éthique juive face à l’Etat” (“Jewish Ethics in the Face of the State”) (1953), STF↩︎
E. Lévinas, ADV, pp. 56–57↩︎
E. Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Of God Who Comes to Mind), Vrin 1982, p. 262↩︎
M. Buber, Une terre et deux peuples (A Land of Two Peoples), op. cit. p. 119↩︎
Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, op. cit., pp. 79–80. In the lineage of these formulations, one must, writes Derrida, “give Lévinas his due: he always wanted to subtract his thematic of election”—and this concerns also all his remarks on Zionism, or on the State of Israel—“from any nationalist seduction.” Ibid. p. 202↩︎
Ibid. p. 164↩︎
For the Arab perception of the presence of the Jews in Palestine, cf. Maxime Rodinson, Peuple juif ou problème juif (Jewish People or Jewish Problem), La Découverte 1997, p. 304 ff.↩︎
Avraham B. Yehoshua, “Le droit à la détresse” (“The Right of Distress”) (1980), STF↩︎