The intertwining of the destinies of the Jews of Eretz-Israel, which became Israel, and the Jews of the Diaspora is as old as the history of the Jews. Was Abraham, the mythical ancestor, not a native of Ur in Chaldea — that is, of the Diaspora? And has the history of the Jews not been, if one recalls the sojourn in Egypt and in Babylon, a coming and going between the land of Israel and the Diaspora, the one or the other imposing itself now politically, now culturally? The periods of presence in Eretz-Israel have for so long alternated with periods of absence of sovereignty or of diasporic exile that one might consider the history of the Jewish people from two angles: either as an ancient succession of periods of statehood in the land of Israel interrupted by exiles in the Diaspora, or as the history of a long diasporic life founded on a dream of return to Zion that would be made concrete by the creation of the State of Israel. Thus one has seen develop, in the Jewish collective consciousness as it expresses itself in its culture, questionings that bore now on the dimension of the political — such is the case of Maimonides’s laws on kingship — now on culture and transmission, even though the historical vision itself for a very long time took its models only from a very ancient past (see Zakhor by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi).
More than fifty years after the Shoah, the greatest catastrophe the Jewish people has known in its history, the Jewish renaissance in the Diaspora is a fact, and the integration of the Jews into their surrounding societies is a reality, whatever the troubles of the present. Likewise, half a century after the creation of the State of Israel, which marked the return of a Jewish presence in statehood form on a part of the ancestral land of the Jews, that State has developed there and has constituted a society strong enough to allow itself — beyond its founding myths — to question its own modern origins. This is what is attempted by those who are called, by a simplifying shorthand, “the new historians,” and who form a highly diverse set as regards their political or ideological options (see, e.g., La nouvelle histoire d’Israël (The New History of Israel) by Ilan Greilsammer).
For a certain time, these two entities, Israel and the Diaspora, evolved toward a kind of reciprocal autonomy, particularly since the hopes for peace born with the Oslo Accords of 1993. Israel questioned its own identity, its inscription within its geographical environment, and the meaning of its new relations with the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. In the Diaspora, a large part of the Jews — conscious both of Israel’s role in the destiny of the Jewish people and of the family, historical, or cultural ties that bind them to it — became more autonomous as regards their culture and, while developing their associations and their institutions, took root in their respective countries by participating actively in national political life.
But the continued occupation and colonization of the Occupied Territories by Israel, and the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to disarm the terrorist groups and to cease the anti-Israeli propaganda, brought about the failure of the Oslo Accords.
The hopes for peace between Israel and the Arab world that persisted in spite of everything received a harsh blow with the failure of the Camp David negotiations in the summer of 2000, then of those at Taba, and above all with the outbreak of the second Intifada, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which was no longer that of stones but that of weapons, of suicide attacks, and of reprisals: thousands of dead, more than seven hundred among the Israelis, more than two thousand among the Palestinians.
This violence reduced almost to nothing the hopes for peace, brought back to the front of the stage the camp of Arab rejection, and brought back to power the Israeli nationalist right and Ariel Sharon, long sidelined. It also brought about the return of an antisemitism that had been thought to have vanished, and thus destabilized the Jews of the Diaspora.
The proliferation of anti-Jewish acts in France in particular — synagogues set on fire, blows and insults to Jewish children in the schools of the Republic, or to Jewish adults in the street — gave rise among the Jews of France to a disquiet and a feeling of solitude and incomprehension, all the greater in that, for too long, the left-wing government then in power tried to minimize these acts, failing to bring forth the strong words of condemnation and the measures of deterrence that the Jews of France expected.
Likewise civil society, the great human-rights associations, the parties and unions were slow to react against these attacks, perhaps because they often came from marginal groups of the Muslim world. At the same time, one witnessed an increasingly dangerous slippage of all too many pro-Palestinian demonstrations toward an ever more frequent assimilation of Zionism and Israel to Nazism.
The consequence of this was a banalization of anti-Jewish attacks, and the feeling of isolation thus engendered contributed to a marked tendency of the organized community to close in on itself, to appear to support unconditionally the policy of the Israeli government.
For our part, we place ourselves unequivocally in the camp of peace, alongside Shalom Archav (Peace Now) precisely. We regret that a portion of those responsible for the organized Jewish community, in the name of a traditional legitimism that we reject, do not distance themselves from the policy of occupation and colonization that does so much harm to the State of Israel. However, neither could we approve those “other Jewish voices” who, through various petitions, give to believe that there would exist within the national community a pernicious influence of the Israeli far right, thereby conveying in another form, and unexpectedly, the sinister and archaic myth of the Jewish conspiracy. Neither the demonization of Zionism nor the unconditional approval of Israeli policy moves in the direction of peace.
It does seem that there is indeed a common fragility of Israel and the Diaspora, nothing that befalls the one being without effect on the other.
You will find in the dossier of this issue of Plurielles texts by both Israelis and Diaspora Jews, questioning our respective destinies, followed by portraits of a few “historic” Jews and by interviews of creators questioned about their relationship with Israel.
The range of positions of the Jews of the Diaspora with respect to Israel is extremely wide: hostility, indifference (no doubt sustained by the tradition of a minority experience and/or the refusal of the coercive power or possible violence that a State represents), solidarity, critical support, or complete identification. One finds symmetrical positions among many Israelis: hostility tinged with contempt for these galut (“exile”) Jews; awareness that the history of the Diaspora’s Jewish sufferings is inscribed in Israel within most families; the wish for recourse to that same Diaspora in order to find a way out of the present impasses.
It is upon this kaleidoscope that we wished to bend our attention.
Among the contributions outside the dossier, I should like to single out that of Rachid Aous, which bears on secularism and democracy in the land of Islam. It gives concrete form to the dialogue that we all wish for.