We wished to draw these few pages from Jean Lacouture’s book on Pierre Mendès France (Seuil, 1981), for a portrait as faithful as possible of one of the great French political figures of the second half of the twentieth century.
The Editors
To the Jewish review L’Arche, which questioned him in 1976 about his origins and his belonging to Judaism, Pierre Mendès France, then on the eve of undertaking a journey to Israel, replied:
“I remain intrigued and impressed by the Jewish fact. It is not a religious fact, since there exist a great many men who have no faith, do not practise the religion, and who nonetheless feel themselves to be Jewish…”
… Here he is, forced into retirement by fragile health. A retirement that weighs on this man of action more than it would on another. He works, of course, reads a great deal, keeps up his contacts, admirably supported by Marie-Claire, whom he married in 1971 and who is, at his side, a source of energy, of clarity, of precious equilibrium.
And occasions for important tasks will yet arise.
Above all, it falls to him to work for peace in Palestine. Zionist, anti-Zionist, Mendès France? An idle question, where a man is concerned who invested himself so deeply in the French national destiny, and identified with it so completely, that for more than thirty-five years he has appeared as an incarnation of French democracy. As Léon Blum recalled so forcefully concerning his own history, he is a Jew who found his homeland in the country of Descartes and Hugo. …
……But it is with joy that he hails the creation of the State of Israel, the accomplishment of a historical hope and a forge for a Jewish future. The approval he gives to the emergence of the Hebrew State is warm, and will never cease from then on to confirm itself, whatever the criticisms a State’s policy may provoke in a friend. A foreign State? Yes. But not quite like the others.…………
… Israel is a small State encircled by adversaries; a State made up in large part of survivors of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis; a State founded on the idea of development; a more or less socialist State, lastly: these, in PMF’s eyes, are good reasons to feel a keen sympathy for an exceptional human endeavour, even if one is little involved in the Jewish tradition, cultural and religious.
Citing him, some have already believed it possible to give a Sartrean definition of his Jewish conscience, and to describe his Judaism as an inverted reflection of antisemitism… Likewise, the feeling of solidarity he experiences toward Israel could only have been sharpened by the terrorism that assails it (that assails the State of Israel, that is) and by the suicidal policy of a government such as Mr. Begin’s.
A sympathy that is plainly of a different nature from the one he feels, however strongly, for Vietnam in crisis or Tunisia put to the test.
From 1948 to 1956, from the proclamation of the Hebrew State to the Suez war, one finds no divergence between Pierre Mendès France and the State of Israel…
… In 1956, a dissonance appears over Suez. PMF does not doubt the right Israel had to fight, given that Nasser’s Egypt was not sparing in its threats, did not respect the free passage of its ships through the Suez Canal, and found itself free to act once the British had evacuated. But in attacking, as he does, the strategy of Guy Mollet and Anthony Eden, he indirectly criticizes Ben-Gurion and his own, who, for reasons that were in fact very specific, and pushed to do so by the French leaders, had associated themselves with the suicidal spasm of these two States in retreat.
… In 1959, Pierre Mendès France makes a study trip to Israel from which he returns profoundly moved, and convinced. The two lectures he delivers in December 1959 under the aegis of France-Israël and the Cahiers de la République reflect an enthusiasm that is more or less without reservation. In the one published by the Cahiers, he salutes from the outset the “extraordinary climate of construction,” and the “atmosphere of unanimous crusade” that reign in Israel. And, ambiguous though it may be, the word crusade, here, carries no ulterior meaning.
Very quickly the decisive remark appears: that the reason for Israel’s success “must be sought in the level of culture and of general education of the population, […] a specific element of Israeli reality.”
… his trenchant assertion of Israeli irreversibility carries conviction:
“The Israeli political fact is now embedded in geography and in history; it has imposed itself, it has driven deep roots into the soil, it has gathered together a million newcomers, and it will not be uprooted.”
That is the heart of the matter and the heart of Mendès’s thought. And on this point he will not waver.
Firm though it be, and often demonstrated, Pierre Mendès France’s solidarity with Israel will never be unconditional. (After the Six-Day War) PMF does not join de Gaulle in condemning an initiative which, in the general’s view, would generate enormous later conflicts. But he declares himself concerned.
… Interviewed a few months later (still after 1967) by Jean Ferniot for Paris Presse, Pierre Mendès France declared:
“Because it has been victorious, the Israeli government must be diplomatically more active. It must not give its adversaries any pretext to accuse it of wanting to annex territories, and to integrate populations that are not Israeli.
The Israeli government would do well, as quickly as possible, to publish a peace programme, making clear its territorial disinterestedness, while also bringing to light the necessity of wresting this part of the world from the intrigues of the great powers. This would be a way, over the heads of governments, of establishing a dialogue with the peoples.”
(When one considers that PMF was speaking thus more than forty years ago, one can only admire the almost prophetic vision he had of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Ed.)
… From now on, Mendès will fight on two fronts. Denouncing the bitterness of Gaullist diplomacy toward Israel…
This influence — whose legitimacy is recognized on both sides — PMF exercises on two major themes… The first theme: he pushes for direct steps between the States of the region. The second theme: the Palestinians are henceforth at the centre of the debate. Since 1967, it has become apparent that a solution will be durable only if it gives this distinctive people a territory. This will never lead PMF to approve of, or even to understand, the type of struggle to which the visible activity of Yasser Arafat and his friends is reduced for years. But even if they manifest it by horrible means, these men have rights. After taking up the challenge and combating the attacks, it is only by recognizing these rights that violence will be brought to a lasting end. Pierre Mendès France has no prefabricated solution to propose.
… It was at the close of a two-week stay in Israel that Pierre Mendès France launched, in the Nouvel Observateur, in 1976, a kind of appeal to the Hebrew State:
“Israel must create a new situation, and to do so make a significant gesture, break the lock that blocks everything. You know what this gesture should be: to tell the Palestinians that there is no intention of standing in the way of their freedom and their right. […] With all my strength I prefer that Israel take the initiative. To avoid a new Munich. An offer from Israel is worth more, in any case, than a forced solution, even if it is almost identical.”
And a few days later… in the presence of tens of thousands of listeners attached without reservation to the cause of the Jewish State, he added:
“What we have in common is to make our feelings known for the survival of a nation to which all democrats are attached…… While being a friend of Israel, one can criticize certain aspects of Israeli policy…”
A firmness that does not please everyone, but which soon earns him recognition from the Palestinians as the link and the arbiter of essential discussions.
A few weeks later, in Le Monde, one of the best spokesmen of the Israeli left, Amnon Kapeliouk, gave, not without some variations, the history of these mysterious meetings:
— As early as the summer of 1976, PMF instigated meetings between Israeli leaders — such as reserve general Matityahou Peled — and representatives of the PLO, such as Dr. Sertawi, one of Mr. Arafat’s close associates.
(We have summarized here, briefly, the history of these meetings, from which one may infer the character of a “good offices” mission on PMF’s part. Ed.)
Three years later, Pierre Mendès France, taking account of the same realities, added a few qualifications to these remarks gathered in a climate of euphoria:
“I told myself at that moment that if the principal problem was no longer Egyptian-Israeli, it was nonetheless impossible that everything, including the most difficult thing, the Palestinian problem, should not be altered by it. I must say that this was also the state of mind of a great many Palestinians whom I saw at the time — practically all the mayors of the occupied territories of the West Bank. And I believe that Arafat himself, at the beginning, hoped for something.
But there is, on the one hand, the Rejectionist Front, which was very violent; there is, on the other hand, the fact that Sadat did not name the PLO from the rostrum of the Knesset, in which he was perhaps wrong: he could have spoken its name without making any too-precise commitment. And there is the fact that Begin was even more stubbornly negativist than I had feared. The fact remains that the most sectarian, the hardest elements gained the upper hand, and that today everything is at a standstill. After an initiative as extraordinary as Sadat’s! It is truly one of the finest missed opportunities of our age…”
He is not one of those who give up. Other visitors will sit around him in the austere drawing room of the apartment on the rue du Conseiller-Collignon. If he considers himself destined for a mission that would crown his career as a negotiator, as a militant for development, as a democrat, it is the mission of helping to make peace in Palestine.
He knows full well that peace is always made by the combatants. But he has seen, from Geneva to kilometre 101 on the road from Cairo to Jerusalem, that between one hand and the other the gesture of a third party can be salutary.