These diplomatic analyses scarcely differed from the analyses devoted to other crises. At moments emotion broke through, but without troubling, it seems to me, the interpretation. On June 4, on the eve of hostilities, in my old farmhouse at Brannay, I wrote for the Figaro littéraire an article that broke with the ordinary style of my texts. One passage in particular has since been repeated countless times: “That President Nasser should openly wish to destroy a State that is a member of the United Nations does not trouble the delicate conscience of Mrs. Nehru. Statocide, of course, is not genocide. And the French Jews who gave their souls to every black, brown, or yellow revolutionary now howl with pain while their friends bay for death. I suffer like them, with them, whatever they may have said or done, not because we have become Zionists or Israelis, but because there rises within us an irresistible movement of solidarity. It matters little where it comes from. If the great powers, by the cold calculation of their interests, let the small State that is not mine be destroyed, that crime, modest on the scale of numbers, would take from me the strength to live, and I believe that millions upon millions of men would be ashamed of humanity.”
What I reproach most in this article is not the passage cited — which was preceded, moreover, by a kind of confession of a “de-Judaized” and passionately French Jew — it is the forgetting or the misjudgment of the balance of forces. Israel remained the stronger; if it attacked first, it would without any doubt prevail. I should have known this and, in a certain way, unconsciously I did know it, since in an earlier article I suggested the irrationality of a new war from the point of view of Nasser’s Egypt itself.
Between 1956 and 1968, Israel’s enemies had not made enough progress to wager on the fortune of arms. Pierre Hassner did not like the pathos of the Figaro littéraire article, and he was probably right. I ought, even at that moment, to have kept a cool head. Emotional, passionate by nature, I happen, from time to time, not to leave my intellect the monopoly of speech.
Let us leave aside — I shall return to it further on — this surge of Jewishness that burst into my consciousness as a Frenchman. And let us return to the past.
I have already said it: I received no religious education. The lessons the rabbi of Versailles gave us — we, my brothers and I, were the three pupils; it was Adrien who had expressed the wish for them — were no substitute for one. The occasional antisemitism I encountered at the lycée left no mark on me in any way. I was passionate in reading the texts relating to the Dreyfus affair, but the affair appeared to me, in retrospect, an edifying story: truth had triumphed, and the French had torn one another apart over a man and a principle. At the École Normale, antisemitism hardly existed; it was underground in any case, almost clandestine. The Hitlerite shock revived my Jewish consciousness, the consciousness that I belonged to a group (or a people, or an international) called the Jews.
[524-526]
I feel myself French, without reserve and without condition, and I felt, in June 1967, a sentiment of solidarity with Israel.
…. I should like to pursue the dialogue with Father Fessard. To be sure, I use the adjective paradoxical several times to qualify the fate of the Jews; I meditate on the construction of a Hebrew State in the twentieth century, animated more by the European nationalism of the past century than by the millennial prayer “next year in Jerusalem.” A State half secular, half theological, Israel remains as paradoxical as the dispersed “Jewish people.” In the eyes of the sociologist, it brings together a population of pioneers, led by immigrants come from Europe and the so-called developed countries — an élite that is increasingly a minority (the Jews come from the Near East and North Africa have more children).
Nothing in the formation of the State of Israel, nor in the persistence of the Jewish diaspora, defies the ordinary modes of historical explanation. Close to the Christians during the first centuries of our era, gradually driven back into ghettos, victims of pogroms that began on the eve of the First Crusade, “liberated” by the Revolution in France and little by little throughout Europe, a deicide people for centuries and a pariah people, the Jews lost, in the mass graves of Buchenwald and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the illusion that they might become, at least in the foreseeable future, citizens like any others of the nations among which they live and to which they belong. It was in reply to modern antisemitism — no longer the antisemitism of religious origin, but the antisemitism nourished by obscure passions, draped in a pseudo-scientific ideology — that Jews, in the majority from Eastern Europe, despaired of “assimilation” and dreamed of a State that would be their own. When Arthur Koestler titled the book in which he recounts the birth of Israel Anatomie d’un miracle (Anatomy of a Miracle), he did not suggest that Providence alone, or the will of God, made the event intelligible; he sought and found the improbable conjunction of accidents that allowed the Israeli troops, drawn from a population of 600,000, to prevail over the Arab countries coalesced against the Hebrew State.
That most Jews experience a sentiment of “kinship” with Israel even if they reject Zionism, even if they will themselves to be citizens, without condition or reserve, of another country — this fact in no way implies the “mystical” unity of the Jews throughout the world. What I wrote in May–June 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, remains written. Each may interpret in his own way the surging of emotions repressed in tranquil times. I do not forbid Father Fessard to draw from it the proof, or at least the symptom, of my “Semitism.”
I believe he is mistaken. I maintain only this: “The sentiment of kinship does not surpass profane, human history. Millennia of history have left in the depths of the Jewish soul indelible traces: among them, the intuition that all Jews, despite their dispersion, share the same fate; all the Jewish communities feel themselves concerned, threatened, when one of them is persecuted. When that community is called Israel, how should this ‘kinship’ not burst forth, irresistible, sweeping away the barriers, mysterious if you will, self-evident in our eyes?”
On one point, not a secondary one, I lay down my arms before my dear Father [Fessard]. When I wrote about the Jews and my Jewishness, I tended to play on a simplified alternative: either the universalism of the Law and of Israel’s message, or the nationalism implicit in the Covenant, whatever the moral, subtle, authentic meaning of Israel’s destination. Between the universal finalities of humanity and the “superstitions” of human groups stand peoples, each convinced that it bears and brings an irreplaceable treasure to the common wealth of humanity. The Jews too possess their treasure but, outside the Bible, outside their faith, they do not share one and the same culture. Once again, if they will themselves to be a people, this people resembles no other.
I shall return, in conclusion, to the antinomy I have never resolved, between the historical diversity of values and ways of being on the one hand, and on the other the vocation I attribute, from time to time, to humanity. I do not renounce the unique destination of the human race, nor do I renounce the plurality of cultures, each of which believes itself — rightly so, for those who live by it — irreplaceable. My attachment to the French language and literature is not justified; it simply is, I live it, because it merges with my very being. My “solidarity” with Israel — should I call it more intellectual or more organic? Perhaps both at once. In any case, this “solidarity” does not rise to the level of sacred, supernatural History, whose place I reserve for believers but to which I do not myself accede.