“You and Israel”: Régine Robin

What relationship do you have with Israel? What does this country represent for you, symbolically or emotionally?

Israel doesn’t represent much to me.¹ I was receptive to the Zionist message for fifteen days of my life, when I was fifteen. With some friends I had thought about leaving for Israel, but it lasted me a fortnight. I was infinitely more receptive to the red flag than to the Israeli one. Zionism struck me as a false solution to the “Jewish question.” In my youth I was fiercely in favor of assimilation, even though Yiddish was spoken in my home and secular Jewish culture was fundamental there. Later, I understood that one could also fight for the preservation of minority cultures without lapsing, for all that, into Zionism. I went to Israel for the first time very late, in 1983. I have returned often since, finding the country superb, inspired. I love Jerusalem very much, and I feel there a very great spirituality, like the inhabited presence of the three religions. I also have a great love of the desert.

I also understood very quickly that this country would become impossible, and its political evolution worries me greatly. Having been a victim, persecuted, marked out for death confers no privilege. It guarantees nothing — neither that one will not become an executioner in turn, nor that one will know what to say, nor how to say it, nor even that one has anything to say. I understood very early the tragedy in which we are caught up today, and the “tribal” reaction of French Jewish intellectuals is intolerable to me.

I wrote a poem about my encounter with Israel, which I published in my collection l’Immense fatigue des pierres (The Immense Weariness of Stones) (Montreal, XYZ, 1996). Here it is.²

Has the existence of Israel played a role in your work?

I have nearly answered this question. Israel does indeed enter into my work, but even more so the Jewish intellectuals of the diaspora. Nevertheless, in my next book, la mémoire saturée (Saturated Memory), due out from Stock this coming March, there is a chapter that is very critical of Israel?

Have the events of the last two years modified your relationship with Israel, and if so, in what way?

Yes, the events since the first Intifada, and even more so since the second, have confirmed my point of view. I truly believe there is an impasse, and that Sharon’s policy is the worst one can imagine. I do not gloat, but I know that what is happening is rotting Israeli democracy, sterilizing thought, and paralyzing all critical spirit. The opposite of the tradition of Jewish intellectuals. When I see or hear young French people settled in the colonies, saying monstrous things, it pains me. They believe themselves to be the owners of this country’s soil, caught up in a nationalist ideology bordering on fascism, and they imagine, without laughing, that Hebrew is really their “mother tongue.” All of this is said with the accent of a “titi parisien” [a cheeky Parisian street kid]. One would howl with laughter if one didn’t know what deadly fantasies coil within the folds of this discourse.

What would change in your life if Israel were to disappear?

I cannot contemplate that situation. To my mind, Israel is not under threat. What is under threat is the price this country will have to pay to have peace, an ever more exorbitant price. It is obvious that one day we shall return to the 1967 borders and that the eastern part of Jerusalem will also have to be ceded, not to mention the colonies. All of this is screamingly obvious, but how many dead, before then?

Notes