Avraham B. Yehoshua — a thinker on a tightrope

Regularly sought out by the Israeli press as by the foreign press, it is in the name of this renown acquired within the literary sphere — recognized by critics as by the broad public — that he multiplies his interventions in the public arena and so delivers, from columns to petitions, from manifestos to speeches, his convictions, his moods, his indignations, and his hopes as well. He is expected to take a stand, and Yehoshua does not shirk this mission in the service of the city, which repays him in kind through the success, and often the triumph, that it reserves for his books. Is he listened to? Does his word have any effect? In any case, together with Amos Oz and David Grossman, he forms the triumvirate of the Israeli Republic of Letters. Not without a certain irony for these three agnostics, they are often called admorim¹, the venerable title that, in the Hasidic tradition, the faithful bestow on the most eminent rabbis and doctors of religious Law. Secular admorim, they cut the figure, indeed, of great sages, of mentors, consulted on every question of the day — which does not mean that secular, left-wing opinion always recognizes itself in their views.

Yehoshua is nonetheless aware of the law of the genre that governs this type of intervention: a few minutes of airtime on the public channel, a few thousand characters in this or that daily. It is too little to foster a deep reflection, a more probing inquiry, the proposal of a new theory. Yehoshua does not discharge himself of this ambition by referring the reader to his works of fiction in order to discern there, through the characters’ words and the thread of the narrative, the state of his thought. He could have resigned himself to that without difficulty: do we not find, to take but one example, scattered through L’Amant (The Lover), Mr. Mani, Le Voyage au bout de l’an mil (A Journey to the End of the Millennium) and La Mariée libérée (The Liberated Bride), the literary representations of what is more than a Judeo-Arab coexistence: a complementarity, if not a symbiosis, between the two fractions of these two peoples who lay claim to the same land? And yet, alongside his novelistic creation, alongside his occasional writings dictated by events, Yehoshua has always taken care to develop his reflection in the form of more substantial essays. This recourse to the essay has allowed him to step back from the tyranny of immediate current affairs. Yehoshua may protest against the continuation of the settlements; call for the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue to be refounded on new bases; implore the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary left to put an end to its fratricidal hatreds; criticize the confusion between the political and the religious within the State; give his opinion on the new Judeophobia in Europe; even if he readily yields to the media pressure that settles for a condensed version, it matters to him to examine more systematically the deep causes of antisemitism, to meditate on the religious and national nature of the Jewish fact, to take up afresh the problem of the moral legitimacy of Zionism. For before claiming to change the world, one must first think it. Rethink it. His point of departure is always that of a wide-awake researcher who has read every thesis and remains no less unsatisfied for it. These theses are not useless — they assuredly shed light — but they are missing something: something that prompts Yehoshua, precisely, to take up the problem in his turn. He feels the necessity all the more keenly in that the reflection he brings is innovative and often provocative. In this sense, he is an agitator. He stirs up received ideas, theories too comfortably settled, cozy commonplaces. It is not that he is fond of the posture of the prophet or that of the imprecator, any more than he has a taste for polemic or scandal. When he notes the shock wave aroused by one or another of his theses, he does not pride himself on being misunderstood or dissident. On the contrary: an effect of his rational and democratic culture, an effect, no doubt, also of his concern to belong, he never despairs of convincing. He multiplies interviews and lectures like trial balloons in order to test and refine his hypotheses; then, after publication, he takes up his pilgrim’s staff once more to dispel final ambiguities, to reformulate arguments that have remained obscure, and to make sure he has been well understood. Without ever claiming to be a sociologist or a historian, he infiltrates this preserve to pose his unanswered questions and advance his audacious theses. In truth, he does not claim to rival them on their favorite terrain. It is not disinterested science that he means to advance through his reflection: the scholars do that very well without him. By interrogating the past through history, ethics, literature, and political sociology, he means to grant his normative views on the present and future of Israel an additional legitimacy capable of fostering the hoped-for change.

But as much as his novels earn him faithful readers from book to book, his theoretical propositions appear iconoclastic and most often disconcert, including those who follow him politically. He could have stopped along the way and preserved the consensus around his literary work; given up this specific genre in order to devote himself solely to novelistic writing, where he gives the full measure of his creative talent. And yet Yehoshua pursues his quest, tirelessly. For across his four volumes of essays, he has committed himself to a long-distance race. Whether it be a novel or an essay, writing is for him the site of mastery: mastery of his characters’ destinies, mastery of a situation that can be laid flat, studied at its root, down to its innermost depths, offering a compensation — imperfect and relative though it may be — for a reality that is ever fleeting and elusive.

Yehoshua has the revisionist cast of mind, in the noble and bracing sense the term had before it was polluted by those whom it was more accurate to call deniers². To revise, that is, to call a consensual truth back into question in order to examine other explanations, other hypotheses, and draw new conclusions from them. This is how he conceives his role: to stretch a thread between the past and the future, to weave a bond between the heaven of ideas and the ground of realities. An intellectual fulfills his mission only if he holds himself on the tightrope: one does not think if one does not take risks.

We shall try, in the pages that follow, to specify the primary values at the origin of his commitment, the better to understand, through them, the convictions that animate him and the changes he calls for, so that to ambiguity, to chaos, to the threats weighing on Israel there might succeed light and order, and at last peace, inner as well as outer.

Born in Jerusalem in 1936 to a mother originally from Morocco and a father whose family had been established in Palestine for five generations; residing since 1967 in Haifa, where a most harmonious Judeo-Arab coexistence perpetuates itself; novelist and professor of literature, Yehoshua defines himself as an Israeli intellectual. This is not merely a judgment of fact, an objective observation, but also the designation of the privileged frame of reference that he in no way considers narrow or cramped relative to a planetary vision extended to the scale of humanity in whose name he could have spoken. Without being indifferent to the world’s misfortunes, Yehoshua fully lays claim to his rootedness in a given community. Contrary to the dominant tendency of so many intellectuals who pride themselves on distancing themselves from the nation, the State, sovereignty, politics, cultural and national identity, Yehoshua fully claims them while passing them through the sieve of his convictions. The intellectual’s pretension to emancipate himself from his identity, to hold himself at a distance from his belonging through the exercise of a supreme universal and transcendent reason, is, for him, a pious wish, a promise unkept and unkeepable, a dangerous illusion, and above all a self-mystification.

It is not that a man is fatally consigned to the identity conferred on him by his place of birth or his family antecedents. Yehoshua is too attached to the idea of individual freedom not to admit that an individual may decide, voluntarily, to detach himself from his community of origin. Many Jews, moreover, have accomplished this identity metamorphosis. Yehoshua does not, however, believe in the consistency of a “man without qualities,” any more than in the abstraction of a neutral State. The proper of man is to inscribe his condition, his aspirations, and his action within a system of signs (language), a territorial space (the place where he lives, whether he was born there or emigrated to it), a political community (the people of which he is a part), and a network of values and practices (culture), which together make man what he is — a whole that it falls to him, in turn, to recompose. The intellectual does not escape this lot. The uprooting he proclaims is an idealist fiction: it does not produce a universal man who would hover above contingencies, above belongings, above identities, to judge from on high and from above the spectacle of all humanity. Voltaire, Zola, or Sartre might well, through the Calas affair, the Dreyfus affair, or the Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew), align themselves with the universal; they nonetheless defended, in France, in French, and for the French nation, a certain idea of France to which they were attached: in this case, open and generous.

This bond, organic so to speak, of the intellectual to his national community, which Yehoshua claims, is a matter of efficacy and of modesty at once. It is by virtue of the knowledge and practice of the codes internal to his community that an intellectual can hope to be better heard. All the more so since the point is not, on the basis of this fully assumed national belonging, to exalt the genius of the people in every circumstance, to endorse en bloc its past and present choices, but, quite the contrary, to signify to it its duties and its shortcomings, to exhort it to self-criticism and self-examination. Inversely, it is because Yehoshua does not have full mastery of the cultural, historical, and psychological references specific to other nations that it would seem to him difficult, awkward, even incongruous, to undertake the moral examination of the United States or of Palestine, for instance. It goes without saying that, relative to the model of the clerc as Julien Benda had defined it, Yehoshua betrays, like so many others, his vocation — except that, for him, the universal is not a function of the audience one claims to address, but of the message one holds, even when that message is delivered initially to one’s immediate community.

If Yehoshua bets on optimism, it is not by virtue of a naive confidence in a moral progress that, converging with technical progress, would be realized each time a little more. Even if the room for maneuver is narrow, even if the efforts are not crowned with success, Yehoshua refuses to despair. He knows full well that this world is not the best of all worlds, but it is the only one in which human beings live. Now, man has this faculty, this duty even, to perfect it, as if this betterment depended on him alone, at the individual scale as at the national scale, so as to prevent new catastrophes. This voluntarism is for Yehoshua the indispensable antidote for resisting what appears to him the most pernicious thing in human history in general, and in Jewish history in particular: the temptation of despair. Today still, when in many circumstances — and they are, alas, numerous — discouragement seems to be winning over the camp of peace in Israel, Yehoshua never ceases to reiterate his leitmotiv: “to fight, first and above all, fiercely, against despair and fatalism, to stem disappointment and desertion.”³ It is this refusal of dejection that animates him in his tenacious will to dialogue with the Palestinians, while remaining lucid about the politically limited effects of these encounters. “If he still has a sensibility, an independence of mind, a political conscience, and something akin to hope, the intellectual,” he wrote as early as 1969, “will bring them with him to places considered lost, there where others have already despaired. We must have the naivety that comes after despair.”⁴

This lucid optimism is, in fact, his way of declaring his obstinate, even stubborn, refusal of fatalism. It is a state of mind that Yehoshua deems opportune and indispensable so that, in the face of adversity, man may deploy the fullness of his responsibilities. This plea for an active responsibility, set against despair and fatalism, results from an attentive confrontation with the tragedy of ancient and modern Jewish history — a tragic dimension to which, too often for his taste, the Jews have resigned themselves, seeing in it the counterpart of their election. In this regard, Yehoshua advocates the historical barter inaugurating a new course in Jewish history: temporal action in exchange for spiritual election. Now, this barter has a name, and notwithstanding its delegitimization, its assimilation to the worst there is in nationalism, Yehoshua claims it without flinching: Zionism. To be sure, he is neither ignorant of nor insensitive to what it could have meant for the Arab population of Palestine. Is not all his public action devoted to repairing, at the local level as at the state and regional level, the damage of the war that Arabs and Jews continue to wage against each other? In doing so, he cannot allow it to be occulted or underestimated, this liberating energy that Zionism was and that it still remains for a people as sorely tried as the Jews. Yehoshua fears that the duration of the conflict and its recent aggravation may reestablish the belief in an eternal return of “Jewish misfortune.” It is not that he has the certainty that the future is radiant and hatred definitively averted; it is not that he is unaware that History is tragic and that evil presents something irreducible. Jewish misfortune is assuredly more a constant than an exception to the rule, an intolerable scandal. But it cannot and above all must not dispense with the categorical imperative of thinking what can and must be done to transform this condition of oppression. All the more so since Israel, despite the particular contingencies in which it finds itself, has made it possible to effect this psychic reversal, substituting responsibility here and now for a messianism deferred to the end of time. The fate of his people inspires in A. B. Yehoshua less the duty to commemorate the sufferings endured than the will to remedy and to interrupt this deadly course. Sisyphus could not be a model with which it would be fitting to make one’s peace. This refusal of fatality underscores, a contrario, the moral supremacy that Yehoshua grants to the exercise of responsibility. In every circumstance, man must ask himself what it commits him to. Now, no one is exempt from this trial: not the victim any more than the executioner. It is here that Yehoshua proves demanding, going all the way to the end of this irrefragable sense of responsibility. That the executioner is guilty does not, in fact, dispense the victim, and above all the survivors, from thinking about what they should have done, but above all about what it falls to them to do to reduce the risk that the executioner repeat his act. One must act as if convinced that the action one undertakes is capable of modifying the adversary’s behavior. “To be sure,” Yehoshua admits, “one can do nothing if one walks past a bomb that is about to explode, but, on the other hand, one can act, on the political plane, so that the man who threw the bomb no longer has any motivation to do so.”⁵ This imperative of responsibility holds as much for the Jews as for the Palestinians. But as Yehoshua deems it his duty to address his own, he is concerned first of all to bring out the share of responsibility of Israel and the Israelis, reproaching the government as well as his fellow citizens for not having done everything possible “so as not to push [the Palestinians] toward a suicidal action into which they will drag us along as well.” And he adds that “this suicidal disposition is not autonomous; it also depends on our acts.”⁶ And Yehoshua takes up for himself Ben-Gurion’s famous formula in order to turn it around in an unprecedented sense — not that of the fait accompli, but that of the effects of action: “What matters is not what the nations of the world (Goyim) will say, but what the Jews will do.”

This elevation of responsibility to the foremost rank among moral human attitudes, Yehoshua deems he owes to a Jewish source (Zionism), to a Greek source (Plato’s “Know thyself”), to which one might also add a French source: Sartrean existentialism.

Zionism is first of all, for Yehoshua, the Jewish people’s historical decision to take charge of its destiny, to constitute itself as a majority national community, in such a way as to be delivered from the problems and complexes posed by the minority condition in general, and the Jewish minority condition in particular. To be sure, Israel was not created without conflict, and to this day that conflict polarizes domestic and international attention, threatens its existence as well as its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the attributes of sovereignty modify the management of the conflict. In this sense, however difficult it may be, the situation lived by the Israelis is not comparable, in Yehoshua’s eyes, to the one that was the lot of the Jews exposed to persecution. Even if the mastery of force engenders in him grave moral anxieties. It is by relying on Plato’s formula that he extends his inquiry from the individual level to that of the nation, and seeks to scrutinize with the same ardor the present and past collective history. Finally, one may venture the hypothesis of a kinship, if not an influence, that is Sartrean. Yehoshua adapts to his own context this idea of a freedom in situation, of an authentic conduct, and of the refusal of bad faith.

This conception of a responsibility always wide awake, concerned, permanently, to proceed upstream as downstream to its examination of conscience — what have we done and what must we do? — if it can be heard and even appears laudable when it concerns the Israeli-Arab conflict, often arouses misunderstanding and incomprehension when it is applied to antisemitism. It is morally inadmissible to explain misogyny by the behavior of women, racism by what Blacks or Arabs do. And it should be no different for antisemitism. It was Theodor Lessing who had conceptualized as the discourse of “self-hatred” — and rightly stigmatized — the prose of those Jews convinced that it was indeed to the mores of the Jews that the origin of their ills had to be imputed. When Yehoshua wonders whether there is not, in the very structure of Jewish identity, a factor of destabilization that potentially awakens the forces of hatred, he is fully aware that he is venturing onto mined terrain, so suspect is it to seek an explanation in the identity of the persecuted, there where the only valid reason must be found in the individual and collective psychology of the persecutors. He thus lays himself open to the accusation — which he vigorously rejects — of justifying antisemitism. Yehoshua condemns in advance any confusion, any slippage, any manipulation of his theses aimed at making them say what he does not say and does not think. His approach is at the antipodes of “self-hatred”: Yehoshua takes great care not to call into question anything whatsoever of what Jews do or think. Neither their mores, nor their ambitions, nor their patriotism or their cosmopolitanism, nor their alleged relation to money or to revolution could pass for factors generating and justifying a hostile reaction. Antisemitism being a long-duration phenomenon, Yehoshua deems it too reductive, for a mind in search of synthesis, to turn toward its historical occurrences, discerning for each of them the unique bundle of conjunctural causes that explain it. There must surely be, he suggests, a structural cause as permanent as antisemitism, one that would make it possible to understand why it reappears cyclically in societies that nonetheless differ from one another, as much, moreover, as the Jews do, who are not the same from one community to another and from one epoch to another. This quest for the deep roots of antisemitism does not answer to a curiosity of a historical and intellectual order. It is not a matter, for Yehoshua, of apprehending the past as such but, once this structural foundation has been laid bare, of drawing the appropriate conclusions to defuse its eventual resurgence. A matter of survival!

The classic Zionist response had consisted in pointing the finger at exile, and notably at its political and demographic flaw: as an ethno-religious minority within a majority population, the Jews are, by their dispersion, vulnerable in the face of a hatred that targets them. Without a doubt, many Zionists effected that slippage which consists in seeing in exile, more than an objective condition of antisemitism, its immediate cause. Yehoshua goes further and considers that what alters the relation of majority societies to their Jewish minorities is the double structuring of Jewish identity. The latter plays on both tables — a religious identity charged with national ingredients and a national identity charged with religious ingredients. What is more, it presents an excessively virtual aspect inasmuch as one refers to a distant homeland where one does not live and to a language one does not speak but cultivates — both of them, in the imaginary, out of a concern for distinction. There you have something to trouble societies, which turn against their Jews. Now, if one returns to the fundamental values invoked by Yehoshua — his optimism, his refusal of fatalism, and his acute sense of responsibility — one easily guesses where he is leading and what motivates his approach and his conclusion: since it is excluded that antisemitism be a permanent fatality inscribed in the order of things, one must hold for possible the prospect of eliminating it, or, at the least, that of reducing its level of intensity. For that, one must act, on one or the other of the actors. It is assuredly unlikely that the antisemitic protagonist would be capable, by enchantment or self-persuasion, of renouncing the hatred he feels. It is fitting, therefore, to turn toward the Jews who, perhaps, hold the means of diminishing the antisemitic pressure — which would have the inestimable advantage of preserving them from a catastrophe to come. The problem of antisemitism remains, indeed, that of the non-Jews. One must obviously interrogate their threshold of intolerance; but inasmuch as the Jews are the targets aimed at, the means of guarding against it fall, well and truly, to their responsibility, and the sooner the better.

His propositions are not, as his detractors think, a reiterated apologia for Zionism. That would be to reduce his thought to the level of propaganda. They flow from his conviction that it is up to the Jews to take the lead — as they have already done, moreover, by gathering themselves in the State of Israel as a sovereign majority in order to recompose Jewish identity there in its territorial and linguistic dimension, thus rendering it less virtual for the Jews as for the rest of the world. Nevertheless, Yehoshua has been able to observe that this part of the Jewish people restored to its national home, and to which he belongs, is also exposed — in the form of anti-Zionism — to vindictiveness. The latter often exceeds legitimate criticism and places Israel beyond the pale of nations. This is an additional reason to proceed with the definitive accomplishment of this still unfinished Israeli identity operation: to dissociate, within Jewish identity, the national aspect from the religious aspect. It is then that the Zionist revolution would have a future. By stopping along the way as it does, it solves certain problems, but it maintains others just as crucial, ones tied not only to the diaspora but also to the structure of the State of Israel and its identity, both in relation to the observant Jewish population and to the Arab population. This revolution, were it to be accomplished, would have a decisive bearing on that part of the new immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not Jewish by the criteria of traditional Judaism, while being Israeli on the civic plane and, what is more, on their way to being so on the plane of language and culture as well. This identity revolution, Zionism laid its markers with the creation of the State of Israel and the production of an Israeli national identity. It is undeniable that it is not stabilized, that it still generates many ambiguities. Now, Yehoshua was one of the first to circumscribe them, once again. “Israeli” designates a political community: that of all the citizens of Israel, independently of their ethnic belonging, their religious confession, and their language. Nevertheless, there does not exist, officially and juridically, an Israeli nation or an Israeli people. In this regard, Israel is not yet, as he would wish, in tune with the nations of the world. The normalization of Israel is still in gestation.

This notion of normality, Yehoshua has made it his leitmotiv, the key word of his Zionist reflection, to the great dismay of many Israelis indefectibly attached to their Jewish singularity. They see in it the reduction of Israel to a “State like the others,” which appears to them an impracticable chimera as much as a contestable ideal. This is why his “Plea for Normality” was the eponymous essay of the entire collection.⁷ To normalize the Jewish condition presupposes a standard, of which one may wonder what it is, who determines it, and in the name of what one should submit to its hegemony. The word presents, moreover, a pejorative connotation that associates it with notions such as mediocrity, uniformity, and the average.⁸ In the era of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the politically correct, it is undeniable that the term does not have a good press. Why should one normalize the Jewish condition and liquidate this singular heritage? To align oneself with the West? But the latter, for having put forward principles of organization on a national basis, is not so free of its religious roots — Christian, in this case — as it claims. This normalization implies that Israel cut its ties with the diaspora. Is it not the whole Zionist project that is thereby called into question? Does Yehoshua not thus make himself, in spite of himself, the ally of those anti-Zionist Jews who clamor for the inverse rupture: that of the diaspora with Israel? Furthermore, why should Israel renounce the Jewish communities throughout the world that have rallied to its centrality, whereas for barely a decade or two now, a certain number of nations have been developing more than ever their ties with their respective diasporas? One sees clearly that Yehoshua’s propositions raise as many objections as approvals, and command respect by the very fact that they arouse and even resuscitate a debate one thought had fallen into desuetude. In Yehoshua’s mind, this normalization is in no way a renunciation of moral exigencies. Inversely, it is the partisans of the domination exercised over the Palestinian people, those very ones who stigmatize this vision of normality, who do harm to Israel and make it a State like the others. By normality Yehoshua means the fact that the Jews established in Israel have at last endowed themselves with instruments similar to those adopted by the nations — which does not mean, obviously, that they will put them to the same use. This mutation deserves to be made explicit by a change of name, passing from the Jewish identity associated with the diaspora to the Israeli identity tied to the State of Israel. It marks, for Yehoshua, the metamorphosis of a partial identity into a total identity — partial, in that it is reduced and confined in the diaspora to a strictly familial, cultic, and communal aspect, stripped of any collective and political dimension; total, in that a State of Israel offers, through the territory of the same name where its sovereignty is established, through the rebirth of Hebrew as a spoken, literary, and vernacular language, through the growing gathering of its scattered members, through the establishment of a public space where they determine, like a daily plebiscite, the political and cultural identity of the City. This “Israelization” of Israel would be, in fact, a republicanization: it would definitively institutionalize the supremacy of national identity to the detriment of religious identity, as well as the political and national integration of the Arabs of Israel into the nation.

This prospect frightens the religious Zionists, who oppose both the institutional secularism of the State of Israel and the invention of an Israeli nation transcending confessional cleavages. The Jewish State, as they conceive it, requires, on the one hand, the maintenance of this weld uniting the two components, national and religious, of Jewish identity, and, on the other hand, the conformity of public space to the religious laws relating to the governance of the City.

To support his vision of things, Yehoshua often refers to the republican model as it was incarnated in France since the Revolution. Nevertheless, in approving the logic of emancipation, which consists in granting all rights to individuals but granting none as a nation, Yehoshua did not gather, among the Arab elites of Israel, the support expected. His reworked proposal to align Israel with the Spanish system, in which the Basque and Catalan minorities enjoy a status of autonomy within a nation-state, was no better received. As an autochthonous community (unlike an immigrant community), and, what is more, a majority until 1948, an integral part of the Arab nation hegemonic on the scale of the region, these political and intellectual elites claim, for the community of the Palestinians of Israel, as they proclaim themselves, beyond equality of rights, equality before the law, beyond the recognition of their cultural, confessional, and linguistic personality, the recognition of their national rights: in other words, the right to weigh as much on the cultural symbols of the State as on political decision-making — which Yehoshua denies them, deeming that it is only within an independent and sovereign Palestine, neighbor to Israel, that the Palestinians will have full legitimacy and full freedom to realize the fullness of their national rights.⁹

Avraham B. Yehoshua has always sensed that a durable and deep reconciliation with the Arabs required a methodical attempt to rethink Zionism in the light of the objections they advance. As convinced as he is of the beneficial and even salutary role that Zionism played for the Jewish people, of its internal legitimacy, he has not shirked the task of thinking, in a demanding manner, the foundations of its external legitimacy. Not so much the legitimacy that suits the Western world, but rather the legitimacy to which the Arab world, and first of all the Palestinians, might consent. A long shot? A losing battle? But is resignation before the balance of forces not just as aleatory a basis, liable to be called into question should it come to be modified? Once again, one sees that Yehoshua does not content himself with taking a stand on this or that episode and this or that conjuncture. His duty as an intellectual was to think a universal legitimacy of Zionism, different from the traditional reasons invoked by the Jews. For it does not suffice to be right in the eyes of God and the Bible, in the eyes of History and one’s culture. One must furnish other arguments capable of being heard and accepted by the one to whom the cause has done harm. Yehoshua deconstructs, one might say, the ordinary arguments. He relativizes them and shows clearly that they remain inoperative for obtaining this recognition indispensable to peace. Having demonstrated, one by one, the vacuity of the criteria founded on historical right, religious right, labor, international resolutions, modernization, he rests, in the last instance, Israel’s right to have established itself at the expense of an autochthonous population on nothing but distress. Neither more nor less. In a certain sense, one may say that his essay is the argued illustration of that famous parable by which Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer, had accepted Zionism: “A man jumps from the roof of a burning house in which several members of his family have already perished. He lands unharmed; but, in falling, he strikes a person who happened to be on the sidewalk and breaks his arms and legs. He had no choice; yet he is the cause of the misfortune that struck the injured man.”¹⁰

To claim himself as an Israeli, Yehoshua remains no less Jewish: through that sensibility which determines him always to seek the responsibility of the Jewish man in History. Responsibility, and not guilt. The nuance is considerable. Indefatigable, answering all his interlocutors, Yehoshua answers for their destiny. And for want of having written it, may one not say that he lives by this maxim: “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, who am I? And if not now, when?” (Pirkei Avot, Sayings of the Fathers).

(Afterword to A. B. Yehoshua, Israël, un examen moral (Israel: a Moral Examination), Calmann-Lévy, 2005)

With the authorization of the author and of the Calmann-Lévy publishing house, whom we thank.

Notes