Brigitte Stora, a word about your background first of all, since your book is a deeply embodied one. I’d like you to situate yourself, culturally and politically, so as to help us understand what led you to write it.
– As I explain in my book, I was an activist on the far left for fifteen years. I came into politics very young, as was often the case back then. There were still “red committees” in the lycées, feminist movements, internationalist ones, and so on. I was a militant in the LCR [Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, a Trotskyist party] from 1977 on. I stopped being an activist in the early nineties, but I had remained a fellow traveler of that radical left, which seemed to me necessary as a goad to government policy…
Was that commitment conceived as a break with your family heritage, or in continuity with it?
– My father was on the left, yes, a trade unionist, not really an activist. The Jews of Algeria were often on the left, in any case fervently republican, nourished by the values of fraternity, solidarity, social justice. In that parenthesis of the eighties, we felt freed from the totalitarian ideologies. My generation never justified the gulag, the Moscow trials, the Cambodian genocide, and so forth. And there were all the great struggles of emancipation: feminism, anti-racism, the struggle of African Americans, of homosexuals. All of that made for an exhilarating picture, in which everyone at last had a place, Jews included. Everyone knows the jokes about the LCR’s political bureau (“Why don’t they speak Yiddish in the Ligue’s political bureau? Because Bensaïd is Sephardic”). There were enormous numbers of Jews. Of course, many of those Jews were fleeing themselves, because they had been born far too close to those two catastrophes that were the gulag and the Shoah. But for our generation there was no contradiction. We had “L’Affiche rouge” [the Nazi propaganda poster denouncing the immigrant Resistance fighters of the Manouchian group] on our bedroom walls, the memoirs of Pierre Goldmann…
Even setting aside any talk of contradiction, there was perhaps at least the possibility of perceiving a dissonance between the Jewish establishment and the Trotskyists, from those years onward. The question of Zionism was already highly divisive.
– Yes, but at the same time, the question of Zionism wasn’t central. We were hostile to nationalism in general, against imperialism, on the side of the oppressed peoples — and the Palestinian people were part of that, they still are, by the way. But it wasn’t central — or at least I didn’t see it that way.
And yet in 1992 you published, in the LCR’s theoretical journal, an article entitled “The Poverty of Anti-Zionism”…
– That’s true. But first of all, I’d note that the article did appear, precisely. An article in which I said that anti-Zionism carried the seeds of a hatred that had nothing to do with our struggle for emancipation. I can’t imagine for a second that such an article could appear today…
We shared, in those days, struggles whose luminous side is what I mostly remember: Mandela, the early days of the Sandinista revolution, which created no gulag (and even won an Amnesty International prize for freeing all the Somocistas), Solidarność, the Kanaks, the anti-racist movement… Of course we knew there had always been people with dubious motives, but that wasn’t what dominated. As for antisemitism, it was clear to us that it lay on the right, on the far right. None of us could imagine, back then, that the perpetrators of the rue Copernic bombing [the 1980 attack on a Paris synagogue] were members of a Palestinian commando. Antisemitism in left-wing circles — working-class circles, or those of immigrant background — we knew of course that it existed, but for us it was so much dross. My struggle was above all an anti-fascist one: we had to replay, a little, the Resistance we hadn’t known.
Then, of course, there are more intimate things. In the revolutionary Jewish commitment, there was that strong conviction that the people who were militants alongside me would have been among the righteous, that they would not have allowed… I used to think that…
And you no longer think so?
– No… I don’t know… Perhaps there was a time when it was true, but it no longer is today. Back then, there was that feeling of warmth, which reconciled me with the group, that feeling of being safe, surrounded by friends. Belonging, no longer being cut off from humanity: that was no doubt one of the matrices of Jewish commitment.
With, on top of that, a Trotskyist “specificity.” Trotsky’s Jewish origins no doubt made a form of identification easier (just as, all else being equal, it could happen with figures such as Marx or Freud)…
– Yes, absolutely, he passed for a kind of secular prophet… And Stalinist violence recycled against him the old anti-Jewish imagery (cosmopolitan, arrogant, intellectual, traitor, and so on).
Along with what you suggest, moreover: that “good fortune” the Trotskyists had, in a way, of being quickly pushed out of power. Which may have conferred on them (wrongly, to my mind…) that aura of innocence: they didn’t have the chance to compromise themselves too long in the crimes of communism, provided one demurely shuts one’s eyes to Kronstadt, the Cheka, and a few other episodes of the revolution…
– When I was in the Ligue, I belonged to a libertarian tendency. I was never a Trotskyist precisely because of Kronstadt… Let’s say I was a Trotsky-libertarian. We had several reference points, even if Trotsky’s thought was nonetheless something substantial. That said, people did play on that “innocence” to get themselves cheaply off the hook of communism’s balance sheet.
In your book a kind of autobiography reconstitutes itself between the lines, punctuated by “dates,” key moments in the crisis you describe. It is not the least of the book’s interest, by the way, to discover that we all have different calendars. Many of the experiences you date to the “Second Intifada,” I had the feeling I had lived through at the end of my adolescence, at the time of the Lebanon War. A moment when the polarization of the camps, the rhetorical inflation, and — already — the Nazification of Israel were given free rein…
– No doubt, but I remember a demonstration in 1982, at the time of Sabra and Shatila: it was a demonstration of left-wing Jews. There was a bit of everything: anti-Zionists, of course, some unsavory groups, but also Hashomer Hatzair, which was clearly Zionist. None of that was possible afterward: afterward, the demonstrations are with Hamas, in a climate of hatred. Let’s not forget what was possible then, and is no longer. At the time of the Second Intifada, everything tips over.
Indeed, you explain that you do go — reluctantly, all the same — to a demonstration in support of the Palestinians in 2000, with a dark foreboding.
– Yes, I knew… An anti-Jewish discourse had been let loose. The Palestinian struggle became central, even exclusive: you’d think it had become the only struggle of the far left. There was a tipping point. The Mohammed al-Durah affair — where I can’t help thinking that it was the first time a child’s death was seen live on television. What did that mean? Without wanting to be paranoid, there was a “staging of ritual murder” side to it…
Certainly, but from the very first Intifada the “narrative” was already in place: an all-powerful army facing Palestinian Gavroches — which was nonetheless (without denying the Palestinians the reality of their suffering and the iniquities they endure) a fairly Manichaean version of an otherwise complex conflict.
– Yes, it was smoldering. But in the meantime that discourse became dominant. An anti-Jewish speech is let loose at that moment. In Le Monde, then run by Edwy Plenel, the anti-Zionist speech of certain Jews is honored, as if the struggle against Zionism were becoming the condition for a respectable Jewishness, for the Jew’s admission into the city. For me, it’s a very clear tipping point. And it can also be tracked in the figures for antisemitic attacks, in words, in acts. There is at that moment an emancipation of antisemitism, long held in check by the memory of the Shoah.
You yourself say you feel trapped. You who say that the genocide was at the origin of your commitment, its mainspring; all at once, the anti-fascist principle and the genocidal paradigm turn against the Jews. “To criticize Israel, the Jewish genocide is invoked” — and twice over rather than once: on one hand to denounce the use the Israelis make of it, on the other to denounce the genocide the Israelis are suspected of committing against the Palestinians.
– Yes, that’s what I call the emancipation from guilt. It’s what happens once one finally has the possibility of turning the victims into executioners, once the victimhood discourse imposes itself (and not only, by the way, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), once one seeks to dissolve any weighing of responsibilities in a massive, moralizing discourse. I profoundly believe that at the heart of antisemitism there is this fear, this dread of the “subject.” The revocation of the subject seems to me one of the principal matrices of antisemitism.
One need only look at what is happening at the level of memorial discourse. Broadly, the peoples who were oppressed, enslaved, colonized find themselves, in certain circles, covered by a kind of immunity that shields them from any serious criticism. Now, that immunity, that exoneration, stumbles on the Jew, on the word “Jew.” There, the opposite occurs: if the Jews were exterminated, then that “obliges” them, it imposes on them obligations and duties. A way of saying, by implication, that only the Jews would be true subjects; in short, that they ought to live up to their election. That’s why I also speak of the underside of a colonial discourse within Third-Worldism. There is, at the bottom of a certain Third-Worldist discourse, a form of contempt for the post-colonial peoples, as if the others were nothing but symptoms of oneself.
All the same, isn’t this also an occasion to question a more general responsibility, one that encompasses Jewish intellectuals as well? Hasn’t there been an abuse of the anti-Nazi paradigm, to the point of recognizing it everywhere and approaching everything through that simplifying lens? As if, in any conflict, the only task consisted in identifying who plays the role of the Nazi and who that of the Jew, who is the inexcusable executioner and who the innocent victim, the wicked and the good, the dominant and the dominated. If that is the only grid of reading, how can one be surprised to see part of the criticism (in itself perfectly legitimate and necessary) of Israeli policy dissolve into the Nazification of Zionism?
– It wasn’t only Jewish intellectuals who helped promote that paradigm: it was the postwar discourse in general, that of the Resistance. In my book I put it differently, asserting in substance that Hitler had set the bar so high in matters of antisemitism that, short of the gas chambers, there was finally nothing to complain about… That is how Stalinist antisemitism, for example, which was terrible, was not taken into account — and already it was hiding under the mask of anti-Zionism (Slánský was accused of “Zionism,” and so on).
Sartre implicitly acknowledged, in his Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew), that he had missed the boat of the Resistance1; and anticolonialism was a bit like that: a make-up session. And it was the Third-Worldists who, first, played on these symmetries. The “wretched of the earth” become the Jews who were not saved. Hence this competition of memories.
And the real, non-metaphorical “Jews” become a bit of a nuisance by continuing to assert their singularity: a new version of Jewish pride, in a sense, which would consist in claiming the exceptional character of their destiny.
– The real Jews are the living Jews, the survivors, those who carry within them the memory of the dead and who remind others of it. In Welcome in Vienna, there’s that moment where a character says: “they will never forgive us for what they did to us”…
Another possible formulation: some complain of the symbolic or media omnipresence of the memory of the Shoah, and see in the manifestations of antisemitism a kind of “backlash” or perverse effect of that memorial saturation… Not to mention the effects of temporal telescoping and the inevitable interferences. For example, the debate over reparations or the trials of former Nazis or collaborators on one side; on the other, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with its train of violence and suffering. There is here an almost inevitable psychological mechanism (which does not mean it is legitimate): since the “Jew,” for better and for worse, occupies such a place in the symbolic and political economy of Europe, Israel and Palestine are in turn endowed with that ambivalent centrality. As if the guilt exposed on one side had to find on the other an outlet. What do you make of that?
– As for the “overflow” of memory, which is sometimes invoked, let’s not forget all the same what relative silence it followed; let’s recall how long it took to have a clear idea of the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps, Chirac’s belated speech on Vichy… And as soon as that memory arrives, here we are denouncing a saturation, an overflow. As for the second part, I think it raises the problem of guilt. Guilt-tripping is a dead end. There is no collective guilt. Even for Germany, it must be refused. We loved that line of Manouchian’s: “I die with no hatred in me for the German people.” There is no responsibility but individual responsibility.
In your book there’s this idea that the Jewish question ends up spoiling all the other causes to which you devoted yourself (Algeria, anti-racism, and so on). Your commitments, your fellowships, stumble on this touchy subject… At the very heart of personal relations, in the middle of a dinner with friends, this subject breaks in, can shatter everything.
– It has always been a dividing line… Between courage and cowardice, the struggle for emancipation or the obscurantist temptation. It’s the subject that parts the waters, as the Dreyfus Affair did in its time: for after all, it’s right there that the left transforms itself, through Jaurès, who understands what is at stake and that the values of the left are at stake. We see it very clearly today in those strange bridges between left and right: it is always the hatred of Jews that is the symptom of it.
There is also, on a more emotional plane, that feeling of being betrayed: “what have my friends become?”
– Betrayal, abandonment, rather. I’ll say it again: I saw the drift, the wreck of that far left. There are no more Jews on the far left, or so few, and that is a sign. A sign that revolt has turned into hatred. This apology for violence that we see today in the demonstrations, these pilloryings found in a certain press… Today, the alliance with the Islamists — people who don’t even hide their designs, unlike the old totalitarian movements that advanced behind masks — is something appalling and unacceptable.
Yes, except that one might object that, while the jihadists don’t hide their game, many Islamist organizations continue to practice dissimulation, to constitute a showcase of respectability, or superficially to acclimatize their rhetoric to democratic terminology. Tariq Ramadan is one example among so many. How else to explain that an Edgar Morin could write a book jointly with Tariq Ramadan, agreeing with him on virtually every problem? And even a practice such as the veil annexes the democratic idiom (“it’s my choice,” individualism, even feminism)…
– Yes, but we’re not obliged to believe them. All the Algerians who lived through the “black decade” (more than 100,000 dead) know what the “freedom” of choice for young girls is worth… And so there is a responsibility of the intellectual. And when a Daniel Bensaïd reissues La Question juive (On the Jewish Question) in 2006, it is downright astonishing. When he writes — transforming Bebel’s phrase (“antisemitism is the socialism of fools,” a phrase that, incidentally, condemned foolishness more than antisemitism) — wondering whether “anti-Zionism might not be the anti-imperialism of fools,” that is willful blindness, he refuses to see what happened in the meantime. He glosses over the black hole of Auschwitz. That book, by the way, would come out a month after the murder of Ilan Halimi — a tragic irony of history. I deeply believe that the Jewish “question,” a question one can no longer now decouple from its “final solution,” is at the center of the indulgence toward Islamism. Anti-Jewish hatred is nodal in Islamism: that cannot be denied; and indeed, the Islamists don’t trouble themselves all that much to take shelter behind colonization or Netanyahu’s policy. The speeches of Qaradawi — one of Tariq Ramadan’s reference points — about Hitler who “didn’t finish the job,” the conspiracism, and so on, know nothing of such nuances or distinctions. And the others make themselves the ventriloquists, the obliging translators, refusing to hear what is really being said, as if the Islamists’ words didn’t count. That’s what, in a passage of my book, I call “the thinking of the non-place.” It’s what one sees with Badiou; for him, communism did not fail: it did not take place, it did not exist. There is a thinking of spite on the part of all those who dreamed of a revolution, a thinking of rage, of hatred, which found a kind of echo in Islamist resentment. Not to see it is to blind oneself, but above all to consent. For me it is obvious that intellectuals like Edgar Morin or Esther Benbassa are pained in their identity and take the risk, through their statements, of a kind of laundering operation for anti-Jewish ideas. Edgar Morin who himself acknowledged, by the way, that he had in his time approved the Munich Agreement on the pretext that the struggle against antisemitism didn’t justify a war.
He himself acknowledged that error of judgment in his “self-criticism”…
– He acknowledged it, but he reconnects with that disposition. When he writes, with Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave, that in Israel the “chosen people acts like the master race,” we have a summary of that ideological derangement. The “chosen people” is, in Judaism, a responsibility, a burden; that burden is experienced today, in all the victimhood ideologies founded on the idea of domination, as an intolerable privilege. If there are only the dominated, it does seem there must be what one might call a “common dominator.”
I would put things perhaps a little differently. The article and the sentence you refer to are indeed odious, for what they contain of political simplification and because, instead of illuminating a complexity, they reinstate a discourse of execration that, by its generality, is antisemitic in nature. That being said, we both know full well that there exist significant swaths of religious nationalism that are far from recognizing themselves in the humanist and ethical sense of Jewish election as a Levinas states it: had the article confined itself to denouncing an ultranationalist, even racist, current within Zionism, the formulation would not have been scandalous; but that is not the case: in this article, it’s all of “Israel” — in the sense of the State as much as the people — that has become the empire of Evil.
– Yes, we are well beyond rational criticism: in a systematic will to dislodge the Jew from his status as victim and to substitute for him the “Muslim.” It’s glaring with Plenel, who dreams of himself as the Zola of the Muslims (Pour les Musulmans [For the Muslims] answers Zola’s Pour les Juifs [For the Jews]). For Plenel (as for Badiou), the “Jew” is in his glory as a herald of deterritorialization, of exile, of revolt; the moment he asserts a belonging, he betrays his vocation. That vocation has something oblative about it, something even “Christic.”
– Yes, absolutely. The good Jew died at Auschwitz, like Jesus dead on the cross. These intellectuals feel abandoned, dropped or betrayed by Israel, orphans of a Jewish messianism.
But when it comes to a Plenel or a Badiou, their political radicalism can, in the end, be a reassuring argument, since it confines them to a sector of public opinion — certainly not negligible, but relatively restricted. Where this feeling of solitude or of being misunderstood, felt by a great many Jews — even left-wing ones — is greatest, is when we come to figures apparently smoother, more consensual… I’m thinking of that quasi-pantheonization of a Stéphane Hessel, to whom you devote a few pages, or again the editorial success of a Shlomo Sand, adulated as the bard of a post-Zionism that scarcely differs any longer from anti-Zionism. There, beyond persons who hardly merit lingering over, is the sign of a spirit of the times.
– I encountered some interesting reactions. I think of that Socialist leader who fell from the clouds when he read in my book the sentences Stéphane Hessel uttered about the German occupation…2 I had no wish to write about Stéphane Hessel, but all in all I couldn’t avoid it. I believe there is here a case of characterized imposture — a taste for lying that one detects as early as Danse avec le siècle (Dance with the Century), some passages of which are downright hallucinatory. This man was launched like a marketing product, the sign of an era and of a sad economic and ideological system, that “empire of nothing” Benny Levy spoke of. One could go on endlessly reeling off the falsehoods, from his imaginary participation in the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the opportunistic showcasing of very distant Jewish origins that played no role in his life (he was raised in a very antisemitic Protestant family). And that obsession with Israel that filled his final years… If Hessel is the axis of good, he who gets himself received by Hamas and grants that movement a label of resistance, then where are we? There too, it’s a rupture. Our Resistance figures were heroes, not terrorists… Gérard Rabinovitch wrote a very interesting essay3 on the fundamental difference between these two postures (beyond the deleterious relativism we are endlessly fed, which would have it that one side’s resistance fighter is the other’s “terrorist”). Resistance stands resolutely on the side of the affirmation of life, on the side of the affirmation of values; and indeed the Righteous too were resistants, not in that obscurantist apology for death and murder.
This book was also, for you, a cry, an appeal, the search for a dialogue in spite of everything…
– I want to say that, on the book’s release, I had numerous very touching reactions from non-Jewish readers who told me they had taken the measure, for the first time, of this problem they had neglected, underestimated. I had an hour-long interview on Beur-FM, with a lot of very warm feedback. There are parallel solitudes that echo one another. These identity assignments are extremely painful. The Arabs too are in an unbearable situation, constantly having their voice confiscated by extremists — what happened recently to Kamel Daoud is a sad illustration of it. My book is called Les Juifs, Charlie, et tous les nôtres (The Jews, Charlie, and All Our Own). And “our own” are all those sentinels who hold firm, in the image of the journalists of Charlie Hebdo: it’s that France I love, of which I feel myself a part.
How did you come out of this book? Do you still recognize yourself in a community of thought, a political community?
– When one wants to write, it’s because one wants to share, to come out of solitude. I am always very sad about the absence of transmission in our society. I am infinitely more indulgent toward young people who, however led astray they may be by propaganda or ignorance, are still in the making, can evolve, than toward certain intellectuals. The famous “minute of silence” was not observed in several schools, but I felt a more unbearable violence in the op-eds of Edgar Morin or Alain Badiou in the aftermath of the attacks, which expressed a colder, more reasoned violence, one that more or less subtly legitimized the other violence. We need, more than ever, to transmit, to say who we were. Yes, many of us fought for anti-racism, we had struggles in common: what is happening today?
Some will tell you: Israeli policy is the cause of all this. And if you want to be part of the new communions, you’ll have to give pledges. What critical word toward Israel is still audible or possible in this poisoned context? Isn’t it paradoxical to feel more bound than ever to the existence of that State even as one feels increasingly estranged from its political evolution?
– I have never given pledges, never shown my white paw. It works the other way around: without antisemitism, I would no doubt be far more radical in my criticism of Israeli policy. I speak of it, by the way, in my essay. I lived through Operation “Cast Lead” with extreme pain, its two thousand dead (for strikes that were called “surgical”). For too many Jews, it went without saying that this was legitimate self-defense. There is a very worrying evolution of Israeli mentalities, a banalization of violence and racism that concerns me to the highest degree, for I think that the Zionist project remains, whether one likes it or not, bound to an ethical project. That’s why I admire in that country those who contest its current policy, which seems to me deplorable. Were I Israeli, I would campaign for the rights of the Palestinians. And it is a suffering too that the existence of antisemitism corners us into a camp, into a single identity, into a form of one-dimensionality in which everyone suffocates. We have to live with that too, with these contradictions. We would like to speak otherwise than “as Jews,” but antisemitism produces this reaction; and I consider, as I wrote in a recent op-ed in Le Monde, that “anti-Zionism has been the finest gift made to the Israeli right” and that it was a catastrophe for the Palestinians as well. But I will never abdicate my critical sense, I will not give in to the temptation of withdrawal.
And yet… a strange thing, for a conflict that undergoes extraordinary media exposure, even as the treatment reserved for Israel is almost systematically critical, and in a context where antisemitic acts keep worsening, one realizes, from a poll, that a clear majority of French people put both camps on the same footing. So it is false to say that this country is broadly antisemitic. There is an incredible disproportion between the share this conflict seems to occupy in the media and ideological space, and the perception our fellow citizens truly have of it. And even in the Arab revolutions, the Israeli question was astonishingly discreet, even absent, in any case not central. For my part, I see in this a ground for hope.
Notes
“If we have lived in shame our involuntary complicity with the antisemites, which made executioners of us, perhaps we will begin to understand that we must struggle for the Jew, neither more nor less than for ourselves.”↩︎
“If I may dare a bold comparison on a subject that touches me, I assert this: the German occupation was, if one compares it for example with the current occupation of Palestine by the Israelis, a relatively harmless occupation, leaving aside exceptional elements such as the imprisonments, the internments and the executions, as well as the theft of works of art.” — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 January 2011.↩︎
Terrorisme/Résistance, d’une confusion lexicale à l’époque des sociétés de masse (Terrorism/Resistance: On a Lexical Confusion in the Age of Mass Societies), Le Bord de l’eau, 2014.↩︎