It is still very difficult to write today, when despair, dread, and melancholy contend within our wounded souls. How to speak of these two years of intimate devastation that, since October 7, 2023, so many of us share?
Of course, the halt of murderous bombing and the return of the hostages and their remains—though unfinished—constitute an immense relief. We know nonetheless that the path of justice and reparation will be long and painful.
Along its way lie, alas! thousands of innocent dead whom nothing will bring back.
Deep wounds, abyssal solitudes have henceforth scarred names that were dear to us, such as Israel and Zionism.
The frightful number of civilian deaths in Gaza and the worldwide antisemitic wave have plunged us into a sort of collective solitude and desolation.
For more than two years, we have been witnessing, petrified, a striking synchronisation of hatreds: the violence of speech criminalising the Jews of the world, verbal and physical assaults, the ostracising of Jewish students on French and American campuses, the expulsion of children in Spain and France right up to the assassination of Jews in the United States, in England, and elsewhere have become banal, even justified.
And at the same time, we are looking on, powerless, at the long calvary of the Palestinians of Gaza, the displacements, the cities reduced to ruins, hunger, cold, destitution, and above all the horror of those tens of thousands of civilians killed by the bombings of the Israeli army.
Far too many here hold up, like supporters’ pennants, their own justification, their good conscience. In a mirror.
For some, what is happening in Gaza would be a matter of legitimate defence; the rest would be nothing but Hamas propaganda. For others, Gaza is Auschwitz, nothing more, nothing less.
It is in the name of “the struggle for Palestine” that some justify antisemitic hatred. It is in the name of this antisemitic hatred that Netanyahu pursues his war of annihilation in Gaza.
The symmetry of these postures reveals one and the same moral indecency, one and the same ethical defeat.
No one can consent to these tragedies answering each other, justifying each other, or worse: cancelling one another out.
Adorno used to say that antisemitism was “the rumour that runs about the Jews”—it must be noted that it is once again galloping across the world. Everywhere it is again being said that the Jews, “dominant, bloodthirsty, despoilers of peoples, continue their work to subjugate the world.” This language, very ancient, continues to be spoken often unbeknownst to its speakers, who are ignorant of the history of the indestructible imaginary that continues to carry it.
And we still feel this vertigo before this implacable reality: a tiny people of 14 million souls remains the obsession of hundreds of millions of other humans. Today as yesterday—and that is still more painful, especially despite yesterday.
The eternal innocence of antisemites
Israel, but also the Jews “warmongers” and now “perpetrators of genocide,” responsible for the global chaos, are once again at the top of the hit parade of worldwide hatred. Their disappearance would be necessary to the restoration of universal communion. The words that had made possible their destruction are the very ones being used, with as much innocence as ever.
Thinkers such as Gérard Bensussan, in his book Des sadiques au cœur pur (Sadists with a Pure Heart), or Eva Illouz in her essay Généalogie d’une haine vertueuse (Genealogy of a Virtuous Hatred) have rightly insisted on this dimension of the antisemites’ innocence.
The historian of the Shoah, Saul Friedländer, had likewise evoked the “redemptive” antisemitism of the Nazis, confused, in apocalyptic fashion, with an eschatological mission, a universal redemption.
Redemption and innocence are regularly claimed by contemporary antisemitism—they are nevertheless at the heart of all antisemitic discourse and have been for a long time.
The word “antisemitism” itself bears, in the lop-sided name that it invented for itself, the alibi of “legitimate defence” as well as its own subterfuge: antisemitism does not act, it reacts to the immense fault of the Jews. If the Jews are guilty, the antisemites can only be innocent.
But after the Shoah, the innocence of antisemites was harder to claim. One remembers Bernanos writing in 1944: “This word [antisemitism] horrifies me more and more, Hitler has dishonoured it forever.”
Had not the honour and innocence of antisemites been definitively put to death at Auschwitz?
And was not the consciousness of European consent to the Jewish genocide that burden, decidedly too heavy to bear, from which one would have to free oneself one day?
It would seem that we have arrived at that moment in history when the offloading and the liberation triumph to the greatest delight of antisemites.
To say that the Jews are eternally guilty—or better, that this time they would “really” be so—has nothing new about it either.
The permanent updating of “the fault of the Jews”—no longer only deicides, but also at the origin of the French Revolution, of capitalism or of communism, etc.—also belongs to the history of antisemitism.
The Jews, contrary to antisemitic fantasies, are people like the others—doubtless still more so since the creation of the State of Israel, which now constitutes a new state of affairs. Israel is no longer only, even if it has remained so, the loathed name of a people without land or army. It is also, since ’48, the name of a national sovereignty, of a State which, like any State, must be able to answer for its acts—many of which are condemnable.
The iniquitous occupation of the Palestinian territories, the violence of the settlers, the Netanyahu government now allied with messianic supremacists, are concrete acts whose necessary denunciation has nothing to do with antisemitism.
Such denunciation, in order to remain political, cannot borrow the ancestral imaginary of antisemitism: that of essentialisation, of a criminalisation of a people and a State, decreed guilty, once again, of their own existence.
But would the violence, without equivalent in the history of Israel, that this State has deployed in the Gaza war, furnish the ultimate alibi?
Will the “innocence” of antisemites, undermined by the Shoah, at last have found in Netanyahu’s criminal policy the argument of its recent resurrection?
The obsession with the Shoah
The Gaza massacres will remain an indelible stain on the name of Israel, and the atrocity of the pogroms of October 7 that triggered them cannot justify them.
The necessary solidarity with a population in distress is imperative, and one must hope that many of those who are engaged in it are so for just motives.
But none can ignore the recurrent antisemitic discourses that colonise this solidarity, nor the unhoped-for asylum that this cause has offered them. Even at the cost of sacrificing it.
For antisemites, it is less a question of speaking of the real misfortune of the Palestinians than of the Shoah. Again and always.
It is their own history with the Jews that is at stake: a history of blood, of murder, and of abandonment. The history of an extermination that took place thanks to the consent of the world.
Western guilt with regard to the Shoah as with colonialism has found in this conflict the opportunity to wipe the slate of its double debt. It is still and always of itself that this guilt speaks, reducing others to mere symptoms of itself.
For a very long time already, on both sides of the spectrum, the Israeli and Palestinian peoples have been condemned to relieve guilty consciences. Reluctantly, often, in complicity sometimes, they were transformed into alibis, into slogans, and into fantasies, to their own greatest misfortune.
The Shoah is of course at the heart of the unforgivable; it is that stain, that defilement upon the history of Europe, of the West, and of humanity.
And the Jews were those messengers of dread, bringing to the world once again that evil “news,” that of illusory “redemption.”
The Jews are: “people whom one hates still more ”since Auschwitz. Because of Auschwitz.” wrote Kertész.
We know it: nothing is heavier to bear than what one does not forgive oneself, nothing more hateful than the recall of a debt.
Now, the antizionist discourse that places at the centre of its grievances and arguments the supposedly guilty link between Israel and the Shoah inscribes itself directly within this denunciation of the debt. And it is in this that it is antisemitic.
The “antisemitism of the rejection of guilt” (Schuldabwehr-Antisemitismus), much studied in Germany, is henceforth the new face of antisemitism.
The memory of the Shoah obsesses antisemites who, in a paradoxical movement, do not cease to denounce it while at the same time perpetuating its centrality.
How can one ignore where their passion led the world?
“Before Auschwitz, antisemitism could still pass for an opinion. After Auschwitz, it has become participation in murder.”
The post-Shoah antisemite has thus become that murderer condemned to return to the scene of the crime in order to erase its trace. The questioning of the Shoah, through its negation or its relativisation, is henceforth the condition of contemporary antisemitism—an antisemitism encumbered by the crime, seeking more than ever to free itself from it, to wash itself of the debt and the guilt by turning them back against its victims.
And it is an additional wound that this inflicts upon the Jews, at the origin of the dread we feel, for there is no longer any antisemitic discourse that seems able to do without reference to the Shoah.
The victory of negationism
The particular violence of present-day antisemitism comes from this proximity to negationism, which is from now on its obligatory passage. Never, in these past two years, has the border seemed so tenuous.
Post-war negationism was first carried by the fascist far right. It was then necessary to be able to continue hating the Jews without the shadow and stain of the gas chambers.
The relentlessness deployed to erase the crime testified, despite itself, to its scope and to the immensity of the fault.
Its discourse accused the Jews of having invented the genocide in order the better to dominate the world. They were, in reality, the executioners, at the origin of the war, while the true victims were the German people.
The principal seduction of this discourse resided in the formidable liberation from European guilt, but also in a real relief: this catastrophe might not have taken place.
“The non-existence of the ‘gas chambers’ is good news for poor humanity. Good news that it would be wrong to keep hidden any longer,” wrote Faurisson in 1978.
This version of “the true German victims” of the genocide long remained confined to the margins of fascist circles.
Everything was going to change when this very discourse and its same logic replaced the Germans with the Palestinians. And when “Jewish world domination” took the name of a real country and a proper name, “Israel.”
The role of Stalinist antisemitism has doubtless been underestimated, then that of the ultra-left, which was going to mobilise third-worldist and anti-imperialist themes in its negationist discourse. Garaudy claimed this lineage, and even more so than his predecessor Faurisson, this former Stalinist was going to bind negationism and anti-Zionism indissolubly through his book that became a bestseller: Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics).
A guilty memory
Garaudy’s relativist negationism, and that of his heirs, no longer had to contest the existence of the gas chambers; it sufficed to minimise and relativise the Shoah, while insisting on the slyness of this memory decreed guilty.
A new antisemitic enunciation expressed itself in the shadow of the same imaginary, each time colonising new territories of humiliation. Arab nationalism, many anticolonial discourses, the Nation of Islam, the ayatollahs, the Islamists, Dieudonné, and so many others were going to take up this Garaudyan rhetoric.
In fidelity of enunciation, this negationist and antisemitic discourse said that the Jews, faithful to their hegemonic design, had made of their misfortune the moral instrument of their enslavement of peoples.
The objective being to take the place of the authentic “wretched of the earth” by occulting other misfortunes such as colonialism and slavery. But also to delegitimise Western domination, through its spearhead, the State of Israel, whose very birth would participate in this criminal enterprise.
This statement, having become the antizionist gospel, always rests on a single antisemitic vision of the world: the memory of the Shoah being the last ruse of the Jewish plot.
The historian Enzo Traverso did not hesitate to write the words “civil religion of the Holocaust,” in the service, according to him, of the political and moral order of the West.
It is no longer a question here of history, but of a narrative on its way to becoming dominant.
The creation of the State of Israel was not that consolation prize, generously offered by Western guilt—nowhere to be found, however, after the war. This version, in the manner of the colonial gaze so well described by Frantz Fanon, speaks in the place of those primarily concerned. It dispossesses the Jews and Zionism of their own agency, of their own dreams, of their own struggles.
Israel was not born thanks to the Shoah, but in spite of it. And if there is a link between the two, it is situated above all on the side of the moral impossibility, after the Shoah, of calling for the destruction of Israel. Auschwitz remaining the principal obstacle to the delegitimisation of Israel.
Anti-Zionism, especially that of the left, had thus to adopt an acrobatic posture. It was necessary to be able to drape oneself in virtue by reappropriating the history and drama of the Jews, as a weapon against them…
From the beginning of its history to today, every negationist discourse is antizionist, and even if the converse is not equally true, it nonetheless remains the case that an important part of the antizionist narrative, of its words and its imaginary, has been encumbered by negationist discourse. Born in fascist far-right circles after the war, passed through the sieve of Stalinist antisemitic propaganda under cover of anti-Zionism, negationism was largely diffused in the discourses of Arab nationalism and then by Islamism, before becoming mainstream in the radical left.
This is where we now stand.
It is indeed under the antizionist mask—“this miraculous discovery that allows one to be antisemitic without looking it,” in the words of Vladimir Jankélévitch—and in its relativist and “Garaudyan,” then “Dieudonnist” form, that negationism today triumphs.
When the discourse of fascism is taken up, including by those who promised to fight it, it has already won. And it is indeed on the question of antisemitism that, once again, things have gone off the rails.
It is quite dizzying to note the contemporary relevance of the words that Hannah Arendt wrote in 1944: “There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and more mysterious than the fact that, of all the great unresolved political questions of this century, it is this apparently small and insignificant Jewish problem that has had the dubious honour of setting the entire infernal machine into motion.”
The unforgivable
The return of antisemitism, of which Europe and the West thought themselves cured, appears as much as a collective defeat as an intimate shame.
It was long believed that the condemnation of Nazism, whose acme was the extermination of the Jews, was a cement of democracy, the foundation of antifascism as well as a protection for the Jews.
Alas, we must take note: this cycle has come to an end; the memory of the Shoah is henceforth part of the great trial against them. It has become a weapon against Israel and the Jews.
This openly claimed link constitutes a footbridge of legitimisation, like a safe-conduct toward the triumph of negationism.
This new antisemitic discourse, intimately tied to the memory of the crime that it ceaselessly brandishes while abolishing it, constitutes a violence without parallel against the Jews.
Of all the accusations that have marked the history of antisemitism, the negationist rumour is certainly one of the most abject and most revolting. Now it is indeed in our daily lives that we are confronted with it. The very real massacres committed by the Netanyahu government, the unprecedented use of food shortage as a weapon of war, the alarming number of civilian deaths, were almost immediately swallowed up, buried beneath another narrative. That of negationism and its relativist avatar.
Gaza would be Auschwitz, the Jews of the whole world would be “perpetrators of genocide.” These words and this imaginary, brandished like slogans in public space, are henceforth inscribed upon the houses of Jews, their cars, their meal-trays, the walls of synagogues, the places of commemoration, the stelae of the children of Izieu. They constitute a permit to hate, to ostracise, to beat, even to kill.
The Shoah is omnipresent across, but also in place of, the real drama of the Palestinians.
Denounced as hegemonic and guilty, in the image of those who suffered it, antisemites do not cease to proclaim the urgency of unburdening oneself of this cumbersome memory. Definitively guilty.
The word “genocide” itself, charged with a long accusation against Israel and the Jews, does not aim at what is happening in Gaza, but at the profound nature, the intrinsically criminal essence of Israel, whose birth would be confused with an original sin.
Making Israel disappear
How to “stand fast,” how to denounce the antisemitism so present in this entire conflict without thereby reducing the whole tragedy of the Middle East to this accursed actor?
One cannot but be overwhelmed by the indecent instrumentalisation of this scourge by Israeli propaganda.
The struggle against antisemitism has become the major argument of the destructive war waged in Gaza.
The Palestinians, more dehumanised than ever, would have become the “new Nazis.” And against this enemy—guilty, according to Israeli propaganda, of having inspired the Final Solution—there can be no pity.
It is indeed the memory of the Shoah that the Netanyahu government—the most right-wing, the most corrupt, and undoubtedly the least “Zionist” in the history of Israel—mobilises as never before.
Yet antisemitism is not this simple alibi brandished by the Israeli right; it was not either peripheral to a just struggle of “resistance.”
October 7, 2023 was thought, conceived, and elaborated with the will to provoke a worldwide wave of antisemitism. And this through its two conditions: the disqualification of the memory of the Shoah and the delegitimisation of the State of Israel.
Aided in this by the criminal policy of the Israeli government, this objective of Hamas was attained, doubtless well beyond its hopes.
In Amir Tibon’s fine book The Gates of Gaza, the author, a young journalist of Haaretz, recounts the hell of October 7, several hours locked in his shelter with his partner and their two babies until his father, a retired general, freed them…
This astonishing narrative is interspersed with another, that of the history of Israel. He tells us about the architect of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, his cruelty, but also his intelligence, tragically underestimated by Israeli hubris and contempt for “Arabs.”
Imprisoned for many years in Israeli jails for the bare-handed murder of Palestinian opponents, the Hamas leader took advantage of this retreat to understand and study his enemy, in order to be better able to bring him down. He learned Hebrew, even translating into Arabic the books of Israeli military strategists and Zionist thinkers. But—and this is more troubling—he also nourished himself on the history of the Shoah.
How to strike the enemy in the very heart? How to destroy his invulnerability by touching him precisely at the heart of his wound?
October 7 was his work; this massacre was perpetrated according to the modalities of an old-fashioned pogrom.
It was a question of showing the world, but first of all the Jews, that they had no land of their own, and that the vulnerability of their existence lay in the precariousness, even the illusion, of any refuge.
And it is indeed Israel as Jewish national home that was eclipsed during those terrible hours.
Looking at the ruins and devastation, Amit Halevi, secretary of the ravaged kibbutz of Be’eri, thought: “What is this? Some pogrom in Lithuania?…”I have the impression that the State of Israel has ceased to exist”.
Be’eri, like the other martyred places, was no longer that little kibbutz of humanist Israelis, fallen during a war, but that shtetl handed over to the murderous madness of the pogrom.
Tsahal, the Jewish army that calls itself “defence” and that had long been the major argument of aliyah, had failed to answer the call.
It was unheard of.
On October 7, for Israelis as for Jews of the world, a wall collapsed. That wall that Israel was supposed to have built between the Jewish past and the present. And behind the wall, there were the pogroms and the Shoah.
The proud Israelis again became those vulnerable Jews, abandoned to the violence of the world.
Such was the objective: to abolish time, to make the Israelis regress to the status of Jews, to send them back to the time of their existential precariousness, to pull out from under their feet the very carpet of their existence.
And it is precisely this that all the Jews of the world felt: the ground that gives way, like a vertigo, a fall.
The leaders of Hamas had foreseen what would follow, too, and they had accepted it.
Israel’s violent riposte, its vengeance tenfold amplified by the guilt of powerlessness. We know today that the political leaders, more preoccupied with their own turpitudes, as well as with the increasingly violent annexation of the West Bank, had not listened to the alerts, had despised the signals.
But it was also necessary to take revenge for another powerlessness: the millennial one that had made the Shoah possible. By the force of trauma, of ancestral anguish, and of propaganda, Tsahal became much more than Israel’s army of defence—it took on the name of the resurrection of an armed resistance that had been missing against Nazism. A sword against the haters of Jews who, far more than the eternal Amalek, had taken the face of Hitler and spoke in Arabic…
Israel’s violent vengeance was thus doubled by the Jewish vengeance that had not taken place after the war and that seemed at last to find here matter for a posthumous deployment.
Such was also the trap laid by Hamas, who knew what thunderbolt the most violent government in all the history of Israel would cast upon their own people.
It was a price to which they had consented. The price of another victory: making the Jews and Israel hated, pushing them into the fault until this country and this people are the most detested, the most condemned, the most boycotted, the most delegitimised on the whole planet.
The Israeli leaders, through their destructive madness, offered them this victory. For never in its history had Israel killed so many.
The war against Hamas has indeed transformed itself into a war against the Palestinians; the tens of thousands of Palestinian dead today found another shroud, that of the honour of Israel.
Hamas the victor? What if antisemitism had won?
Antisemitism has accompanied the history of the Jews; even the Bible evokes this ancestral hatred: “at each generation, they shall rise up.” Nevertheless, despite the long litany of persecutions and pogroms, the Jews continued to exist.
Better still, they form today one of the oldest peoples who, despite dispersion and destructions, has survived the disappearance of empires.
For centuries, the Jews studied, taught, created, invented, raised children. The strength and resilience of Jewish life, of its thought, its spirituality, its actions, resided in this: the hostility of the world should not determine them. Antisemitism did not lay down its law.
After the war, and in spectacular fashion, this desire for life took the form of a resurrection. Despite the Shoah, or perhaps against it, the Jews continued to engage in the world.
Neither Hitler nor antisemitism were to have the last word.
Israel and Zionism embodied, more than anything, this refusal to submit to the destiny of misfortune that others had fixed for the Jews.
Contrary to the rewritings of history under way, Israel was not born of a desire for vengeance, but of a revenge of life over death.
For a long time in Israel, the memory of the catastrophe was buried; one was no longer to speak the languages of exile, struck with the misfortune of the “diaspora”; one had to invent other names for oneself, no longer be bent for hours over books of prayer, to straighten up, to plough the land. There was no question that Israel, its name and its people, would pursue its existence in the shadow of a wounded and threatened Jewishness.
Israel, through its technological, artistic, scientific, and above all democratic successes, restored to the Jews a pride; the demand for changes of family name underwent a spectacular drop after the military victories of Israel.
Like other dominated peoples, the Jews no longer had to ask permission to exist.
And even if their enemies sent them back, each time, to that memory of misfortune, neither the Jews nor Israel had decided to consent to it. Everywhere on earth, they were determined to write their own history, which was not that of antisemitism.
But we live henceforth in another dread, a complete change of paradigm: Israel has decided to behave as if antisemitism defined it, contrary to all its history, including the history of Zionism, thus betraying a Jewish ethics that had survived Nazism.
The memory of the Shoah, long held at a distance, is henceforth central in Israeli identity. The Israeli writer Yishai Sarid, in his book Le Monstre de la mémoire (The Memory Monster), denounces this grip, “a deleterious power, a haunting force that gnaws at him and installs itself in him to possess him.”
It is not possible here to enumerate the stages of this process that has seen the horizon darken, fear triumph over hope. The failures of the peace processes, the Iranian threat, the rise of fascisms, of Islamism, of identitarianisms and supremacisms everywhere in the world, as well as the explosion of antisemitism, have paved this path.
National religious messianism, henceforth in power in Israel, as well as the democratic erosion of a country that has become an occupying state of another people, henceforth propose fear and vengeance as a political programme. Like, need it be recalled, the identitarian violences that, everywhere in the world, are unleashed.
The October 7 pogroms inflamed the ancestral anguish of Israelis and of the Jews of the world. They were conceived to revive the memory of the Shoah. A memory that, at the same time, antisemites the world over decreed hegemonic and guilty and finally “expired” by the massacres of Gaza…
The Shoah has become a Jewish affair, a shady affair, as is their custom.
At a time when memories undergo the same reification as marketing products, when the henceforth enviable place of victim is everywhere coveted, and when the desire to unburden oneself of the past meets the spirit of the times of consumerism, it is whispered everywhere that the memory of the Shoah, henceforth Jewish and guilty, would have become obsolete.
And that it would be time once again to dislodge the Jews from their new monopoly, that of pain.
In the war of images and imaginaries, Israel has also lost the battle.
So much does it seem that it does not know what forces it is dealing with.
The pro-Trump blindness of Israeli power, its ideological conversion into the armed wing of the defence of a Christian West threatened by new “barbarisms,” seem to testify to this tragic going astray.
In this confusion in which Israeli pride has dramatically underestimated the intelligence of its enemy, Netanyahu has himself also contributed to blurring the memory of the Shoah.
The Israeli right, against the whole of Jewish history, has also made of the Shoah a guilty memory, that of the defeated, of the “diasporic,” against which an implacable Israel rises up.
By substituting “Never again” for humanity with “Never again” for the Jews, it has given its worst enemies unhoped-for alibis.
The targeting of this memory, decreed guilty both by those who contest it and by those who claim it, is a catastrophe for our common humanity.
For it is indeed the memory of the Shoah and the call to the responsibility of “Never again” that were at the foundation of antifascism, but also of European construction. More broadly, it reinforced the demand for equality, the democratic aspiration, and the refusal of hatred, of all hatred. The antiracist and anticolonial struggles of the post-war period also drew from it the arguments of their legitimacy. Out of a common and shared memory.
The permanent call to unburden oneself of this memory has become the slogan and signature of contemporary antisemitism. It is perhaps also one of the most patent signs of the fascism to come.