#289 / Editorial
Much has been said lately about the extremist parties that seem to be gaining support among voters, including in Germany, at least in the east. And it is true that the massive vote for the AfD in two states of the former GDR should not be taken lightly, given that this far-right party is so radical that even the RN refuses to form an alliance with it in the European Parliament. In Saxony-Anhalt, where it has just won nearly 44 percent of the vote, its chief ideologue accuses Israel of collectively punishing the Palestinians for the crimes of Hamas, before immediately concluding that the German people cannot be held responsible for the Shoah either. On the other side of the political spectrum, the victory in Berlin of Die Linke (“The Left”), a party that, to be sure, is part of Germany’s democratic political landscape, is also cause for concern, at least if one considers that the radically anti-Zionist, even openly antisemitic, voices rising within its ranks are not offset by the program of radical social reform that the party proposes for Berlin. However, beneath the clamor of the extremes, there is still, in Germany as in France, something that can be called day-to-day politics. Across the Rhine, this is embodied by the chancellor, the two chambers of Parliament, and what is known as “reason of state.” Since Chancellor Merkel’s speech to the Knesset in 2008, this has officially included “the security of Israel,” and all subsequent coalition agreements have reaffirmed this German understanding of reason of state. Yet here, too, it may seem that Germany is changing.This week, Gisela Dachs examines the evolution of this official doctrine of the Federal Republic and offers an interpretation of what is shaping German politics as the historical obligation toward Israel clashes with the obligation to uphold international law.
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In Israel, the political uproar is of a different nature. With just a few weeks to go before the October 27 parliamentary elections, war, security, and identity divides dominate nearly the entire public debate. There, too, however, day-to-day politics continues amid the noise, and its effects accumulate all the more surely because they are rarely discussed. Gilles Darmon, who founded the NGO Latet thirty years ago, describes this consistency. Since the economic reforms of the 1980s, all governments, both right-wing and left-wing, have followed the same neoliberal line, which has certainly produced exceptional economic growth, but without any of the promised “trickle-down” effects ever materializing. Between 2 and 2.8 million people currently live below the poverty line, which, according to OECD figures, places Israel second among the most affected member countries. The “Start-up Nation” and the “Soup Kitchen Nation” coexist. Faced with the political class’s indifference to deepening inequalities, Latet, which Darmon describes as a transfer to Israel of the French civic culture of the 1980s, is based on a gamble: to make social action the last space of consensus in a society that is increasingly divided over its own definition.
Another example of a transfer from Europe, though in a completely different field, is discussed in David Lemler’s review of Daniel Boyarin’s book, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. Boyarin posits that “Judaism” is a Christian category internalized with the Emancipation, one that must be discarded in order to rediscover an authentic premodern Jewish identity. The decolonial framework produces a singular effect here. Elsewhere, Boyarin places Jews, through Zionism, on the side of colonizing Europe; here, he portrays them as the colonized subjects of a European category. Their “indigenization” would require stripping Jewish history of its modern and European elements, including Zionism. David Lemler questions the possible purity of this kind of “indigenous” Jew portrayed by Boyarin, who seems to be more the product of a carefully constructed fantasy than a real historical figure.
