Politics

Hadas Ragolsky, former journalist, activist and founder of the Women in Red movement, met twice with K., the first time in her office in Tel Aviv City Hall in June 2024, and the second time this past week to talk about the repeated assaults on democracy and on the opposition resistance as well as women’s rights while part of the Israeli society is marching against Benyamin Netanyahu’s government dangerous actions. A strong call for a Diaspora support to the movements of protests.

Faced with the collective experience of modern powerlessness, democracies are doubting and populists across the board are promising to regain control by ‘taking action’. Goethe’s Faust and Walter White, the hero of Breaking Bad, paradigmatic figures separated by two centuries, embody this headlong rush: when understanding the world is no longer easy, we destroy and rebuild it. But always, in the shadow of these stories, a Jewish figure accompanies the destructive impulse, embodies negation, or bears the blame. In moments when modernity cracks, what becomes of the Jewish minority, asks the philosopher Julia Christ? While large sections of our societies are listening to the whispers that promise an immediate way out of powerlessness, she reminds us that only the possibility of building solidarity can guarantee minorities against the tyranny of majority desire.

David Hirsh was invited, in his capacity as academic director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, to the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism organized by the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora. In this text, he explains why he chose not to participate in this initiative which, by giving pride of place to the extreme right, discredits the fight against antisemitism and endangers Jews in the diaspora.

Can the fight against antisemitism be anything other than a parody when it is organized by the far right? By inviting members of Europe’s authoritarian and xenophobic right to parade on the stage of its “International Conference on Combating Antisemitism”, the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora has committed a serious political error, which rings like a betrayal of its mission. Here, Michael Brenner reports on the drift represented by this move and the trap into which it is locking Jews.

Hatred of mediation and language, abolition of differences in an all-or-nothing logic, a solipsistic dream in which the world disappears: in this aphoristic text, the philosopher Gérard Bensussan proposes a conceptual approach to nihilism. This pathology of reason appears, beyond the diversity of its manifestations, as that which threatens thought as soon as it forgets its outside – a slope on which the critical gesture easily slides, and where the old Jewish question is encountered.

Isn’t the meaning of Purim – the quintessential exile festival that reflects the issue of protecting the dispersed people – bound to fade away once the Jews have given themselves a state charged with preserving them from persecution? This is the question Danny Trom reopens in light of October 7 and its aftermath. How should we understand the circulation, for this year’s Purim, of calls for children to adopt Ariel Bibas’ Batman costume? Is it not the case that the Jewish political condition in exile remains latent in the realization of the Zionist project, merely awaiting its actualization?

Last March, Jean-Claude Milner delivered a disturbing diagnosis in our pages: the rapid American trusteeship of Israel, due to the loss of the illusion that made the Jewish state an “impenetrable and solitary diamond”, a representative of the democratic West in hostile lands. In his text, “Western” meant above all the recognition of American supremacy, WASP values and a doctrine where peace is the rule and war the exception. An alternative was emerging for Jews: either orientalization in a vassalized Israel, or dissolution in the new American Jerusalem. At a time when the Trump presidency seems to be reshuffling the cards by reconnecting with an imperial logic, and Europe seems increasingly marginalized, Milner revisits his diagnosis.

Who is Herbert Kickl, and what political project does he promise Austria? As the far-right FPÖ party, which won the last elections, prepares to take the helm of a coalition government and appoint Kickl as chancellor, Liam Hoare traces the trajectory of this party and its leader with Nazi sympathies.

The truce concluded between Israel and Hamas has given rise to a deplorable spectacle. On the Hamas side, they are shouting “victory” over a field of ruins and corpses, with no regard for the fate of the Gazan population for whom the group has no other plan than that of martyrdom. On the Israeli side, Netanyahu is delighted with the parodies of “solutions” announced with incredible levity by President Trump. Here, K. shares a Palestinian voice, that of Ihab Hassan, first published in Liberties, who thinks in the only politically viable terms: those of a conflict between two equally just national claims, pointing to the horizon of a two-state solution.