Politics

“Israel faces the vertigo of vengeance” was the headline of an article published in Le Monde a week after 7 October. But to imagine that Israel will act in this way is to delude oneself. Danny Trom explains why Israel will not and cannot avenge itself by deciphering what this omnipresent warning imperceptibly conveys.

Sergey Lagodinsky is a German politician (The Greens) of Russian Jewish origin, member of the European Parliament since 2019. “We have all been attacked” was published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a few days after the Hamas attacks. In it, he expresses his concern when, in the face of “terrorists [who] destroy human bodies”, he sees, at the heart of democratic Europe, “indifferent neighbours, discreet silencers, cold relativists and all those, many of them, who are too comfortable where they are to seriously confront the new reality”.

In the wake of Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel and the Hebrew state’s armed response against the Gaza Strip, American philosopher Michael Walzer, author of “Just and Unjust Wars” (1977), offers his analysis of the political and legal motives behind this unprecedented conflict.

European and American universities, once considered politically neutral, have gradually become involved in political statements in solidarity with victims of injustice. However, when it comes to events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these same universities, without consulting each other, have generally remained silent, tacitly and collectively. They have thus revealed their fundamental reluctance to take a stand on any issue concerning the Jews, especially when the issue is their mass murder as Jews and in the most important Jewish centre in the world, Israel. Why is this so? What does it mean, in particular, that the majority of the social sciences have become incapable of studying the Jewish condition from an objective point of view, whether in the Diaspora or in Israel, and seem to have an irresistible tendency, without admitting it, to place “the Jews” in the camp of the “dominant”?

After the events in Israel on October 7, 2023, the coordinates of the Jewish world are no longer the same. They are shifting, recomposing, and rearranging themselves, so that among all the feelings that beset Jews today stands the disorientation provoked by this upheaval. It’s not easy, while gripped by dread and plunged into mourning, to make sense of it. The only way to unravel the new situation is to force ourselves to open our eyes – even if we’d like to keep them closed and look only inside ourselves. 

In issue 129 of K., we discussed the open letter, entitled “The Elephant in the room”, denouncing the State of Israel as an apartheid regime. The petition was signed by more than 2,500 academics, bringing together, in a combination unthinkable only a few months earlier, committed Zionists and avowed anti-Zionists. We gave the floor to several of our authors, who explained why they had signed even though they did not agree with the use of the word apartheid. The following text is intended to explain why such a characterization is historically and politically inappropriate, counter-productive and the fruit of an absolutely impracticable analogy, unless one wishes to discredit the history and very existence of Zionism in bad faith.

The get, the centrepiece of traditional divorce, is a particularly sensitive legal act which today seems to be the focus of the greatest tension between civil law and Jewish law. Is it a place of confrontation? Astrid von Busekist sees it more as a place where a legal pluralism is formed, capable of honouring freedom of religious practice while bending it towards recognition of the general principle of equality for all.

An open letter entitled The Elephant in the Room was launched in mid-August to “call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” To date, it has been signed by just over 2,300 people—most of them academics (including eminent figures in Jewish history research) and personalities from Israel and the American diaspora—and has the dual characteristic of qualifying Israel as an “apartheid regime” and bringing together signatories who generally disagree with that qualification.

Nearly 2,800 public figures, most of them Israeli and American (including a very large number of academics), have signed an open letter, The Elephant in the Room, calling on them to speak out against the “ultimate goal” of the judicial reform proposed by the current Israeli government: the maintenance of the “apartheid regime”. This last qualification is debatable – and even contested by some of the petition’s signatories. So why did they sign it? This is Joel Whitebook’s response.