One month since October 7. Every day that passes confirms that the unprecedented massacre perpetrated by Hamas was the spark that ignited the spirits and triggered increasingly worrying events. The fires are multiplying. The war in Gaza – in an area where Palestinian civilians are tragically exposed and Israeli hostages are still at the mercy of Hamas – is creating a front that seems to have the whole world as its rear base. What is most striking is the increase in anti-Semitic acts and words, which goes hand in hand with the relativisation of the pogrom at the beginning of this new era. A month after it began, and in parallel with this rise in anti-Semitism, which the general public is slowly beginning to take into account, it is moving towards a kind of consensus on the need for a ceasefire, as Bruno Karsenti notes in a text that tries to clarify what is at stake in the current war, while asking what could be “the right policy for Israel to pursue given the trap into which Hamas has deliberately lured it”. What is at stake here is the question of what Israel must remain faithful to in order to remain itself. The question has been asked with intensity since the installation of a right-wing government a year ago. Today it is being raised again in the new conditions created by October 7.
An attempt at clarification of a different kind comes from Germany. Its vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck (Green Party), has circulated a video of a speech on novembre 1. It is certainly primarily a German speech when he says that “It was the generation of my grandparents that wanted to exterminate Jewish life in Germany and Europe”. But this speech has an additional political dimension: it also expresses a vision of Europe that reminds him that it is a post-Holocaust construction, and that the legitimacy of the European political project would collapse if Europe failed to defend Jews against any form of anti-Semitic threat – whether from the far right, the far left or Islamism. And this, Robert Habeck shows, includes defending the State of Israel, whose security, he tells us, is “necessary” for Germany “as a state” and, by extension, for Europe as a sovereign political entity.
Another voice expressing concern about what he calls the “moral idiocy” of the left, in this case the American left, is being heard in K. this week. Mitchell Abidor, a regular contributor to our review, has been involved in the left-wing Jewish press for over forty years. As well as tracing the history of his own involvement in the 1970s, he gives us an account of the reaction of the new generation of radical activists, particularly Jewish ones, after October 7. It is both fascinating and distressing to see how these activists, for example in a magazine like Jewish Currents, proved unable to grasp the nature of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas and therefore unable to condemn it outright. He speaks of a kind of ideological “paralysis”. “It was as if the mere mention of Jewish deaths signified the privileging of Jewish deaths.”
