The echoes of the current reactivation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public debate in Western societies force us to revisit an old question: that of the difference, but also the articulation, between racism and antisemitism. This is particularly clear when it comes to the question that is, or should be, posed to the left: how to integrate the manifested possibility that “dominated”, “racialized” people can be antisemitic? We’re already familiar with the culturalist, even essentialist, explanations that circulate on the right of the political spectrum. The left, when it doesn’t deny the embarrassing fact, too often resorts to psychologizing explanations (especially by resorting to the idea of an all-too-understandable resentment of the “dominant”) that evacuate the political specificity of modern antisemitism. In his text “Racism and Political Modernity”, based on Race and History in Western Societies (15th-18th centuries) by Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani (who were recently interviewed in K.), Cyril Lemieux offers us the conceptual tools to avoid these pitfalls and to produce a genuinely sociological diagnosis of the situation. He distinguishes the logic of class racism from that of egalitarian racism, whose Christian roots serve as a matrix for modern antisemitism. In this way, the possibility of an egalitarian aspiration turning into a reactionary position is made intelligible and thus open to criticism formulated from an ideal of collective emancipation.
In K., we tried to describe the existential upheaval that the October 7 massacres implied for Israel: the questioning of its ability to protect Jews from pogroms. But the aftermath of the event also calls into question another dimension of Israeli society: the fact that Arabs live and must continue to live there as Israelis. Mouna Maroun’s article published this week, “I am an Israeli Arab. Hamas does not represent me”, testifies to the significance of this issue and the way it is experienced on a subjective level. Mouna Maroun shares the embarrassment she feels when asked if she condemns Hamas and the fear that the consequences of October 7 will have a lasting effect on the integration process of the Arab population. But her testimony also resonates with the hope of those who know the extent to which the lives of the two communities are intertwined, even in the experience of horror: “Hamas made no distinction between Jews and Arabs; for Hamas, they were all Israeli.”
