Over the past year or so, you may have noticed Israel’s extraordinary ability to find itself at the center of the world and its problems. Since we will undoubtedly continue to wrestle with this tendency, it would be useful to clarify why it seems so suspicious. If Israel’s rightful place is not at the center of the world (even if it is Jewish), then where is it? This is the question at stake in the text written by Noémie Issan-Benchimol and Gabriel Abensour, who set out to map diasporisms. Dismissing religious Zionism and the neo-diasporism of those intellectuals who idealize exile from their American campuses, they point to a way out of their political impasse. If Israel is to be grasped as a political reality that can be criticized and improved, it must be stripped of its character as a metaphysical exception, whether thought of as redemption or damnation. In other words, it must be reinscribed in the political situation of the Jews: “there is no outside exile”.
Have you ever wondered whether anti-Zionism might not be our best hope of escaping planetary destruction caused by global warming? No? Then you haven’t read Andreas Malm, whose eco-Marxist theories and call to disarm the fossil fuel industry have found a wide echo in activist circles. Malm places the Palestinian cause at the heart of the ecological struggle, not hesitating to draw inspiration from the “sabotage” of Hamas and to suggest that it would be necessary to destroy Israel in order to put an end to greenhouse gas emissions. Sylvaine Bulle, who takes the defense of political ecology to heart, unpacks the logic of this green anti-Zionism for K., and shows that this focus on the “Zionist entity” reflects the failure of ecological thinking, making the prospect of emancipation unthinkable.
To close this back-to-school issue, we publish two short pieces by our esteemed collaborator Karl Kraus: “Matters viewed (Jewishly)”. Unfortunately, stupidity never takes a vacation, so he had to stay on the ball and spend the summer tracking it down, even in the scribbles of a bad joker. But this need to stay on the lookout, this impossibility of letting the mind take a vacation in a world that seems to know only the logic of the worst, is tiring. In this fatigue, everyone can easily recognize themselves.
