Once again, fire is raining down on Gaza. Neither the demands for the return of the hostages addressed to their captors and torturers have been heard. Nor those for negotiations to take precedence addressed to an Israeli government, that is reinforced in its policy of force and which revels in the perpetuation of war. (We are republishing the report of Day 210 after October 7. K. dove into the protests for the liberation of the hostages.) Once again, the declared desire to eliminate the Hamas leadership is being paid for with an unjustified number of Palestinian civilian deaths, and the victims are piling up in the midst of a polarization that no responsible political discourse, in either camp, is able to stop. Such a discourse would presuppose that the current dominant trend, which sometimes seems on the verge of sweeping everything away, is finally being countered: the trend that inclines towards unbridled nihilism, the nature of which has yet to be diagnosed.
In terms of such a diagnosis, it is equally striking to see that what brings us closest today, in our regions, is the reflection that arises from the apparently irrepressible surge of antisemitism. What do antisemitic people believe in? Answer: Nothing. But in this case, it is a Nothing that becomes all-powerful and all-consuming. It proliferates in the period we are living through. The important thing here is the gesture that denies, because when speech is decreed powerless, all that remains is to oppose it with the perspective of an act that would have the immense capacity to exhaust all meaning. From this arise those apocalyptic dreams, half-exalted and half-anguished, in which the possibility of finally finding a world to match oneself emerges for the subject who is sustained only by this negation. But it is also the breeding ground in which strange acts flourish – a misery of current political affairs – which, in order to present themselves on the public stage, nevertheless radically refuse to be interpreted. For those curious about the origins of this resounding nihilism, which is specific to an era that exalts the immediate over representation, and its deep affinities with antisemitism, the philosophical reflection proposed this week by Gérard Bensussan will be a valuable contribution.
Successive reforms to secondary and tertiary education have increased the opacity of the selection process and competition between students. Today stressed pupils and their worried parents are faced with a real obstacle course. Combine this fact with the unease felt by Jewish students in France since October 7 and you get a place where promises of academic excellence rub shoulders with those of a guaranteed refuge: the “Choosing a Jewish School” fair. Two years ago, Maëlle Partouche went there for K., to examine the upsurge in enrolments in the Jewish private sector, and its link with the increase in the number of people leaving for Israel. On the occasion of the sixth edition held on January 19, she returned to assess the effects of October 7 on the educational strategies of Jewish families and their relationship to the possibility of Aliyah. A view from the ground.
