When the political horizon seems blocked by a present with no way out, taking a step back from utopia opens up new possibilities to build on. This week, K. wanted to highlight the project “A Land for All – Two States, One Homeland”. After meeting two of its pillars last year in Israel, Israeli Palestinian Rula Hardal and Israeli Jew Meron Rappaport, we are publishing an interview in which the latter presents the outlines and challenges of the project to Elie Petit, accompanied by an introductory text written by Julia Christ, Bruno Karsenti, and Danny Trom. At a time when the morbid confrontation between anti-Zionism and the Jewish far right is locking everyone into fantasies of mutual annihilation, we believe it is vital to give a platform to any perspective that allows us to think about how legitimate demands can be articulated on the basis of their differences. Obviously, as utopian as the idea of a confederation of two sovereign nation-states may seem in the current situation, this perspective is nonetheless based on a realistic understanding of the conflict and its issues of mutual recognition. First, recognition of a legitimate attachment to the same land. Second, recognition of the trauma that the conflict has caused to both sides, which requires each side to acknowledge this trauma, without which it is impossible to enter into a genuine political resolution process. The eminently pragmatic intuition that guides this utopia is, in short, that it is in the conflict between two legitimate national claims that the prospect of integration within a shared political space emerges. Maintaining a critical edge will therefore require fighting against inevitable attempts to obscure the mutual recognition that this utopia presupposes.
This week’s issue opens with a project that looks resolutely toward the future. It closes with a voice from the past, that of Milena Jesenská—a free and incandescent figure, too often reduced to being considered merely the recipient of Kafka’s letters. In her tribute to her, Christine Lecerf restores Milena to her rightful stature: that of a committed woman, a writer, and a resistance fighter. What she calls “the Milena effect” is, in particular, this rare ability to understand fear, to name it, and sometimes to disarm it—in Kafka, as in Ravensbrück, where she died in May 1944.
