In the dire context we know, violent arguments arose these past months between those who voice necessary criticisms of Israeli state actions which must remain focused on the political and legal implications of violations of international law, and those whose critiques are fuelled with antisemitic rhetoric. And yet it is precisely from this chasm that an enigma poses itself, from which a divide emerges that seems to overshadow all others. For since the beginning of the war, and even before October 7, certain actors have been using a term that seeks to monopolize the descriptive and critical discourse: “genocide.” The enigma is as follows: Why must the value of a discourse, however critical it may be, necessarily be judged by the use of this term—at the risk, as too many examples attest, of being completely disqualified if one refuses to employ it? Why this injunction to say “genocide,” on pain of being suspected of saying nothing, and even more so of wanting to say nothing?
Clarifying this enigma is essential if we are to finally free the expression of critical voices that must today oppose Israeli policy in the name of finding a genuine solution to the tragic conflict unfolding before our eyes. That is why, after showing last week what political imagination can produce even in this context, we felt it would be useful this week to publish Matthew Bolton’s text “The meaning of ‘genocide’”. Its great merit is that it refuses to respond to the injunction in question with the sole defensive argument that there is simply a subversive pleasure in accusing Jews of genocide. Bolton goes further. Without prejudging the appropriate classification of the acts, his analysis aims above all to preserve the possibility of making a lucid judgment, oriented toward a political resolution of the situation to which it applies. This requires exposing the ideology behind the equation “Israel = genocide,” which aims to deny the very existence of the Jewish state since its founding, and not to counteract what its government is doing.
The great historian Pierre Nora passed away this week. To pay tribute to him and highlight the continuing relevance of his research, we are publishing a text by Danny Trom[1], that explores the echoes between Nora’s Rethinking France [original: Places of Memory] project and Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. The confrontation between these two divergent approaches to the question of memory gives rise to a reflection on the specificity of Jewish historical consciousness and its relationship to memory, whose permanence is linked to the revolutionary promise of Emancipation. What does it mean to remember when the republican ideal is faltering?
The debate launched by Gabriel Abensour on the decline of French Judaism continues to provoke reaction. His uncompromising diagnosis was initially responded to by David Haziza and Julien Darmon, but this week, it is Jérémie Haddad’s turn to add his two cents to the discussion. In his view, we must first draw conclusions from the decline of consular and assimilationist French Judaism in order to recognize the specific characteristics from which French Judaism truly derives its spiritual and intellectual vitality. Once freed from its “proud pretension of fulfilling a prophecy,” even at the cost of awareness of its precariousness, isn’t French Judaism better equipped to face contemporary challenges?
Notes
| 1 | An initial version of this text first appeared in La France en récits, edited by Yves Charles Zarka, Puf, 2020 |
