The war is finally over. It is with immense relief and unadulterated joy that we welcomed and celebrated the news of the past week. The deadly sequence that began two years ago and has been dragging on ever since has now come to an end, and in many ways this feels like a liberation. Liberation for the surviving captives of October 7, and liberation for the people of Gaza from the violence of Israeli bombing. Achieving this result was the most urgent task, one that had been delayed for too long, relegating everything else to the background. Now that this has been achieved, new political horizons are opening up in the Middle East, both for the Palestinians and for Israel’s relations with its neighbors. Caution is obviously called for, but the mere seed of possibility is already cause for celebration.
For the State of Israel, this liberation is an opportunity. It is a chance to chart the course that the state intends to follow in the future, to reexamine the meaning of its policies, and to question where they have proven to be flawed. For what this sequence of events has brought to light—but which had already been clear at least since the political crisis triggered by the announcement of the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform project—is the extent of the disagreements within Israel over the meaning of realized Zionism. Israelis are expected to clarify what the existence of the refuge state means to them today, between a democratic path that will have to assume the heavy demands of appeasement, and a neo-messianic path that will be part of the general trend of moving away from the rule of law in favor of a policy of power. It is hard to see how they could avoid facing this alternative. The Israeli democratic aspiration is as strong as it is tenacious—as recent signs have again attested—and it deserves the trust and support of Jews in the diaspora. The fact remains that it is their own future that Israelis will have to decide on.
There may be one last, more obscure and less avowable reason for the relief we felt this week. For on October 7, 2023, every Jew experienced the reactivation of a specific principle of solidarity, forged in exile, which sees in a single life threatened, reduced to its purest destitution, the entire survival of the entire people at stake. On that day, when the state that most strongly embodies this principle faltered, and on each day since then that the hostages remained in captivity, Jews were called upon by their solidarity. Now, however, the direct threat to Israel’s existence has receded, and the last surviving hostages have just been released. The call to action is therefore fading. Of course, the principle of solidarity persists, always available for reactivation, and the entire people, scattered as they are, are today experiencing their unity with great emotion and jubilation. But tomorrow? Tomorrow is fraught with threats and challenges: between here and there, some may echo each other, but it is clear that there can be no unified perspective to address them.
Perhaps then the Jews of Europe, at least those who still attach significance to this label, are entitled to feel relieved of the need to be in two places at once. But relief, of whatever kind, cannot be a cause for complacency. For what this sequence has revealed about the crisis in Europe, which in this case is expressed in a resurgence of antisemitism—a resurgence that has found a paradoxical driving force in its denial—is that the diasporic condition has become more critical than it has been for a very long time. These post-October 7 developments will undoubtedly continue to unfold. However, with the closure that has just taken place there, what we can now expect is a clarification and settling of the situation here, and thus a highlighting of the real divisions. At K., we are more aware than ever of what the European future of the Jews requires of us.
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In this week’s issue, we present an analysis that goes beyond the immediate news mentioned above. Historian Jacques Ehrenfreund, drawing on the authority of Yitzhak Baer in 1936 and Marc Bloch in 1940, mobilizes history as “practical knowledge” to grasp what “has never before presented itself to us.” His analysis highlights the end of an era, one that began after Shoah and during which “the hatred of Jews, which had previously been a defining feature, suddenly became unacceptable.” According to him, October 7, 2023 marks the end of this protective interlude. Jewish existence, both in Israel and in the diaspora, is once again confronted with the test of hostility that European history seemed to have definitively disqualified. The historian deciphers in particular how a postcolonial reading of the massacre immediately “invisibilized” its antisemitic dimension, contributing to an effort to “de-singularize” the Shoah aimed at “breaking down” the “protective barrier around Israel” that the memory of the genocide still constitutes in Western opinion.
A rare text from 1973, long overlooked and which we are publishing in its entirety, already anticipated elements of this observation: that of Robert Badinter’s closing argument in the lawsuit brought by the LICA (now LICRA) against the bulletin “URSS,” a publication of the Soviet embassy in Paris. In condemning the state anti-Zionism promoted by Moscow at the time, the lawyer sought to show how this propaganda against Israel “drew on the sources of antisemitism.” Historian Emmanuel Debono introduces and contextualizes Badinter’s argument, shedding light on its contemporary significance.
From the very first days of the war, a new political divide emerged in Israel: should an agreement for the return of the hostages be negotiated, or not, at the risk of national security? Noémie Issan-Benchimol examines the coordinates of the opposition between the various Israeli “tribes” on this thorny issue. Tracing the traditional legitimization of hostage rescue in Jewish thought, Noémie Issan-Benchimol asks how the form of brotherhood specific to exile can relate to the state situation.