At the call of the families of hostages and a large section of civil society, a general strike will take place on August 17 to denounce a military strategy in Gaza that is perceived as a dead end and an aggravation of the consequences of the war, both for Palestinian civilians and for Israeli captives and combatants. The first large-scale mobilization since the judicial reform crisis in 2023, it crystallizes the political divide in Israel. Bruno Karsenti sees it as a reminder of a fundamental question: that of the founding principle of the Jewish state and the very future of the Zionist project.
The war triggered by Hamas’ deadly attack on October 7 has been raging for 22 months. At the time of writing, the Israeli government has decided to take it to a new level, presenting as a solution what is nothing more than an escalation to extremes. The ever-growing number of civilian casualties is a historic tragedy for the Palestinian people, which this so-called “conclusive phase” will only seal. On the Israeli side, the tension of war will grow even further, and there is a real fear that it will soon reach a breaking point. For while national unity prevailed in the early stages of the conflict, and was reestablished when the deployment of forces was justified on other fronts—the neutralization of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the halt to Iran’s nuclear program—it has gradually cracked over the Gaza campaign. We have now reached the point where the government and most of civil society appear to be in direct opposition. As in the struggle against judicial reform in March 2023, when the government risked leading the country down an anti-democratic path, a general strike has been called against the announced military strategy. At the time, the government was forced to back down in the face of massive protests. These protests were not only led by citizen movements, but also by the main intermediary bodies that structure the country’s life. What will happen this time? No one knows. Throughout the war, weekly rallies continued and never let up, representing a permanent platform for criticism and collective reflection on the course of events. That this will reach a new threshold, where the rejection of the policies pursued will gain in intensity and scope to the point of blocking the path forward, is a possibility and, indeed, the hope that is emerging at this moment.
Throughout this long war, the longest the country has ever known, one thread has remained unchanged. For Israeli society, the fate of the hostages and the consideration of their rescue, not as a secondary issue or a background wish, but as a primary goal of the war itself, have remained a decisive criterion for positioning. Only the far right within the ruling coalition has unflinchingly assumed that this was not the case, that the destruction of the Palestinian enemy must take precedence over everything else. Netanyahu, however little he cares about the civilian population of Gaza, does not show this harshness towards the hostages in his statements. He assures us that he will never forget the two “goals of the war,” which he considers equal and exclusive. But the official rhetoric sounds like a litany, with actions belying words, so that the latter have long since ceased to deceive a disillusioned public.
This has been said many times in K, and at this moment of escalation in the conflict, it must be repeated. For the particular form of state that is Israel, considered in itself and in terms of its function for the entire Jewish existence, the question of hostages has a cardinal significance.
It should be remembered here that modern states have formal characteristics that make them all similar. Insofar as they are democratic states governed by the rule of law (which is the case with Israel), these characteristics even unite them in a common destiny (Europe, in principle, is based on this conviction). However, this does not make them void of meaning, mere formal devices. Each has its own will, which is the source of its moral and political motivation. For each state, this motivation is unique: it stems from the concrete society that built it, based on its own history and sense of justice. The question of what kind of state is desired by the unique society of which it is the state is therefore never a trivial one. In truth, it is even the decisive question. Hence, let us note in passing, the symbolic and insubstantial nature of a “recognition” declared from outside. As for the driving force behind this will, it can be said that it is based on a certain mode of solidarity among the members of this historical society. It moves it through and through, in that it is capable of constantly motivating the actions of individuals by directing them toward a common goal.
That the Israeli government has never lived up to the founding principle of the state—to ensure the survival of the Jewish people—has been made increasingly clear by the hostage crisis.
The uniqueness of the solidarity that constitutes the Jewish state refers, socially and historically, to the rescue of the Jews. Through the laws adopted and decisions taken by this state, whether in its internal life or in its external relations, the fact that Jews constitute a structurally minority people, affected by an ineradicable fragility within the non-Jewish nations where they are scattered, is never lost sight of. The adoption and use of the egalitarian and democratic form of the modern state—the form best suited to minimizing the risk of persecution of Jewish minorities—was one way of responding to this consideration. The ultimate justification for Israel as the state of the Jews lies here. This state draws its political and moral strength from the idea of providing a refuge for the structurally minority Jewish people. For the same reason, it also has a mission toward the diaspora that it cannot ignore at any time or in any of its fundamental choices. For it assumes responsibility for all Jewish life potentially threatened anywhere in the world. Every Jewish life counts for this state, not simply in terms of ensuring its security in a generic sense, but insofar as it constitutes for each and every one a focal point embodying the survival of the entire people.
Jewish survival is the very principle of Israel’s existence. By this we mean the broad policies it decides to pursue—including, of course, wars—but also, and inseparably, the commitment that this state can count on from its citizens, the mobilization it can draw upon to act on itself and in the world. For if a state—any state—must have meaning in order to truly exist, it is always, in the final analysis, from the perspective of its members that this meaning is felt.
That the Israeli government has never lived up to this principle has been made increasingly clear by the hostage issue as it has unfolded in the conduct of the war in Gaza. Whatever the outcome, it can already be said that it will have revealed the ideological crisis that Zionism has been going through for too long. A crisis whose two symmetrical symptoms are the rise of right-wing politics and religious Zionism on the one hand, and anti-Zionism and post-Zionism on the other. The explicit motivation behind the mobilizations calling for an end to the war is that a new line must be drawn where Israel can reconnect with its founding principles, beyond or rather within the political divisions themselves. These mobilizations are part of a decisive ideological struggle that will determine the future of the country and the unity of the Jewish world. A world in which Israel occupies not a central position, but a point of equilibrium that is difficult to imagine breaking down.
It could be said that by digging in our heels on the hostage issue, we are only reinforcing the assertion of Jewish particularism; that the defenders of the hostages’ cause are not, in this respect, so different from the religious Zionists and warmongers they oppose—if we consider that the latter can, after all, claim to be merely more consistent in what is required, in terms of necessary sacrifice, by the act of extending and consolidating the shelter of the Jews.
It is to misunderstand the significance of highlighting Jewish lives, reclaimed in their singularity as existences currently under threat—which is what hostages are by definition—for authentic Zionism as for modern politics in general. It is to refuse to see that what is at stake here is a challenge that has been historically determined within 20th-century Europe: that of the risks to which minorities as such are exposed, of which Jews are not the exclusive representatives, but rather the most prominent witnesses, precisely in the modern context of nation-states. It means acknowledging that the façade of universalism that these states generally claim to uphold is insufficient to make the peoples and individuals they bring together subject to a truly egalitarian policy, i.e., one free from discrimination and potential persecution. This is something that is never entirely achieved, but it is something to which we must strive.
The defense of hostages and the conduct of a just war are two sides of the same coin of commitment that lies at the root of the Jewish state.
The Hamas militiamen, for their part, are the radical enemies of the Jews: the violence they have chosen to pursue by hunting down and killing their victims one by one, and kidnapping others to hold them in chains, torture them, and display their suffering, makes them the most visible representatives of the persecutors of the moment. Their actions have always been nothing but a work of death. For the same reason, they are also the gravediggers of the Palestinian cause, the people they claim to defend while treating them as a mass to be sacrificed. They are the enemies of their own people, as they are of all peoples who seek to reclaim the individual lives that make them up and who, through this collective endeavor, commit themselves to a universalism that is effective and not merely verbal. A universalism lived intensively and not extensively, where it is from within individual identities and through the work they are capable of doing on themselves that the break with identity-based partiality and the adversity it generates is achieved.
This is precisely what was at the root of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state. This is what motivates its current struggle against all forces that deny this state the right to exist. There is no doubt that this struggle is on the agenda. For these forces are powerful today, and they have allies that extend far beyond Hamas and the state and non-state entities that share its desire for elimination. There is no doubt, in particular, that a distortion of universalism, its translation into an abstract humanitarianism that uses indistinctness to cover up its own rejections and inclinations, can fuel, consciously or unconsciously, this ill wind in the West. The trend that brings together Israel’s absolute enemies (by “absolute,” we mean all those whose most ardent desire is to see this state wiped off the map as quickly as possible) is not about to end. But this must not obscure the essential point: if the struggle for the fate of the hostages has the Jewish meaning that we have emphasized, and if this experience reaffirms a certain conception of national identity, then it is impossible for Israel’s war to have any other people as its adversary. If war has its demands, if Israel in war finds itself confronted with states and groups that effectively want its disappearance and proudly claim it, the fact remains that civilian lives must matter to it in an essential way. That is to say, as lives that are embodied in other peoples, with whom the Jewish state, more conscious than any other state of what the historical persistence of a people means, intends to coexist peacefully.
This obviously applies to the lives of the Palestinian people. This is what the anti-Zionist camp in the broadest sense has never understood during this war: that the defense of hostages and the conduct of a just war are based on exactly the same unitary principle, both political and moral—the two aspects being inseparable here. In truth, they are mutually understandable because they are two sides of the same commitment that lies at the root of the Jewish state.
These considerations are completely foreign to the Israeli government in charge of conducting the war. The plan for Gaza presented by Netanyahu is its outright negation. As a result, opposition and a return to reason have been entirely shifted to Israeli society. Its voice is now being raised and heard without ambiguity. It is up to us, in the diaspora, that is to say, in this other pole of Jewish life that is playing its part in the post-Shoah era, to amplify its reach—thus making our belated but no less indispensable contribution to the revival of the Zionist project.
Bruno Karsenti
