Emmanuel Macron’s quip about Israel’s original debt to the international community demonstrates the persistence of an outdated image of Jews and their relationship with nations. Gabriel Abensour reminds us in this text of the history of Zionism, and how this presidential statement seems medieval.
“Mr. Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a UN decision”. This insidious phrase was reportedly uttered by Emmanuel Macron during a cabinet meeting. While the President claimed that his words had been distorted, the Presidential Press Association took offence at this questioning, which it saw as a serious “challenge to press ethics”. In any case, this phrase, if uttered at all, is not just a diplomatic blunder against a sovereign state; it testifies to a Western inability to free itself from the image of the Jew as an eternal foreigner, whose very existence is a favor granted with condescending indulgence. This statement is likely to arouse the ire of Jewish communities around the world, while once again provoking incomprehension among their non-Jewish neighbors, who would see it as a legitimate appeal to respect international law. And yet, it is only through the prism of fifteen centuries of conditional Jewish life in the West that we can truly grasp the meaning of this phrase.
It’s all very well to invoke Jewish over-interpretation, but it’s hard to imagine a Western leader daring to remind the hundreds of peoples dominated, oppressed or colonized by the West that their contemporary existence as nations is due to the grace of ancient empires and their international metamorphoses. After all, as the most sordid of the French extreme right liked to point out, Algeria had never existed as a nation-state before 1962. Just as it is impossible to say that many Asian and African countries “owe” their existence to Resolution 1514, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”. A state cannot be created artificially, ex nihilo. At most, it can receive international recognition based not on charity, but on the terms of international law concerning the self-determination of peoples. Other nation-states cannot create states, but they can block this universal right to self-determination. Let’s remind the President, for example, of the Kanak people’s current claim towards France, which is still the colonial power.
A state cannot be created artificially, ex nihilo. At most, it can receive international recognition based not on charity, but on the terms of international law concerning the self-determination of peoples.
If we are to understand the roots of this Jewish existence, conditional on the grace of a third-party political authority, we need to go back to medieval times. In medieval Christian Europe, Jews were tolerated in various kingdoms and principalities. They received an edict of tolerance from the local lord, prince or bishop. With the status of servi camerae regis (servants of the crown), they were directly dependent on the local kinglet, who in turn had a duty to protect them. When a crisis struck the region, be it epidemic, famine, or when, for whatever reason, popular anger had to be appeased, all that had to be done was to revoke the said edict, and hope that divine grace would return to the city once the Jews had been driven out. Bishops, kings and princes were not necessarily anti-Jewish; they were above all pragmatic. It was better to sacrifice a handful of Jews for the sake of civil peace, than to defend them and risk losing power. To do this, they could easily rely on the Church’s official doctrine, theorized by Augustine, on the preservation of the Jewish people as a witness people.
The Jews themselves accepted this situation with a certain resilience, not least because they shared with their oppressor the paradigm of the Jew as a foreigner. By virtue of their history and faith, they saw themselves as a nation, a people in exile, scattered among the Gentiles. Their constant departures, their repeated expulsions, were but the terrestrial reflection of theurgic movements in the celestial spheres, where each suffering, each persecution, corresponded to a divine readjustment, awaiting the miraculous return to the promised land. Since this article is published during the festival of Sukkot, celebrating among other things the fragility of Jewish existence, let us mention the poem by Eleazar Ha-Kalir (6th century), perfectly illustrating this Jewish political theology in a text read in all Ashkenazi synagogues for centuries, on the day of Sukkot:
I am a wall, Pure as the sun.
Exiled and rejected, Compared to the palm tree.
For You I am sacrificed, Considered a sheep for slaughter.
Scattered among the haters, But embraced and bound to You.
I bear Your yoke, Unique in sanctifying You.
Oppressed in exile, I learn Your fear.
My cheek bruised, Given over to blows.
I endure Your suffering, Poor and tormented.
Redeemed by Your goodness, Sacred flock,
Assemblies of Jacob, Marked with Thy name.
We cry out: Save us!
Sustained by You. Deliver us!
Since the Jews did not evolve in a vacuum, their self-conception as a spiritual “wall” enduring the worst torments in order not to abandon their Creator crumbled with the advent of the Enlightenment. After fifteen centuries, the Christian West seemed to be in the throes of change, ready to reduce the impact of religion in favor of a shared citizenship, within a state owned by its constituent populations. Instead of the tolerance edicts of the Middle Ages, the first emancipation decrees appeared, notably in France.
Naturally, Jews had to pay their dues to merit this new citizenship. And, by and large, they accepted it. The Jews of France who, through the Great Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon, affirmed loud and clear that they now belonged to the French nation, that they would respect French laws, that they would fight for this country, for this homeland, and that they would consider other French citizens as their brothers. In Germany, Hungary and other countries where Jews were emancipated, the response was similar. The Jews would part with their former ethos in exchange for real inclusion in the nations where they had lived for centuries, sometimes millennia, exiled and repelled.
Despite their meteoric integration, assimilation at all levels of society and ardent patriotic commitment, emancipation turned out to be a lure for many Jews. Racial, political and cultural antisemitism soon replaced the old Christian anti-Judaism. As the antisemitism movement was quick to point out, a Jew’s citizenship was also conditional. Unsurprisingly, the Dreyfus Affair, in which the indictment of the Jew once again served to restore social peace, was one of the triggers for political Zionism. An Austrian journalist of Jewish origin, himself a fervent supporter of assimilation, observed in Paris that even almost a century after his ardent patriotic commitment, the Jew was still considered a different citizen, one apart from the rest, whose citizenship had yet to be proven. Theodore Herzl organized the first Zionist Congress in Basel.
Despite their meteoric integration, assimilation at all levels of society and ardent patriotic commitment, emancipation turned out to be a lure for many Jews.
While political Zionism was initiated in Western Europe by Jews who had a priori been assimilated, it was among Jews in the rest of the world that it soon met with widespread success. In Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, more and more Jews were pinning their hopes on nascent Zionism than on the broadening emancipation policy whose echoes reached Baghdad, Fez, Tunis and Damascus through the French and English colonial empires. When the first Zionist association was set up in Morocco in 1900, its founder, David Elkayim, made explicit reference to French antisemitism to explain to his flock that it was futile to hope to live off the West.
Then came the Holocaust, which definitively destroyed the promise of emancipation in the eyes of many Jews. Jews, no matter what they did, no matter how much they embraced their adopted homeland, would always be tolerated at best. Their citizenship would always be conditional. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, all it would take is a political, economic or religious crisis for Jewish rights to be called into question. These rights would never be acquired. To mention France alone, the French state under Vichy not only agreed to implement antisemitism legislation, but did so with rare zeal, not hesitating to initiate roundups. Nor did it spare the Jews of the colonies. The Jews of Algeria, who had been French since 1870 and had paid a heavy price in the First World War, simply had their citizenship revoked. Those from Morocco and Tunisia, whose status was that of natives, suffered various forms of vexation and persecution. For the average French Jew, the explosion of antisemitism in France after October 7 no longer comes as a surprise. It was expected.
Now we come to President Macron’s phrase. Of course, in 1947, the UN voted for the creation and existence of a Jewish state in part of Mandatory Palestine. At the time, the UN was a neo-colonial body, in the hands of the powerful powers that had won the Second World War, which granted itself the right to create or destroy nations, on the basis of completely disjointed borders that took no account whatsoever of the realities on the ground, and which to this day is responsible for numerous conflicts around the world. Would the State of Israel have existed without this vote? That’s a question no one can answer. The fact remains that the movement that gave birth to it – Zionism – existed long before the UN. As did the sentiment that drove millions of Jews around the world to immigrate to the land of Israel after its creation. Without these millions of Jews – overwhelming proof both of the perseverance of this people and of the otherness to which it was unwillingly reduced in the West and in the East – this country would never have survived its early years.
For a long time now, Western leaders, Macron included, have believed it their duty to constantly reiterate their “attachment” to the State of Israel’s right to exist. As if Israel’s existence still depended on their goodwill.
The fact that half of the Jewish people have moved to a third-world country should raise questions in the minds of any wise political leader. The fact that French Jews flock to Israel even when the latter is going through an existential war should prompt any president to question his policies. But rather than reflect on the perpetual political exclusion of Jews, Macron prefers to make the State of Israel the new Jew of the nations. The latter is tolerated; its existence is conditional on its ability not to disturb. If it fails, if it is not immaculate, if it is sometimes too much like other states, violent like others, at war like so many others, then this grace could be withdrawn.
Yet the State of Israel was not founded from a traditional Jewish perspective. On the contrary, most Zionist leaders hoped that, through a national existence, the Jewish people would finally achieve a normal existence. “A people like all peoples”, said the first Zionist leaders. This abandonment – or rather, secularization – of traditional Jewish theology remains to this day the bedrock of opposition to the State of Israel among some Orthodox. If Zionism failed at anything, it was in its naive belief that creating a state would ‘normalize’ the Jewish people. But the main reason lies in the international obsession with returning Israel to its medieval status as a Jew pardoned by the nations. This attitude exacerbates the Jewish feeling that the world, and especially the West, will never leave the Jews in peace. It prevents us from seeing Israel for what it really is: a tiny territory, in the grip of a conflict that is, after all, similar to so many others in its region. This international obsession, particularly evident at the UN, only strengthens the most extreme voices in Israel and the Middle East. Ironically, it also undermines the ambitions of leaders like Macron to make their mark on the international stage, perpetuating a cycle of mistrust and mutual incomprehension.
Of course, the West didn’t wait for Macron to condition Israel’s existence. For a long time now, Western leaders, Macron included, have believed it their duty to constantly reiterate their “attachment” to the State of Israel’s right to exist. As if this display of magnanimity in granting Israel the grace to exist were their last desperate attempt to conjure up a long-lost power, endlessly reenacting the posture of petty rulers granting and revoking privileges to Jews at will.
