ROUDINESCO - Revisiting the Jewish Question

Table of Contents

First published in French as Retour sur la question juive ditions Albin Michel, 2009

This English edition Polity Press, 2013

This book is supported by the Institut franais (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme (www.frenchbooknews.com).

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5219-1

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8374-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8373-7 (mobi)

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go to all those who have helped me, in one way or another, to write this book: Laure Adler, Jacques-Martin Berne, Stephane Bou, Mireille Chauveinc, Raphal Enthoven, Liliane Kandel, Guido Liebermann, Arno Mayer, Maurice Olender, Benot Peeters, and Michel Rotfus.

Thanks to Dominique Bourel for reading the proofs.

And thanks, of course, to Olivier Btourn for all his support.

Things have been said about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contradictory to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate by granting the Jews imprescriptible human rights which no human power could ever take from them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, a sectarian spirit and selfish interests. [] But to what can we really impute these faults but our own injustices? After having excluded them from every honour, even from the rights to public esteem, we have left them with nothing but lucrative speculations. Let us deliver them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by granting them the dignity of men and citizens; let us hope that it can never be a policy, whatever people say, to condemn to degradation and oppression a multitude of men who live among us.

Maximilien de Robespierre, 23 December 1789

That Cline was a writer given to delirium is not what makes me dislike him. Rather it is the fact that this delirium expressed itself as anti-Semitism; the delirium here can excuse nothing. All anti-Semitism is finally a delirium, and anti-Semitism, be it delirious, remains the capital error.

Maurice Blanchot, 1966

Introduction

Nazis, that's what you are! You drive the Jews out of their homes you're worse than the Arabs.

This accusation was uttered in December 2008 by some young fundamentalist Jews settled in Hebron, in the West Bank, who had never experienced genocide: it was aimed at other Jews, soldiers of the Israeli Army (Tzahal) who had been given orders to evacuate their compatriots, and who had also never experienced genocide.

Nazis worse than Arabs: these words symbolize the passion that has been spreading unstoppably across the planet ever since the IsraeliPalestinian conflict became the main issue in every intellectual and political debate on the international scene.

At the heart of these debates and against a background of killings, massacres, and insults we find extremist Jews reviling other Jews by calling them worse than Arabs. This shows how much they hate the Arabs, and not just the Palestinians, but all Arabs in other words, the Arab-Islamic world as a whole, and even those who are not Arabs but who claim a stake in Islam in all its varieties:

If you cross the walls, the barbed wire, the borders, you will inevitably encounter the same passion, kindled by extremists who, though they may not represent public opinion as a whole, are just as influential. From Lebanon to Iran, and from Algeria to Egypt, the Jews are often, in one place or another, called Nazis, or seen as the exterminators of the Palestinian people. And the more Jews as a whole are here viewed as perpetrators of post-colonial genocide, as followers of American imperialism, or as Islamophobes,

In that world, people eagerly read Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Mythical Foundations of Israeli Policy;

The enemies [the Jews] have been scheming for a long time, and they have consolidated their schemes, in order to achieve what they have achieved. [] [Their] wealth [permitted them to] take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [] They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B'nai B'rith and the like. [] They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein.

If we turn now to the heart of Europe, especially to France, we see that the same insults erupt with equal vehemence. Many essayists, writers, philosophers, sociologists, and journalists support the Israeli cause while heaping insults on the defenders of the Palestinian cause, while the latter insult them back and both sides endlessly call each other Nazis, Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and racists. On the one side are the sworn opponents of the Shoah business or Holocaust industry, the genocidal Zionist state, national-secularism, collaborators Judaeolaters and Ziojews (Zionist Jews). On the other, we have the fierce critics of collabo-leftist-Islamo-fascist-Nazis.

In short, the IsraeliPalestinian conflict experienced as a structural split tearing the Jews and the Arab-Islamic world apart, but also as a rift within the Jewishness of the Jews or as a break between the Western world and the world of its former colonies now lies at the centre of all debates between intellectuals, whether they are aware of it or not.

And it is easy to understand why. Ever since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis a tragic event underlying a new organization of the world from which sprang the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the State of Israel in Palestine the notions of genocide and crime against humanity have become applicable to every country in the world. As a consequence, and gradually, the so-called Western discourse of universalism has been seriously undermined. Since the most civilized nations in Europe had given birth to the greatest of barbarities to Auschwitz it was now possible for all the peoples humiliated by colonialism or the various forms of capitalist exploitation, as well as for all minorities oppressed on grounds of their sex, the colour of their skin, or their identity, to criticize so-called universal values of freedom and equality. After all, in the name of these values, Western states had committed the worst crimes and continued to rule the world while perpetrating crimes and misdemeanours that went completely against the principles of the Declaration of Rights that they themselves had enacted.