By GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN*

When Didi-Huberman states that the situation in Gaza constitutes “the supreme insult that the current government of the Jewish state inflicts on what should remain its very foundation,” she exposes the central contradiction of contemporary Zionism.

Gaza or the intolerable. For months, and every day more so, we would say. This situation is two, three, a thousand times intolerable. First of all, of course, humanly, because of what the civilian population is suffering, crushed under the bombs of an army that, in the American style, believes it can “eradicate” (that is, pull a root from deep in the ground) by indiscriminately destroying everything that is on the surface (homes, hospitals, women and children, journalists, ambulance drivers, humanitarian workers…).

The situation is also politically intolerable, because the nameless voices that are raised against it are proving to be hopelessly powerless, since American bombs continue to be delivered and used on the ground. Benjamin Netanyahu no longer listens – and has not for a long time – to the world around him: tactical deafness, deeply cynical, but also suicidal at heart, apocalyptic, and thus reducing to nothing any possibility of a political solution to this conflict.

All this is well known, even if it needs repeating. There is, however, a third aspect of this intolerable situation: a psychic aspect, I would say, that particularly affects the Jews of the diaspora. Those who have never dreamed of any kind of empire, only of a civic life in the country, whatever it may be, where they have chosen to live. Those who do not place their Jewish existence in the crucible of a State. They carry on their backs, it is true, this enormous burden called history, gathered in masses or piles more or less well accommodated in the psychic meanders of their memory.

In 1893, Henry Meige, a student of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital, published a medical thesis on what he called the “wandering Jew syndrome”: in many cases, these were homeless migrants who had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe and had gone mad after having endured so many hardships. They could be recognized on the streets of Paris by the enormous bundles they carried on their shoulders, full of worn-out, miscellaneous, useless but sentimental objects.

Four decades later, after Hitler's rise to power, those who did not succumb to Nazi persecution became, in turn, migrants who endured miserable living conditions and the deprivation of rights for many, including great intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, who made a rigorous analysis of this situation in a now famous text entitled We, refugees (1943)

The rest of us today are certainly no longer Jewish refugees, but free citizens – more or less free – living in a country whose laws supposedly protect us from the centuries-old anti-Semitic syndrome. We are not directly at war, nor do we live in daily fear, nor are we prisoners, nor are we hungry, nor are we anyone’s hostages. There are still hostages held by Hamas there, and we do not know how many survive, how many will survive. There is an entire population of Gaza held hostage by endless revenge. We are therefore, in comparison to all this, no one’s hostages here.

But the intolerable situation in Gaza has thrown us into something like a paralysis of astonishment, an abysmal shame, a sign of our strangulation in a moral vise. Neither persecuted, nor refugees, nor prisoners, we are nevertheless psychological hostages of the situation created by the recent history – but in fact, a long time in the making – of this region of the Middle East. Faced with this situation, which is not new, some great minds, such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jérôme Lindon, have contributed, through the past, to easing the moral strangulation.

"Zakhor”, “remember”

Today, unfortunately, we have to start all over again. We have to reiterate that the weight of history on our shoulders is one thing, and the question of knowing what to do with it is another. Zakhor, “remember” in Hebrew. Remember and you will have a better understanding of your present existence and how to face your future.

But what, how and for what purpose do we remember? What desire emerges from this memory, depending on the use that is made of it? Endless mourning or emancipatory utopia? Obstinate paranoia (the other seen only from the perspective of hateful fear) or the possibility of an ethical relationship to be reimagined, to be started again?

In short, here we are, despite everything, brought back to the situation that Hannah Arendt, in the opening of her book The crisis of culture, summed up in an aphorism borrowed from René Char: “Our inheritance is not preceded by any will.” This disorientation, however, should not be used by anyone to turn us into psychic hostages.

With Gaza before our eyes, what do we want to remember to understand, if possible, the infernal logic of history? We spontaneously remember Aleppo, bombed by Bashar Al-Assad’s forces and Vladimir Putin’s air force; we see Mariupol and its ruins as far as the eye can see. And we feel dizzy and nauseous when we suddenly see the Warsaw ghetto systematically destroyed by the Nazis, burned house by house with all that was left of its population between April and May 1943.

This is an approach that is as obvious to make as it is difficult to accept in terms of Jewish history and ethics. If there is any legitimacy, it has a very simple corollary: the situation in Gaza – an “enclave,” as they say, that is, a starving, bombed-out ghetto on the brink of liquidation – constitutes, in fact, the supreme insult that the current government of the Jewish state inflicts on what should remain its very anthropological, moral and religious foundation. I refer to its most ancient biblical commandment: Zakhor – Jewish memory itself.

Thus, the first thing to remember is that the current violence of the Israeli army against the Palestinian civilian population has its own political tradition: it dates back to the movement whose deleterious effect the Labor Party – founder of the State of Israel – was unable to prevent over time.

Netanyahu is, after all, the zealous disciple of Menachem Begin [Prime Minister from 1977 to 1983], already described as a “fascist” by David Ben-Gurion and Hannah Arendt at the time of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, and later by Primo Levi at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. Begin who, as we know, was nothing more than a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky, author of The Iron Wall in 1923, founder of the “Revisionist Zionist Party”, of a “Jewish Legion” and later of Betar [far-right Zionist youth movement], which trained, in the time of Mussolini, in the fascist camp of Civitavecchia.

Fascism mirrored

I can easily imagine that many Tsahal [Israel Defense Forces] officers remember from childhood what their own grandfathers suffered under Nazism. This statement by one of them, on January 25, 2002, in the newspaper Haaretz, is even more overwhelming and symptomatic of a reversal of memory that shifts from compassion for the massacred civilians of the ghetto to a pragmatic concern for the military technique of the mass murderers themselves: “It is justified and even essential to learn from all possible sources. If the mission is to seize a densely populated refugee camp or to take the citadel of Nablus, and if the commander’s obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, he must first analyze and internalize the lessons of previous battles – and even, shocking as it may seem, the way the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.”

This inversion of memory is heartbreaking, embarrassing and revolting. But it does not characterize the creation of the State of Israel, nor the democratic tradition of its fundamental institutions, nor the call for justice – the intensity of the street demonstrations in Tel Aviv and the positions taken here and there attest to this – by a part of its population. Consequently, it in no way authorizes the aberrant inversion promoted by those who would like to transform Palestinians into “new Jews” and Jews into “new Nazis.”

But this kind of reversal is necessary when we give in to paranoid politics and the simple desire for revenge, that is, to a mimetic rivalry. Then, hatred for the other overrides everything (I imagine Emmanuel Levinas turning in his grave, as they say) and we end up using the same political weapons as our enemy. Thus, fighting an Islamo-fascist organization is a task that must not give rise to this kind of mirrored fascism, driven by a spirit of colonial conquest and absolute domination, which the civilian population of Gaza, deprived of any real political representation, has suffered for so long.

It seems that the Tsahal strategists are very intelligent. They must surely know how to combat a terrorist organization without having to starve and massacre so many civilians with bombs, unless they are to serve as instruments in a project of eradication for which, as far as I know, they were not trained in their military schools. But today it is the project of a political opportunist and of some theocrats, those religious fundamentalists absorbed in their frightening messianic activism, in their fantasy of the “Third Temple” or in their colonial perspective of “Greater Israel”.

By acting in this way, the soldiers of the Israeli army are only insulting the memory of their own genealogy, of their own ethical and religious tradition that goes back twenty-seven centuries. If there is any hope today, it lies in the protesters in Tel Aviv who also brandish images of children from Gaza, or in the hundreds of soldiers who refuse to fight because they understand the human and political aberration of murdering their – our – own cousins ​​in the name of Abraham, the father of Ishmael.

Georges Didi-Huberman is a professor at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. Author, among other books, of In front of the image (Publisher 34).

Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.

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