by FREDERIC LORDON
The first says: ‘Zionism could never have triumphed without the Holocaust.’ The second adds: ‘Netanyahu more or less let it happen in order to take back Gaza.’ Who are these people? Where are they speaking? How long before they are denounced by the media, summoned by the police and taken into custody? The answer: they are talking heads of the French political centre, the former MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit and erstwhile education minister Luc Ferry, appearing live on the cable news channel LCI. As for their public condemnation and visit to the police station, we’re still waiting. Such is the scale of the tectonic shift.
The astonishing volte-face unfolding before our eyes, and the collective whitewashing that accompanies it, will go down as a textbook case in the annals of propaganda. A reversal emanating from the most hypocritical precinct of the propaganda bloc – the ‘humanists’: Delphine Horvilleur, France’s first female rabbi, Joann Sfar, a well-known cartoonist, and Anne Sinclair, the former TV anchor. Celebrated for their moral integrity, all three were perfectly comfortable with eighteen months of mass slaughter, systematically smearing those who saw things clearly from the beginning and took every risk – symbolic, legal, even physical – to decry the genocide and the obscene conflation of support for Palestine with antisemitism. Then, once these paragons of virtue gave the signal, the mass of denialists moved in lockstep, pretending to open their eyes – or better yet, claiming that they had never been closed in the first place.
Why have our ‘humanists’ finally come around? Not out of any stirring of a universal conscience, but rather to protect a set of interests, starting with their own, symbolic and reputational, imperilled by complicity with a crime that has broken every taboo; followed by those of the Zionist project itself, whose political and moral credentials have been shipwrecked, and yet must be kept afloat – hence the need to present its ‘humanist’ face.
Here is the heart of the matter: the question of Zionism, the axiom that must be preserved at all costs, whether by silencing dissent or feigning contrition. This is the neuralgic point where repression persists, even amid the great reversal. The Socialists and the Greens, in the colonial camp from day one, deniers of seventy-seven years of occupation, censors of every voice raised in defence of the Palestinian cause, mute before the massacred until permission to speak had been granted – these same Socialists and Greens, only a month ago, voted through the infamous university censorship law affirming the equivalence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and criminalizing the former in the name of the latter. All the more perverse, at a moment when the concept of Zionism is the only thing preventing the blanket attribution of a crime to all Jews, including those who utterly reject it. Anti-Zionism, far from being equivalent to antisemitism, is a bulwark against it.
In these quarters, European panic is understandably at fever pitch. By what right do the perpetrators of the Judeocide presume to pass judgement on the state of Israel? Overwhelming historical guilt, complicated by a troubled philosemitic conversion, logically issued in a carte blanche – and the message was received. But the truth is this: there will be no settlement either in the region or, by the classic boomerang effect, at home, until we break with the wretched euphemisms of the ‘humanists’ and return to politics: that is, to calling the indisputable into question.
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