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.

We must start by knowing what we mean by the words we use. The multiple historical and doctrinal definitions of Zionism and anti-Zionism are well known. But we can also take a conceptual view. For example, in saying this: by Zionism, we mean the political position that establishing the state of Israel on land that was already settled, by expelling its inhabitants, poses no problem in principle. Anti-Zionism, accordingly, is the political position that sees the establishment of the state of Israel in the land of Palestine as a problem in principle. Besides its simplicity, this definition has the advantage of being open-ended – that is, it poses a problem without presupposing the solution. Which is why only a crude lie could turn anti-Zionism into a project to ‘drive the Jews of Israel into the sea’.

In reality, however indisputable it may have seemed after the Holocaust, the Zionist promise to give the Jews not just a state but – as the phrase goes – ‘a state where they could live in safety’ was spurious from the outset, in fact a contradiction in terms. Only a terra nullius could have made it otherwise. So long as the land had prior inhabitants, the state of Israel that came into being could not know safety: you cannot dispossess people without them fighting to recover what belongs to them. Thus, the bankruptcy of the European ‘West’ was compounded, and the industrial mass murder of the Jews ‘repaired’, through an impossible political arrangement: Israel. Shlomo Sand offers the brutal summary: ‘Europe vomited us, the Jews, onto the Arabs of Palestine.’

This is where we are, seventy-seven years later. The genocide is not some unfortunate turn of events, still less the act of a monstrous leader who need only be removed. For the truth is that a terrifying proportion of Israeli society has quite literally become insane. Another possible title for this article might have been ‘Open Air’. Since 2005, Gaza has been an open-air prison; today it is an open-air concentration camp, while swathes of Israeli (and diasporic) society resemble an open-air psychiatric ward. The Israeli psychologist Yoel Elizur, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, collected testimonies from soldiers deployed in Gaza. One of them said: ‘from the moment you leave the place called Israel and enter the Gaza Strip, you are God’. Another: ‘I felt like, like, like a Nazi . . . it looked exactly as if we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.’

What vertigo grips us in the face of such total catastrophe – psychic, political, historical? What will we learn of the sadistic abominations committed in the Sde Teiman torture camp, when the facts are finally brought to light? What can be said about the depravity of luring the starving to a food distribution point only to shell them with artillery? Social media is flooded with videos of soldiers documenting their murderous jouissance, and Israeli civilians exulting in the spectacle, many demanding in the same breath that we not forget that the Palestinian children are to be slaughtered as well. Some might object that these torrents of filth, however abundant, are no index of the society as a whole. To be sure, there are the others: soldiers in moral devastation, reservists who refuse to ‘go back’, longstanding opponents of a colonial consensus that has become a consensus in favour of annihilation. Eyal Sivan reminds us of their numbers: negligible. One poll published in Haaretz found that 82 per cent of Israelis support the complete expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and 65 per cent subscribe to the myth of Amalek and the divine commandment to wipe them out. The core of this society is descending into madness.

There inevitably comes a time when political projects of domination reveal their true nature. Here then, the fundamental features of Zionism are exposed in full light: it is colonial, racist – that much was already clear – and, when necessary, genocidal. This is what we have come to understand. And this, after all, is logical: there is no Zionism with a human face just as there cannot be a secure Jewish state on land taken by force. At this point, the historical alternative presents itself. Either Israeli society persists in its drive towards extermination, laying the ground for its moral perdition, and eventually its downfall. Or it recognises that from the moment it committed the Nakba it was preparing its own catastrophe, and in doing so perceives the sole viable future for a Jewish presence in Palestine: a binational, egalitarian state. As is often the case, the apparently utopian is the only genuine realism.

There are seven million Jews in Israel, they are not going anywhere, no serious anti-Zionist position is asking them to. The anti-Zionist demand is disarmingly, biblically simple: equality. Equality for all inhabitants, equality in dignity and in rights, equality in the right of return for refugees, equality in everything.

One can grasp without difficulty the anxiety that such a prospect might arouse in many Israelis, or Jews in the diaspora. All the more so given that, after the Holocaust, anxiety was bound to become the dominant affective condition of Jewish identity – which explains the spasms of violence and senseless disorientation whenever the palliative solution called ‘Israel’ is brought into question. ‘It is abnormal, inhuman that the whole world should be antisemitic’, declares Elie Chouraqui, a mediocre film director- turned-pundit – completely unhinged – to a dumbfounded Luc Ferry. But no amount of emotional intensity can alter the objective reality of the situation: land was taken from its occupants. There is nothing, not even the Holocaust, that can erase, let alone justify, that fact. The alternative is stark. Short of a murderous flight onward, the original crime of the state of Israel admits of no resolution but equality.

Translated by Grey Anderson.

Read on: Rashid Khalidi, ‘The Neck and the Sword’, NLR 147.