At a time when more than ever asserted the impasse, which dangerously weaken the authority of Mahmoud Abbas and the voice of reason among Israeli leaders, accumulating signs of a future armed confrontation between Israel and Hamas . The de facto truce observed was clearly taken advantage of by the Hamas to rearm, the firing of rockets against towns bordering the Gaza Strip resumed, which heightened the temptation can not the government's military Israel. To add to the woes, the good will of Europe they are approaching their traditional late hours and always with compassion?
Israel and Europe: the reasons for misunderstanding. - Interrogation on national identity as a Malay flush in France and in many countries of the European Union. Others have analyzed this malaise, its innuendo, its multiple determinants. I want to examine here how it blurs the eyes of some Europeans, the reading of Jewish identity and the identity of the Israeli nation. I need to do this, go back to World War II and describe three underlying trends.
The first nation-state, disqualified by the two great conflicts of the twentieth century e the benefit of the project of European peace and unity in a common area exceeding, both the nations and their rivalries. It creates a new supranational order, primarily legal and economic reaction to the horror of the state criminal regimes of Nazism and collaborators. This wonderful project was brought initially by men from the Resistance, socialist leanings and Christian Democrats. But this project was conceived and remains without a European identity.
The second trend is a reaction to the horror of the Holocaust and hatred rooted in the identity of the Other: the extermination of Jews because Jews. It is to sublimate the Other and to make an apology, the name of "Never Again . That is foreign, different, or may become an enemy, is now thought of as the Other, but that his place is clear. Whoever rejects the Other rejects the human race, it may even be amalgamated for the crimes against humanity. We have all become the Other, in a general indefinite and anonymous where individualism is the only thing shared and where anything goes because everything sells.
At the same time, under the double impact of European integration and globalization, politics and law have weakened and turned away from their primary mission: to organize community life, mastering the tensions and violence inside and outside its borders. European societies have become paramount rights over duties, they have become individualistic.
These developments lead to a Europe that aims to exceed cultural antagonisms to open to multiculturalism, which removes the question of the relationship to others abroad, in different, but very often questioned by any peculiarity in countries concerned, each for its future.
By its lack of clear identity, Europe is unable to answer these questions with something other than consumerism. And she could not prevent the return of "ethnic cleansing" in its periphery. Failing to meet its obligations and meet its responsibilities, it may propose that compassionate indignation. Was installed and compassion for the victims, all causes. The victim is the Other in a state of weakness, diminished identity, in fact the only identity that is consistent with the role unclear, poorly defined assigned. Forgetting that, as already said Hannah Arendt, " compassion without justice is one of the most complicit powerful devil. "
Israel took an opposite path, having long been a victim, having fertilized humanity from an identity so strong that it has passed into history. And after the men who share its values and ideals did not intervene during the killing. It is worth remembering that the number of Jews killed in Europe during the Holocaust remains higher than the Jewish population of Israel this year. Israel bases its nation-state when the nation state in Europe is disqualified. The war began in Israel when it ends in Europe. And Israel becomes the winner, without alternative.
Today, Israel is accused of behaving like their oppressors yesterday. It is sometimes called a racist state, the Nazi state. Perhaps, some will cry one day Israel is a state anti-Semite. An ideology of substitution is thus at work in Europe after the replacement theology put forward by Christianity to self-identify as "real" Israel.
In this reading of the world, non-Jews have learned from history and now lead as the "real" Jew by the creation of Europe, rising the supranational, the apology of the Other and the universal. Conversely the Jew in Israel behave like Europeans before the war, rooted in its nation-state.
ideology of substitution is based on an infringement of Jewish identity. It skews a relativism universalism indifferent, devoid of mutual obligation, but whose confrontation with what is different is unbearable. It takes so unthinking and automatic stereotypes and lies of the anti-Israeli propaganda. As reality French, American, Palestinian or Chinese, the reality Israel is far from perfect and should not be idealized or sanctified. However, like any foreign reality, it must be thought from itself and not through itself. As Emmanuel Levinas wrote, " is not to think me and all the other, but to be in front . Now, in the particular case of Israel, thought must first reject the loan-to-insult out of the sewer of hatred - a hatred that Jews are entitled to expect that Europe outlaws forever events.
For a European, understanding Israel suppose to meet with a reality that goes against its frame of reference. Only a free mind can both loosen and enrich this information from the past and bring about " What no eye has seen " (Isaiah 64, 3). Think freely, it starts by choosing his words, by resisting automation, amalgam, and reducing destructive to syllogisms. - Gilles Bernheim, Grand Rabbi of France, published in Le Monde of December 31, 2010.
© Solange Nuizières: Chenille rocket raid shelter in a kindergarten in Sderot . In People over there , November 2009.
