MICHEL GURFINKIEL: SUPPORT ISRAEL UNCONDITIONALLY
Support Israel “unconditionally” [Google translation] By Michel Gurfinkiel
http://www.dreuz.info/2011/11/soutenir-% C2% AB-unconditionally-% C2% BB-israel /
Most Jews in France unconditionally support Israel. It is a fact. It is also a kind of ontological necessity, which can neither be surprised nor indignant. For three reasons.
First, the particular historical experience of this community. French Jews today are, for half of them survivors of the Holocaust, or direct descendants, one or two generations of survivors. And the other half of the Jews expelled from Islamic countries, or, upon a generation or two again, their direct descendants.
The two tragedies, it should be emphasized, are interrelated. The Holocaust, where it took place, struck indiscriminately Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Ideologies which it has fed, or who made it possible, directly influenced or reactivated ones in the East led to ethnic cleansing or community. In both cases, the Jews were crushed as Jews. In both cases, they were betrayed: by governments in which they had placed their faith and trust in the companies they thought they were full members.
How, then, French Jews would they not attached to the world’s only Jewish state, founded and inhabited by other Holocaust survivors and others expelled from the country of Islam?
But this reason alone would perhaps not alone.
Two complementary reasons give it its full meaning: the very existence of Israel is still disputed to this day by most of its neighbors and more distant states, in violation of the Charter and the UN, the Israel, despite this state of perpetual war and genocidal threats against him, is a democracy, and the decisions that its leaders are called on to take are, democracy is rightly the main criterion modern political legitimacy, absolutely legitimate.
The support that French Jews are in Israel, so pure it is, is nevertheless subject to two types of criticism – or rejection.
The first comes from non-Jewish circles, and especially politicians, who do not hesitate to mention in this respect, openly or obliquely, in brutal terms or using innuendo, a “dual loyalty.” Or, which is the same today, “communitarianism.” Let me be clear about them. Their arguments fall at least in the classic anti-Semitism, which conceded to the Jews of existence in the submission or humiliation.
I note the reappearance, in their speeches, themes quite old. It was common and fashionable before 1940 and until 1942, to distinguish between the “Israelites” French, long-time associate of the national community, which wanted to “discrete” and “Jews” foreign, or freshly naturalized, and noisy protest. Vichy High Commissioner to the Jewish Question, Xavier Vallat, still claimed the first save by sacrificing the latter.
This trope – against which the CRIF history, that of the Resistance, was expressly raised in 1943, when he federated “Israelites” and “Jews” in the same struggle – has rebounded under the Fifth Republic, through a new distinction just as fallacious as the first among Ashkenazi Jews, so European, so French, so able to move away from Israel, Sephardic Jews, exotic, unassimilable, so subservient to the state mean, I refer you to the secrets of the third President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, such as reports Renaud Camus, the Saint-Simon of our time, the volume of his journal devoted to the year 2009 (* Krakmo, Fayard). It can be discerned even today, especially in connection with Canard Enchaîné reported October 5, 2011: The President noted with “satisfaction” that the “Jewish community”, ie some of its official leaders, “proved worthy and responsible as a result of my speech at the UN. “. About the highest authorities have not thought it
necessary to deny.
The other type of criticism or rejection comes from Jewish circles minority, but influential, present in most of the high Jewish elites, Israel, Europe and America.
This doctrine was formulated for the first time by the Israeli military and intellectual distinction, General Yehoshafat Harkabi, former Director of Military Intelligence of his country. Harkabi believed, in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the Israeli presence in the West Bank, Gaza or the Golan constitutes a grave strategic error.
Harkabi was a great soldier and a great intellectual. I learned a lot personally in his articles and books. He was certainly entitled to think what he thought, and the duty to know. But in 1987, he had circulated a text, Israel before the fateful choice (later expanded and turned into a real book), where he felt that since the Israelis were unable to make themselves “good choice” it was that America being forced, and that since the Jewish lobby U.S. officials discouraged from exercising such pressure, it was desirable to create, in the United States and elsewhere, a lobby-against neutralisât the first incitât Washington and instead to exercise the irresistible pressure on Jerusalem. Because, he observed, “American friendship towards us we could be equally harmful, paradoxically, in this phase that Arab hostility.”
Disseminating such a text was a crime against democracy. Or the people are sovereign and we can not challenge decisions which it manages through debates where all opinions expressed. Or it is not. Harkabi felt that it was not. His doctrine has continued to rebound through various U.S. and European initiatives, including in recent years (Arshsav Shalom, the Geneva Initiative, J Street, J Call). The Democrats will treat as it deserves.
Reproduction is authorized, and even actively encouraged, with the following and the link below:
© Michel Gurfinkiel, 2011
The original article can be found on the blog of Michael Gurfinkiel
Comments are closed.
