Mr President, dear François Hollande, I could never have thought that you might one day figure in the history of French socialism as something of a new Guy Mollet. And, to be frank, I cannot get truly used to this idea, such was my belief that you were aware of the danger of a socialist relapse into national blindness and international alignment, this pretence of civilizations which believe themselves superior to the point of using this as an alibi to justify the injustices they commit.
This Mollet-like ghost that haunts your political family is one you know very well. That of a militant who was devout to his party – the SFIO – and a leader with undeniable democratic and social convictions who ends up by losing all credit in a political sense, and his soul in a moral sense. All because he failed to understand the new world that, before his eyes, was in the process of being born. This was during the 1950s, and the emergence of a Third World, the rising up of subjugated peoples who shook the yoke of colonizers and imperialists amid a time of liberation and national independence.
Guy Mollet and the political majority of the Left that supported him, faced the situation by denying reality. They held on to a bygone world, already lost, adding to the misery with their stubbornness, deepening unjustness with their blindness. In that manner, they argued that Algeria should remain French at all costs, to the point of sending the army into a dirty war, to the point of authorising the use of torture, to the point of attacking freedoms and silencing the opposition. And it was with this same colonial mentality that they engaged our country in a disastrous military adventure against a sovereign Egypt in Suez, alongside a then young state of Israel.
Mollet was neither an imbecile nor incompetent. He was simply blind to the world and towards others. Others who, already, took the form of Arabs and Muslims from a diversity of origins who invited themselves back to the table of History, laying claim to their pride and seeking their freedom. And who, in the same movement of dignity and fraternity, cannot admit that today the injustice meted out to the Jews by Europe, that crime against humanity in which they had no part, can be followed by an enduring injustice against their Palestinian brothers, by the denial of their right to live in freedom in a proper state with secure and recognised borders.
Concerning Mollet, you know very well what followed, a disaster for your political family and, beyond, for all of the Left. You know this so well in fact that you concluded, in your 2006 book Devoirs de vérité (Duties of Truth), that it was: “A fault that was dearly paid for: twenty-five years in opposition is no little matter!” You might have added that on top of that came the renaissance of the French far-right, which had been eclipsed since the fall of Nazism, and also the advent of the exceptional institutions of the Fifth Republic, those of the Ceasar-like personal power of the presidential office. Twenty-five years of penitence, you insist, because the SFIO, the ancestor of your Socialist Party of today, “lost its soul in the Algerian War [of Independence]”.
You were so very clear about this that you added: “We still have apologies to give to the Algerian people. And we must ensure that what was does not happen again […] We are never sure to be right, to choose the right direction, to choose the proper orientation. But we must, at every major moment, ask these simple questions: are we acting according to our values? Are we sure of not altering our principles? Are we staying true to what we are? These questions must be asked at every moment, on pain of otherwise forgetting the lesson.”
Well, I have come to ask you these questions because, alas, you are in the process of forgetting the lesson and, in your own turn, becoming blind to the world and others. I ask you them given the stupefying errors of judgement you have made in face of this umpteenth chapter of war provoked by the Israeli government’s stubborn refusal to recognise the Palestinian reality. I have counted at least seven, leading France into the spiral of a war of worlds, of civilizations and identities; a war without an end, except for that of death and hate, of desolation and injustice. Of inhumanity, in sum, that dark path upon which humanity ends up destroying itself.
Adding hypocrisy to incoherence
1. You have firstly made a staggering political mistake. Doing away with France’s traditionally balanced position towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you aligned our country with the outrageously offensive position of the Israeli Right, with its refusal to compromise, and which governs a far-right explicitly racist, with no morals nor principles except for the stigmatization of the Palestinians and the hatred of Arabs.
Your position, as that expressed in your statement on July 9th, cites Hamas attacks as justification for the disproportionate Israeli riposte in which the civil population of Gaza would, yet again, pay the price. Your position, a knee-jerk and in large part improvised, ignores all the complexity of the situation, notably that of the infernal duo that are the Likud party and Hamas which both give themselves legitimacy amid the ruins of peace efforts.
Above all, your position is worrying for the future, in the context of an international situation that is increasingly uncertain. This green light given to a state whose military might is incomparable with that of its enemy is tantamount to giving retro-active legitimacy to the over-reaction of the United States after the 9/11 attacks, with its liberticidal Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq. In short, your position is one that turns its back on that which France, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, was able to build and affirm with the autonomy of its diplomacy in face of American blindness.
Since then, you have tried to moderate this neo-conservative alignment with statements calling for calm, for restraint by the Israeli military, and for the relief of Palestinian suffering. By doing so, you add hypocrisy to incoherence. Because it is a false compassion that is one based on a false symmetry of the belligerents. Israel and Palestine are not equals here, not only in terms of military force but also according to international law.
In violation of United Nations resolutions, Israel has maintained since 1967 a situation of occupation, of domination and colonization of territories conquered during the Six-Day War, and never been returned to the full sovereignty of a Palestinian state to come en devenir. It is this situation of prolonged injustice that in return provokes refusals, resistance and revolts, all the more so because the Palestinian authorities of the Fatah in the West Bank have been unable to bend Israeli intransigence - which, as a result, lends legitimacy to the military actions of Fatah’s rival Hamas since it imposed itself in Gaza.
Historically, the difference between progressive and conservative forces is that the former seek to reduce the injustice that causes disorder, while the latter are resolved to committing injustice to halt disorder. Unfortunately, Mr President, you have spontaneously chosen the latter camp, leading your own political family to become lost on the terrain of its adversaries.
2. You next blundered by knowingly confusing anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. It would be akin to blinding oneself to deny that, in France, the Palestinian cause has its wayward anti-Semitic elements, just as the Israeli cause has its anti-Arab and anti-Muslim extremists. But to assimilate all of those demonstrating in solidarity with Palestine with a resurgence of anti-Semitism is to become a docile relay of Israeli state propaganda.
Zionism, the nationalist Jewish movement, attained its goal in 1948 with the agreement of the United Nations – including the former USSR – amid the shock of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. To accept the historical legitimacy of the state of Israel, as eventually did the Palestinian national movement under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, does not imply that the policies of this state are beyond criticism or contestation. To be anti-Zionist in this sense is to refuse a never-ending war that comes from the claim to an exclusively-Jewish state in the Middle East, not only closed to all other elements but also built with the expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
To confuse anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is to install a political prohibition that serves a situation of oppression. It is to use the genocide against the Jews, for which Europe was guilty, for the discrimination against the Palestinians, in which as a result we become complicit. It is also, furthermore, to imprison the Jews of France in a position of required support for a foreign state whatever its actions, along the same logic that required French communists to support the Soviet Union, their other homeland, whatever its crimes. Whereas, obviously, one can be Jewish and anti-Zionist, Jewish and resolutely part of a diaspora rather than being blindly nationalist, just as there are citizens of Israel – alas, a too-small minority – who are opposed to colonisation and who express solidarity with the Palestinians.
To brandish this confusion as did your prime minister during the commemoration ceremonies of the July 1942 roundup of Jews at the Vél’ d’Hiv’, which became a symbol of the collaboration of the French state in the genocide committed by the Nazis, is as undignified as it is ridiculous. It is as if to say that to protest against the state of Israel’s repeated violations of international law is to open the path to a crime against humanity. It is as if to demand that justice at last for the Palestinian people, so that they can live, work and circulate normally in peace and security, would be tantamount to calling again for a massacre.
The right of equality and difference
That this argument was officially put forward, while the only massacres that are before our eyes are those against the civilians of Gaza, shows to what extent this supposed equivalence between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is brandished about to create indifference. To make us deaf and dumb. “Indifference, the worst attitude,” wrote the late Stéphane Hessel in his best-selling pamphlet Time for Outrage (whose original title in French was Indignez-vous !) a work which earned him so much contempt from the indifferent of all sides, and notably because Hessel wrote that today his “principle indignation concerns Palestine, the Gaza strip and the West Bank”.
Together with the eminent French thinker and sociologist Edgar Morin, who has also been targeted by calumnious cabals for his criticism of Israeli policy, Stéphane Hessel was symbolic of a Left that allows no compromise of its principles and values, one which has no hesitation in placing itself in question and which above all refuses to be caught in the trap of what some see as required of one’s origins or persuasions. During your presidential election campaign, Mr President, you invited this free Left to walk alongside you, to support you and to debate with you. Now, you have turned your back on it, deserting the path of hope traced by Hessel and Morin and, in the process, loosing those who once placed trust in you.
3. You also made the mistake of attacking a fundamental freedom, that of the right to demonstrate. In democracy – and it took a long struggle to achieve it – to express and defend one’s views in writing, to voice them in a meeting hall or to project them in a march in the street is a fundamental right which does not require authorization. A right that is not dependent upon the goodwill of the state or the police. Any eventual abuse of the exercise of this right is punishable after the event, not before it.
The history of street demonstrations is cluttered with moments of disorder and situations which run out of control, of violence in which are expressed neglected sufferings and humiliated anger, sometimes bitter feelings, challenging the state’s monopoly on the use of legitimate violence. There have been such demonstrations by workers, by peasants and farmers, by students. In recent times there have been those of the Breton 'Bonnets Rouges' movement, by Green militants against the Great West Airport site, and by conservatives against the same-sex marriage bill. In January, there was the so-called ‘Day of Anger’ march in Paris, in which racist and homophobic banners and chants were paraded and shouted along the capital’s streets.
If the police have the speciality of ‘maintaining law and order’, it is to make us learn how to live with this social tension that sometimes gets out of hand, which is suddenly expressed in confusion and violence by those who feel themselves to be usually without a voice, despised or ignored, and who are not necessarily likeable or honourable.
Now, with your prime minister, you have decided, explicitly targeting the youths of working-class neighbourhoods, that one issue alone justifies a ban on the right to demonstrate, namely solidarity with the Palestinians, a position that has been miserably reduced by government propaganda as a venting of anti-Semitism.
This decision is unprecedented – save for the move in December last year by Manuel Valls, when he was interior minister, to issue a ban on the right to organize a meeting, also for reasons of anti-Semitism. (At the time, we at Mediapart made clear, as we had already six years earlier, of our distaste for the anti-Semitic antics of stand-up comedian Dieudonné, whose shows were the object of the ban which we just as clearly opposed, as set out here in French). This ban against the right to demonstrate places your government upon the path towards a state of exception, where security is mounted against freedom. The umpteenth anti-terrorist bill of law that was presented before the cabinet earlier this month follows the same direction, brandishing again the same scarecrow as reason for limiting our fundamental rights. This is namely the threat of terrorism, of which the obvious reality is surreptitiously spread in an indistinctive manner to the ideas and positions adopted by our Muslim compatriots of diverse origins and culture.
To accept the war of civilizations abroad is to import the war to home. It leads to the criminalization of minority, dissident or disturbing opinions. And it is this irresponsible choice that was instantly taken by he who you chose to make prime minister, Manuel Valls, who designated the ‘enemy inside’ for public condemnation, pointing at a sort of fifth column more or less identified with Islam. And here, alas, far from calming tensions, you in turn have lost your way by giving in to this easy, short-term and little effective line on security.
4. You have also made the mistake of giving a religious dimension to the debate in this country about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is thus that after reducing the conflict to being what you described as “quarrels too far away from here to be imported”, you symbolically limited your efforts to ensure calm in France by organizing a meeting with the representatives of the different religions. After having reduced diplomacy to war, and politics to the police, the debate of ideas was then reduced, by you, to a conflict of religions – and by doing so came the risk of exacerbating such a problem.
Where questions of principle are at stake, those of justice and law, you pretend to see only an expression of persuasions and creeds. The truth is that you are prolonging the tragic mistake made by the Left ever since that section of the working class that descends from our colonial past have claimed their right to equality. Three decades ago, the ‘March for equality and against racism’ was reductively dubbed as the march of ‘les beurs’, the slang name given to French citizens of North African origin, who made up most of those taking part in the march. Just as the strikes in the French car industry during the early 1980s were described as Islamist movements all because among the demands of those taking part was the right to pray at the workplace.
This manner of reducing the other, namely the Muslim, into a religious, potentially foreign, and even threatening identity is to refuse to accept him or her as a complete citizen, one who is equal to others. One who has the same rights, among these that of being different, and to ask that this difference be accepted and respected. To obtain, in short, the same as our Jewish compatriots did, although only very tardily and under the weight of the crimes to which their kin were the victims: namely, to be accepted at last as being both French and Jewish. The one and the other. The one with the other. One that is not without the other.
A youth population abandoned to its demons
If you spontaneously think ‘religion’ when what is being expressed is dissatisfaction and anger in solidarity with the Arab world, where the Muslim culture and faith dominate, it is paradoxically because you have not accepted the evident existence of a multicultural France; to the banal reality of a plural France in which are diverse persuasions and heritages which, through a mixture of fear and ignorance, you regard as religious sectarianism. Yet French Muslims take part in politics, like you and me, thinking by themselves, and inventing, by their presence in the world and in face of its injustices and urgencies, a path of citizenship that is precisely what is called secularization.
It is thus, Mr President, that instead of raising the debate you have fuelled irascible reaction. Because by reducing French Muslims to an Islam which is itself already reduced to connotations of terrorists and integrists is to gift religious radicalization in a game of mirrors in which xenophobia ends up justifying the existence of sectarian communities. It is gift offered to all of those who have lost their way.
5. You have made a historic mistake by isolating the fight against anti-Semitism from other anti-racist movements. As if it needed to be placed apart. It is as if there was a hierarchy in crimes against humanity, the European crime of genocide being more important than other European crimes, be they concerning slavery or colonialisation. As if the memory of this one monstrous crime should diminish indignation, or even simply vigilance, towards other crimes, this time those of war being committed today. And this in the name of the origins of those who commit them, brandished like an absolutory excuse, whereas you know very well that origin, birth or belonging, whatever these may be, protect nothing and certainly not human folly.
You and your prime minister have not only thus encouraged a detestable competition among victims, instead of encouraging common causes that should be initiated and championed, you have also shown a form of anti-racism that is markedly forgetful. Because it does not suffice to remember only of the crime committed against the Jews. Even then, it is necessary to learn and pass on the lesson of the process that led to it: the acceptance and habit of designating scapegoats, with caricatures and calumnies, mixed together in an ideological gruel of ignorance and distrust which fed persecutions.
How can one fail to see that now, today, in everyday life in our society, it is firstly our compatriots of Muslim origins, culture and faith who occupy this little enviable place? And how can one not understand that by remaining indifferent or insensitive to their lot, the daily cases of small discriminations and large detestation, we are making the whole of our society used to a series of exclusion – because racism functions like a Russian doll – against Arabs, against the Roma, against Jews and against black people, carrying on all the way to homosexuals and other supposed deviants?
To be concerned only with the resurgence of anti-Semitism is to erect an extremely fragile edifice against the revival of racism. Has the French far-right Front National party suddenly become respectable because, as its vice-president explained: “It is anti-Semitism that prevents people from voting for us. There is only that. Once you break that ideological block, you free the rest.” That was what Louis Aliot told the historian and researcher Valérie Igounet, author of a lengthy book documenting the party’s existence from 1972 to 2011 and who recently gave a lengthy interview to Mediapart in which she explained that the enemy of the far-right “is no longer the Jew but the French Muslim” (read the interview, translated into English, here).
From one annual report to another, the French national consultative commission for human rights (la Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’Homme), the CNCDH, whose detailed and rigorous workings you cannot be unaware of, identifies a constant rise in anti-Muslim intolerance, and of a polarization of anti-Islam prejudice. In the CNCDH’s 2013 report, an invited group of commentators made up of sociologists and political scientists noted: “If we compare our times with those of before the war, we could say that today the Muslim, closely followed by the North African, has replaced the Jew in the representations and the construction of a scapegoat.”
The anti-racist efforts consistent with this are those which target that reality while also remaining vigilant towards anti-Semitism. It is certainly not that which, on the contrary, holds high, like a standard, only the fight against anti-Semitism. This mistake is unpardonable, Mr President, because not only does it instill the venom of a supposed hierarchy among victims of racism, but furthermore it convinces the less considered among them of a feeling of being abandoned, a sentiment that fuels revolt and despair. Which also leads them astray.
6. Above all you have made the error of transforming the youth population of working class neighbourhoods into a dangerous element of society. Your prime minister had no hesitation in making this gross transformation during his speech at the commemoration ceremony of the 1942 Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundup of Jews by French police, when he targeted national reprobation against working class neighbourhoods where, he said, anti-Semitism was rife “among a youth population that often has no bearings, with no consciousness of history and which hides its ‘hate of the Jew’ behind a façade of anti-Zionism and behind hatred of the state of Israel”.
But who was it who left this youth population abandoned to its demons? Who, if not those who neglected or ignored it, who stigmatized it when it publicly claimed its Muslim identity, who humiliated it with continuing police checks based on racial profiling, who discriminated against it, preventing it from progressing either professionally or socially because of appearance, family origins or faith? Who, if not those very people who today govern us, like you Mr President, and especially your prime minister who reinvents this habitual scarecrow of conservatives who see an equivalence between the working class and a dangerous class?
A disastrous direction
Does this youth population not also have ideals, principles and values? Is it not, just as much as you and me, concerned about the world, its dramas and its injustices? For example, how could you not take into account this ideal, albeit subsequently abused, that leads a youngster from one of our cities to embark for Syria to fight a dictatorial and criminal regime that you, yourself, François Hollande, just one year ago imprudently demanded should be “punished”? Is it so complicated to be able to distinguish between what amounts to juvenile idealism and what is a terrorist threat, instead of criminalizing everything out of hand by indiscriminately designating ‘Jihadists’?
The worst of this is that this blindness, this policy of fear-mongering which your government has adopted in turn after those preceding it, feeds it own prophecy. Inevitably, it prompts those targeted to take distance, to take up revolt – to take up their resistance, in short – and to demonstrate a pride or anger together in face of this stigmatization and exclusion which they attempt to confront and overcome. “One ends up creating a danger by shouting, each morning, that it exists. By regularly waving a scarecrow at the people, one creates the true monster.” Those words were written by Emile Zola in 1869, amid the Dreyfuss affair, in an article published in French daily Le Figaro, and which was entitled ‘For the Jews’.
Zola had the luminous prescience of those who know how to put themselves in the place of others and who, as a result, understand revolts, desire for revenge and the will to resist that is nourished by a heavy load of humiliation. Mr President, I don’t in any way underestimate the dangers for our country that represents this shock in return. But I blame you for having fed such sentiments rather than knowing how to disarm them. For having encouraged them by placing this young population in working class neighbourhoods at a distance, the same population to which, during your election campaign, you promised so much, to the point, you said, of making it your priority interest. In doing so, you took the risk of abandoning it to eventual wayward influence.
7. Finally, you made the moral blunder of taking the path towards a war of worlds, both abroad and at home. You should think twice about this, at a time that marks the centenary of the moment when Europe toppled into the barbarity of armed conflict, destruction and hate that was World War I. It is a fatal process that transforms the other, however similar to ourselves they may be, into a stranger and ultimately a barbarian, which is what indeed happened on this continent during the destructive madness that took the world to the edge.
Socialist leader Jean Jaurès will be remembered on the centenary of his assassination on July 31st, shot dead while actively campaigning against France’s entry into war. Before his body was cold, his socialist colleagues joined the national political union. German socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht also opposed the war, and ended up murdered in 1919, on the orders of their former party colleagues who had become transformed into nationalists and fierce militarists. Today we know that the three were right to oppose the conflict.
You will remember, of course, that celebrated and prophetic speech of Jaurès before parliament in 1895 when he warned: “This violent and chaotic society, even when it wants peace, even when it is in a state of apparent rest, carries war inside it in the same meaner as sleeping clouds bring the storm.” Now, when the inequalities created by greedy and preying financial capitalism having reached the same dire levels as in those days, it is for you, in the position you occupy, to push back those clouds.
You won’t manage this if you continue in the same disastrous direction you have taken these past weeks, after having already engaged France in several wars in Africa that have no end in sight because they have no political strategy (see Mediapart editor François Bonnet’s analysis here). You won’t manage it either by ignoring the world’s fragilities and imbalances, its injustices and its humanities, all those elements that motivate those for whom the fate meted out to the Palestinians is of the highest concern.
Mr President, dear François Hollande, you were right to say that the Israeli-Palestinian cause should not be “imported” into France, in the sense that France should not enter into a war against itself. But unfortunately you have given the bad example yourself by importing, through your errors of judgement, the driving elements for this which are injustice, ignorance and indifference.
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- The French version of this opinion article can be found here.