Tribune. In a context marked by Emmanuel Macron's visit to Israel and by the publication of a survey announcing that in France, seventy-five years after the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, 34% of the Jews feel threatened because of their religion (and showing, by the way, the persistence of anti-Semitic prejudices), the temptation to find refuge in a so-called Jewish state is strong. Yet this state is not immune to a legitimacy trial, which has been brought up in the name of an equivocal ideology, anti-Zionism.
From this equivocity, Shany Mor ("A form of anti-Zionism is less an ideology than a vision of the world placing Israel at the heart of evil", The world, of December 14, 2019) said the essentials: it is unacceptable to confuse the doubt of one who, in 1919, wondered about the best way to protect the precarious existence of the Jewish minorities of Europe and the Middle East with the attitude of one who, in 2019, pleads for the abolition of an existing state. Desiring the destruction of Israel is a position unparalleled: no other state, no matter what its crimes may have been, has produced such a stigma. Anti-Zionism, understood in this sense, is clearly anti-Semitic.
"Strangeness to politics"
There is another aspect of Israel's right to exist challenge that needs to be addressed: Zionism has presented itself as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, thus presupposing the existence of that people. If these people are a fiction, the legitimacy of the State of Israel is said to be greatly weakened, and therefore their right to independent existence. Is it so safe?
In his memoirs (Julliard, 1983), Raymond Aron writes: What does the “Jewish people” mean? Is it? Can we speak of the Jewish people as we speak of the French people? Or as we speak of the Basque people? (…) All I do not hesitate to support, at the risk of raising passionate protests, is that, if there are Jewish people, there is no other people of the same type as him " (P. 502-505).
Almost thirty years later, the philosopher Bruno Karsenti replied: "The Jews are a people without a state validating or sanctioning their claim to be one. (…) A strangeness to politics as we understand it has manifested itself since the Jews lost their political sovereignty over their territory, a people have configured that the political meaning of the word people has not seen fit to retain " (Moses and the idea of the people. Historical truth according to Freud, Cerf, 2012, p. 16).
