In recent weeks, we have faced the dismay of many men and women, Jewish citizens who, faced with the savagery of the attack of October 7 by Hamas terrorists, felt a glaring lack of solidarity towards them. The most affected were the people of the left, generally pacifists, who expressed themselves critically towards the current Israeli government. This dismay is that of those who suddenly realize that they remain part of an insurmountable otherness: within their civic and political community, their suffering encounters not a common emotion in the face of horror, but the coldness of a political conflict in which, whatever they say or do, whatever they suffer, they will be less victims than others. 

There is reason to be more than touched by this lack of moral positioning. It undoubtedly reveals a latent anti-Semitism that is dangerously resurfacing, going far beyond the Middle Eastern conflict and which is all the more worrying because it combines with the identity perspectives adopted by a certain left: these reinforce the fixed inscriptions of individuals in their affiliations, whether chosen or imposed, and decree a lopsided division of society between dominant and dominated, between guilty and innocent. In this schematism, there is no room for taking into account contexts and acts, accomplished or suffered. The appeal to common values ​​that would serve as a reference for political judgment is replaced by immediate feelings, by epidermal paths of identification, determined by empathy. 

But empathy, as a reflex of identification with the other, is selective: as Paul Bloom has shown, we choose with which feelings we can or want to identify. When the image of society is binary and fixed, there is therefore no room to grasp the inhuman scope of events, unless the victims already belong to this category. As a result, empathy only fuels the fracture between "us" and "others" and can, as in the present case, prevent us from seeing the common humanity that unites us when other human beings are affected by barbaric acts. It reveals the faults that run through our society and ends up amplifying them by removing from politics its role in resolving conflicts, relegating it to the defense of particular rights in a permanent power struggle between emotional identities. 

The “Yes, but” that we have heard too much in recent days forces us to retreat into binary identifications that prevent us from considering the individual and collective drama into which we all plunged on October 7. Humanity then dies a little more, as does the possibility of recognizing universal values ​​that would guide our political action independently of our personal identities and our suffering. The solitude in which the “global left” has quickly left the Jews of Israel and the rest of the world since October 7 will have serious consequences: once again, an “essence,” a fixed and imposed identity – that of Jew – also erases the recognition and legitimacy of individual suffering, as well as the political choices of each person, the freedom to choose and embrace one’s own struggles. Under these conditions, there will be no civic and human community, no common policy that unites beyond affiliations, beyond the emotions and suffering of each person.

The Jew of Israel or the Diaspora engaged in a battle to provide an honest and just solution to a crisis that overwhelms us all, who has taken to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, whose mezuzah is being torn from his door and who believes he is witnessing a bad “déjà vu,” does not need the variation of our identities or our suffering. He needs to feel around him the solidarity as a human being, which he lacked after October 7, and our ability to look with lucidity at what is happening while he mourns his dead. He needs us all to be Yocheved Lifshitz, a Hamas hostage who, putting aside his own pain for a moment, puts the political struggle of a life back at the center by addressing his captor with a Shalom at the time of his release. 

This will only be possible when we stop distinguishing between sufferings by considering some to be more just than others, when we stop basing a policy on a sickly and naive empathy towards those we judge to be suffering or to have suffered the most, when we commit to the (re)creation of a common space of universal values ​​– including the recognition of a necessary, but autonomous space for individual and collective emotions. And when the left returns to these fundamentals of humanism, then I will be able to say: "I am (still) on the left."