An article co-written by Michel Ben Arrous (geographer) and Evelyne Sylva (journalist).
Israel has lost the war of words and images. We watched the images of October 7. We have not slept since. The orgy of violence perpetrated that day by Hamas, documented on GoPro by the very perpetrators of an indescribable butchery, haunts our insomnia. We also had access to unused rushes, still filmed on GoPro, showing the jubilation of the butchers self-celebrating their butchery, mocking and triumphant. Their jubilation is no less unbearable. For a month now, we have also been watching images of Gaza under the bombs – the real images and the fake ones, created on Midjourney or borrowed from the Syrian conflict, as if the reality of the war were not enough. We do not sleep any better.
The fact remains that Israel is defending itself, that its army will perhaps put Hamas out of harm's way, but that things are quite different on the information and communication front. Language, reason, and probity are the victims of this war. Victims that might seem insignificant compared to the dead of flesh and blood, but without which no political outcome is possible. At least Hamas, which advocates the destruction of Israel in its Charter, states things clearly: for it, it is indeed a question of erasing a State, and those who inhabit it, from the map of the Middle East. The more distant relays of the Islamist movement, avowed partisans, opportunistic supporters or simple useful idiots, speak for themselves a newspeak worthy of Orwell, reversing both the positions and the meaning of the words. In this newspeak, decapitating children is said " resist"The war against Hamas is called " genocide of palestinians"The evacuation of Gazan civilians away from the fighting is called " ethnic cleansing"
One only has to browse social media to realize that no lie – the worst being those that we obediently allow ourselves to be convinced – is too big anymore. The fake bombing of the Ahli Arab hospital, or more precisely the reception of evidence exonerating the Israeli army, which was initially accused of having carried out a massacre, is a textbook case. On TikTok, Facebook and Telegram, two reactions prevailed. One, rejecting on principle the admissibility of the evidence, presumed " fabricated " or "we invented " as long as they came from Israel. The other, reluctantly admitting the obvious but refusing to be moved by it: " anyway, they [the Jews] commit so many crimes that one more or less... "The general narrative has not changed one iota. If Hamas murders also Palestinian civilians, using them as human shields and machine-gunning them when they flee, is still and always " Israel's fault"
Ready-to-think and ready-to-hate
Many people endorse this hatred of principle out of conviction, spread it and amplify it in all good conscience - yet another hackneyed word. To those, saturated with slogans and laden with certainties, we have nothing more to say. Alas. Because speaking, speaking to each other, presupposes on both sides a capacity to listen. Without the latter, the exercise is futile. There remain those who question themselves, who still resist automatic positioning, ready-to-think and the ready-to-hate that goes with it. Those people have not yet forgotten October 7. It is to them that we are speaking. Let us be clear: not to impose a particular reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because that is not what it is about. The conflict, its history and its resolution are and must remain legitimate subjects of debate. Illegitimate, on the other hand, is the perversion of the " Palestinian cause " to justify the unjustifiable.
Edwy Plenel, then. Why mention him by name? Because the boss of Mediapart has a considerable audience, a public that is his and that he manipulates, in this case, in a manner that is as skillful as it is shameless. His article " Israel-Palestine: The Moral Question", published online on October 22, then reprinted on camera on the 24th, generated thousands of likes and approving comments: " well done sir"," respect"," excellent analysis"," lucid"," real"," Fair"... In their unanimity as in their conciseness, these comments testify to a limited knowledge of the Middle East, but ignorance is not a crime. We cannot hold it against Plenel's admirers for not seizing on what he glosses over, distorts or misrepresents. It is worrying, on the other hand, to see them unflinchingly endorse a conception of 'morality' which regards the carnage of October 7 as an inevitability and considers the 'political' question from a purely mechanistic angle - which is the very negation of politics.
« The moral question", said Plenel, " is a practical, concrete benchmark, a political benchmark". Why not? Except that Plenel's world is reduced to two categories: the oppressors on one side (understand, Israel), the oppressed on the other (the Palestinians). The first are necessarily wrong, the second always right. The aspirations of each, their projects, the conduct of their objectives, do not count. Neither do individuals. No more than the internal diversity of each large bloc. Hence the supposedly inescapable character of violence. Oppressive violence on the one hand, presumed founding, inherent to the very existence of Israel. Violence of the Palestinians on the other, " legitimate and necessary", necessarily liberating.
There is no room in this binary logic for anything other than confrontation: this is the zero degree of politics. A deadly fantasy and, for the Palestinians, a fool's game. Seventy-five years after Israel's declaration of independence, their national movement is still running after the creation of a state. A state that they could have created themselves in 1948, by accepting the UN partition plan that provided for two, one Jewish, the other Arab (in a territorial configuration that was moreover much more favorable than the Oslo Accords). Under pressure from the Arab League, the Palestinians refused. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria then took the initiative of a first war against Israel, promising the Palestinians that they would indeed have nothing to share, that everything would come back to them - from the Sea to the Jordan. A first lost war. Other wars followed, other Arab defeats, other desires for revenge that were never satisfied. What have the Palestinians gained? Three, soon four generations of refugees in neighboring countries - 'friendly' countries that ensure they remain eternally in this refugee status by limiting their civil rights, their mobility, their access to employment. The advisers, no more the Arab League than Plenel, are not the ones paying.
What Plenel says, what he hides
The zero degree of politics is also the zero degree of morality − which always presupposes a choice. The moral being is the one who determines himself according to a system of values, who chooses, among several options, the one that best accords with his conception of good, of justice, of virtue. But this is precisely what the dogmatic vision of a Plenel forbids the protagonists, in which violence is constructed as inevitable and necessary. The only ones capable of making a choice are in reality his readers, distant observers. It is to them that he reserves this possibility, by pushing them to 'virtuously' embrace his own bias − not as a journalist anxious to enlighten them, but as a propagandist making a point of indoctrinating them. His surest method: selective obliteration. The most interesting thing, in fact, is not what he says but what he hides.
On the creation of the State of Israel, first. Plenel takes up the conventional narrative, wanting that in the aftermath of the Shoah, the European powers had " repaired the injustice " done to the Jews (their genocide) by committing another" injustice", this time against the Palestinians (the Nakba). It neglects the long term: the visceral attachment of the Jews to Jerusalem (as expressed every day for two thousand years in prayers and ritual); the uninterrupted presence of Jewish communities in the places of their ancient kingdoms (whatever the occupying powers, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans); and closer to us the failures of British decolonization. Having received a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the former Ottoman territories that would become, today, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the British promised the same lands to each. They favored each in turn, militarily opposed Jewish immigration before and during the Second World War, and left behind them, as in India at the same time, a powder keg. But history, short or long, is misused when it aims to settle the vain question of who was there before. It could more judiciously illuminate the moral and political failure of legitimizing an undeniable Arab autochthony to the detriment of an equally undeniable Jewish autochthony. It would then push us to recognize the equal dignity of two peoples condemned to coexist.
On Israeli society, then, Plenel teaches his readers nothing by condemning Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, the most right-wing the country has ever known. He only half-educates them by observing that "There are Jewish supremacists just as there are white supremacists just as there are Christian supremacists. " (while omitting Muslim supremacists, of whom the region is not stingy). Silence, above all, on what his rhetorical edifice makes inconceivable - and which is not so rare: one can be a Zionist et benevolent towards the Palestinians. The victims of October 7 were overwhelmingly both, both at a time. Zionists, because they embodied the right of the Jewish people to live freely on their ancestral land. Committed to the Palestinians, because they also campaigned for the right of Palestinians to have the same rights as them. The inhabitants of the kibbutzim in southern Israel, bordering Gaza, were for the most part left-wingers - this left that every Saturday evening in Tel Aviv jeered the Netanyahu government in monster demonstrations, and that animated a large network of associations and initiatives in favor of the Palestinians of the territories. They were the daily artisans of a possible agreement, the partisans of a just and lasting peace. Their absence of the 'moral question' in the Plenel style is morally inexcusable. But convenient: exit the people who prevent caricatures in circles.
Destitution
The most confusing passage is where Plenel explains his expectations of the Palestinians: " the emancipation camp, which is in this case the Palestine camp (…) has the duty to have a higher morality"Its objective, he specifies, must be to " to free the people who oppress him from his own violence". At this level of distance from reality, Plenel takes refuge behind the figure of Nelson Mandela in an imaginary episode of South African history. The ANC would have " committed massacres against civilians in the 80s", before Mandela, an unassailable moral conscience, made his self-criticism and reconciled the rainbow nation with itself. Ah? What are massacres that never took place doing there? For the record, let us recall that the ANC shot prisoners in its training camps abroad, then fought Buthelezi's Inkatha at the turn of the 1990s, but nothing that resembled " massacres of civilians". The function of these massacres that were never committed seems to be to avoid the disqualification of Hamas: see, the ANC also committed horrors... The way in which Plenel summons, in following, the authority of Franz Fanon, reinforces the hypothesis. Mobilizing Fanon in defense of the violence, sometimes legitimate (and sometimes only, Fanon recognized) of the colonized against the colonizer, is to instill, in a subliminal way, two false equivalences: between the Islamists of today and the colonized of yesterday, between terrorist violence and anticolonial struggles.
It would have been simpler to cite Amilcar Cabral, whose fight was explicitly aimed at the Portuguese colonial system, not at the Portuguese as individuals. Cabral, in his writings as in the maquis of Guinea-Bissau, unequivocally condemned violent impulses that were supposedly liberating. He was aware of the existence of an insurmountable threshold in the use of violence, beyond which, having become criminal, it loses all emancipatory dimension. Plenel could not find a more accomplished example of what he calls a " higher morality"But it would then have been impossible for him to keep Hamas in the " emancipation camp"...
Finally, the last variation of the 'moral question': France would today be " unworthy" . She would have " forgot his balance position » - a euphemism for the pro-Arab foreign policy put in place by General de Gaulle at the end of the Algerian War. The last three French presidents (Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron) are said to have lit the fire of a « war of civilizations " in France itself, " a war of all against all". Plenel poses here as a firefighter, which would be perfectly honourable if he did not also play the role of arsonist. His central argument is that France " is the first Muslim country in Europe". That is correct. It is also, demographically, the first Jewish country, even if he does not mention it. But demography is not a moral argument, it is at best a blackmailer's argument, brandished as a threat of conflagration. Plenel is obviously not alone, in France, in the Middle East and elsewhere, in fanning the flames of primary solidarity by manipulating fears and feelings. But the moralizing posture that he adopts, and that a complacent public concedes to him too hastily, only makes a triple indigence: moral, political, journalistic, more indecent.
