Galerie Claude Lemand

Open letter to the President of the French Republic
Orient Today / By Dominique EDDÉ, writer, October 20, 2023
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Dear President Macron,

I am writing to you because France is a member of the UN Security Council and the secu­rity of the world is under threat. I am writing to you in the name of peace.

The horror that the people of Gaza are cur­rently enduring, with the sup­port of much of the world, is an abom­i­na­tion. It embodies the name­less defeat of our modern his­tory. Yours and ours. Lebanon, Iraq and Syria are in ruins. Palestine is being torn apart, pulled to pieces in line with a glar­ingly clear plan: its annex­a­tion. Just look at the maps.

Hamas’s mas­sacre of hun­dreds of Israeli civil­ians on 7 October was not an act of war. It was an atrocity. There are no words to describe its ignominy. If many Arabs or Muslims are slow to denounce its bar­barity, it is because their recent his­tory is lit­tered with car­nage of all kinds, affecting all faiths, and the over­load of humil­i­a­tion and impo­tence has finally exhausted their reserves of indig­na­tion and immured them in resent­ment. Their memory is haunted by the mas­sacres, long ignored, com­mitted by Israelis on Palestinian civil­ians in order to take over their land. I am thinking of Deir Yassin in 1948 and Kafr Qasim in 1956. They are also con­vinced – and I share this con­vic­tion – that Israel’s pres­ence in the region and the brutal means used to ensure its dom­i­na­tion and secu­rity have largely con­tributed to the dis­mem­ber­ment and gen­eral col­lapse. Israel’s colo­nialism, policy of vio­lent repres­sion and apartheid regime are unde­ni­able facts. To per­sist in denial is to fan the flames in the minds of some and to delude the minds of others. We all know, more­over, that incen­diary Islamism has largely fed on this open wound, which is not called “the Holy Land” for nothing. Let me remind you in passing that Hezbollah was born in Lebanon just after the Israeli occu­pa­tion of 1982, and that the dis­as­trous Gulf Wars gave a fatal boost to reli­gious fanati­cism in the region.

It goes without saying that a large pro­por­tion of Israelis are still trau­ma­tized by the abom­i­na­tion of the Shoah and that this must be taken very seri­ously into account. It also goes without saying that you are doing your utmost to pre­vent anti-Semitic acts in France. But the fact that you have reached the point where you no longer hear any­thing about what is hap­pening else­where and in other ways, that you deny one suf­fering on the pre­text of healing another, does not con­tribute to building peace. It amounts to cen­soring, dividing and blocking the horizon. How much longer will you and the German author­i­ties con­tinue to draw on the Jewish people’s fear as a remedy for your guilt? It is no longer accept­able to redeem an odious past by passing the burden on to those who have nothing to do with it. Listen instead to the Israeli dis­si­dents who are acting so coura­geously. Many of them are sending you warn­ings, from Israel and the USA.

You Europeans must begin by demanding an imme­diate halt to the bombing of Gaza. You will not weaken Hamas or pro­tect the Israelis by allowing the war to con­tinue. Use your voices not just to demand the cre­ation of human­i­tarian cor­ri­dors, echoing US policy, but to call for peace! The suf­fering endured by the Palestinians, decade after decade, is no longer sus­tain­able. Stop giving carte blanche to an Israeli policy that is driving everyone, including its own cit­i­zens, towards a catas­trophe. When the United States recog­nised Jerusalem as the cap­ital of Israel in 2018, you didn’t bat an eyelid. This was not just an insult to his­tory, it was a dev­as­tating blow. Your mis­sion was to defend the common sense advo­cated by Germaine Tillion: “An inter­na­tional Jerusalem, open to the three monothe­istic reli­gions”. That same year, you endorsed the Knesset’s adop­tion of the fun­da­mental law defining Israel as “the Nation-State of the Jewish people”. Did you give a moment’s thought to the twenty-one per­cent of Israelis who are not Jewish? The fol­lowing year, Mr President, you announced that “anti-Zionism is one of the modern forms of anti-Semitism”. You had come full circle. With one neat for­mula, you rode roughshod over all nuances. You appeared to forget that many Jewish thinkers, from Isaac Breuer to Albert Einstein, were anti-Zionists. You have denied all those of us who are trying to combat anti-Semitism without aban­doning the Palestinians. You ignore the long road that we on the so-called “anti-Zionist” side have trav­elled, to change our vocab­u­lary, to rec­og­nize Israel, to work for a future that revives the rich time when we all lived together. Surely the floods of hatred cir­cu­lating on social net­works, directed at both sides, demand that you, as a leader, be even more vig­i­lant in your choice of words. Speaking of peace, Mr President, we were stunned by the absence of that word from your lips in the after­math of 7 October. What do we want if not peace at a time when the planet is on the brink of the void?

The Abraham Accords rep­re­sent the ulti­mate in con­tempt, cap­i­talist arro­gance and polit­ical bad faith. Is it accept­able to reduce Arab and Islamic cul­ture to juicy con­tracts accom­pa­nied – with France’s pas­sive sup­port – by peace agree­ments man­aged like real-estate deals? The Zionist pro­ject has reached an impasse. Helping the Israelis to find a way out of it requires an immense effort of imag­i­na­tion and empathy that is the oppo­site of blind com­pla­cency. Ensuring the secu­rity of the Israeli people means helping them to think about the future and to antic­i­pate it – to look for­wards and not back­wards. Here in Lebanon, we have failed to ensure that living and living together are one and the same thing. Our fault? In part, yes. But not solely. Far from it. This pro­ject was the oppo­site of the Israeli pro­ject, which has con­stantly manoeu­vred to make coex­is­tence impos­sible, to prove it is a failure, to encourage the frag­men­ta­tion of com­mu­ni­ties, cre­ating ghettos. Now that this entire part of the world has reached the very depths of despair, is it not time to decide to do every­thing dif­fer­ently? Only a rad­ical rein­ven­tion of its his­tory can re-estab­lish a future.

In the mean­time, the sit­u­a­tion is dete­ri­o­rating by the day: there is no more room for indig­nant pos­turing and human­i­tarian dec­la­ra­tions. We want action. A return to the basic rules of inter­na­tional law. Demand that the UN res­o­lu­tions be applied. Giving formal warn­ings to the Islamists means giving formal warn­ings to the Israeli author­i­ties. Stop sup­porting reli­gious nation­alism on the one hand and cas­ti­gating it on the other. Fight both. Put an end to this harmful atmo­sphere that makes French Muslims feel that they are not wanted if they do not remain silent.

Listen to Nelson Mandela, uni­ver­sally admired: “We know all too well that our freedom is incom­plete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he said loud and clear. He knew that humil­i­a­tion can lead only to hatred. The Blacks of South Africa were called ani­mals. The Jews were also called ani­mals by the Nazis. Is it con­ceiv­able that none of you has spoken out pub­licly against the use of this word by an Israeli min­ister with regard to the Palestinian people? Is it not time to help mem­o­ries to com­mu­ni­cate, to listen to them, to try to under­stand where the sticking point is, where it hurts, rather than giving in to emo­tions and rein­forcing the stum­bling blocks? What if the immense pain felt by everyone in this region could be the trigger for the begin­nings of a shared deter­mi­na­tion to do things dif­fer­ently? What if we sud­denly under­stood, through sheer exhaus­tion, that it takes a mere nothing to make peace, just as it takes a mere nothing to start a war? Are you sure you have cov­ered all the “mere noth­ings” nec­es­sary for peace? I know many Israelis who, like me, dream of a move­ment of recog­ni­tion, of a return to reason, of a shared exis­tence. We are only a minority? What was the pro­por­tion of French Resistance fighters during the occu­pa­tion? Do not stifle this move­ment. Encourage it. Do not give in to the lethal fusion of phobia and fear. It is no longer just a ques­tion of freedom for all. It is about a min­imum of bal­ance and polit­ical clear-sight­ed­ness, without which secu­rity is in danger of world­wide col­lapse.

 Dominique Eddé is a writer. Her last book is Edward Said: His Thought as a Novel (Verso Books, 2019)

 his article was orig­i­nally pub­lished in French in L’Orient-Le Jour.

 Translation : Ros Schwartz