For Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, the Netanyahu government's accusation of anti-Semitism against any criticism of its actions locks Israel into a deadly logic.
When the UN denounced the state of famine in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu responded: "In the Middle Ages, every massacre of Jews was preceded by a campaign of defamation and lies. We were accused of spreading disease, of being parasites on the Gentiles. We were accused of poisoning wells. We were accused of killing Christian children for their blood." » And he concludes: "What the Jewish people were accused of in the Middle Ages and in the following centuries is what the Jewish state is accused of today."
Such a reaction is, of course, another, and particularly caricatured, variation on the classic Israeli propaganda argument, according to which all criticism of the State of Israel is ultimately inspired by an inevitably reprehensible anti-Semitism. Yet it is not just that. By saying "we," Netanyahu means: "We, the Jews." But this "we" does not exist. The Jews of Israel are not the Jews of the Diaspora. And the Jews of today are not the Jews of yesterday. Advertisement
Thus, to stick with this single example, Jews accused of ritual murder, in the Middle Ages but also later, up until the 19th century, in Damascus, for example, or even up until the beginning of the 20th, with the Beilis affair in Ukraine, were perfectly innocent of what they were accused of. No Christian child was ever ritually sacrificed by Jews in the run-up to Passover, nor was their blood used in the making of the unleavened bread eaten during this holiday.
Today, however, it is not "the Jews" as such who are being accused of imaginary crimes, but rather a state that is guilty of real crimes that rightly outrage the UN and so many citizens. The suffering, persecution, and slanderous accusations that so many Jews of past generations unjustly endured cannot allow Netanyahu to cloak himself in innocence. And nothing can justify associating all of today's Jews with the crimes currently being perpetrated in Gaza: the first person to be held accountable is the person who gave the orders. And everyone knows who this person gave the orders. It's Netanyahu.
The accused here is a sovereign, heavily armed state, defining its own policies and freely implementing them. This state and its Jewish citizens are quite simply a power. And this power must be held accountable. They have nothing to do with the minority scattered across the world that for centuries was the "Jewish people," devoid of territory, fragile, exposed to the prejudices of an often hostile majority, to discrimination and periodic violence, and quite incapable of reacting to them itself with force. Zionism and its project of creating a state for the Jews aimed precisely to break with this very condition: that of the Jew in exile.
A brief historical review is in order here. Jewish national aspirations took concrete form under the leadership of Theodor Herzl. The founder of modern political Zionism, he defined a coherent program based on diplomatic action and supported by a structured organization. At the first Zionist congress, which he convened in Basel in 1897, he spoke of the illusory nature of emancipation, recalled that Jews continued to be subject to discrimination and persecution, and attempted to demonstrate that the only solution to the Jewish problem was the creation of a national homeland in Palestine.
Zionism, a nationalist movement like so many others in Europe at that time, was therefore also a reaction to the growing antisemitism of the 1880s. Current events in France and elsewhere fueled its various trends, which combined at the end of the 19th century, characterized by political, social, and economic changes that destabilized societies engaged in modernity. And while it cannot be reduced to a simple matter of antisemitism, the Dreyfus Affair clearly illustrates this general shift in thinking. It would have a direct impact on Herzl.
The idea of creating a state for the Jews, for Herzl, his friends, and his successors, was therefore aimed, among other things, at permanently removing them from the scourge of antisemitism and its host of pogroms. The proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948, a state of refuge for those who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust, was therefore also the culmination of a long struggle, which began at the end of the 19th century. It nonetheless resulted in the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to neighboring countries. The rejection of this uprooting and the dispossession that accompanied it ultimately led to the creation of a plan for an independent Palestinian state. The conflict only worsened over the decades. Following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which caused the deaths of nearly 1,200 Israelis and the hostage-taking of 200 others, some of whom are still being held, Israel responded in a massive and disproportionate manner, resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. This destruction and killings affected women, children, and civilians. The official goal was the eradication of Hamas, using all available means, including starvation.
Netanyahu, anxious to remain in power at all costs, ceded everything to his ultra-religious, messianic, and supremacist allies. And today he faces a well-documented accusation: genocide. Israel's international isolation is now profound. Anti-Israeli hatred and anti-Semitism have increased tenfold, directly affecting Diaspora Jews, with Netanyahu and their "representative" institutions, such as the CRIF in France, having unwillingly dragged them into this appalling adventure.
The creation of a state for the Jews was supposed to put an end to anti-Semitism and its terrible consequences. On the contrary, this state only fuels them. Worse, its leader uses it to justify the worst and downplay the reality of the horrors he orders. The complete opposite of what Herzl and others had undoubtedly dreamed of.
Isolated, abandoned, rejected, hated by democratic countries and their populations, Israel is on the verge of becoming a new ghetto. An unimaginable step backward? Netanyahu has done it. Part of the Israeli population is leaving the country. Who will want to live in a ghetto anymore? As for the Jews of the Diaspora, they will, despite themselves, inherit a stigma reminiscent of a past we would have liked to be a thing of the past.
BIO EXPRESS
Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, directors of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Université PSL). They jointly published "Israel-Gaza. Jewish Consciousness Put to the Test by Massacres" (Textuel 2024).
