To those who remain unconvinced, are you beginning to sketch out the very essence of the demonstrations rising all across the globe ?
They arise from a fundamental critique of state Zionism, which reproduces the nationalist mechanics of 19th-century Europe.
Hannah Arendt herself fiercely opposed the death-bound logic that led to the Nakba.
“We are witnessing a closed, authoritarian, and militarized Jewish nationalism that is heading straight for disaster,” she wrote to Karl Jaspers in 1948.
She had already foreseen much of what is unfolding today, especially in Zionism Reconsidered, where she examined the consequences of an exclusive sovereignty exercised at the expense of coexistence with the Arab population.
So I wonder : where lies the excess ? In those who cry out for the end of state Zionism, or in those who, by fanaticism or by silence, condone its drift ?
Calling for the end of state Zionism is not antisemitic. It is lucid and sometimes springs from a Jewish tradition itself critical of that nationalism, as exemplified by Ilan Pappé, Shlomo Sand, or Noam Chomsky.
But who truly reads or listens to these thinkers? Do we not allow ourselves to be captivated by the reductive sensationalism of a media landscape dominated by continuous news channels like BFMTV, or CNews, the latter being a far-right propaganda outlet.
The Israeli government flouts international law with impunity in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and commits another unforgivable wrong, alongside those who support this deadly enterprise :
that of profaning the memory of the Shoah, and of all those who sacrificed themselves so that such remembrance would prevent us from repeating the very patterns that allowed nationalism to thrive.
I refuse to be a perpetual collateral victim of mere facticity, of the simple fact of being, nor to be assigned to an ethnicity reduced to Islamism.
We no longer even speak of Islam ; instead, the Muslim is merely glimpsed ; whether Arab, Persian, Turk, or otherwise and so are those who dare to stand by them, seen as vectors of radicalism.
There exists, in every society across the world, a share of extremism. But is that reason enough to dispense death?
So I say: beware of believing one has the right to arbitrarily annihilate a people or civilians, however distant they may seem simply because our genes are not theirs, or we do not share the same civilizational root.
Otherwise, the tragedies of the 19th century will return, reaching even our own doorsteps, and seize hold of our very conscience.
Younis M.