Zionism and anti-Semitism: error Valls – Liberation

Editorial

It takes risks, in politics, to depart from the prepared text. Unless we did so in good conscience … Manuel Valls, in any case, was wrong to declare that “anti-Zionism” and “antisemitism” was “synonymous” formula that does not appear in the original text of his speech. Not that his speech at the dinner of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions either erroneous or malicious. For too long, the left has underestimated the reality of a new anti-Semitism, mostly coming from Islamic fundamentalism in the suburbs, which spreads like a metastasis in a part of the French Islam. In the French Republic, that of the emancipation of the Jews and of the fight for Dreyfus, the French Jews are insulted, attacked, even killed, and this for the simple fact that they are Jews. unbearable reality …

Under the influence of a Soral or Dieudonné, antisemitic discourse we thought reserved for extreme right nostalgic found a second youth. On the extreme left, finally, hate criticism of Israel – under the label “anti-Zionist”, which implies, at the foot of the letter, the destruction of the State of Israel – borders, with propagandistic simplification force , the anti-Jewish prejudices that have caused such crimes.

Manuel Valls would be taken there that have received approval unmixed. It is the identification of two related but distinct concepts – anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism – which raises questions. First for a historical reason. The original anti-Zionism – that is to say, the opposition to the creation of Israel, goal of the Zionist movement founded by Theodor Herzl – was not only the fact of opponents of the Jews. Of course, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 30s, supported his hostility to Zionism on religious origin Semitism, which led him, during the war, to fricoter with Hitler. We find echoes of this hatred in the Hamas charter, which explicitly refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, famous anti-Semitic forgery, and that means not only Israel but Jews in general as enemies evil, controlling the media, Freemasonry and even the Rotary Club

But Zionism was also the fact … Jewish organizations. Besides some religious extremists who deny Israel’s legitimacy, the Bund, heroic Jewish socialist movement in Central Europe, persecuted by the Stalinists and successively by the Nazis disapproved of the creation of the State of Israel, predicting that it would lead to “a hundred years war”. Today a small minority of the Jewish public remains at this position. Similarly, the Trotskyist movement, often run by Jews, condemned Zionism. They were not anti-Semitic …

And above all, the original Zionism derived in part. Against the principles of the founding fathers, secular and mainly socialists, we now assimilated, in certain sectors of the Israeli right, the crazy project of creating a “Greater Israel”, which refers in the biblical name “Judea and Samaria” in the West Bank territories assigned by the UN to the Palestinians, which we therefore question the right to a state. Corruption of the original idea, which involved the division of the land between Jews and Palestinians and respect for universal values. This Zionism then, we admit, deserves criticism, which is not anti-Semitic.

Laurent Joffrin