Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
As a people dies before our eyes, we seek to look the other way. One year on from the unjustifiable Hamas attack against Israeli families, the Middle East is set ablaze like never before. On October 7th 2023, war crimes in the form of murders and kidnappings of civilians were committed by armed men who wanted to show Israel and the world, in the most brutal manner, that they were ready to do anything, including sacrificing Palestinians and creating a regional cataclysm, to unlock Gaza and destroy their enemy.
The infernal cycle of reprisals was immediately engaged, with the “unconditional” support of numerous Western countries, including France, whereas it was clear that the use of military force could only prove to be disproportionate and indiscriminate. In the name of Israel’s “legitimate right to defend itself”, more than 40,000 Gazans have perished under the bombs, which already makes this war the deadliest since the beginning of the 21st century.
One must take measure of the singularity of this disaster. Lives have been mown down, but also gone alongside them are a collective memory, a culture, and a future, with the destruction of schools, museums, hospitals, water and electricity networks, humanitarian aid, arable fields and shops.
On January 26th 2024, the International Court of Justice recognised that “there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused” to the inhabitants of Gaza, and said “Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention”.
On May 20th 2024, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that his office had applied for arrest warrants to be issued against three Hamas officials, and also the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On June 12th 2024, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was set up after the 11-day Israel-Palestine crisis in May 2021, reported that, in incidents during Israeli military operations and attacks in Gaza, “the Commission found that Israeli authorities are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or wilful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention and outrages upon personal dignity.”
“The Commission found that the crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, murder, forcible transfer, and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment were also committed.”
It also found that Palestinian armed groups were responsible for war crimes committed in Israel.
Children at the site of an Israeli air attack on Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the Gaza strip, October 4th 2024. © Photo Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via AFP
Despite international law, the mobilisation of countries of the Global South, and the protests among a section of young populations in the West, the international community has done nothing to stop the massacre – which it could have done.
If the United States and its allies in Europe stopped delivering arms, the war would stop. That is true also if they suspended economic and diplomatic relations. If they recognised the state of Palestine, they would show a will to find an equitable solution. Their calls for a ceasefire are hollow. It is false to suggest that these countries are powerless. They have the means, but they allow the situation to continue.
While its crimes remain unpunished, Israel, with its superior military strength, has a free hand to continue with its dire campaign. The war is spreading dramatically into Lebanon, in the name of the fight against Hezbollah. After the attacks on its southern suburbs, the heart of Beirut is being targeted. In the space of two weeks, hundreds of civilians have been killed and around a million people have been forced to flee their homes.
“I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions,” wrote Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust and a specialist on issues of genocide, and who fought in the Israeli army during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, in a long-read opinion article published in The Guardian in August. In conclusion he wrote that, “perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, now find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised”.
Behind the blindness
Responsible for its inaction, the authorities among the international community are complicit. But what about civil society in the West? While a genocidal process is underway, why does civil society look the other way? What is it, in their common culture, that holds them back from mobilising massively, and notably those who are not descendants of colonised populations?
Let’s first put aside what is obvious. The Israeli authorities prevent us from seeing. By prohibiting foreign journalists from entering Gaza, they avoid their crimes – and the scale of these – from being documented. The only images and accounts we receive are transmitted by Palestinian journalists who are themselves targeted by the Israeli army. By suggesting every man is a potential fighter for Hamas or Hezbollah, the Israeli propaganda renders civil losses invisible and justifies taking aim at a whole people.
Israel can also count upon its allies to silence Western societies, where the possibility of expressing support for Gazans is muzzled. In France, notably, in a sort of renewal of McCarthyism, displaying solidarity with Palestine can lead to a police summons or a court sentence, not to mention being prohibited in advance.
The colonial subtext
But above all, a deep introspection is called for. Because it is not just that people in the West don’t see what is going on, they don’t want to see it. To understand why, one must look back at the ghosts of the past, to the intrinsic racism of our societies, itself the fruit of an unrepaired European colonial history.
In his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, the British-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad recounts the tragic destiny of a colonial mission of a steamer captain for a Belgian company in central Africa, sailing up the troubled waters of a sinuous river, amid hostile nature, looking for one of his own, an ivory trader called Kurtz in charge of a trading station. In all its darkness, the narration translates the dehumanization which is that of the colonial experience, and which, with the motive of “civilising the savages”, is the self-awarding of the right to have at disposal bodies and land – when, that is, things have not finished in annihilation. “Exterminate all the brutes,” wrote Kurtz in a report sent to his company’s head office, a phrase that the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist borrowed for his 1992 book about European colonialism in Africa and its accompanying racism and genocide. The title of Lindqvist’s book was in turn borrowed by a 2021 documentary mini-series, directed and narrated by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, and which tells the story of colonialization from the point of view of the colonized.
Founded on the idea of the superiority of one racial group over another, the mechanics of colonization, consolidated by Europeans in the 19th century, can only lead to the negation of the people who are under the yoke of the occupier. It is worth remembering that at the end of the Reconquista in 1492, the expulsions of Spanish Jews and Muslims, coinciding with the departure of the ships of Christoper Columbus for the Americas, were preceded by massacres for grabbing land and resources, along with forced conversions to Catholicism.
It is also interesting to note, as does Canadian social activist and author Naomi Klein in her 2023 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, that one month after the Kristallnacht Nazi attacks against Jews in Germany in November 1938, a delegation of the Australian Aborigines’ League travelled to the German consulate in Melbourne to hand over a petition against the “cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany”, in what was one of the very first protests at the horrific events.
For Klein, the aborigines’ leaders were able, while battling for their own fundamental rights, to see the gravity of the Nazi threat. While the ‘industrial’ character of the Nazi massacres was new, and the case of the Jews different, all cases are different, she wrote, and some elements definitively alike.
In his 1950 essay, Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme), the late Martinican author and poet Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the “Négritude” movement, wrote that European countries “tolerated” Nazism “before suffering it”.
European democracies are supposed to be freed, at least at an institutional level, from their ragged past. The recognition of equality between all humankind is inscribed at the heart of the principles and fundamental legislation that govern them. But racism, intrinsically linked to slavery and colonialism, has not disappeared for as much. It suffices to read Mediapart to take stock of the extent of the problem. Those who more or less admit to the idea of a natural inequality are just outside the doors of power in France. In fact, the new hardline interior minister Bruno Retailleau and Marine Le Pen, the figurehead of the far-right Rassemblement National party, already have a foot inside.
“The question that structures French political life is that of racism,” observed Nadia Yala Kisukidi, a philosopher and senior lecturer at Paris VIII university, in an interview with Mediapart. In an article published in September 2024 in the leftwing review Contretemps, socio-historian Houda Asal wrote: “Years of Islamophobic ideology and international war ‘against terrorism’ have impregnated minds and made anti-Palestinian speech more acceptable, justifying, in the eyes of many, a war of annihilation in Gaza.”
It is a fact that the different forms of colonialization differ through history, and to plate the Israeli case onto previous European ones does not allow for an understanding of the present, nor for the preparation of the future, given that the only political solution of any worth in the Middle East is to create a framework within which the two peoples can cohabit.
But also, the fact remains that Israel – the creation of which paradoxically constituted an injustice towards the Palestinians in order to repair another injustice, that of the horror of Nazi death camps – is a colonial state, which the international community has unanimously denounced, in vain, over its expansionist policies of occupation and expropriation that began in 1967. At that time, there were less than ten illegal settlements in the West Bank. Today, they number 145, all of them illegal under international law, as were those dismantled in Gaza in 2005.
The arrival in power in Israel of the nationalist Right and the messianic far-right has only accelerated the process. When, on July 19th 2018, the Knesset adopted the Basic Law that defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”, the state had acted the discrimination within it agaisnt the Arab and Druze minorities, turning its back on the May 1948 declaration of independence according to which the new state of Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”.
For the Israeli authorities, the October 7th attacks were the ultimate justification for their separatist policies. Faced with an enemy who, in a terrifying mirror image, refuses to admit its right to exist, Israel’s existential anxiety over the spectre of a new Holocaust was reinforced, and, as a consequence, so was the necessity to guard against that whatever the cost.
The supremacist depths of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu just as soon came up from the deep. Announcing, within 48 hours of the Hamas attack on Israel, a total siege of the Gaza Strip, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant furiously detailed the consequences: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, it’s all closed. We are fighting animals and we will fight accordingly.” How can one not see here a variant on the call by Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to “Exterminate all the brutes”? What can one say about the comment by Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich on August 5th 2024, who said: “Nobody will let us cause two million [Gazan] civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.”
Why we must decolonize ourselves
While a people is being wiped off the map, the absence of massive revolt should question Western societies and lead them to a collective self-examination in order to finally abandon the ethos of colonizers or, at least, that of descendants of colonizers. Their past crimes, rather than facilitating the acceptance of current crimes, should help them to see clearly the mechanisms at work and to strive to put an end to them.
Without a thorough recognition of their wrongdoings – whereas they imagine themselves to be the world’s enlightened avant-garde – and without a deconstruction of the racist markers still profoundly entrenched, with no real desire to give reparation to the victims – these societies will continue to be blind to the gravity of what is brewing in front of them, and will be of no help for the Palestinians and Israelis who seek a mutual understanding. It is urgent that we decolonize our minds, our culture, our organisational structures, in order to face up to what can become irreparable.
On the opposite of this necessary self-examination, France is underway with a tragic return to the past. The manner in which the political executive has, over the past several months, methodically destroyed a 40-year process of decolonization in New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific, has energised old colonial reflexes . In a land where inhabitants and institutions had shown a collective intelligence and reasonable compromise, the policing approach to the situation this year, brutal and with no past or future, is not only destined to fail, but also to lead to dramatic consequences. Rather than defusing tensions and bring security to the archipelago, it has opened wounds, heightened tensions and already caused deaths.
It is no accident that, in their denunciation of the retrograde actions of the French authorities, the pro-independence movement of New Caledonia’s indigenous Kanak population have never failed to affirm their solidarity with the Palestinian people, the sign that the ones and the others recognise themselves in their mutual conditions of existence and destinies.
The recent nomination of hardline conservative Bruno Retailleau as French interior minister is an ominous move. Just one year ago, Ratailleau vaunted the “wonderful moments” of colonization, and attacked what he called “perpetual repentance”. It is a troubling fact that it is with French Prime Minister Michel Barnier that lies the hope of a “constructive approach” by Paris, to borrow the phrase of pro-independence Caledonian Member of Parliament Emmanuel Tjibaou (son of the assassinated Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou).
Against this reactionary steamroller, only an unfailing resolve on the part of citizens can lead us to look the past in the eye, which is a sine qua non condition for defending the right of peoples to self-determination, and for avoiding that we be covered in shame in the eyes of future generations. Let’s not look elsewhere. Let us stop putting up with the carnage. We are morally responsible for what is happening if we do not oppose it. Silence will destroy us too.
Carine Fouteau
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