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The Eternal Present · Heritages · 30 min
Humanity’s living heritage: traditions, masters of wisdom, sacred places and lives devoted to the quest.

‘Beauty will save the world.’ Fyodor Dostoevsky, taken up and meditated upon by Nicolas Roerich

In the valley of Kullu, in the heart of the Himalayan foothills, there lived in the 1940s an old Russian painter whom the people of the Punjab called, with affection, the Son of the Himalayas. He rose before dawn to paint the peaks. He had crossed the steppes of Siberia, the sands of the Gobi, the Tibetan passes at more than five thousand metres. He had designed the sets for one of the most scandalous creations in the history of music. He had signed an international treaty at the White House. And he continued to paint, each morning, as though the mountain had something to say that colour alone could convey. His name: Nicolas Roerich. The question his life raises is not biographical. It is a question about the nature of the Beautiful, and about what a human being can do with his existence when he decides, lucidly, to make of that Beauty his sole compass.

A life in quest of Shambhala

There are lives whose coherence is not immediately visible. One looks first at the inventory — archaeologist, symbolist painter, stage designer for The Rite of Spring, explorer of Central Asia, philosopher, founder of institutions, diplomat of culture — and one believes one sees the scattering of a gifted dilettante or the frenzied activity of an insatiably ambitious man. Then something falls into place. One understands that all of it is connected. That the boy who dug up Slavic burial mounds on the family estate at Izvara and the old man who contemplated Kanchenjunga from his studio in Naggar were both carried by the same obsession: to find, beneath the shifting forms of the visible, the deep continuity that connects man to himself across the civilisations.

This obsession Roerich gave several names according to the periods and the languages of his life. He called it Beauty, in the Dostoevskian sense, not aesthetic but ontological. He called it Culture, carefully distinguishing this word from civilisation, which is, in his view, merely its material envelope. He called it Shambhala, that Tibetan word designating a legendary kingdom of wisdom, which he and his wife Helena transformed into an inner orientation. All these names point in the same direction.

Born in Saint Petersburg in 1874, dead in Naggar in 1947, Nicolas Roerich traversed a century of catastrophes (two world wars, a revolution that closed the doors of his native country to him for ever, the rise of the totalitarianisms) without ever abandoning the certainty that humanity was something greater than its convulsions. One does not call that naivety. One calls it a conviction earned in the field, canvas by canvas, expedition by expedition. This article attempts to show how.

The excavations at Izvara: when the earth holds memory

Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh was born on 9 October 1874 into a family of the cultivated bourgeoisie of Saint Petersburg. His father was a notary, his mother from a family of merchants. But it is Izvara that counts: the family estate sixty kilometres from the city, where the young Nicolas spent his summers.

He was twelve years old when he began to excavate. Not the digging of a child at play: he worked methodically, recorded his finds, corresponded with archaeologists. The soil of Izvara harboured Slavic remains from the pre-Christian era — burial mounds, ceramics, traces of rituals whose meaning no one could any longer say exactly. For the young Roerich, these objects had not merely an antiquarian value. They were proof that the earth holds a memory that books do not contain, that civilisations pass but that something of them remains, buried, available to him who knows how to look.

This conviction never left him. It would be the deep structure of his entire work.

In 1893, he enrolled simultaneously at the Faculty of Law and at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, two callings of which he already knew which would prevail. At the Academy, he worked under Arkhip Kuindzhi, that Ukrainian painter whose speciality was light: not the realistic light that illuminates objects, but light as an almost autonomous phenomenon, as though the canvases themselves radiated from within. What Kuindzhi transmitted to Roerich was not a technique: it was a question. What is light in a painting? What is one seeking when one paints not what the eye records, but what vision intimates?

Roerich’s first great painting, The Messenger (1897), answers this question in its own way. A rower crosses a dark river beneath a leaden sky. On the far bank, a wooden fortress. The atmosphere is that of mediaeval Russia, heavy, tense. Something is being prepared, something is about to change, but nothing is yet visible. The tonality is that of a secret being transmitted. Pavel Tretyakov, the great Muscovite collector, bought it at once. The painter was twenty-three.

In 1900, Roerich went to Paris to study in the studio of Fernand Cormon, that master of scenes from human prehistory. His time there opened him to European symbolism, to the debates on primitivism, to the question of what art can do with the memory of origins. He returned changed, confirmed in a path that was neither academicism nor avant-garde, but something he would take years to name fully.

The World of Art and archaic Russia

Back in Russia, Roerich joined the circle of Mir Iskusstva — The World of Art — which Sergei Diaghilev animated with that combination of aesthetic intelligence and organisational genius that would make him the most influential impresario of the early century. Roerich contributed to his journal, exhibited in Russia and in Europe, created mosaics for Orthodox churches, designed costumes. In 1906, he was appointed director of the School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, a post he would hold until 1918.

But it is his painting that reveals what sets him apart from his contemporaries.

Overseas Guests (1901) depicts Viking longships gliding over a pewter-coloured sea towards misty Slavic shores. The sky is low, of a bluish grey that is neither threatening nor peaceful. The silhouettes on the boats are reduced to their function: human forms carrying something, a presence come from elsewhere. This is not a historical illustration. It is a meditation on the encounter of civilisations, on that undecided moment when the other arrives and one does not yet know whether it is a threat or a gift. Roerich would return to this motif throughout his life: the waymaker, the messenger, he who crosses over to bring what the others did not yet know they were waiting for.

Those Russian years were years of pictorial archaeology. Roerich drew sustenance from pre-Christian Slavic spirituality, from those strata anterior to Christianisation in which man was still in direct dialogue with the cosmic forces. This was not a matter of nostalgia, but of recovering something that modernity had covered over without having resolved it. The rupture between man and the sacred is not an evolution: it is an amputation whose consequences have yet to be fully measured.

All of this converged, in 1913, in the most shattering project of his life.

The Rite of Spring: the memory of ritual

On the evening of 29 May 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the premiere of The Rite of Spring unleashed what remains, in the collective memory, the greatest scandal in the musical history of the twentieth century. The audience booed, hissed, cried out. Fights broke out in the stalls. The music could barely be heard.

Roerich and Stravinsky had co-signed the original scenario: Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts. The music, polytonal, rhythmically fractured, violently anti-Romantic, was by Stravinsky. The choreography, with feet turned inward, body curved towards the earth, gestures of a deliberately archaic ritualism, was by Nijinsky under the direction of Diaghilev. The sets and costumes were by Nicolas Roerich.

What Roerich painted on those sets is significant: not a dramatic or symbolist landscape, but something deliberately flat, deliberately archaic in its palette — the ochres and muffled greens of the steppe, the treeless horizon, the low sky of the earliest humanities. A space in which the rite is not represented but made possible. Where what is about to happen on stage is not theatre but the summoning of collective memory.

The scandal of The Rite was, in its own way, a confirmation. What the Parisian audience was rejecting was not the formal obscurity: it was the presence of something real. Modern art could well shock by its dissonances. It was more difficult to admit that behind those dissonances lay an appeal to the most buried strata of the collective consciousness. It was not ugliness the audience was refusing. It was depth.

Maxim Gorky, who had observed Roerich closely, described him in those years as a ‘great intuitivist’ — a formula that expressed, better than any academic title, what distinguished him: the capacity to short-circuit the intellect in order to reach directly what civilisations know of themselves without being able to formulate it.

Exile and the call of Asia

The October Revolution of 1917 found him in Finland, where he was staying for reasons of health. The borders closed. He would practically never see Russia again. What could have been a biographical drama became, in his inner logic, a liberation — not a happy one, but a necessary one.

From Finland he made his way to Scandinavia, then to London, where he worked for the Covent Garden Opera and exhibited under the title Spells of Russia. It was there that he encountered Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel laureate in 1913, a figure of universal humanism whom the West had just discovered. The two men recognised one another without needing to explain themselves: two different forms of a single certainty, that Beauty is a shared language, that the cultures of the world have a common bedrock that politics and religion have covered over without ever extinguishing it.

In 1920, Roerich arrived in the United States, where he founded in New York the Master Institute of United Arts, an institution built on the idea that all the arts proceed from a single source and that their division into separate disciplines is a mutilation of the human spirit. He exhibited in more than thirty American cities. European museums, including the Louvre, acquired his canvases. His recognition was international.

But something in him had never ceased to look eastward.

His turn towards Asia was not a whim of exoticism. It had long been prepared by a careful reading of the works of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, whose The Secret Doctrine (1888) proposed a synthesis of the great spiritual traditions of the world around a vision of the evolution of human consciousness. Roerich had studied these texts with his wife Helena, born Shaposhnikova in 1879, with whom he had formed, since their meeting in 1899, a complementary couple in thought as in life. She: a musician trained at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, a self-taught philosopher reading Sanskrit, translator into Russian of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. He: the artist who translated into images and forms what she formulated in words. Between them, a collaboration that was not a division of roles but a unity of vision worked out simultaneously in two registers.

In 1923, at the age of forty-nine, at the height of his Western recognition, Nicolas Roerich left America and set sail for India.

The great traverse (1924–1928)

The Central Asian expedition that Roerich led between 1924 and 1928, with Helena and their elder son Georges, an orientalist and Tibetologist fluent in Tibetan, remains one of the great adventures of twentieth-century exploration. Not for its geographical exploits — others had already mapped those regions — but for what it sought, and for what it produced.

The itinerary defies the imagination: Sikkim, Kashmir, Ladakh, the Karakoram, Chinese Xinjiang, Soviet Central Asia, Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, Tibet. Five years. Conditions that Roerich’s travel journals describe with a sobriety that renders the violence of the facts more gripping: blizzards in passes at more than five thousand metres, burning sandy deserts, a forced encampment on the Tibetan plateau in the depths of winter, where several members of the expedition came close to dying of cold. Negotiations with suspicious colonial authorities, unpredictable tribal chieftains, Soviet border guards. And encounters with lamas in monasteries lost in the snows, with Tibetan scholars whose language Georges spoke.

What Roerich was seeking, beyond the scrupulously gathered scientific data — botany, geology, ethnography — was of another order. He was seeking the living confirmation of a conviction that the Tibetan, Mongolian and Hindu traditions seemed to share: the existence of an underground spiritual continuity between the great cultures of humanity, of which Shambhala was the legendary name.

It is necessary to be precise about what this word signifies, and not to confuse several things. In the Tibetan texts of the Kalachakra Tantra, Shambhala designates a mythic kingdom situated to the north, guardian of the deepest teachings of Tantric Buddhism. This is a precise doctrinal representation, not a vague legend. The question of its nature — geographical reality, state of consciousness, intermediate space — has been the subject of debate within the traditions themselves. Roerich, for his part, operated a personal synthesis between these Buddhist sources and the theosophical cosmology of the Masters of Wisdom. This synthesis is creative but it is not orthodox. In Heart of Asia (1929), he reports signs and conversations that confirm his vision, without ever claiming to have found a geographical location, but affirming that he had felt, in contact with the living traditions of Asia, something that overflowed the categories of Western rationality. This conviction may be accepted, questioned, placed in critical perspective. It cannot be ignored when one looks at the canvases of this period.

During the expedition, he produced approximately five hundred paintings. The journey culminated in the founding of the Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute in the valley of Kullu in 1928, the first permanent scientific research centre in India led by Europeans.

The Banner of Peace

In 1929, Roerich set out to give legal form to a conviction he had held since 1904: that the creations of the human spirit — temples, libraries, museums, universities, works of art — deserve an international protection as unconditional as that which the Red Cross affords to the wounded of war. Men fight one another: that is a reality that each generation confirms. But that is no reason for the traces of their greatness to be collateral victims of their violence.

The treaty he proposed, drafted according to the norms of international law by Professor Georges Chklaver of the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris, stipulates that all educational, scientific, artistic and religious institutions must be recognised as inviolable by all nations, in time of war as in time of peace. The League of Nations approved the principle in 1933.

To identify the monuments and institutions thus protected, Roerich designed a sign: three red spheres encircled on a white ground. The three spheres: art, science, religion — three forms of the human aspiration towards what exceeds it. The circle: the culture that encompasses them and gives them meaning. He called this sign the Banner of Peace — Pax Cultura.

On 15 April 1935, the Roerich Pact was signed at the White House by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the representatives of twenty-one nations. Roosevelt kept a bust of Roerich in his private apartments. The initiative received the public endorsement of Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and Rabindranath Tagore.

On that day, Roerich spoke words that should be engraved on the pediment of every museum, every library:

‘May the Banner float in the wind above the hearths of Light, the sanctuaries and the bastions of Beauty. May it float above all the deserts and the solitary hiding-places of Beauty, so that the deserts may bloom from this sacred seed.’

This pact is not just another legal document. It is a philosophical declaration: the recognition that even in the worst convulsions of history, something exists — the creations of the human spirit — that belongs to all times and all peoples, and that must remain intact. It directly inspired the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and constitutes one of the normative foundations of UNESCO.

The historical irony is bitter. It was precisely during the months that preceded and followed the signing of the Pact that an expedition led by Roerich in Manchuria and Mongolia, financed by Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture, was turning into a diplomatic scandal. Accused of political activities in a territory under Japanese occupation, Roerich was recalled. A spiritual correspondence between Wallace and Helena, in which the minister addressed Roerich as Guru, became public years later. A tax investigation added to the difficulties.

Roerich left the United States in 1936 and never returned. He had wanted to build bridges; circumstances had placed him in contradiction with his own intentions. The Pact outlived him. That is perhaps the best definition of a true legacy. This chapter does not diminish the greatness of his vision. It is a reminder that spiritual depth and political naivety can coexist in the same person, and that great visionaries are not spared the errors of judgement that their century sets before them.

Kullu: the evening light

In 1936, Roerich settled permanently in Naggar, in the valley of Kullu, in what was then the British Punjab. This verdant valley, enclosed between snow-covered Himalayan walls, bathed in a light that Punjabi poets compare to gold dust suspended in the air, became his final studio, his final sanctuary. The local people venerated him. Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore counted among his friends.

He continued to paint with an intensity that never faltered. The witnesses of this period are agreed that he worked each morning before sunrise, in that blue and cold light that precedes the Himalayan dawn — that light which in his paintings takes on an almost phosphorescent quality. The late series — dozens of canvases in which Kanchenjunga, Everest, the snowy passes and the deep valleys return like variations on a single silent theme — achieve a formal austerity and concentration that the language of art struggles to capture. One leaves the register of description and enters something that resembles pictorial liturgy.

In Path to Shambhala (1933), a path climbs towards snow-covered mountains of an impossible blue. The light comes from above, from a sky that seems to vibrate with a presence. No human being is visible: the way is open for him who looks. This is not a representation. It is an invitation.

As the Second World War approached, Roerich sometimes darkened his vision: with Armageddon (c. 1935–1936), he showed burning cities, human silhouettes caught in an apocalyptic atmosphere, as though the imminent historical catastrophe were already projected onto his canvas. He launched, without respite, appeals to the entire world for peace and for the protection of culture. His writings of this period bear witness to a man who never separated art from responsibility, nor contemplation from engagement.

Nicolas Roerich died on 13 December 1947, a few weeks after Indian independence. He had asked that his ashes be scattered in the mountains. The same light that had nourished his canvases for thirty years was shining, that morning, on the snow-covered peaks of Kullu.

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The language of light

It is estimated that Roerich produced more than seven thousand paintings during his lifetime. This figure is staggering, but it explains nothing of what these canvases do to one who pauses before them.

His preferred technique was tempera, an egg-based paint inherited from mediaeval frescoes and Byzantine icons. Where oil paint may darken over the decades, tempera retains its vibration. The tones remain vivid. The blues do not brown. The Himalayan pinks do not fade. This technical choice is not without significance: it was a matter of painting not what passes, but what endures.

The great works of spiritual maturity

Mother of the World (1924) is perhaps the most universal work Roerich ever produced. A veiled figure, immense, occupies the centre of the canvas in a space that is neither earthly nor celestial. Her hands are spread in a gesture that is not an offering but a presence. Her face is hidden. This veil is not an absence: it is an affirmation that what is represented here exceeds any particular face. She is neither the Christian Virgin, nor Kali, nor the Tibetan Tara; she is anterior to all these forms, or rather: she is what all these forms have sought to say. This painting does not ask for allegiance. It asks for silence.

Madonna Laboris (1933) offers something less expected. The divine figure is no longer still and contemplative: she reaches ropes down towards human beings who are climbing the walls of a city under construction. The divine does not save from without; it works from within, alongside man, as though spirituality were also an effort, a participation, a co-construction. It is difficult not to see in this an answer to the question posed by Mother of the World: this veiled presence is not passive. It builds.

Oyrot, Messenger of the White Burkhan (1925) is the strangest painting, perhaps the most charged, that Roerich produced. A lone horseman advances through a landscape of absolute desolation: infinite plains, distant mountains, an empty sky. No visible destination, no announced purpose. The canvas is linked to the Altaic legend of the return of Oyrot, the mythical hero whose people have awaited for centuries as a sign of renewal. Roerich hears in it an echo that transcends the Altai: the messenger of transformation, the announcement of a change that always precedes its visible accomplishment by a great distance.

The Treasure of the World / Chintamani (1924) shows a chest being carried through a nocturnal landscape of cosmic gravity. The Chintamani is, in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the wish-fulfilling jewel — not in the ordinary magical sense, but as a symbol of the knowledge that fulfils. Roerich connects it to the legend of Shambhala: that supreme knowledge which circulates through time, invisible, carried from one era to another by hands that history will never name.

The Himalayas: another way of seeing

What happens in Roerich’s Himalayan paintings, and particularly in the works of the final period, between 1936 and 1947, has no equivalent in Western painting. One does not find it in the Orientalism of the nineteenth century, which regarded Asia as an object of exoticism, nor in Romantic landscape painting, which sought in mountains the thrill of the sublime. What Roerich makes of the Himalayas is something else, and one must look at the canvases for a long time before understanding in what respect.

Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, visible from Darjeeling and from the valley of Kullu, returns in his work as a character. Roerich painted it in dozens of versions over several decades. The mountain does not pose. It is. In the canvases of the late period, the geological forms are simplified to the essential: no more realistic irregularities, no more anecdotal details. What remains is pure presence — as in that representation illustrating the whole chain of Kanchenjunga. The five sacred peaks of the famous mountain float above blue clouds; their snow-covered summits stand out against a spectacular background of magenta. Roerich’s sky is not above the mountains — it is in the mountains, as though the rock itself were made of condensed light.

In the great Himalayan series of the 1940s, painted from his studio in Naggar, perspective has disappeared in the classical sense of the term. There is no longer an external observer looking at a landscape from a fixed vantage point. The canvas absorbs the gaze into what it represents. That cobalt blue covering the shadows of the snowfields: it is not the colour of cold. It is the colour of a bottomless depth. That pink which ignites the ridges at sunset: it is not exactly in nature, and yet it is not invented either. It inhabits the space between perception and what perception intimates.

Roerich had noted in his notebooks that the mountains had led him towards pure colour — not colour that imitates nature, but colour that communicates directly with something in the one who looks. This intuition brought him close, without his having sought it, to a question that his contemporaries were formulating differently. Kandinsky, from Munich, was working on the dissolution of form in order to liberate colour. Roerich, for his part, retained form — the mountain, the pass, the solitary horseman — as though form were the condition for colour still having something to transmit. The mountain as support. The support as threshold.

The final Himalayan canvases, those of the years 1943–1947, painted while the Second World War was devastating the world that Roerich had spent decades trying to protect, achieve an austerity that even his closest admirers struggled to describe without resorting to extra-painterly categories. The palette narrows further: snow white, near-black blue, the pink of dawn, the gold of raking sunlight. The forms become geometric, almost architectural. The peaks are no longer wild; they are composed, like mandalas risen from the rock. One has the feeling of standing before works painted not from the outside of things, but from within.

Helena and Agni Yoga: a philosophy of the inner fire

If Roerich is the painter of this vision, it is Helena who is its philosopher, and the word must be heard in its full force. Helena Roerich is not the wife who accompanies and supports. She is the intellectual without whom the thought of the couple would have neither its depth nor its systematic form.

A musician by training, she translated into Russian Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, a seven-year endeavour requiring simultaneous mastery of Sanskrit, philosophical English and a complex esoteric tradition. This translation, published in 1937, remains a reference work. She reads, she argues, she corresponds with scholars the world over. It is she who, from 1924 onwards, receives and writes the texts that will constitute Agni Yoga.

Agni Yoga — or Living Ethics, Zhivaya Etika in Russian — is a corpus of fourteen volumes published between 1924 and 1938, under evocative titles: Leaves of Morya’s Garden, Illumination, Community, Agni Yoga, Hierarchy, Heart, Fiery World. Helena affirms having received them through inner communication with a Master of Wisdom whom she calls Master Morya, in the lineage of the Theosophical tradition. This affirmation must be heard for what it is: a precise declaration about the mode of reception of these texts, which cannot be reduced either to ordinary composition or to fabrication. It may be accepted, questioned, placed in critical perspective according to each reader’s frame of reference. What withstands criticism is the philosophical coherence of the corpus itself.

Agni means fire in Sanskrit — not physical fire, but psychic fire, that inner energy which the Indian traditions call prana, the Chinese chi, the Greeks pneuma, the Sufis baraka, the Hebrews shefa. A force that circulates, is refined, can be cultivated or neglected. Agni Yoga teaches that this energy is the central resource of human evolution, and that the responsibility of each being is to purify it through the quality of his acts, his thoughts and his creations.

What distinguishes this corpus from other contemplative systems is its radical refusal of the separation between inner life and engagement in the world. Agni Yoga asks for no retreat, no postures, no membership in a closed community. It asks for a transformation of the quality of our ordinary presence — in work, in human relations, in artistic creation. It is an ethics of daily life, not a programme for spiritual élites.

The distinction Roerich drew between culture and civilisation is the direct expression of this philosophy. Civilisation is the material organisation of collective life: its techniques, its institutions, its laws. Necessary but insufficient. Culture — and etymology authorises this, cultura deriving from cultus, meaning veneration — is the capacity of a people to honour what exceeds it: artistic creation, the transmission of living traditions, the education of the soul. Roerich expressed this in a text he held particularly close to his heart:

‘Culture is the veneration of Light. Culture is the love of man. Culture is a fragrance, the blending of life and beauty. Culture is the synthesis of sublime and subtle progress. Culture is the weapon of Light. Culture is salvation. Culture is the moving force. Culture is the heart.’

A civilisation that has lost its culture is an efficient machine without direction. It can last a long time. But it always ends by turning against those it was meant to serve.

These convictions do not remain in books. They have a geography, a chronology, a flesh: institutions founded, treaties negotiated, thousands of canvases painted before dawn. What Agni Yoga formulates in philosophical terms, the life of Roerich has translated into acts. The question that flows from this no longer belongs to him alone: it belongs to whoever encounters them.

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What this life teaches

A civilisation that has lost its culture, in the spiritual sense that Roerich had given this term, is not a passing anomaly. It is a structural risk that every age carries, and the twentieth century took it upon itself to furnish the demonstration. Technical sophistication immunises against nothing. Economic power does not orient. What orients is the capacity of a society to keep alive its relationship with what exceeds it: creation, transmission, the quest for meaning. When this capacity dwindles, it is not institutions that falter first; it is something more difficult to name and longer to rebuild. Our age, saturated with means and at a loss as to its ends, has not yet finished measuring what Roerich meant by this.

From this conviction flows his relationship to Beauty, which is neither aestheticism nor consolation, but something more demanding. If culture is that which orients, then Beauty is the mode of orientation itself: not the agreeable, decorative beauty that furnishes interiors and flatters the gaze, but Beauty in the sense that Dostoevsky understood it — a force that transforms whoever exposes himself to it, that obliges him to something, that reveals to him a dimension of reality that ordinary habit conceals. Roerich spent his life seeking this type of Beauty, in the archaic forms of Slavic spirituality, in the Himalayan peaks painted before dawn, in the religious traditions of Asia. He did not seek it to enjoy it. He sought it because he was convinced that it is Beauty which decides, in the end, what humanity makes of its capacities. Dostoevsky’s formula — Beauty will save the world — he did not receive it as a fine phrase. He made of it the programme of an entire existence.

This conviction naturally led him towards a question that geographical distances and the weight of history seemed to render impossible: is there something that connects the great spiritual traditions of humanity beyond their formal diversity? Roerich answered with his life as much as with his writings. Orthodox by birth, nourished by theosophy, deeply attentive to Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu philosophy, he never claimed that these traditions said the same thing — he was not superficial enough for that. What he affirmed is that they seek in the same direction. That the paths are different, that the light is one. He expressed this conviction in a declaration of 1929 with a clarity that has not aged: ‘In our view, the opposition between East and West is a wholly outdated idea. We are loath to believe that there could exist walls capable of cutting in two what is best in humanity: the impulse of creative evolution.’ This is not a pious wish. It is the description of what he himself lived, conversation by conversation, monastery by monastery, tradition by tradition, across tens of thousands of kilometres.

From this recognition there flows a question that Living Ethics addresses to each person — not to spiritual élites, not to initiates, but to whoever has understood something of this movement: what do you do with what you have received? Transmission is not preserved passively. It demands to be carried, extended, embodied in acts. Roerich lived this demand with an intensity that excluded neither errors nor human frailties — the Manchuria affair is there to bear witness — but that never faltered. Every canvas, every treaty, every institution, every expedition was part of the same direction: that of a thread stretched across the civilisations, which he had taken it upon himself not to allow to break in his hands.

These convictions do not form a closed system. They form an orientation. And an orientation belongs to no one — it is of no century and of no school. It simply awaits those who, in their own time and in their own language, decide to commit themselves to it.

Epilogue: the thread never broken

Frances Grant, an American journalist and Roerich’s collaborator in New York, recorded what he had confided to her one day. What inhabited him, he had told her, was man as part of the whole cosmos. And what also inhabited him was the image of a thread — a thread he held at its Russian end, and which reached back, without ever breaking, to its origins in Central Asia. ‘He had the vision of this thread of humanity, always the thread, never broken.’

This thread he followed in the archaeological strata of Izvara, in the snow-buried monasteries of Tibet, in the canvases painted at sunrise in the valley of Kullu, in the treaties submitted to the governments of the world. This is not a metaphor. It is an operative conviction: that humanity is one, despite its fragmentations, its wars, its failures of understanding — one not in its forms but in its aspiration, in that movement which, across the civilisations, always seeks the same thing under different names.

The question of Shambhala, that legendary kingdom which Roerich sought with a seriousness that did not exclude lucidity, was not a geographical question. He never claimed to have found a place. He said he had approached a certainty: that the great spiritual traditions of humanity, if followed to the end of their own logic, converge towards a common hearth that each culture names differently. That wisdom belongs to no tradition, and to no century. That it is transmitted, lost, found again, and that this transmission is the true continuity of history.

What the life of Roerich shows us is the possibility of an existence sustained by a single orientation: Beauty not as ornament but as a form of knowledge, through the exiles, the revolutions, the political disappointments, the errors, the old age. This orientation promises neither success nor the comprehension of contemporaries. It promises something more sober: that acts accomplished in this spirit inscribe themselves in something more lasting than the biography of a single man.

His canvases continue to speak to those who consent to stand in silence before them. Not to seek answers in them — great works do not give them — but to remember that there exists a way of looking at the world that is not separated from the way of inhabiting it.

To explore the work of Nicholas Roerich further, see the website of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York: https://www.roerich.org

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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Series: Israel-Palestine: beyond the war of narratives | Article 4 — The night of the Jabbok: seeing in the enemy’s face the face of G-d

‘The stranger who sojourns among you shall be to you as the native among you; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ — Leviticus 19:34

‘O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and constituted you as peoples and tribes so that you might come to know one another.’ — Quran, sura Al-Hujurat, 49:13

Beyond the maps: why this article will be unlike the others

The preceding article ended on a conclusion that one hundred and fifty years of history impose without mercy: peace was possible on several occasions between Israelis and Palestinians, and it was destroyed — by strategic calculation, by ideology, or by the refusal to assume before one’s own population the cost of a painful compromise. This conclusion opened onto a question which the three preceding texts in this series had prepared without resolving: if political solutions alone, the maps, the treaties and the roadmaps, have systematically failed whenever they were not accompanied by a more profound transformation, what remains to be sought beyond the maps?

Where conflicts deemed insoluble have ultimately yielded — South Africa emerging from apartheid through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Northern Ireland pacified by the Good Friday Agreement, France and Germany become partners after centuries of enmity — the solution never came solely from a document signed under duress. It required, each time, something more: that the national narratives be transformed, that each camp recognise the other’s wound, that an interior displacement occur, the very one which no diplomatic protocol knows how to manufacture, because it is not of the same nature as diplomacy.

It is precisely here that politics finds its limits, and the question changes register. This article therefore descends beneath politics, towards the layer where what politics alone cannot produce is at stake. And I must name from the outset what this descent may have of paradoxical, even of provocative, for anyone who has read the first three texts. To seek resources for reconciliation in the Torah and the Quran, when it is these very two bodies of scripture that the fanatics on both sides have transformed into weapons — the promised land turned into an inalienable land register, Palestine turned into a waqf consecrated until the Day of Judgement — may seem a strange imprudence. Is it not religion that sacralises the abyss which Ben-Gurion, as early as 1919, declared he did not know how to cross? Is it not religion that transforms a territorial dispute into a holy war, and a compromise into sacrilege?

This objection must be answered without circumlocution, for it governs everything that follows. The whole series has shown that extremism, on both sides, never proceeds from the depth of a tradition but from its amputation. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook was a universal mystic for whom the redemption of Israel was only the first light of a redemption of all humanity; it was his son, Zvi Yehuda, who closed this prophetic opening upon an absolute territorial particularism. On the Islamic side, the mechanics of betrayal are of the same nature, but they require a precision that polemic always evades. Classical Islam was never a religion without political ambition: the caliphates were conquering empires, and the articulation of the religious with the political has existed within it since the seventh century.

What the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian armed branch, invented was therefore not the union of faith and power, which is ancient, but its transformation into a totalising modern-type ideology, modelled on the fascisms and communisms of the twentieth century, one that claims to furnish a complete and definitive answer to all questions of existence, and to punish those who refuse to submit. In doing so, they smothered what Islamic civilisation had carried that was deepest and most fertile: the plurality of the great legal schools, the ijtihad, that effort of interpretation which adapted the law to circumstances, and above all contemplative Sufism, that admirable spiritual tradition for which the decisive struggle is not the conquest of the world but the transformation of the soul. The error does not lie in believing that Islam is innocent of power; it lies in forgetting that, within it, power has never entirely devoured its depth, and that it is this depth which the Brotherhood ideology has sacrificed.

The mechanics of betrayal are thus identical on both sides: to take authentic concepts, tear them from their living context, and make of them instruments of exclusion. What this article undertakes is, in every respect, the inverse gesture. It does not go towards religion as the extremists have confiscated it; it moves back towards the sources, against those who have seized them. For these same texts, which the fanatics have turned into titles of ownership, contain, for those who will read them in their prophetic and mystical depth, the very resources for the reconciliation they are bent on making impossible. Leviticus, which declares that ‘the land vomits out those who defile it’, prescribes thirty-six times the love of the stranger; the Quran, which may be read as a theology of conquest, also affirms that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’. The question is therefore not whether these resources exist — they exist, manifestly, abundantly — but why they have never governed politics, and what it would take for them to do so one day.

To understand this, one must begin with the narrative which, from the first article onward, has served as the guiding thread of this entire series. Not to impose it upon current events as a convenient moral lesson, but because a text which millions have read and reread for three thousand years has retained, regarding how two enemy brothers cease to be so, what neither diplomacy nor political analysis has been able to put into words.

The four stations of Jacob: anatomy of a journey

This text is the story of Jacob and Esau, twin brothers, grandsons of Abraham, whom the betrayal of a stolen inheritance and twenty years of exile had turned into mortal enemies. Jacob — Yaakov, literally ‘he who grasps the heel’ — had come into the world after Esau, seizing him by the heel, but had later stolen through cunning the paternal blessing that belonged to the firstborn. He had fled from Esau’s fury, and now, after two decades, he returns towards the land of his fathers, knowing that his brother awaits him with four hundred men. The entire narrative, in chapters 31 to 33 of Genesis, is tensed towards this dreaded encounter. And the structure which the text imposes between this announcement and its resolution is not a succession of episodes: it is the precise anatomy of a path whose every stage is the condition for the next, such that none may be skipped. (Read these chapters of Genesis online.)

Laban: closing the past one has endured

We often forget that the road towards Esau does not begin with the night of struggle at the ford of the Jabbok, but much earlier, with another figure: Laban, the uncle with whom Jacob had fled and spent twenty years. And those twenty years were not spent at a generous host’s table. Laban deceived Jacob as Jacob had deceived his brother Esau: he substituted Leah for Rachel on the morning of the wedding, he altered Jacob’s wages ten times, he sought to hold him captive in the service of his wealth. Jacob, the deceiver, was thus himself deceived in turn, and more greatly still. He too, then, is one to whom wrong was done. When he finally decides to leave, he does so in secret; Laban pursues him, overtakes him, and from this confrontation there arises not a warm reconciliation but a pact: a boundary set, a stone raised as a stele, a shared meal, and an oath not to cross this limit to harm one another. It is a cold, contractual peace, founded on separation rather than on transformation. But something, behind Jacob, closes.

This first station says something that all that follows presupposes: one cannot go towards the one to whom one has done wrong without first having settled one’s relation to what one has oneself endured. Jacob sets out towards Esau only after having closed the Laban chapter, painfully, imperfectly, but in fact. He has refused to remain indefinitely in the bitterness of the despoiled, just as he will later refuse to remain in the fear of the guilty. He who remains entirely defined by the wrong done to him does not yet have his hands free to open his arms. This is the most discreet station in the narrative, and perhaps the most difficult to transpose — as will be seen — to the scale of two peoples who have, neither of them, yet finished closing their own Laban chapter.

Mahanaim: the first step before one is ready

Scarcely has this chapter closed when the text inserts a scene of disconcerting brevity: ‘Jacob continued on his way, and angels of G-d met him. When he saw them, Jacob said: “This is G-d’s camp”, and he called that place Mahanaim’, which means the two camps. Two verses, no description of the envoys, no message delivered. Jacob sees them, names them, and continues. Why so elliptical a narrative, planted there between the departure from Laban and the night of the Jabbok?

Precisely because the essential lies not in the content of the vision, but in what it reveals of Jacob’s inner disposition at that instant. He has just closed the past; he sets himself in motion towards his brother with no guarantee whatsoever that the encounter will not be a massacre — fear is explicitly named in the text, it does not disappear. And it is in this very movement, this first step taken before one is ready, that the angels become visible. As though the direction chosen opened a space of presence inaccessible so long as one remained motionless in fear or resentment. Mahanaim teaches this, which contemporary psychology has rediscovered by other paths: one does not wait until one has inwardly resolved a wounded relationship before beginning to move towards the other; it is often the movement itself, the first fragile and fearful gesture, that unties what rumination alone cannot unknot. Action precedes and begins the transformation one believed should precede it. Jacob is not yet reconciled — he sets out. And it is this setting out, and it alone, that makes possible the night which is to follow.

The Jabbok: the night that breaks and refounds

Then comes the heart of the narrative. Jacob makes his wives, his children and his flocks cross the ford of the Jabbok. He remains alone. And in the darkness, a man — ish, says the text, with deliberate opacity — wrestles with him until the break of dawn. The narrative never states clearly who this adversary is; one learns only afterwards that he may have been of divine character, for Jacob then declares: ‘I have seen G-d face to face.’ This opacity is not an accident of composition. It is constitutive of the meaning: the struggle with the Mystery takes place in the night, at the edge of a ford, between two worlds, and one emerges from it not with a clear answer but with a transformation.

Two things happen at dawn. Jacob receives a new name: ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with G-d and with men, and you have prevailed.’ And he emerges from the struggle limping, his hip wrenched by his adversary. These two events are inseparable, and therein lies all the depth of the scene. The old identity — Yaakov, the supplanter, he who defined himself by what he seized, took, stole from the other — breaks and reconstitutes itself as Israel, an identity no longer founded on subtraction from his brother but on direct confrontation with what surpasses him. Jacob ceases to be defined by what he took from Esau, and becomes defined by what he traversed in the night. But this refounding bears a price inscribed in the flesh: the limp. Israel does not emerge from the struggle intact, glorious, purified. He emerges wounded and upright. And this detail is decisive, for it forestalls any triumphalist reading: the name Israel does not designate he who has conquered the Mystery, still less he who possesses it, but he who has held fast despite the wound. All authentic Israel limps. A thought, a tradition, a people that presented itself as having dissolved the question, eliminated the mystery, resolved without remainder the human condition, would thereby have betrayed this emblematic figure of an authentic spirituality.

Esau’s morning: recognition without fusion

In the morning, ‘Jacob lifted his eyes — wayyissa Yaakov einav — and saw Esau coming with his four hundred men.’ He advances, and, against all the accumulated fear, no longer hides behind his flocks: he goes before his own people, he walks, he limps, but he walks. He bows to the ground seven times before his brother. And against all expectation, the encounter is not a carnage but an embrace: Esau runs towards him, falls upon his neck, kisses him, and both men weep. Jacob then says a phrase that sums up everything this series has sought to document: ‘To see your face is like seeing the face of G-d.’

The symmetry is too precise to be coincidental. The face of G-d encountered in the night makes possible the re-cognition of the other’s face in the day. The struggle with the Mystery has opened in Jacob a capacity to see, to be truly face to face with one he could not previously face. And there is more: Jacob comes towards his enemy limping. He does not arrive transfigured, in a position of strength. His visible wound says to the other: I am not intact, I have been through something, I do not come to dominate you. Vulnerability equalises. It creates the conditions for a mutual recognition that is perhaps the only solid foundation for a real peace.

But the narrative refuses easy consolation to the end, and it is this that saves it from naivety. Jacob and Esau, after the embrace, do not fuse. They do not become one people, do not share one encampment. Esau offers to journey together; Jacob declines with courtesy, and each departs on his own way, towards his own destiny. Reconciliation does not efface difference; it only makes it possible for difference to cease to be a threat. Two brothers, two peoples, two trajectories, now coexisting without the existence of the one being the negation of the other. It is this model, and this alone — not that of an improbable fusion, nor that of one party’s victory over the other — that will need to be transposed.

But before this transposition, a question arises that is by no means obvious: can this narrative, born of the memory of only one of the two peoples, speak to the other as well? And above all, who here is Jacob, and who is Esau? One will see that the answer is not the one expected, for neither camp occupies a fixed place when we transpose this narrative: each is in turn the brother who has wronged and the brother who is feared. It is here that the two traditions must enter into dialogue.

Torah and Quran in dialogue: two shores, one water

We must begin by dispelling a misunderstanding that the war of narratives has installed as a self-evident truth: the idea that the Torah and the Quran are two alien universes, two rival legitimacies disputing the same land from worlds with no convergence whatsoever. This is false, and a falsehood verifiable by reading the texts themselves. The two traditions are not foreign to one another; they are interwoven at the root. And the best way to demonstrate this is not to place them side by side in two separate expositions, but to set them in dialogue — as the peoples who claim them would, if they permitted themselves to do so.

The shared family: a genealogy of reconciliations

The first interweaving is genealogical, and it bears directly on the narrative we have just traversed. Let us ascend two generations before Jacob, to his ancestor Abraham. He had two sons: Ishmael, the elder, born of his servant Hagar, and Isaac, born of Sarah, the child of the promise who would be the father of Jacob. Genesis recounts the sending away of Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, the separation, the wound of the rejected son on account of Sarah’s jealousy. One might expect this rupture to be the final word. It is not. For when Abraham dies, the text notes a detail that hurried readers pass over without heeding: ‘And Isaac and Ishmael, his sons, buried him in the cave of Machpelah’ (Genesis 25:9). The two separated brothers, the rejected and the chosen, come together side by side before their father’s body. The first broken Abrahamic fraternity closes, in silence, over a shared tomb.

Yet this genealogy belongs not only to the Torah. Abraham — Ibrahim — is one of the pillars of the Quran: the hanif, the pure believer prior to all confessional division, ‘the friend of G-d’, model of confident submission to the divine. And Ishmael — Ismâ’îl — is honoured there as a prophet, son of Abraham and, according to tradition, co-builder of the Kaaba with his father; he is also considered the ancestor of the Arabs, the lineage through which, centuries later, the Prophet who would receive the Quran would come. The two peoples are therefore not simply disputing a land: they descend from the same man, through his two sons.

But one must guard here against an easy conclusion, for the two traditions do not say the same thing about these two sons, and their disagreement is more instructive than any accord would be. In the Torah, the covenant with G-d, the brit, passes through Isaac; to Ishmael the divine promise is of another tenor, not the covenant but an express blessing and a great nation descended from him (’I will bless him, make him fruitful, and multiply him exceedingly’, Genesis 17:20). The Quran performs precisely the inverse movement: the decisive lineage passes through Ishmael, for it is Abraham and Ishmael together who raise the foundations of the Holy House in Mecca and pray to G-d to raise up from their descendants a messenger who shall teach the Book (Quran 2:127-129) — a prayer which tradition reads as the announcement of Muhammad. Each revelation therefore places the centre of gravity with ‘its’ son: the Torah with Isaac, the Quran with Ishmael. (To read the Quran online)

One might see in this the very heart of the conflict, and that would not be altogether wrong: each tradition believes itself to hold the true promise, and holds the other lineage to be secondary. But two things forbid making of this a war of heirs. The first is that neither text transforms this preference into a curse upon the rejected one: the Torah has Ishmael blessed and brings him back to bury his father; the Quran honours Isaac as a truthful prophet and professes that ‘no distinction is made between the messengers’ (Quran 2:136). On both sides, the other son is blessed, recognised, never cursed. The second is that this double, inverted promise is precisely what the gesture of Meiri of Perpignan, of which we shall speak further on, makes it possible to think without contradiction: each reads, from his own shore, a promise as real for him as mine is for me, and to recognise that the other knows himself to bear a promise does not oblige me to renounce my own. It is this asymmetrical fraternity, where each is the elder in his own narrative — not an abstract equality — that founds common ground. It exists prior to all dialogue; it is inscribed in the very blood of the narratives themselves.

And what strikes one, as soon as one holds the two bodies of scripture together, is that reconciliation within them is less a theme than a law of the lineage, repeated from generation to generation. Isaac and Ishmael come together before the dead Abraham. Jacob and Esau embrace at the ford of the Jabbok. Joseph, as we shall see, forgives the brothers who had sold him. Three generations, three broken fraternities, three reconciliations. The family from which the two peoples in conflict are descended is, in its very founding texts, a long school of forgiveness between brothers. When a Muslim reads the story of Jacob, he does not read the myth of a foreign people: he reads the story of Ya’qub, a prophet honoured in the Quran, father of Yusuf. The narrative thread is shared; it is the heirs who have forgotten it.

The stranger one must recognise

To the most repeated commandment in all of the Torah — ‘you shall not oppress the stranger; you know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt’, a formulation that recurs thirty-six times, more than any other precept — the Quran responds with one of its most universalist verses, placed in the epigraph of this article: ‘We have constituted you as peoples and tribes so that you might come to know one another’ (Quran 49:13). The decisive word is ta’âruf, this mutual knowing: the diversity of peoples is not there a defect to be abolished nor an obstacle to overcome, but the very purpose of creation, an invitation to know one another rather than to dominate one another. And the Quran pushes even further this theology of plurality, to a vertiginous point that fundamentalist readings hasten to forget: ‘Had G-d willed, He would have made you one community’ (Quran 5:48). The diversity of paths is not a concession to human weakness; it is willed, deliberate, divine. What the Torah formulates as an ethical obligation towards the other, the Quran formulates as a theological intention: otherness is not an accident of history that truth will eventually dissolve, but the very condition which G-d has chosen to bestow upon mankind. To which it adds, in a phrase that should suffice to disarm all conquest in the name of faith: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ (Quran 2:256).

When the Quran cites the Mishnah: the inviolable life

There is even a place in the Quran where the two traditions do not merely answer one another: one explicitly cites the other, and says so. Sura Al-Ma’ida states: ‘We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever kills a person, unless it be for a killing or for corruption in the land, it is as if he had killed all mankind; and whosoever saves a life, it is as if he had saved all mankind’ (Quran 5:32). This verse echoes, almost word for word, an older teaching of the Mishnah, in the tractate Sanhedrin: ‘Whosoever destroys a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whosoever saves a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had saved an entire world’ (Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a).

The Quran does not merely converge with the Jewish tradition on the absolutely inviolable character of a human life; it explicitly attributes this teaching to the Children of Israel, thereby recognising its source. The interweaving of the two bodies of scripture is therefore not an analogy invented by a well-meaning commentator; it is textual, assumed, engraved in the Quran itself. This is what both extremisms had to cover over in order to kill: a sacred text of one citing a sacred text of the other to say that to kill one man is to kill all of humanity.

The great struggle: Islam’s Jabbok

The night of Jacob, that solitary, nocturnal confrontation with what surpasses him, from which he emerges transformed and wounded, finds on the other shore a structural echo of striking precision. The Islamic tradition distinguishes two forms of jihad, a word whose primary meaning is not ‘holy war’ but ‘effort’. According to a saying attributed to the Prophet — the transmission chain of which hadith scholars debate, but which has become central to the entire spiritual and Sufi tradition — Muhammad, returning from a military expedition, is said to have declared: ‘We have now returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad‘; the greater being the struggle against oneself, against the nafs, the carnal soul, the passions that enslave.

All of contemplative Sufism, the very form of Islam that the Brotherhood has marginalised in order to make it an ideology of external combat, has placed this jihad al-akbar, this great interior struggle, at the heart of the spiritual life. And this is the very structure of the night of the Jabbok: the decisive combat is not the one waged against the other, but the one waged against oneself, in solitude and darkness, from which one emerges not unscathed. Both traditions know, each in its own language, that the transformation which makes peace with the other possible passes first through a struggle with oneself that no one else can conduct in one’s place.

The betrayed brother and forgiveness: the sura of Yusuf

But the deepest mirror between the two traditions is not a concept: it is a narrative, and it is the direct continuation of the story of Jacob. The Quran devotes an entire sura, the twelfth, to Yusuf, Joseph, Jacob’s son, and introduces it with a formula unique in the whole Quranic text: ahsan al-qasas, ‘the finest of narratives’. Yet this story is not a Quranic invention: it is, almost detail for detail, the one that the Torah recounts in chapters 37 to 50 of Genesis. Joseph thrown into a pit by his jealous brothers, then sold and taken into slavery in Egypt, raised to the summit of power by his gift for interpreting dreams — and who, when these same brothers come to him during the famine without recognising him, chooses not vengeance but forgiveness. Genesis places in his mouth: ‘It was not you who sent me here, but G-d’ (Genesis 45:8); the Quran has him say: ‘No reproach upon you this day; may G-d forgive you, for He is the most merciful of the merciful’ (Quran 12:92). Two Books separated by a thousand years and by a schism, recounting the same reconciliation between the same brothers, in the same words or nearly so.

And the differences between the two versions, far from weakening this parallel, make it more eloquent still, for each illuminates one face of the same movement. The narrative of Genesis is long, choral, encumbered with an entire family: Judah who stands surety for Benjamin, Joseph’s successive ruses, hiding the cup in his brother’s sack, testing his kin, delaying the revelation, weeping in secret before revealing himself. It is the narrative of a process: reconciliation there ripens slowly, in stages, exactly as the night of the Jabbok ripened through Laban and Mahanaim. The Torah shows the path in its full duration and full difficulty. The Quran, for its part, tightens the narrative around Joseph alone, presents him immediately as a prophet receiving a revelation, and lays the emphasis on two virtues it holds up as a model: sabr, patience in ordeal, and forgiveness as the summit of spiritual life. Where Genesis unfolds the process, the Quran draws from it the lesson. One narrates at length how one makes the journey; the other goes straight to what the journey teaches. That both versions are needed to hold the whole story is perhaps the most just of symbols: the two peoples each hold a part of the same wisdom, and would possess it whole only by consenting to read it together.

That this shared narrative is, for the Quran, the finest of all, and that it extends directly from that of Jacob and Esau, the generation after, the same blood, the same Abrahamic family — this is no coincidence. The two traditions agree not only, in theory, on the value of reconciliation: they share the very narrative in which this reconciliation takes place and is transmitted, from Isaac and Ishmael before the tomb of Abraham to Jacob reconciled with Esau, then to Joseph reconciled with his brothers. Fraternal forgiveness is not a theme borrowed from outside; it runs in the veins of both founding narratives, and it is the same blood that circulates in them.

There is, moreover, a word in the Arab-Muslim tradition to name what Joseph accomplishes towards his brothers: sulh. Far from designating a vague goodwill, it is a precise institution for the resolution of conflicts, one that does not seek first to establish who is guilty but to restore the severed bond, and which is sealed through a public reconciliation and a shared meal. The Quran summarises it in a lapidary formula: ‘reconciliation is a good’ (wa-l-sulhu khayr) (Quran 4:128). And the final scene of Joseph is its archetype: not a court of judgement, but the wronged brother who pardons, the bond remade, the family reconstituted around a table in Egypt. The Torah had already given the form of this gesture a generation earlier, when Jacob and Laban, at the end of their dispute, raised a stone and shared a meal to seal their pact (Genesis 31:54). From one end of Abraham’s family to the other, reconciliation takes the same concrete form: an outstretched hand, a table, a meal taken together.

Mystics and philosophers, from shore to shore

What the prophetic texts lay down, the mystics of both traditions have carried to incandescence, and they have done so, from opposing shores, in strikingly convergent terms. Ibn Arabi, the greatest of the Sufi masters, wrote in the thirteenth century in his work The Interpreter of Desires, Turjuman al-Ashwaq: ‘My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for monks, a temple for idols, the Kaaba of the pilgrim, the tablets of the Torah, the book of the Quran. I am the religion of love, whichever direction its mounts may take.’ Shortly before him, al-Ghazali — who is no marginal figure but one of the greatest Sunni theologians, he whom the tradition has surnamed the ‘Proof of Islam’ — had made interior purification, the struggle against the passions of the soul, the very heart of the lived faith; he had reconciled in a single work the rigour of the law and the depth of Sufism. And Rumi, a century later, sang in a verse that has become proverbial: ‘Beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.’ From these three voices rises the same water: the authentic spiritual life of Islam was never the conquest of the other, but the welcoming of what the divine has deposited within him.

On the other shore, Jewish mysticism had sensed the same thing in its own language. The Kabbalists made Jacob-Israel a sefirah, Tiferet, Beauty, the heart of the sefirotic Tree, the principle that harmonises and reconciles the two opposing divine forces, the overflowing mercy of Hesed and the cutting rigour of Gevurah. Israel thus became, in Jewish mysticism itself, no longer merely a people but a structure of being: the figure of the middle that holds together what opposes, the cosmic reconciler. And Rav Kook, heir to this Lurianic Kabbalah, wrote in For the Perplexed of the Generation — Le’Nevuchei Ha’Dor that ‘in every religion there is a divine spark of morality that sustains it’, through which ‘humanity may progressively advance towards belief in divine unity’.

That these two mysticisms answer one another is, moreover, no surface coincidence: they truly crossed paths, and fertilised each other. The Kabbalah was born and matured precisely where Judaism lived in closest contact with Islam, in Andalusian Spain and the Provence of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, those same lands where Meiri would write at Perpignan. Historians of mysticism have long shown what the Kabbalistic theory of the divine attributes, like the spiritual poetry of a Judah Halevi, owed to Sufism and to Arabic philosophy; Maimonides himself thought in part in the language and with the tools of the Muslim philosophers. In other words, the convergence of the two traditions on the welcoming of the other is not simply an analogy that a well-disposed reader imposes after the fact: it is a historical kinship, woven across the centuries when Jews and Muslims inhabited the same cities and read the same books. This fertile coexistence truly existed; it is not, therefore, in principle beyond reach.

This mystical intuition, two twentieth-century Jewish thinkers translated into philosophy, and their translation touches the very heart of this article. Martin Buber, who was also, as we saw in the second article, one of the voices of the ethical Zionism of Brit Shalom, opposed two fundamental ways of existing in the world: the I-It relation, where the other is merely an object to be used, classified, dominated, and the I-Thou relation, where the other is encountered as an irreducible presence, a genuine interlocutor. The whole mechanics of extremism described in this series is, at bottom, nothing but a gigantic reduction of the other to an It — a threat, an obstacle, an invisible labour force. Buber, who from the 1920s defended a Judeo-Arab understanding and a homeland common to both peoples, had drawn from this a direct political consequence: peace would not be built upon the domination of one people by the other, but upon the genuine encounter of two presences that recognise each other.

And Emmanuel Levinas, marked in his own flesh by the Shoah, made the face of the other the foundation of all ethics: the face of the other man, in its nakedness and fragility, addresses me with a silent injunction that precedes all words and all calculation — ‘thou shalt not kill’ (Exodus 20:13). The face, in Levinas, is precisely what forbids murder. One measures then the depth of Jacob’s phrase, ‘to see your face is to see the face of G-d’: it says, twenty-five centuries before Levinas, that to recognise the enemy’s face as a face is to render oneself incapable of killing him. From shore to shore, from century to century, the same intuition surfaces and is transmitted: the other is not the enemy of my faith nor the object of my power, but one of the forms the divine has chosen to take, and his face looks upon me.

The limit that must be named

It would be dishonest, and contrary to the rigour this series has claimed from one end to the other, to stop at this harmony. For this dialogue of texts, as real and documented as it is, has never governed politics. The same scriptures that cite and answer one another have been changed into land registers and waqf, into titles of divine ownership withdrawn from all human compromise. The convergence of prophets and mystics has prevented neither the wars, nor the seventh of October, nor the destruction of Gaza. The question, then, is not whether resources for reconciliation exist in both traditions — they exist, as we have just verified, abundantly and interwoven. The question is to understand why they have remained without effect, and what prevents them from being mobilised. And the answer, at bottom, comes down to a single obstacle, formidable precisely because it hides at the very heart of what makes a tradition strong: the temptation to believe that recognising the truth of the other is to betray one’s own. It is this obstacle which a single man, in Perpignan, in the thirteenth century, knew how to remove — and it is he of whom we must now speak.

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‘All Israel limps’: Meiri and al-Ghazali, or the recognition of the other

Meiri’s gesture: recognising without absorbing

Menahem ben Solomon Meiri (1249-1316), born and died in Perpignan, is the author of the Beit HaBechirah, ‘the House of Choice’, an encyclopaedic commentary on almost the entire Talmud. Heir to the Provençal school, to the rationalism of Maimonides and to daily contact with the Christians and Muslims of the towns of Languedoc and Catalonia, he accomplished a gesture which the Jewish tradition largely forgot for centuries — it was rediscovered above all in the twentieth century, notably by the historian Jacob Katz, precisely because it was troubling. Where the halakhah drew a juridical distinction between the Jew and the non-Jew, the goy, Meiri introduced a third category that overturns this binary: the umot ha-gedurot be-darkhei ha-datot, ‘the nations bounded by the ways of religions’. Any people, any community that lives under the governance of a moral law, a religious discipline, an ethic of responsibility — whether Christian, Muslim, or other — deserves, he argues, to be treated with the same ethical consideration as an Israelite, in the very domains where the halakhah had previously distinguished.

What Meiri accomplishes is not a relativism; he does not say that ‘everyone is Jewish’ or that ‘everything is equivalent’. He says something far more nuanced, and far more powerful: the determining category is not ethnic or confessional affiliation, but the moral structure of existence. He thus performs what contemporary philosophy would call a universalisation by recognition, the exact opposite of the universalisation by substitution practised by historical Christianity in proclaiming ‘the true Israel is us’. In substitution, the universal cancels the particular: it claims to replace the original. In Meiri’s recognition, the particular remains the hearth from which the universal is glimpsed — Meiri speaks from Israel, never in place of Israel — and he recognises a common form through irreducibly diverse expressions, without dissolving any of them. This is, in more recent language, a concrete universal: a universal that is valid only because it is inhabited by an irreplaceable particularity, and that radiates from it without erasing it.

Al-Ghazali: the same recognition, seen from within

And this gesture is not a Jewish singularity, isolated on its shore: it has, on the other, an almost exact counterpart. Each tradition therefore bears within itself, from the inside, the principle that makes it possible to recognise the other — and that, at bottom, is what this entire article seeks to show. Al-Ghazali, already encountered for his knowledge of the interior struggle, sustained in his treatise on the Decisive Criterion a thesis of quiet audacity: salvation is measured not first by the confessional affiliation declared, but by the sincerity of the quest for truth and the uprightness of the heart. Many of those who have never received the message in its authentic form, or have known only a distorted image of it, belong, in his view, to divine mercy, because G-d judges what lies at the depths of beings and not the label they wear.

The parallel with Meiri is striking, and the difference between the two gestures is what gives it its full value. Meiri, a jurist, shifts the criterion from outside: what renders a nation worthy of consideration is its visible moral discipline, its orderly manner of inhabiting the world. Al-Ghazali, a mystic, shifts the same criterion towards the inside: what saves a being is the interior quality of his search, invisible to all but G-d. One recognises the other by his conduct, the other by his heart; but both refuse to let the frontier of belonging be the frontier of humanity. That this refusal was formulated separately, at the very heart of Judaism and at the very heart of Islam, by two of their greatest minds, says clearly enough that the recognition of the other is not an import from modernity: it lay dormant in both traditions, waiting to be awakened.

Defusing the war of promises

This is what defuses the war of promises evoked above. As we have seen, each tradition places with ‘its’ son — Isaac for the Torah, Ishmael for the Quran — the decisive promise, and is inclined to hold the other lineage to be secondary. As long as one reasons by substitution, these two claims are mutually exclusive: if my promise is the true one, yours is usurped, and one is brought back to the logic of the two extremisms for which one people’s land can only be the denial of the other’s. Meiri’s gesture opens another path: I may hold my promise as mine, fully, irreducibly, and recognise at the same time that you know yourself, from your shore, to bear a promise as real for you; without your certainty annulling mine, nor mine yours. To recognise the other’s promise is not to renounce one’s own; it is to cease demanding that the other have none.

Israel, proper name and common noun

Let us apply this key to the very name of Israel, and the whole tension unravels. Israel designates, in its primary and irreducible sense, a particular people, bound to a singular history, to a revelation, to a wound inscribed in the flesh through circumcision and in time through the Sabbath. This cannot be diluted, transferred, or claimed by anyone else. But the existential structure which this people embodies — the struggle with the Mystery of the Living without capitulation or evasion, the wound accepted, the transmission of this experience as a path for standing upright — can be recognised as active, differently and partially but genuinely, in any human being or any tradition that lives under this same exigency. Israel, in this figurative and secondary sense, is whoever refuses to evade the Mystery, enters into struggle with it without seeking to annihilate it nor to submit to it passively, emerges transformed and wounded, and attempts to transmit this experience as a possible way of assuming the human condition. This excludes from this figure the militant atheism that denies the Mystery, the fundamentalism that claims to possess it without remainder, the nihilism that renounces the struggle, and the gnosticism that believes it can stride over this Mystery through knowledge, and emerge intact. And it includes, as the whole history of the just on both sides has shown, all those who have faced the night without averting their eyes.

Esau too is a wrestler

The decisive reversal is then this. The other, in this conflict, is always a son of Abraham. According to the tradition that makes him the ancestor of the lineage which would receive the Quran, the Arabs descend from Ishmael, the first son, the desert castaway who returned nonetheless to bury his father at Isaac’s side, the second son, progenitor of the tribes of Israel. Yet in the narrative of the Jabbok, both can also take the figure of Esau, the twin brother turned enemy and reconciled at the ford. These two aspects are not interchangeable, and it would be inaccurate to confuse them: Ishmael is the other by blood, Esau the other through the history of a fraternal betrayal. Yet together they speak the same truth, and with a force that neither would have alone. For in this night that each must traverse, it is indeed the other who holds the role of Esau, the brother one has feared, whom one may have wronged, and of whom one does not know whether he comes to embrace or to slaughter: the Israeli is the feared Esau of the Palestinian as much as the Palestinian is the feared Esau of the Israeli. The reconciliation to which this conflict calls is therefore not that of an elect with one who is rejected, of a people bearing the truth with a people deprived of it. It is the reconciliation of two brothers who each have their Jabbok to cross, and who are, for each other, in turn the wrestler and the feared enemy.

To see in the enemy’s face the face of G-d is not an edifying formula: it is to recognise that the other, too, is Israel in the sense that Jacob became it that night, a being who wrestles with the Mystery and bears its mark. And Meiri’s gesture has this liberating quality: that this recognition takes nothing from the proper name of the Jewish people. To recognise that the other too wrestles is not to renounce what one is; it is, on the contrary, to fulfil it. For ‘all Israel limps’ — and he who, on the opposite side, limps as well is not the enemy of my Israel: he is its unrecognised brother.

The process: helping two peoples cross the Jabbok

There remains the most difficult test: to transpose this individual path — four stations traversed by a man alone, in one particular night, at the edge of a ford whose name we still know — to two entire peoples, each laden with millions of dead, with irreconcilable memories, with national narratives soldered to suffering. This transposition will never be an equivalence: the two memories do not weigh the same at the same moments, and the whole series has refused the false balance that settles responsibilities in equal shares. But the structure of the path holds good for both, for neither can do without a single one of its stations.

Laban, or free hands

Before being able to open their arms towards the other, each people must settle its relation to what it has itself endured. For the Jewish people, this is the wound of two millennia of persecutions, expulsions and pogroms, of which the Shoah is the abyss: that matricial wound which, in Paris in 1895, before Captain Dreyfus degraded beneath cries of ‘death to the Jews’ in the courtyard of the École Militaire, founded in the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl the conviction that a refuge-state was needed, and which today renders any questioning of Israel’s security literally unbearable. For the Palestinian people, it is the Nakba, the dispossession, the exile, and those refugee camps maintained across several generations as a wound that no one wished to let heal: not Israel, which refused return; not the Arab regimes, which often preferred to perpetuate refugee status rather than integrate those they claimed to defend; not an international community that funded survival without ever imposing a solution. The wound is real; its guardians are more numerous than is ordinarily said.

This is not a matter of placing these two wounds on the two pans of a balance; that would be to fall back into false symmetry. It is a matter of noting that each must be worked through by those who bear it, because a people that remains entirely defined by its victimhood, whatever that may be, has not yet closed its Laban chapter, and keeps its hands bound by its own past. Charles Rojzman, the inventor of social therapy, who spent his life leading groups in conflict towards reconciliation, formulated this in clinical terms when he cited Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who featured in the second article: ‘nothing is more comfortable than to define oneself by what others have done to us, for it spares us the question “who are we?” and the need for any examination of conscience.’ The remark was aimed at Israelis, but Rojzman observed that it applies just as much, almost identically, to Palestinians: two peoples each enclosed within the circle of their own wounds, and each systematically underestimating the fear and suffering of the other. This is the station that both have, until now, most obstinately refused: each remains in the camp of the despoiled, and from there one does not open one’s arms; one clenches one’s fists.

Mahanaim, or the craftsmen of the first gesture

It is here that the lucid voices whose history the second article of this series recounted return, no longer to be enumerated but to be named at last by their proper name: they are those who took the first step before being ready, in fear, without guarantee, and who saw for this reason the angels on their path. The mothers of Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun who marched together in Jerusalem on 4 October 2023, three days before the worst, signing a Mothers’ Appeal against the cycle of bloodshed. The Combatants for Peace, former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters who laid down their arms together. The forum of bereaved families from both camps. Standing Together, which secured humanitarian convoys in the midst of war. All wagered that action precedes transformation, that one sets out towards the other without waiting to have resolved one’s own night.

And what they practise intuitively, half a century of fieldwork has distilled into method. Rojzman, again, tested his own in the French banlieues, in Rwanda after the genocide, wherever groups separated by fear and hatred must relearn to live together. His postulate runs counter to the usual diplomatic intuition: it is not the conflict that must be eradicated, but the violence. Conflict, when conducted within a framework that maintains mutual recognition, is not the enemy of peace; it is its necessary passage, for it obliges adversaries to say face to face what polite dialogue conceals. Violence, by contrast, dehumanises the other and excludes him from the human race; conflict accepted and faced, on the contrary, maintains him as an interlocutor. This is, transposed into the language of fieldwork, the night of the Jabbok itself: not the avoidance of the confrontation, but its traversal, from which one emerges changed.

Rojzman added a fundamental requirement for reconciliation to become possible: it would be necessary to teach, in schools, the affective history of the other — not the history of events, always disputed, but that of his emotions, his pride and his anxieties, received without judgement, as a recognition of the other’s heart. To hear the adversary’s pain without judging it is already to see in his face something other than a threat. This is what the mothers of Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun do, without always theorising it, when they sit together: not to negotiate positions, but to hear the other’s fear as one would wish one’s own to be heard. And all have paid the price of Mahanaim: the seventh of October struck first at the peacebuilders, the kibbutzim of the pacifist left, Vivian Silver murdered at Be’eri. The first step is not reconciliation; it is only the putting in motion, and it exacts a price. But without it, nothing of what follows is possible.

The Jabbok, or the transformation that cannot be passed on

Then comes the struggle which no one can conduct in the other’s place, and it is here that the transposition becomes most demanding, for the night does not have the same content for each. For Israel, to cross the Jabbok would be to confront the temptation of mastery — not the legitimacy of its existence, which is not in question, but the risk that the vital quest for security stiffens into a will to domination, that attachment to the land solidifies into a sacred land register, that the national impulse closes in upon the exclusivity which Kook the son substituted for his father’s prophetic universalism. Israel’s night would be to allow the name Israel once again to signify first the wrestler-with-the-Mystery, and not the master-of-the-territory. For the Palestinians, to cross the Jabbok would be to confront the identity built upon refusal and resentment, that theological line of the rejection of all Jewish presence which al-Husseini inoculated, that prison of martyrdom which Hamas has erected. The Palestinian night would be to recover the Quranic ta’âruf and the spirit of sulh against the waqf turned into a weapon, and to transform the combat into a jihad al-akbar against its own hatred rather than a lesser jihad against the other.

Neither can cross this night for the other, nor claim to have crossed it so long as the other has not crossed it also. And each, if it does cross it, will emerge limping: this must be named without circumlocution, for any reconciliation that presented itself as intact, triumphant, without scar or renunciation, would be a lie. Both peoples will emerge wounded from their night, or they will not emerge from it at all.

The morning, or the other’s legitimacy

At the end of the process, there is not one single people, not a fusion, not the erasure of differences. Jacob and Esau embrace, then each departs his own way, towards his own destiny. Two peoples, two national legitimacies, two memories, coexisting without the existence of the one being the negation of the other. The political translation of ‘to see your face is to see the face of G-d’ is not a treaty clause: it is to recognise the other’s national existence as legitimate, his wound as real, his face as a face and not as a threat. It is precisely this which has been absent from every agreement signed and subsequently betrayed over the last century: not one more article, not one more security guarantee, but this recognition, which no protocol contains and which only a night of the Mystery traversed by both peoples can produce.

A possible dream: the federation of two brothers

The morning of Jacob and Esau does not merely sketch an interior attitude; it sketches, if one listens to it to the end, a political form. Two brothers who embrace and then camp separately, on a land they can neither divide by ignoring one another nor inhabit by fusing: this is almost a definition of what could one day be a federation. One may dream of it, and to name that dream is not to yield to the naivety this series has combatted from one end to the other; it is to refuse that the absence of a horizon itself become a destiny. To dream, then, of two sovereign states, each endowed with its own institutions, its flag, its memory, its assumed national narrative, but linked by shared institutions where separation is impossible: to manage together Jerusalem, which neither can possess alone without denying the other; to guarantee free movement on a land too narrow for two walls; to watch over the balance of two forms of development which, instead of each proceeding against the other, would discover themselves to be complementary.

This is not a utopia without partisans. It is, almost point for point, the project carried since 2012 by an Israeli-Palestinian movement named A Land for All — Two States, One Homeland, founded jointly by thinkers, jurists and geographers of both peoples, and led today by an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman. Its proposal starts from a fact that no walls will suppress: the land, from the Jordan to the sea, is felt as homeland by both peoples at once, and no boundary line will ever separate a Jew’s attachment to Hebron from a Palestinian’s attachment to Jaffa. The example of these two cities is eloquent, for it is a crossed one. Hebron, where tradition places the tomb of Abraham and the Patriarchs, one of the holiest sites of Judaism, lies in the heart of the West Bank, that is to say in Palestinian territory. Jaffa, the ancient Arab port, one of the great centres of Palestinian life before 1948, celebrated for its orange groves and its men of letters, is today a district of Tel Aviv, in Israeli territory.

Each people thus carries its deepest attachment towards a place situated ‘with the other’: proof, inscribed in the geography itself, that no frontier will ever bring the political boundary and the map of the heart into alignment. Rather than denying this double bond, the movement A Land for All proposes to recognise it and draw the consequences: two independent states within the 1967 borders, but an open frontier, freedom of residence and movement for the citizens of both states, and a set of shared institutions for water, the economy, the environment, fundamental rights and the joint management of Jerusalem. Separation where it is necessary, partnership where it is possible: a future, in their formulation, that is at once together and separate.

The analogy which this movement itself invokes is the one that the third article of this series had already cited as proof that an abyss can be bridged: the Franco-German reconciliation. Had one told a German of 1945 that his granddaughter would study freely in Paris, that the border between the two countries would vanish, that the same parliament would unite them, he would have held such words for madness. Three wars in seventy years, millions of dead, hatreds deemed hereditary — and yet two peoples eventually understood that their common interests outweighed their differences, and that they did not have to sacrifice their separate identities in order to build a shared future. The difference, and it is a considerable one, is that neither of the two nations inhabited the other’s land; here the two peoples share the same soil, which makes the challenge harsher still, but the stakes identical: to recognise that the other is here, that he will not leave, and that the only alternative to perpetual war is some form of existence side by side. This is, transposed into the grammar of the modern state, the very wisdom of the ford: neither fusion, nor war, but two brothers standing beside one another, each at home yet together.

I do not overlook how distant such a horizon may appear today, still more so after the seventh of October and the long and bloody war that followed it, at a time when the walls are rising and the voices of peace are more inaudible than they have ever been. But one must carefully distinguish between what is distant and what is impossible, for to confuse the two is precisely the gesture of the fanatics. And above all, one must see what this horizon requires concretely of us, here and now, well before it becomes reality. For such a federation to be one day conceivable, the two camps of reconciliation, those lucid and tenacious minorities that the second article named, those peacemakers of both societies, must cease to be minorities.

And the first step towards amplifying their voices costs neither money nor physical courage: it consists in refusing, in our own use of language, the war of narratives that feeds the conflict from afar. For this war is waged not only in Gaza or the West Bank; it is waged also on our screens, in our conversations, in the camps we choose by relaying one narrative against another. Each time one repeats the slogan that demonises a whole people, transforms a real pain into a weapon against the pain across the way, settles in a single word a conflict of which one knows only half, one throws one more twig into the fire — from one’s armchair, and in the belief that one is on the right side.

Conversely, to propagate a different discourse is already an act: one that holds both wounds to be real without setting them in competition, that distinguishes the fanatic from the sincere believer and the leader who exploits a people from the people he claims to serve, that refuses fatality without denying gravity. That, modestly, is what this series will have tried to outline from one end to the other — not in order to be right, but to offer another way of seeing, and therefore of speaking. Let this view and this way of speaking be passed on, let them gain a conversation, a shared article, a spirit that doubted, and already the balance of power between narratives shifts by one notch. Thus, if some readers emerge from these pages with, in their ear, a voice a little different from the tumult of slogans — less assured of holding the right camp, more attentive to the wound across the way — then this work will not have been in vain.

Beyond that first gesture, these artisans of peace must be supported, relayed, funded, heard, multiplied, until their number tips the balance of forces that the extremists now hold. And this is not the business of diplomats alone, nor of governments alone: it is also the business of each of us. To support those who, in both camps, have chosen to see in the other a face before an enemy — through the attention one gives them, through the narratives one relays, through the refusal to yield to the amalgams this series has dismantled one by one — is an engagement of conscience, and an engagement for the future. For the future is not written; it will be made of the decisions and actions that men and women, at every scale, will have chosen to assume or to refuse.

If this path is yours, if you think as I do that wherever we are we can contribute to advancing the cause of peace, there and around us, write to me, or let us speak by video: you will find my contact details and my video calendar on the Opening page. I will suggest a few associations to support there, and a few actions possible here from today — for it would take only a small determined group to begin, together, to make a voice for peace heard. That, at bottom, is the whole spirit of the Waymakers: to carry from one shore to the other the voices open to the future that the tumult of the times covers over.

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Conclusion: neither naivety nor despair, but the patience of the ford

The path of Jacob traces, between two symmetrical illusions, a narrow and realistic way which must, finally, be named in all its sobriety. Against the romantic illusion that believes goodwill is sufficient, that wishing for peace would suffice to reach it, the narrative opposes the necessity of a night, of a real transformation that breaks and refounds. And against the perfectionist illusion that waits to be entirely healed, entirely ready, before making the first gesture, it opposes Mahanaim: begin to walk, and it is the movement that will make the crossing of the night possible. Reconciliation is not a moment, it is a process; it begins before one is ready, it passes through a night that cannot be anticipated, it produces not a fusion but a recognition, and it leaves in the body a limp that recalls that one has truly confronted something.

I shall not pretend that this path will be trodden shortly. The night of transformation is not complete for either of the two peoples; at the collective scale, one may even doubt that it has truly begun. Nothing guarantees that Esau will run towards his brother to embrace him: in the text, he arrives with four hundred men, and Jacob does not know until the very last instant whether he comes to embrace or to massacre. The first step is always taken without knowing. But what this series will have tried to demonstrate, from one end to the other, is that there is no destiny here — there is history, and history is made of the decisions taken by men and women. The abyss that Ben-Gurion did not know how to cross will not close of itself, but neither is it graven in eternity. Other abysses, apparently deeper, have been crossed by generations that refused to hold them as a destiny. And if politics alone has never succeeded, it is perhaps because it sought in the maps what was written only in the narratives — those narratives which both peoples revere, and which describe, from millennia past, exactly the night they will need to traverse, and the morning that may follow it.

The ford has a name. The morning was described, long ago, in a text that the heirs of Isaac and those of Ishmael hold in common. Nothing remains, for those who will read it from both shores at once, but to set out — with fear, without guarantee, limping perhaps already — and to recover, through long patience, the direction of what is just.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Living Notebooks · Poems · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Under the boughs of the tree
in the resonance of green and yellow
I listen, motionless,
to the dialogue of birds

Further off
the rumble of vehicles
carries its human freight
from place to place

I stand here
my gaze wide
my breath tranquil
vagrant words passing by

without holding me

All is so simple
for one who renounces within
the vast game of the world

A living, gentle breath
has taken shelter in me
for eternity

© Jérôme Nathanaël - 26 août 2021

Traduit du français par l’auteur.

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© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 25 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

From the adaptation of the steam engine to the locomotives of the nineteenth century, through to high-speed trains and commercial aircraft, we have travelled ever more swiftly from one place to another; and today the internet even provides immediate access to information that once took several weeks to reach an individual. In our cities, the least object of our desires is often readily accessible, almost within arm’s reach. This acceleration and this ease have gradually rendered us eager for the immediate satisfaction of our expectations, making us ill-equipped to tolerate whatever requires time and patience. Yet a famous proverb tells us that patience is the mother of all virtues, and therefore its absence the source of a great many ills. Let us rediscover, then, a taste for slowness and for those things which demand that we have long awaited them!

Impatience, that ordinary ill

In the seventeenth century, a great French poet, whom we have all studied, already wrote, in his celebrated fable The Lion and the Rat, the following moral: “Patience and time do more than strength or rage.” He recounted the story of a lion caught in a net at the edge of a forest, roaring in vain to escape the trap, whilst that same rat, whom he had previously spared, by gnawing through a master mesh, undid the entire snare and succeeded in freeing him.

La Fontaine’s Fables remain remarkably relevant today, for they speak to us of our human nature and of our behaviours, which have evolved so little over the centuries, even as cultures and fashions have varied, and our scientific knowledge and our technical achievements have prodigiously grown. That brief phrase, contained within two octosyllabic lines, alerts us more acutely than many another to the gravity of one of the worst ills of our age: impatience, which often travels in the company of its companion anger — a frequent consequence of the same affliction.

We may find illustrations of this impatience around us every day, for instance in observing the risk of accidents caused by those irritable drivers who endanger their own lives and those of others in order to gain a few seconds in excessively congested urban traffic. High risk for a derisory outcome: here is a remarkable illustration of impatience, which in general resolves no problem whatsoever, yet risks subjecting the one who yields to it to manifold inconveniences — being swept away by it, thereby losing an inner stability that is often fragile enough, and then visiting one’s agitation upon others.

The faces that impatience may assume are manifold and arise in countless situations, so thoroughly is it the force underlying a great many impulsive behaviours, which deprive a man of his consciousness and deliver him to his lowest tendencies, or feed the most obscure stratagems for gaining the upper hand in a situation, or over a person, who obstructs his access to what he deems necessary.

When the desire to possess governs time

But like so many of our most powerful and least controllable tendencies, impatience is an almost visceral and in fact desperate response to the flight of time, which obsesses and terrifies us. When we have a crucial need that determines our pleasure or well-being in the short term, or the attainment of our more distant dreams and ideals, we come up against our own temporality and our finitude, in a manner conscious or unconscious according to the individual and the subjects that engage them.

Since our criteria of success in life belong to the domain of having — having pleasure, love, security, possessions, achievement, renown, and even for some, having being itself, that is to say a certain state of personal or spiritual development — and since to have means to reach the object of that having, to hold it with or within oneself, whatever it may be, as long as we fail to attain it, we experience a dissatisfaction that engenders impatience, together with all the ills that are its consequence.

Lao-Tzu, who lived in China from the middle of the sixth century before the Common Era to the middle of the fifth century before the Common Era, and to whom the Taoist tradition attributes the authorship of the Tao Tö King, the Book of the Way and of Virtue, noted therein: “The goal is not only the goal, but the path that leads to it.” In other words, what we seek to attain or obtain motivates us to make the effort to approach it, yet an equally important part of success lies in the path we take to reach it.

The Taoist concept of wu wei, literally “non-action”, but more precisely action without forcing — acting in accord with the natural movement of things — extends and deepens this intuition. The patience it designates is neither inertia nor withdrawal, but the refusal to violate reality through a will clenched about its object. It is an openness to the real that resembles more the attitude of the musician who listens before playing than that which forces a passage.

Whatever it is that we desire or seek, it is in the dimension of being — what I am, in movement towards what I wish to have — that a fundamental key to our spiritual and peaceful relationship with our temporality resides. It is from this awakening of awareness that our capacity to release the grip of impatience may arise, allowing us to accept the time necessary to every human undertaking, whatever its nature.

The tyranny of desires and the path towards oneself

Few beings are naturally inclined towards patience. We are more generally inhabited by the impatience generated by the power of our desires, which cause the waiting or effort required for their satisfaction to seem so painful. Like the child who importunes his parents by demanding their immediate attention, or who attempts, through a fit of tears, to obtain the object of his craving more swiftly, we seethe inwardly when the facts resist us, until we sometimes boil with anger, when this takes the form of a person or an object standing in the way of achieving our end.

This is because patience is learnt, and it requires a profound change in our relationship with ourselves and with reality. It is necessary to enter into the time of slowness and interiority, to learn, step by step, to embrace life and to become a friend to oneself. The task at hand, as I have begun to indicate, is to pass from the time of having to the time of being, by turning inward to escape gradually from the determinisms of the desires that sweep us along — not in order to attempt to cease desiring, but so as to make the desire to be primary within oneself in relation to the desires to have, and to begin to desire to become, as René Daumal expressed it in that poem of which I wrote in a previous article.

If we begin to observe the extent to which we are, as it were, acted upon by multiple desires — sometimes so contradictory that they seem like the desires of several different people within us — and that for each of these desires, we are ready to prove to ourselves, and to others if necessary, that they deserve to be satisfied, and that it will therefore be legitimate to suffer if they are not, perhaps then we shall aspire to free ourselves from these chains in order to gain access to freedom. I speak here not of freedom in the popular sense — the freedom to do whatever one pleases whenever one wishes, which is nothing more than the will to power of an ego reduced to animality, concerned with extending its hold over a territory, real or virtual — but of the freedom to determine who I am, to choose the quality of being I wish to cultivate within myself, starting from the initial givens with which life has endowed me: that mysterious assemblage of a unique body and a unique spirit, which no science will ever be able to map in its entirety, for it partly eludes mere materiality.

The human being, shadow of the Living

It is in approaching this dimension, which I call spiritual, that our perception of time and our manner of living it inwardly undergo change. We are no longer in the world to accumulate, delivered up to the imponderable of birth and circumstance, tormented by desires that carry us away, but to accomplish a work that depends upon ourselves alone — to raise ourselves from the torments of animality, preoccupied solely with its survival, to the luminous heights of integral humanity, awakened to all the dimensions of the living, intimately and consciously bound in a relationship of love to each of its expressions. Here again, it is not a matter of acquiring an inner state in exchange for the practice of techniques or the observance of religious rules, but of transcending even that notion itself, by understanding that the task is rather to render manifest within oneself the presence of a ray of the one and infinite Life, through a progressive transformation that gradually prunes away the superfluous and orients one’s entire being in an opening to love, than to be a closed ego attaining the desired object of its beatitude. Human language struggles to describe its subtleties; it stumbles against the absence of words that might carry the trace of a shared experience of this ascent towards the dimensions of the sacred. Here it confines us to dual relations between subject and object, and to recourse to spatial or temporal notions in order to express the inexpressible.

In attempting to convey to us, despite these linguistic limitations, these notions that invite us towards another understanding of our human condition, two geographically distant traditions — the Hebrew and the Buddhist — offer us two images that are in reality quite close. The first tells us that man was created in the image and likeness of that infinite Life which is called G-d, an almost unusable catch-all term, since it covers as many meanings as there are beliefs. The two Hebrew words employed indicate, for the one, tselem, from a root meaning shadow, that the human being is the projected shadow, within the space-time of the earth, of that boundless Life; the other, demout, speaks of a structural kinship or pattern between that infinite Life and the human being who is a part of it. Buddhism, for its part, reminds us that we all have within us the Buddha-nature, that is to say that our deepest nature is pure, unblemished, clear and omniscient, capable of love, compassion, and wisdom, freed from the shortcomings of our ego clenched upon its immediate needs.

The Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition has gone further still with the concept of kṣānti, one of the six perfections or pāramitā. Śāntideva, in his Bodhicaryāvatāra, devotes an entire chapter to it and distinguishes it in three dimensions: endurance in the face of suffering, the capacity not to be shaken by the pairs of opposites — praise and blame, pleasure and pain — and the ability to remain firm before the very depth of reality. Kṣānti is therefore not merely patience in the temporal sense of the term; it is an inner composure that sustains the whole of existence, extending far beyond a simple relationship with time.

The Sufi tradition converges with this demand through ṣabr — an Arabic term whose semantic richness far exceeds our notion of patience. Al-Ghazālī, in his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, distinguishes it in three successive degrees: ṣabr in the face of affliction, ṣabr in the effort of orientation towards G-d, and ṣabr in the face of the incessant desires that solicit the human soul. This tripartition overlaps with remarkable precision the progression we seek to describe here, and recalls that patience, in all the great traditions, is not merely one virtue among others: it is the one that renders all the others practicable.

These presentations converge, if one is willing to consider G-d not as a punishing father or a God made man, but as the Living with all His qualities — His faces, as the Hebrew tradition tells us, of which love is not the least — and within whose unity we are each a part capable of being conscious of itself. Be that as it may, in seeking to liberate within ourselves our essential and initial nature, we gradually escape from the impatiences arising out of our appetites for having, in order to enter into a more vertical temporality, where each instant contains within itself its own potential riches, which our inner life shall unveil.

This mutation of our relationship with ourselves — whereby we come to desire to build ourselves, through the unfolding of our spiritual potentials and the fulfilment of our essential being, rather than through enslavement to all our transient and competing desires — is only possible if we discover therein the horizon of happiness and the consolation of our existential anxieties.

Man rarely changes through adventure or whim; he exerts effort, and still more commits to a sustained effort, only with the hope of a return on his investment. From generation to generation, we have grown accustomed to bargaining with life in relationships mingled with demand, disbelief, and mistrust. Our will is thus frequently nourished by a tacit negotiation with it, and enters into contract for defined and measurable gains. And, in our age tyrannised by the immediate, in which artificial intelligence can, within a few seconds, produce texts that are certainly intelligible yet wholly devoid of those stylistic asperities through which life transpires, this tacit contract will most often be made on a short-term basis.

To attempt to escape from the impatience that proceeds from the immaturity of the desire to have, in order to gain access to the time of interiority born of the desire to be, can therefore only arise from a lucid evaluation of a well-being made possible at the conclusion of this effort. One must then clearly discern within oneself how far impatience delivers us to feverish restlessness and threatens us with despondency if contentment is delayed, and then understand that the edifice of the self opens us to a density of life and experience that renders sustainable the long duration and the constancy of effort. This new orientation does not burden us with the necessity of renouncing our desires; on the contrary, it will enable us to dispose of an inner measure — a kind of gauge by means of which we shall be able to distinguish those desires whose expectations are legitimate and whose satisfaction may contribute to our progress, from those which encumber or enslave us.

Self-observation as the first discipline

It is through self-observation that we shall bring to light the diversity of the inner movements that pass through us, and the variability of the desires that animate us — provided that this observation is truly a perception simultaneous with what is being observed; that is to say, that we develop a presence to ourselves sufficiently stable as not to be drawn along and ultimately merged with what we observe. In other words, the task is to look inward as though we were spectators of a theatrical performance, whilst avoiding identifying ourselves in turn with each of the players. And if we wish to understand progressively the meaning of the play being staged — of which we are scarcely the director — let us beware of our permanent inclination to judge, comment upon, and criticise the actors who have taken possession of us, in relation to the image we would wish to have of ourselves, or to the favourable effects we would wish our theatre to produce beyond ourselves. Let us simply endeavour to be sincere with ourselves, which would already be a fine spiritual achievement.

This lucidity and this presence to oneself will persuade us that we live most often dragging the weight of the heavy luggage of our past — filled with dissatisfactions, resentments, regrets, doubts, and prejudices — our eyes fixed upon a future enjoined to be more radiant, onto which we have projected the imagined scenes of our happiness, towards which we are stretched in a painful and unhealthy waiting. And in this all too common attitude, our present slips through our fingers, without our being attentive enough to receive its liberating teachings, should they differ from our preconceived ideas, or to savour its richnesses and subtleties, should they not correspond to our expectations.

In this unfolding it will then appear to us, as something self-evident, that numerous are the desires we nourish through this manner of being in order to compensate for the inner insecurity it provokes. What happiness, other than fleeting and fragile, can we hope for if we are absent from the present life, torn between the ghosts of the past and the evanescent visions of the future, impatient solely for satisfactions that do not depend upon us, but upon aleatory and transient elements such as, for example, material comfort, social success, or the recognition of others?

We are now beginning to understand clearly that establishing within ourselves this quiet yet active patience — which would allow us to free ourselves from our agitation and our fevers — means orienting ourselves towards a form of wisdom that knows how to be lived through an attentiveness to the present, discerning the essential that elevates us from the incidental that enslaves us, and attaching itself more to the edification of our being and to its spiritual inscription in life than to our hold upon the world through power or wealth.

This does not preclude attaining a certain material ease or an influential position, provided it is possible to succeed therein without renouncing the dignity of our being and the uprightness of our conduct — those dimensions which ultimately give direction and meaning to any existence that aspires to be lived at the full measure of humanity. Abandoning this primary requirement encloses us in the condition of the man devoid of all greatness, reduced to the horizontal earth, upon which, bent under the weight of his narrowest inclinations, he produces, consumes, ensures his survival, and reproduces, awaiting death with dread, insensible to that latent force within him which he might cause to spring forth in order to bind himself to the infinite of the sky, and which once drove him to stand upright.

But to perceive the possibility of this connection, one must indeed cease yielding to the easy seductions of the appetites that dominate us and invade our mind — to the point sometimes of rendering us deaf to any somewhat deeper questioning — and refuse to renounce ourselves in order to obtain greater comfort or recognition. If we decide to direct ourselves towards this wisdom and this interiority, which give a sublime meaning to our destiny, we shall attach less importance to the material conditions of our existence, which will progressively free us from certain of our former expectations, and far greater importance to the way in which we live them, so as to know ourselves better and to evolve.

Knowing oneself without judging oneself

Our inclination towards impatience then risks being displaced onto a new demand: that of obtaining quickly signs of progress to reassure us of the validity of our choice, for at the outset of this process of progressive mutation, we are still encumbered with our habits of avidity and all our anxieties. We do not yet measure the profound consequences of these attitudes which have structured themselves within us over the long term, and from which we shall not be able to disengage ourselves without effort.

We have a frequent tendency to judge and evaluate ourselves by comparison with others, scarcely capable of considering ourselves according to our own interior criteria of lucidity and sincerity; and we also experience great difficulty in being present to the simple reality of what we are living, so thoroughly are we traversed by the regrets or the traumas of the past or our projections towards the future, which troubles our relationship to the present moment. These inner attitudes will long resist our will to escape them, for we must first draw up a kind of inventory of our inner domains before we can undertake any substantial change whatsoever.

The only change that is initially possible is a change of gaze upon oneself, which passes through the apprenticeship of sincerity — so as to know oneself in reality, that is to say to cease deceiving oneself in wanting to please oneself, like a Narcissus who could not bear his own face and would employ his talents to disguise it. No one can evolve without passing through the acceptance of seeing everything within oneself, without which all our effort results merely in the maintenance of illusions, for which we shall sooner or later pay the price in still greater suffering.

But for one who succeeds in ceasing to judge himself, it becomes possible to cease lying to himself, and there opens before him the possibility of beginning to accept himself as he is, of progressively entering into friendship with himself — yet a demanding friendship that requires the constancy of effort in working upon oneself, so as to acquire an inner composure upon which to lean in the building of the self.

Christian mysticism has named this posture ὑπομονή, hypomoné, a Greek term from the Pauline epistles often translated as “patience”, but which designates more precisely a perseverance under pressure that does not yield, an active endurance of the wayfarer who knows the path is long and does not turn aside from it. John of the Cross makes of it the virtue necessary for the traversal of the dark night of the soul — that inevitable passage in which all spiritual crutches give way and nothing remains but the sole force of the continuing will to carry on.

And, in this awakening spiritual dignity, there appears a new patience, born of the total acceptance of oneself and one’s present, whose density becomes that of a being in motion, reinvested with himself.

Through the attention we shall bring to bear upon our spiritual realisation, we shall begin to escape the power of those desires which previously drove us to seek outside ourselves something to compensate for our inner void and our secret anxieties. We shall thus be able to free ourselves from the many impatiences generated by so many cravings and covetings that encumber us, so as to accord importance only to legitimate needs — those that contribute to the equilibrium of our inner life, to our refinement, and to our maintenance.

But in thus orienting our existence towards personal progress, we are embarking upon a demanding path, which must first pass through a progressive disclosure of our actual state, which will require of us total sincerity and an effort of humility, to accept discovering ourselves in a less flattering light than the illusion we had hitherto maintained. Another form of impatience then risks overtaking us, for we should like to be able rapidly to reduce the flaws and failings we discover within ourselves. This impatience we can only transform into a positive force by accepting, little by little, no longer to judge or compare ourselves, but simply to regard ourselves as a being in the process of becoming, who applies himself each day to pursuing his work — the re-creation of himself.

If we succeed in observing ourselves with this benevolent gaze, whilst at the same time maintaining towards ourselves a firm attitude that incites us to surpass ourselves rather than to relapse into easy complacency, we shall manage to bring into being within us that quiet humility and that active patience which are the beginning of wisdom and serenity.

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The secret chamber and the river

Our relationship to temporality then begins to change substantially, because at the deepest part of ourselves there gradually crystallises, a little more each day, a space of immobility and silence — like a secret chamber in which the agitation from without, the preoccupations of material life, and the gaze of others no longer hold any sway, because something more living, more dense, and yet more light unfolds therein, in a dimension that seems to elude the flight of time.

It is here that the tradition of Advaita Vedanta introduces the notion of titikṣā — one of the six preparatory disciplines that Śaṅkara names sādhana catuṣṭaya — which designates the capacity to remain serene in the face of opposites: heat and cold, pleasure and suffering, praise and blame, without being either indifferent or swept away. Not the refusal to feel, but the refusal to be governed by what one feels. This inner stability, cultivated through patient and regular practice, is precisely what renders habitable this secret chamber of which we speak, and what allows vertical temporality to open within it without being immediately reclosed by the first turbulence to arrive.

In this place within ourselves, we may receive other emotions, other thoughts, other intentions, for there we brush against the mystery of another presence. Is it that of my truest, most intact, most free self, escaping from the illusory identifications into which I habitually project myself? Is it some fragment of a greater presence — stardust, divine dust? What words to use to describe what can only be heard and shared by one who has lived the liberating experience?

But what matters is that from this place — different for each one, for even were it but a speck of near-nothingness, it would be unique to him whilst being born of the same infinite life — from this chamber, I may then diffuse myself into the world, and sense this presence in each person, so as to discern sometimes, upon certain faces, the fragile halo of light of which it is the trace, and thus give free rein to my love for my fellow human beings, my very nearest. For it is by virtue of this dynamic patience that I establish within myself, and the consciousness and humility that accompany it, that I cease to expect others to conform to my desires or my conceptions, and begin to accept them as they are — just as I practise for myself — without projecting upon them judgements that separate me from them, discovering them at last in their real humanity. Thus, beyond the appearances with which they adorn themselves, they become to me quite simply infinitely loveable, in their hopes and their sorrows, in their joys and their disappointments.

I also renounce seeking outside myself what might fill my void and my gaping insufficiencies, for in opening myself to this inner temporality so different from clock-time, I also sense what escapes the hold of the visible — which is measured in duration — and become responsive to richer and more fruitful treasures. As long as I succeed, even whilst active in my daily life, in maintaining myself in this quiet state — as long as my presence to myself does not yield before all that outside might draw me in its wake and cause me to fall back into a mindless torpor — I remain connected to this inner chamber through which life flows like a river. And I discover little by little that I am this river, and that I am Life itself.

Armed with a burning patience

As we have been able to elaborate throughout this article, we now understand that the patience born of our spiritual awakening is an active patience, engaged in daily life, and not a renunciation of existence and its joys. On the contrary, by freeing us from the painful subjection to those compensatory appetites for our various deficiencies, it enables us to enter into an ever more authentic dialogue with ourselves, to receive life in an openness devoid of avidity, and to go towards the other for his own sake.

Thus, attaining this dynamic patience is a first victory for one who walks towards his spiritual fulfilment — the victory of having succeeded in establishing within himself a kind of sanctuary that renders serenity possible: a place where he is free to replenish himself far from social agitation and human tensions, a place beyond the world whilst yet being in the world. For the point is indeed to remain in the world whilst managing to progress within it, to remain amongst men in order to assume fully our common condition, and to endeavour to breathe into it, in a loving and helpful presence, more hope and more fruitful questioning. Enriched by this inner life, nourished by this experience of a presence within oneself that bears the taste of eternity — binding us to the whole universe — how can one not sense the so frequent absence of light and love amongst one’s fellow human beings? How can one not see in this terrible atrophy the real and lasting cause of all the ignominies of our societies?

The Hebrew tradition has forged for this tenacious and inhabited waiting a word of rare precision. The root qvh (קוה), which one finds in the Psalms — qavéh el Adonaï, “hope in the Eternal” — does not designate a resigned patience, but a tension of the whole being towards a sensed horizon. The patience it names is inseparable from hope, and hope from action. This is perhaps the most just formulation of the gaze we need in order to continue — the very one evoked in the subtitle of this text: to have one’s gaze resting upon the horizon where the dawn shall rise.

“Let us receive all the influxes of vigour and of real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.” Thus wrote Arthur Rimbaud in 1873 in his Une Saison en enfer. It is indeed a burning patience that one must cultivate in order to enter, nourished by all those “influxes of vigour”, into those cities with their sometimes dazzling architectures, where so much wealth and artifice are displayed, yet where the stupefaction of men — reduced to supervised producer-consumers — and their inner misery, when not material, seems ever more intent upon gaining the upper hand over the intelligence of the heart and the beauty of self-giving, ceaselessly deferring the possibility of engaging in real changes that would liberate human genius.

And Pablo Neruda, that immense Chilean poet — committed, pacifist, anti-fascist — who fought for his convictions despite persecutions, added, addressing all men of goodwill in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the 13th of December 1971: “it is only with a burning patience that we shall conquer the splendid city which will give to all mankind the light, justice and dignity.” This tenacious patience can only come from an irreducible faith in man’s capacity to re-create himself as a spiritual being and to reactivate within himself love and wisdom — which will enable him to find at last the strength to realise, in harmony with all, that city for which Neruda hoped, or to bring to fruition the magnificent dream that inflamed Martin Luther King in Washington on the 28th of August 1963, before 250,000 people, during his celebrated speech I have a dream.

With one’s gaze resting upon the horizon where the dawn of this new world shall rise, armed with that burning patience which causes us to regard each instant as an invitation to the celebration of the best of ourselves and each human being as the unique and sublime place where the infinite of the living has deposited its mark and its potential of light, it remains for us to advance step by step in our personal transformation and to go towards our fellow human beings, attentive to every means of laying with them the first stones of the splendid city.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 70 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

Series: Israel-Palestine: beyond the war of narratives | Article 3 — A century and a half of sabotaged peace: anatomy of a machine for manufacturing fatalism

“14 May 1948 is the most important day in Jewish history since the destruction of the Temple. We have become a free people in our own country.”
— David Ben-Gurion, proclamation of the State of Israel, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948

“15 May 1948 is the day of the catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, their lands, their lives. This wound has never been closed.”
— Palestinian collective memory, Yawm al-Nakba

The deadlock was not written in advance

Imagine a cartographer who surveys the territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and sees in every frontier not a natural datum engraved since the beginning of time, but the fossilised trace of a human decision — a treaty signed in colonial haste, a war launched then lost, a forced or acquiesced exodus, an agreement signed then circumvented, an outstretched hand rejected, an opportunity deliberately destroyed. Every checkpoint, every settlement, every suicide bombing, every refugee camp maintained by design, every rocket fired at civilians, every section of the separation wall is the scar of a precise choice, taken by identifiable actors at a locatable historical moment. There is no destiny here — there is history, and history is made of decisions.

This is the argument that this article will demonstrate by traversing a hundred and fifty years of this conflict: the current impasse is not the ineluctable product of ancestral hatred between two peoples condemned never to coexist. It is the product of a series of precise choices that have, at every decisive turning point, closed doors that other choices could have kept open. And these choices reveal a pattern whose regularity, over a century and a half, is genuinely stunning: every time a partition of the territory has been proposed, it has been accepted — with reluctance, with pain, with legitimate reservations — by the Jewish or Israeli side, and rejected in its entirety by the Arab or Palestinian side. And at every refusal, the outcome obtained by the party that had refused proved worse than what it had rejected.

This pattern is not a partisan argument; it is a documented historical observation that we shall traverse together, from the Peel Commission of 1937 to the Camp David negotiations of 2000, by way of the UN partition plan of 1947 and the Oslo Accords of 1993. It does not, for all that, exonerate the Israeli responsibilities in the current impasse, which are real, documented, and will be named without restraint. But it forbids the convenient narrative that would make Israel the sole party responsible for the impossibility of peace.

A few words for readers who are encountering this series through this article. The first article dissected the two extremisms that feed on each other — radical Palestinian Islamism and the Israeli far right of Greater Eretz Israel — showing how each camp furnishes the other with the justification for its existence and the energy it could not sustain alone. In that context, Haj Amin al-Husseini was presented as one of the founding figures of the Islamisation of the conflict. The second article sought out the other voices — Zionist and Palestinian alike — who saw the catastrophe coming, sought a different path, and were systematically silenced by their own camps. This article goes back in the chronology of that double sabotage, from the first Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth century to 7 October 2023, to see precisely by whom and how the opportunities were destroyed. Understanding is the minimal condition for ceasing to be mistaken about the solutions.

A necessary clarification about what this article is not. It is neither an indictment of Israel, nor an absolution of the Palestinian leadership, nor a trial of European colonialism, which, while it bears a real responsibility for the seeds of the conflict, is not in itself sufficient to account for a century and a half of deliberately destructive choices. The responsibilities are multiple and unevenly distributed: those of the colonial powers who planted the seeds of the conflict with cynicism; those of the leaders of both peoples who at every turning point chose outbidding over compromise; those of the regional powers who instrumentalised the Palestinian cause for ends that had nothing to do with the welfare of the Palestinians. These responsibilities will be named with the same rigour regardless of which camp is concerned.

The poisoned foundations

Ottoman Palestine: neither lost Eden nor permanent war

The Palestine of the late nineteenth century is neither the idyllic tableau of perfect coexistence that some pro-Palestinian narratives project into the past, nor the terra nullius — land without people — that certain propagandists have sometimes invoked to deny any pre-existing Arab presence. It is a complex territory forming part of the declining Ottoman Empire, populated by Muslim and Christian Arab communities, by Jews long established there, and, from the 1880s onward, by those waves of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe in the context of the nascent Zionist movement. Tensions with the local Arab populations begin during this period, and they are documented — as we have noted — as early as 1891 by Ahad Ha’Am, a proponent of cultural Zionism. They are not yet war, but they carry the seed of it.

The first Jewish immigrations: fleeing before building (1881-1917)

To understand 1948, one must understand 1882. Not as an arbitrary point of departure, but as the moment when a Jewish immigration that had existed for centuries in Palestine changes radically in nature and in project.

The Jews do not arrive in Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century as strangers come to colonise an unknown territory. A continuous Jewish presence is documented there from Antiquity; the communities of the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron and Tiberias bear witness to it, and as early as the 1880s the Jews constitute the majority of the population of Jerusalem. The second article of this series recalled that an equally real and deeply rooted Arab presence coexisted with this continuity; both facts are true, and it is precisely because they are both true that the conflict is tragic rather than simple. What the first aliyot (waves of immigration) introduce is something else: no longer families integrated into the Ottoman fabric over generations, but an organised movement of national return carrying an explicit political project.

The first aliyah begins in 1882. Its immediate trigger is precise and must be named: the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 1 March 1881 unleashes in Russia a wave of pogroms in the shtetlech, the Jewish towns and villages of Ukraine, Poland and Bessarabia. The Russian government responds not by condemning these massacres, but by institutionalising them: the May Laws of 1882 forbid Jews to settle in rural areas, to own land, to practise the liberal professions. They are laws of disguised progressive expulsion. Between 1881 and 1914, approximately two million Jews leave the Russian Empire — the great majority for the United States, a minority for Palestine. These first immigrants of the Zionist movement are not conquerors borne along by an ideology of domination: they are, for the most part, survivors rebuilding. The Bilu movement, a Hebrew acronym drawn from Isaiah — Beit Yaakov lechu venelcha, “House of Jacob, come, let us go” — brings together students who decide, after the pogroms of 1881, to wait no longer for the uncertain grace of the European nations.

The second aliyah (1904-1914) differs in texture and ambition. It is carried by young Jewish socialists, often marked by the Russian Revolution of 1905 and a new wave of organised violence: the Kishinev pogrom of April 1903 had killed forty-nine people and mutilated hundreds more, under the indifferent gaze of the tsarist police. These immigrants bring with them a structured political ideology: collective labour, the kibbutzim — agricultural communities founded on collective ownership and egalitarian sharing — and the renaissance of the Hebrew language as an instrument of nationhood. David Ben-Gurion, who would proclaim the birth of the State of Israel in May 1948 and who disembarked at Jaffa in 1906 aged twenty, belongs to this generation. It is this generation that will found the institutions that become the State of Israel.

The Palestine they join is neither empty nor without tensions. The land purchases by the Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901, pose a real and documented problem from that era: the sellers are often absentee urban notables living in Beirut or Damascus, whose lands are cultivated by Arab fellahin. When the land changes hands, it is these peasant families who lose their way of life. This reality feeds a concrete hostility towards the purchasers, which unscrupulous Palestinian leaders would know how to transform, as we shall see, into the fuel of war. As the second article of this series has documented, Ahad Ha’Am writes as early as 1891 that Zionists who ignored this reality would be preparing a catastrophe. No one truly listened.

The third aliyah (1919-1923), the fourth (1924-1929) and above all the fifth (1933-1939) — this last comprising massive numbers of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany — amplify these tensions within the framework of a British Mandate that possesses neither the political coherence nor the moral will to arbitrate them honestly.

The British double promise: the architecture of the conflict

If one seeks a foundational act of the impossibility in which the conflict has entrenched itself, one must look not towards Tel Aviv, nor Gaza, nor Ramallah, but towards the offices of the Foreign Office in London, between 1915 and 1917. We recall here briefly the two contradictory commitments made by the United Kingdom over the same territory, with the insouciance of an empire that believed it could manage the consequences from a distance, and which was gravely mistaken — elements we have already touched upon in the second article of this series.

The Hussein-McMahon correspondence (July 1915 — March 1916) promises the Sharif Hussein of Mecca, in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire allied to Germany, the independence of a vast Arab state covering the greater part of the Middle East, including, according to interpretations still debated by historians, Palestine. The Arab Revolt does indeed take place, commanded by Hussein’s son with the help of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, and plays a real military role in the Ottoman defeat. The promise is honoured on certain territories; it will not be honoured on Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 is a sixty-seven-word document that changed the destiny of a region. The Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour writes to Baron Walter Rothschild that the British government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, while specifying that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. This specification, formulated as a guarantee, is in reality a logical impossibility in a territory that the two commitments promise simultaneously to two distinct peoples.

The global context of November 1917 illuminates the scale of the calculation: the war is not won. The October Russian Revolution has just broken out and threatens to take Russia out of the war, which would free German divisions for the Western Front. The Lloyd George government seeks levers of mobilisation everywhere. The Balfour Declaration is not an act of generosity towards the Jewish people: it is an instrument of war, designed to obtain the support of American Jewish communities in order to influence Woodrow Wilson — the President of the United States, then still neutral — whose entry into the conflict on the side of the Allies had become London’s absolute priority. The Palestinian people are not consulted. They are not even named directly: the Declaration speaks of “the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, as if a majority population on its own land were an administrative category to be managed rather than an actor to be heard. This initial act of rendering-invisible is perhaps the original fault of the British colonial enterprise in the Levant, from which all subsequent ones derive.

It is in this void that everything plays out. The British have promised the same territory to two peoples, without giving themselves either the means or the will to arbitrate the consequences. The Arab population of Palestine, unconsulted, unrepresented, deprived of political frameworks after centuries of Ottoman administration, finds itself confronted with an organised and growing Jewish immigration in a territory that London manages according to the strategic interests of the moment. A genuine popular frustration, an Arab national identity under accelerated construction, a colonial authority simultaneously omnipresent and incoherent: all of this constitutes an extraordinary political combustible awaiting a spark.

What is needed to ignite this combustible is a man capable of naming it, of channelling it — and above all of radicalising it beyond any possible compromise. This man emerges in 1921, in the form of a major colonial blunder by the British themselves.

Haj Amin al-Husseini: the systematic Islamisation of a territorial conflict

His name already appears in the first article of this series, where he was presented as one of the three founding fathers of radical Palestinian Islamism, alongside Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, and where his collaboration with the Nazi regime was documented in its darkest detail: his meeting with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, his interventions with the Bulgarian, Romanian and Hungarian governments to oppose any transfer of Jewish children to Palestine, demanding that they be sent to Poland — that is to say, to the extermination camps. These facts need not be repeated here.

What this article will unfold is what precedes 1941, the strategy that al-Husseini methodically constructed in Palestine from his appointment, because it is precisely this that explains why the opportunities for partition collapsed one after another even before the Shoah and the creation of Israel entered the equation.

His appointment of 1921 and the foundational colonial error

In 1920, the British have to appoint a Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the supreme religious leader of the Muslims of Palestine. The internal election designates Raghib al-Nashashibi, representative of a family of Palestinian notables renowned for their pragmatism and their openness to negotiation. The British ignore this result and appoint instead the defeated candidate, Haj Amin al-Husseini — from a rival family and then twenty-six years old. The motivations of the High Commissioner Herbert Samuel remain disputed by historians: perhaps the desire to hold in balance the rival Palestinian clans, perhaps a misplaced confidence in al-Husseini’s capacity to be tempered by his youth.

The result is one of the most ill-judged decisions in British colonial history. Al-Husseini understands immediately what this position offers him: religious authority over Islam’s holy sites in Palestine, notably the Temple Mount, and above all control of the revenues of the waqfs, the Islamic religious foundations administering mosques, schools and landed properties. He thus disposes of an autonomous financial base that he will use to construct a personal political apparatus.

1929: transforming a dispute into a holy war

In August 1929, a relatively limited dispute breaks out in Jerusalem over the Western Wall, the last remnant of the destroyed Temple, the most sacred site of prayer and memory in Judaism: Jews had installed benches and partitions for women during the Yom Kippur prayers, a modification the British would judge illegal.

Al-Husseini seizes the opportunity. From his networks of mosques and associations, he spreads the rumour that the Jews are plotting to seize the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Within days, what had been a dispute over prayer furniture becomes, in the narrative he orchestrates, a religious war for the defence of Islam’s third holiest site. The ensuing riots kill 133 Jews, among them 67 in Hebron in two days — a Jewish community present in that city for millennia. In Safed, twenty more Jews are killed. These acts of violence are not spontaneous: they are prepared and directed, and they do precisely the work al-Husseini expected of them.

The conflict has just changed in nature. What might have remained a nationalist and territorial tension between two communities sharing a disputed territory is now, in the Arab consciousness he has worked upon, a holy war for the defence of Islam. This ideological pivot of 1929 is decisive; the Hamas charter of 1988, as the first article of this series has shown, is its direct descendant, forty years later.

The methodical elimination of the moderates

What the second article of this series has documented through the fate of the Palestinian voices who sought an arrangement — those notables, mayors and intellectuals who were assassinated or forced into exile for having explored paths of coexistence — al-Husseini is the central organiser of all of it. The Nashashibi family, his historic political rivals, represented a different line: realism, the conviction that a territorial arrangement is possible and preferable to a war that the Arabs risked losing. He treated the Nashashibis and their allies with the same method he employed against the Jews: intimidation, violence, expulsion or assassination.

Between 1936 and 1939, during the Great Arab Revolt, his militias kill several hundred moderate Palestinian Arab notables — more than the British forces during the same period. This internal purge is fundamental to understanding why the Palestinian leadership that presents itself at the negotiating tables of 1937 and then 1947 has neither the will nor the political room to make a compromise. The moderates had been eliminated. Violence did not serve only to combat the Jews; it structured Palestinian politics in such a way as to render any compromise politically suicidal for whoever dared to propose it. This is a legacy whose effects run forward to the present day.

The revolt of 1936-1939: a legitimate uprising confiscated

The Great Arab Revolt has real and legitimate causes. The 1930 Passfield White Paper, named after Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, Colonial Secretary in the Labour government, had severely limited Jewish immigration and Zionist land purchases, responding to Arab pressure following the pogroms of 1929. But, under the joint pressure of Zionist organisations and a portion of the British Parliament, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had practically emptied it of its substance as early as February 1931, in a letter to Chaim Weizmann that the Arab press immediately dubbed the “Black Letter” — proof, in their eyes, that London systematically ceded to the Jews as soon as they mobilised. The fifth aliyah, swelled by the arrival of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany after 1933, transforms the demography of Palestine at a speed that profoundly alarmed the Arab populations. The general strike of April 1936 carries a genuine popular frustration.

Al-Husseini takes hold of it adroitly, gradually displaces the secular leaders who were negotiating with the British, imposes his authority over the armed bands, and transforms what might have been a movement of political pressure into an insurgency of which he controls the command and the objectives. The paradoxical result: the Jews of Palestine, compelled to organise themselves militarily in response, reinforce the Haganah, the clandestine defence militia founded as early as 1920, and create in 1941 the Palmach, its elite strike unit, thereby acquiring the combat experience and command structures that will prove decisive in 1948.

Exile and the pan-Arab strategy

The Great Revolt that al-Husseini had orchestrated turns against him: the British, after three years of insurgency, decree his dismissal and issue an arrest warrant against him in 1937. He flees Palestine in disguise, crosses Jordan, takes refuge in Iraq, where he attempts to launch a pro-Nazi coup in 1941 — the Rashid Ali al-Gaylani putsch, which he actively supports and which fails in the face of a British counter-offensive. Forced to flee again, he makes his way to Iran, then Turkey, before reaching Rome and then Berlin in November 1941. This choice is not that of a refugee seeking any asylum: it is a deliberate ideological and strategic alliance with the regime that shares his central objective — the elimination of the Jews.

In Berlin, he is received by Hitler in person, is housed in a requisitioned villa, receives a monthly stipend from the German Reich, and disposes of offices and radio studios. From these positions, he continues to work his influence, no longer only on Palestine but on the entire Arab world. He broadcasts radio programmes in Arabic from Berlin and Rome, which interweave Nazi propaganda and Quranic rhetoric to forge in Arab consciousnesses a vision of the Jew as racial, civilisational and religious enemy all at once. It is he, more than any other actor, who introduces the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a tsarist forgery recycled by Nazi propaganda — into the mosques and Quranic schools of the Middle East, presenting them as an authentic revelation of the mechanisms of a supposed world Jewish conspiracy.

He coordinates the rejection of the UN partition plan of 1947 by the Arab League, transforming this refusal into military mobilisation. From November 1947, even before the proclamation of the State of Israel, he coordinates the first armed attacks against the Jewish communities of Palestine. The military alliance of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon that invades the territory on 15 May 1948, with the publicly declared objective of “throwing the Jews into the sea”, bears in part his organisational imprint.

His legacy, as the first article of this series has documented in detail, crosses the decades without fading. The Hamas charter of 1988 carries his mark in its antisemitic formulations, in its definition of Palestine as an inalienable Islamic waqf, and in its doctrine of jihad as the only legitimate response. The lineage is intellectual, political and documented: Qutb, the other founding father analysed in the first article, gave al-Husseini’s system its mechanics of total and permanent war.

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The theological locks against acceptance of Jewish presence

To understand why the successive rejections of the plans for partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews — which we shall detail in the following section — are not tactical errors, nor even simple political calculations, but often genuine ideological coherences, one must look squarely at what the rigorist interpretation of Islam renders structurally impossible. This interpretation is to be carefully distinguished, as this series emphasises at every opportunity, from Islam in its millennial richness and diversity. We take up and deepen here elements already sketched in the previous articles, for readers approaching the series through this text.

The first obstacle is the concept of dar al-islam, the domain of Islam, opposed to dar al-harb, the domain of war. This distinction, developed by classical jurists from the eighth century onward, implies that any land once integrated into the Islamic domain by conquest cannot leave it. Withdrawal is theologically assimilable to a defeat that faith cannot validate. Palestine, conquered by the Arab armies in the seventh century and governed — except during the parenthesis of the Crusades — under Islamic authority until 1917, falls into this category. Rigorist jurists who invoke this doctrine cannot recognise a sovereign Jewish state on this land without committing what is, in their conceptual framework, a religious betrayal, not a simple political concession. The difference is not one of degree: it is one of kind.

The second obstacle is the historical status of Jews as dhimmis in classical Islamic tradition. This status, often presented in an either too favourable or too unfavourable light depending on the commentator’s position, was a form of conditional tolerance: Jews and Christians could practise their faith and retain their property in exchange for a special tax (jizya) and precise limitations on their civil rights. This regime, unequal and sometimes oppressive depending on the era and the dynasty, was nonetheless a form of coexistence. What it absolutely excluded was Jewish political sovereignty over an Arab and Islamic land. A Jewish state represents in this framework not an injustice of degree but an ontological inversion of theological order. This is why Arab leaders who could, personally and pragmatically, have accepted a territorial arrangement did not do so: the theological and popular pressure they would have had to confront was precisely this, and not a simple nationalist preference.

The third obstacle is the doctrine of the hudna — the truce. In classical Islamic jurisprudence, a truce with a non-Muslim enemy is legitimate but temporary: it is a tactical instrument, not a definitive solution. Any permanent peace with a non-Islamic state on lands of Islam would be, in this framework, theologically illegitimate. This is why the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch as the first article has documented, has always refused to characterise its ceasefires as peace: this word, in their framework, is an ideological concession they cannot make without disavowing themselves. This is also why the formula of the inalienable Islamic waqf in Article 11 of the 1988 charter is not a political posture; it is a theological position whose internal coherence, once this framework is understood, appears entirely logical and rigorous.

These theological impossibilities do not explain everything. They do not explain the choices of secular leaders such as Nasser, nor the geopolitical calculations of the Arab states that used the Palestinian cause for regional hegemonic ends. But they explain why the compromises that pragmatic actors might have negotiated always ran up, in the final instance, against a popular and religious resistance that Arab leaders knew to be insurmountable within their own society. This dimension is not merely political — it is cultural and spiritual, which connects directly with the question the fourth article of this series will address.

The pattern of rejected partitions

The Peel Commission and the first partition (1937)

This must be stated with clarity, because the dominant narrative systematically conceals it: Arab violence against the Jewish communities of Palestine predates by two decades the creation of the State of Israel. It cannot therefore be explained as a reaction to that creation, nor to the occupation of 1967.

The riots of Tarpat in August 1929 — which we saw above how al-Husseini orchestrated from a dispute over the Western Wall — had already prefigured this logic of total exclusion: 67 Jews massacred in Hebron in two days, a two-thousand-year-old community annihilated in forty-eight hours by organised popular violence. This is not a conflict between states; it is the refusal that the other should exist there.

The Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 convinces the British of the necessity of a lasting political solution. The government then commissions a royal commission of inquiry, six members, presided over by Lord Robert Peel, former Secretary of State for India, charged with examining the causes of the uprising and proposing solutions. The commission spends six months in Palestine, hears hundreds of witnesses from both camps, and delivers its report in July 1937 after a rigorous undertaking that the protagonists themselves acknowledged. This report is one of the most important and least cited documents in the history of the conflict, because it contains the first official proposal for territorial partition, and because its diagnosis of the deep causes of the incompatibility between the two national projects retains a lucidity that seventy years of subsequent history has not disproved.

The Peel Plan divides Mandatory Palestine into three zones: a Jewish state covering approximately 33 per cent of the territory (the coastal plain, Galilee, the Jezreel Valley), an Arab state covering approximately 67 per cent (most of the rest), and a zone under British mandate including Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency accepts the principle of partition, with substantial reservations about the size of the territory allocated. The Arab Higher Committee, directed by al-Husseini, rejects the entire proposal without a counter-proposal.

The context of 1937 gives this refusal a particular gravity. Hitler has been in power for four years. The Jews of Germany and Austria are fleeing. Palestine is at that moment the only territory where a mass Jewish immigration is still possible, the United States having closed its doors with the Immigration Act of 1924, and the other European democracies also refusing to receive the refugees in significant numbers. To reject a Jewish state in 1937 is to reject a lifeline for tens of thousands of people that no one else, at that date, is willing to receive. This reality does not resolve the question of the rights of the Palestinian Arabs; it complicates it in a way that history has made tragic.

It is here that the pattern announced in the introduction manifests itself for the first time in full clarity. Had the Peel partition been accepted in 1937, an Arab Palestinian state would have existed on 67 per cent of the territory ten years before the UN plan, within frontiers incomparably more favourable to the Palestinians than those that all subsequent arrangements have offered. The Nakba of 1948 would probably not have taken place. Every refusal has consequences, and these too belong to history.

The partition plan of 1947: in the shadow of the Shoah

The systematic assassination of six million European Jews between 1941 and 1945 transforms the world’s moral equation in a way that no diplomatic mechanism had anticipated. European guilt — legitimate, immense, and entirely warranted — translates into massive political support for the creation of a Jewish state.

In February 1947, exhausted by three years of simultaneous Jewish and Arab insurgency and unable to arbitrate between its two contradictory promises, Great Britain hands the file to the United Nations and announces its withdrawal from the Mandate. The UN then constitutes a special committee, UNSCOP, eleven member states carefully chosen from outside the great powers to ensure neutrality, which spends several months in Palestine hearing the representatives of both camps. The Jewish delegates cooperate fully. The Arab Higher Committee refuses to participate, repeating the pattern of systematic boycott of any body liable to produce a partition.

UNSCOP delivers its findings in September 1947: a majority of its members recommends partition into two states; a minority proposes a binational federal state. It is the majority solution that is put to a vote. The partition plan adopted by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947, Resolution 181, allocates 56 per cent of the territory to the Jewish state and 43 per cent to the Arab state, with Jerusalem placed under international administration.

This vote of November 1947 is less a triumph of international justice than a product of the nascent Cold War. The Soviet Union votes in favour — Stalin hoping that a Jewish state in Palestine, partly populated by socialists, might constitute a Soviet bridgehead in the Middle East against the Western powers. The United States votes in favour, Truman imposing this decision against the reluctance of the State Department and the Pentagon, who fear alienating the oil-producing Arab countries. Great Britain abstains, exhausted and humiliated by its inability to manage the Mandate.

This vote, presented retrospectively as the international legitimation of Israel, is in reality the product of a conjunctural alignment of the nascent Cold War that neither the Soviets nor the Americans would have anticipated six months earlier. The pattern repeats itself with a disconcerting precision: the Jewish institutions accept the plan, lamenting its limitations. The Arab states reject it unanimously and publicly announce their intention to prevent it by force of arms.

The foundational wounds

1948: two legitimate memories of the same event

On 14 May 1948, Ben-Gurion proclaims the independence of the State of Israel. The following day, five Arab armies — Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon — invade the territory to prevent the implementation of the partition plan their governments had rejected. At the end of ten months of war of extraordinary violence, the State of Israel controls 78 per cent of Mandatory Palestine — 22 per cent more than the UN had allocated to it — and signs armistices with all its adversaries. Jordan annexes the West Bank. Egypt controls Gaza. The Arab Palestinian state that the partition plan had provided for is never proclaimed.

During this war, between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs leave or are expelled from the territory of the new state — this is the Nakba, the catastrophe. The work of the Israeli New Historians — Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim — who exploited the declassified Israeli archives in the 1980s, established that this displacement was neither solely the product of Arab calls to flee, nor exclusively the result of a pre-established plan of ethnic cleansing. It was, according to locality and circumstance, a mixture of spontaneous flight amplified by fear, of direct expulsions documented in several cases (Lod, Ramla — a town of the coastal plain, not to be confused with Ramallah in the West Bank — and several villages in the Jerusalem region), and of military logic in the context of a war in which each camp feared for its survival.

One must hold together, without cancelling one by the other, these two realities: the legitimacy of the creation of Israel, necessary after the Shoah and rendered inevitable by the Arab rejection of the partition plan; and the real, documented and lasting trauma of the Nakba, which tore from their land hundreds of thousands of people who had not personally chosen the war their leaders had decided. These two memories coexist within the same event. The inability to hold them together without cancelling one is one of the deepest roots of the impossibility of dialogue.

The double exile that no one places side by side

The Palestinian Nakba is not the only mass uprooting that this period produces. A symmetrical exile, almost exactly contemporary, has been effaced from the dominant narrative with a consistency so remarkable that it cannot be fortuitous: the 700,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948 are named, documented, commemorated — rightly so — but the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees expelled from the Arab countries are almost systematically absent from that same narrative.

Between 1948 and the early 1970s, some 850,000 to a million Jews left the Arab countries and Iran, the great majority under duress, in forms ranging from direct expulsion to popular violence by way of economic and legal pressures that made any normal life impossible. The Farhud of Baghdad in 1941, a pogrom that had massacred hundreds of Iraqi Jews, had given warning of what was to come. The Iraqi confiscations of 1948 and 1967, the Egyptian expulsions following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the forced departures from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria: in each case, communities sometimes two thousand years old were torn from lives built over generations.

Israel absorbs these refugees — the Mizrahim, who today constitute almost half the Israeli population — at a considerable human and economic cost for a nascent state already under military and economic pressure. It does not maintain them in camps of permanent waiting. It does not establish a transmissible refugee status for their descendants. The Arab host states of the Palestinian refugees, with the partial exception of Jordan, have on the contrary deliberately maintained these populations in precarious statuses, without full civil rights. Lebanon forbids Palestinians by law from practising dozens of professions, keeping them in structural dependency in the camps. Nasser proclaimed it without circumspection as early as the 1950s: the Palestinian problem, kept raw, is an instrument of political mobilisation and pressure on Israel and the West.

The UNRWA: a humanitarian agency become a political instrument

The UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, created by General Assembly resolution in December 1949, embodies institutionally this deliberate perpetuation. The agency was born of a genuine emergency: hundreds of thousands of displaced persons without resources, in provisional camps, awaiting a political settlement that was not arriving. But its structure was rapidly shaped by the neighbouring Arab states, which refused to integrate the refugees into their societies — UNRWA offering them a convenient alternative: maintaining these populations in the camps, under UN tutelage and Western financing, without having to naturalise them or grant them civil rights.

Its mandate is unique in the world and will remain so: unlike the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, created the same year to manage all other refugees on the planet with the objective of their reintegration or resettlement, UNRWA transmits refugee status to descendants in perpetuity, according to a definition that exists nowhere else in international law. This mechanism transforms 700,000 refugees of 1948 into more than five million registered refugees in 2026 — a figure that grows mechanically with each generation. Its governance reflects these contradictions: the agency operates in territories controlled by political factions hostile to any settlement, employs tens of thousands of local staff recruited from the camps themselves, and has systematically resisted independent audits of the neutrality of its educational activities. Journalistic investigations and reports from monitoring organisations have nonetheless been able to document the presence in its school textbooks of content inciting violence and denying the existence of Israel. This mechanism is not humanitarian in its logic; it is political in its structure.

In January 2024, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA himself admitted that Israel had provided damning information on twelve employees of the organisation implicated in the attacks of 7 October 2023. Nine were dismissed within the hour, and several major donor countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia — immediately suspended their funding, before gradually restoring it under humanitarian pressure, revealing the impasse in which this institution places the international community: held hostage by an agency whose excesses it can neither acknowledge nor accept the disappearance of without a replacement solution.

The Suez crisis: when Washington draws the limits (1956)

In October 1956, Israel invades the Sinai in secret coordination with France and Great Britain, who seek to overthrow Nasser following his nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July. The military operation is a success. But Eisenhower, the President of the United States, is furious at having been kept in the dark and refuses to allow two European colonial powers to dictate American policy in the Middle East at the height of the Cold War. He demands withdrawal, and Israel withdraws.

This sequence contains a lesson that history will repeat: without American cover, Israeli military victories do not hold politically. It explains the permanent asymmetry between Israel’s military power and its diplomatic dependence on the United States — an asymmetry that will fuel decade after decade the conspiracist theories about the “Jewish lobby” controlling Washington, whereas it is in reality Washington that has imposed and continues to impose limits on Tel Aviv. This confusion between the reality of an asymmetric strategic bond and the imaginary of a world Jewish conspiracy is one of the intellectual sources of contemporary antisemitic conspiracism — to which we shall return.

The 1967 war and the structural turning point

The Six-Day War (5-10 June 1967) is, alongside 1948, the second foundational event without which the contemporary conflict is incomprehensible. It is triggered by an Israeli pre-emptive strike, but the context preceding it is inseparable from this choice: since May 1967, Nasser has massed 100,000 Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai on Israel’s frontiers, closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships — an act internationally recognised as a casus belli — and obtained the withdrawal of the UN interposition forces that had separated the two armies since 1956. Jordan and Syria have signed offensive military pacts with Egypt, and the Arab radio stations openly broadcast calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Israel, whose strategic depth amounts to only a few dozen kilometres, chooses to strike first rather than await an attack. In less than a week, it conquers the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, Gaza, the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan.

What is at stake in 1967 is a structural shift: Israel moves from the status of a state born of the 1948 war to the status of an occupying power over territories inhabited by more than a million Palestinians. The international law of occupation applies from that point forward — the Geneva Conventions, notably their Article 49, which prohibits the transfer of the civilian population of the occupying power into the occupied territories. This is precisely what successive Israeli governments will systematically do in developing the settlements, in documented and unanimously condemned violation of the UN Security Council.

The victory also restructures the international narrative of the conflict in a way that must be named plainly: before 1967, Israel was perceived by the world left as a pioneering socialist state and a refuge for survivors of the Shoah. After 1967, it becomes an occupier. This narrative transformation is not entirely unjust — the occupation begins there, with the settlements that will follow. But it is immediately instrumentalised: in the same period, the Soviet Union, through its propaganda services, begins systematically producing and distributing a narrative that makes Israel the armed wing of American imperialism. The UN Resolution 3379 of 1975, which declares that “Zionism is a form of racism”, adopted by the Soviet-Arab-Third-World bloc, is the culmination of this strategy. It will be repealed by Resolution 46/86 in December 1991, a few days after the dissolution of the USSR — the connection is explicit.

1973: the Yom Kippur War, the oil shock and Kissinger

The October War of 1973, the Yom Kippur War — launched by surprise on the day of the great Jewish fast by Egypt’s Sadat and Syria’s Assad to recover militarily the territories lost in six days in 1967 — almost turned to catastrophe for Israel in its opening hours, before its counter-offensive restored the situation at considerable cost. It ends militarily in a belated and dearly bought Israeli victory — more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers killed in nineteen days — but OPEC, under the impetus of Saudi Arabia, decrees an oil embargo against the Western countries that had supported Israel during the war.

The price per barrel quadruples within weeks, queues lengthen at filling stations across the United States and Europe, and heating rationed in several countries transforms a war in the Middle East into a domestic crisis felt in every Western home. For the first time, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly affects the daily lives of Westerners, and permanently changes their political relationship to the subject.

It is in this context that Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon and then Ford, deploys what the American press would call shuttle diplomacy. The principle is simple in its mechanics, formidably complex in its execution: Kissinger travels personally between the belligerents’ capitals — Tel Aviv, Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Riyadh — by air shuttle, carrying each party’s proposals to the other himself, without ever bringing them directly to a table together. This choice has a precise logic: Kissinger knows that direct meetings between Arab and Israeli leaders are politically impossible in 1973-1974; no Arab head of state can be photographed shaking hands with an Israeli without risking his domestic political stability. The shuttle circumvents this obstacle by making the American negotiator the only visible intermediary, the one who politically absorbs the cost of the exchange.

Between October 1973 and September 1975, Kissinger makes dozens of trips, negotiates two disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and one between Israel and Syria, and lays the foundations for the process that will lead, under Carter, to the Camp David Accords of 1978. His method embodies a vision of the Middle East as the strategic chessboard of the Cold War: the objective is not a just peace but a stable equilibrium, not the resolution of the conflict but its management at a level of tension tolerable to American interests. This vision — realist in the philosophical sense, cold in the human sense — will produce real diplomatic advances but will leave the deep causes of the conflict intact, causes that the management of symptoms neither was intended nor had the capacity to treat.

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The occasions of peace deliberately sabotaged

The Israeli-Egyptian peace: political courage changes history (1978-1979)

In November 1977, Anwar Sadat accomplishes a gesture that no one had anticipated: he boards a plane for Tel Aviv and addresses the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. It is the first official visit by an Arab leader to Israel since the creation of the state. In a sober and courageous speech, he says what no Arab leader had said publicly: the war has lasted long enough, peace is possible, and he has come to seek it. The effect on Israeli public opinion is staggering; millions of people who had grown up in the certainty that the Arabs wanted their destruction see for the first time an Arab president speaking to them face to face, in their own assembly. This single gesture changes something in the psychological fabric of the conflict that neither UN resolutions nor ceasefires had managed to touch.

Jimmy Carter seizes this opening. In September 1978, he invites Sadat and Begin to the presidential retreat at Camp David, in the mountains of Maryland, and confines them there for thirteen days, deliberately isolated from the world, without press, without the agenda of other affairs of state. Carter involves himself personally with an intensity that few American presidents have matched on a foreign dossier: he himself drafts compromise proposals, navigates between the two men whose personalities are antagonistic — Sadat is visionary and impatient, Begin conducts himself like a meticulous jurist clinging to details — and relaunches the negotiations several times when they are on the verge of failure. The thirteen days produce two texts: a framework for peace for the Middle East as a whole, and a specific framework for the conclusion of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

The treaty signed in March 1979 settles the bilateral questions with a clarity that few peace agreements have achieved: Israel returns the entirety of the Sinai to Egypt, including the Israeli settlements built there after 1967, evacuated by force if necessary, in exchange for full diplomatic normalisation, recognition of Israel, and a guarantee of free passage through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran. It is a complete territorial exchange — land for peace in its clearest formulation — and it holds: the Sinai was returned, the frontier has been peaceful for forty-five years, and the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv has never closed even in periods of tension.

What does not hold, however, is the Palestinian dimension of the accords. The first of the two Camp David texts explicitly provided for autonomy for the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza within five years, intended to lead to a negotiated permanent solution on their status. Begin had accepted this framework, but his interpretation of “autonomy” was radically different from that of Sadat and Carter: for him, autonomy concerned the persons, not the territory, which by definition excluded any form of Palestinian sovereignty over the land.

From the moment of his return to Israel, the Begin government accelerates Jewish settlement of the West Bank, as if to materialise in concrete an interpretation of the accords that his partners did not share. The Palestinian dimension of Camp David is stillborn, sabotaged from within by the Israeli party that had signed it.

Sadat returns to Cairo ostracised by the Arab world: Egypt is expelled from the Arab League, Arab embassies close in Cairo, and Sadat is treated as a traitor in the streets of Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut. He pays this courage with his life — assassinated on 6 October 1981, the exact anniversary of the Yom Kippur attack, by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who had infiltrated his own army during a military parade. His principal killer, Khaled Islambouli, cries out as he fires: “I have killed the Pharaoh.”

This precedent weighs on every Arab leader who comes after him: making peace with Israel can cost one’s life, and his successors, beginning with Hosni Mubarak, drew the lesson by maintaining with Israel a cold peace — technically observed but emotionally abandoned, without popular normalisation or cultural cooperation, a peace of states without a peace of peoples. This is perhaps the deepest limit of the Kissinger-Carter method: one can compel governments to sign; one cannot force societies to be reconciled.

Oslo 1993: the hope and the seeds of its failure

The Israeli-Egyptian peace proves that an Arab-Israeli agreement is structurally possible. But it does not resolve the Palestinian question, Begin having set about emptying the autonomist dimension of the accords of its substance, and it remains a peace between states — cold and deserted on the human level. What is missing on the Palestinian side is a legitimate and recognised interlocutor, capable of signing on behalf of his people. For fifteen years, this condition seems out of reach.

Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation is classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States and Israel — not without reason: its factions have multiplied attacks between the 1960s and the 1980s, from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972 to aircraft hijackings, embassy attacks and lethal operations against civilians in Israel, Europe and Lebanon. Meanwhile, the first Intifada breaks out in 1987 in the camps of Gaza and spreads to the West Bank in the form of a spontaneous popular uprising that no one had anticipated. And that same year, Hamas is founded — the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood — which immediately begins to challenge the secular PLO’s claim to represent the resistance. Three simultaneous obstacles, three reasons to believe that any negotiation is durably impossible. Yet a glimmer would appear — by a path that no one had mapped.

The handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993, under the visibly moved gaze of Bill Clinton, represents the moment closest to a resolution of the conflict that the history of this region has produced. But to understand that moment, one must go back to the discreet backstage that made it possible, because Oslo was not born in Washington, nor under American pressure.

It all begins in the autumn of 1992, in villas on the outskirts of Oslo, in secret conversations between academics, mid-ranking Israeli officials and PLO representatives, organised by the FAFO Institute, a Norwegian research centre. The Norwegian government, discreet and without strategic interests of its own in the region, provides the logistics and diplomatic cover. These meetings, ignored by the chancelleries, produce in a few months more real advances than years of official negotiations, precisely because they take place without cameras, without public declarations, without the pressure of national opinion to be managed. This is the paradox of Oslo: the most spectacular peace proposal of the conflict was negotiated in complete secrecy, by people who did not yet have an official mandate to do so.

The accords are born in an exceptional context on two counts. The first is geopolitical: the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has removed the principal financial and military patron of the radical Palestinian factions, and the Gulf War has just isolated Arafat — who had supported Saddam Hussein — from his Gulf financers. Arafat is short of funds, his organisation in disarray, and he knows that without an agreement he will be overtaken by the Islamists of Hamas who are on the rise. The second context is ideological: the liberal optimism of the post-Cold War period produces a real window of opportunity, which courageous negotiators on both sides — voices subsequently silenced, such as those the previous article has documented in detail — seize in Oslo in secret. On the Israeli side, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres understand that demographics leave them little time: governing indefinitely a Palestinian population without granting it either equality or independence is a moral and political dead end. On the Palestinian side, Arafat is playing for his political survival.

But what Oslo also contains, concealed by the enthusiasm of the White House ceremony, is the architecture of its own fragility. The accords establish mutual recognition — the PLO recognises Israel, Israel recognises the PLO — and create the Palestinian Authority as the embryo of a civil administration in the West Bank and Gaza. But they defer to final-status negotiations precisely the most difficult questions: Jerusalem, the fate of the refugees, the definitive borders, the future of the settlements. In leaving these questions open for five years, they give each camp — and above all the extremists on both sides — the time and space to sabotage them. An agreement of process without an agreement of substance is a structure that holds only if all the actors play the game. They will not all do so.

Hamas launches its first major waves of suicide bombings in 1994-1996 — buses blown up in Jerusalem, shopping centres in Tel Aviv — with the explicitly declared strategy of destroying the peace process by bloodshed: every attack is designed to radicalise Israeli public opinion, reinforce the right and weaken Rabin. Meanwhile, the settlements continue to expand in the West Bank under all Israeli governments, including those that profess allegiance to Oslo, adding each year thousands of new residents to a territory whose final status is supposed to be negotiated.

The assassination of Rabin: what a bullet killed (1995)

On 4 November 1995, in Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated after a large peace rally. His murderer is called Yigal Amir; he is a law student, a religious nationalist, and convinced that the Torah forbids ceding lands of the Land of Israel and that killing the head of government who was resolving to do so is a pious act. It is not an Arab enemy who kills Rabin: it is the internal logic of Jewish extremism described in the first article of this series, arrived at its most murderous conclusion.

What the death of Rabin has killed, beyond the man, is the existence of an Israeli leadership that had made the inner journey of recognition of the other, that carried an irrefutable military legitimacy, and was thereby capable of drawing a part of the Israeli right into the peace process. Rabin had understood that one does not make peace with one’s friends. This understanding was buried with him.

The five years following Rabin’s assassination are those of methodical deceleration. Netanyahu, elected in May 1996 on a security platform, applies the Oslo Accords to the bare legal minimum while allowing the settlements to expand. His successor Ehud Barak, elected in 1999 with an explicit peace mandate, wants to settle everything at once — Jerusalem, the refugees, the borders, the settlements — before his own government collapses. This haste will be both his strength and his weakness.

Camp David 2000: deconstructing a myth without absolving anyone

In July 2000, Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton meet at Camp David to attempt what Oslo had promised and deferred: negotiating the final status. This attempt arrives seven years late, in a political context on both sides deeply degraded by Hamas’s attacks and the continuous expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The moment is poorly chosen on almost every count. Barak is politically weakened in Israel: his governing coalition is crumbling, ministers have resigned even before the summit to protest the anticipated concessions, and he knows he has only a few weeks before his government falls. Arafat, for his part, had never wanted this summit at this moment: he had explicitly asked Clinton not to convene it before having prepared the ground, judging that conditions were not ripe. Clinton overrides him; his second mandate ends in January 2001, and he wants his peace agreement before leaving — the Lewinsky affair and the impeachment proceedings need to be erased by a historic diplomatic legacy. This pressure of the American calendar weighs on the entire dynamic of the summit, in a way that professional diplomats subsequently analysed as a fundamental error of method.

The fifteen days of Camp David, from 11 to 25 July 2000, unfold in an atmosphere of accumulated mistrust that this bucolic Maryland residence cannot suffice to dissipate. The two delegations barely speak to each other directly: Clinton and his team navigate between them in the manner of Kissinger in his time, carrying proposals that each party receives without knowing exactly what the other has said. This format, useful in an exploratory phase, reaches its limits when the questions are at the complexity level of Jerusalem or the right of return.

The Israeli proposals are real and represent a step forward from all previous official positions — this must be said plainly. Barak offers a restitution of 91 per cent of the West Bank initially, with the possibility of reaching 94 per cent in time, and accepts the principle of a Palestinian state. But the shortcomings are substantial and are not matters of detail. Concerning East Jerusalem, Barak suggests a functional sovereignty over certain Arab neighbourhoods — a deliberately ambiguous term that avoids the words full sovereignty — and refuses any Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount, Islam’s third holiest site, at the heart of the identity of every Arab leader. No Palestinian president can sign an agreement that formally abandons any claim to sovereignty over al-Aqsa without being overthrown or assassinated within the week. On the refugees, the right of return is refused in its very principle, and the financial compensation proposed is presented as a substitute for recognition — which Arafat, owing to the fragility of his political position, cannot publicly accept without disavowing the Nakba. On territorial contiguity, the proposed Palestinian state is surrounded and cut through by settlement blocs that compromise its real geographic viability; the maps show a territory in archipelago rather than a coherent state.

Robert Malley, a member of the American delegation at Camp David, publishes as early as 2001 in the New York Review of Books an analysis that profoundly nuances the official version, earning him years of hostility from the American-Israeli establishment before being largely validated. The American negotiator Aaron David Miller would also write, years later, that the United States had too systematically adopted the Israeli point of view during the negotiations, and that Clinton had lacked the neutrality necessary to be a credible mediator in Palestinian eyes.

The documented truth is twofold, and one must hold both its components without abandoning either. The Israeli offer was real but imperfect, and some of its conditions were structurally unacceptable to any Palestinian leader who had to justify them before his people. Arafat, for his part, presented no developed counter-proposal; he said no without offering an alternative, which is a real fault in a negotiator, whatever the legitimacy of his substantive objections. The most clear-eyed Palestinian negotiators acknowledged this privately: Arafat was a man of resistance, not a man of compromise, and Camp David asked precisely the opposite of what he had built himself upon over forty years.

The consequences of this failure are disproportionate to the duration of the summit. The transformation of this missed encounter into the definitive proof of congenital Palestinian bad faith — a narrative imposed by Clinton in his closing press conference, which designates Arafat as the sole party responsible for the failure — will serve for twenty years to disqualify every peace initiative. Every time an Israeli leader is questioned about the possibility of an agreement, the answer will be: “we tried at Camp David.” The mythologisation of this failure, whose causes were complex, into a definitive verdict on the impossibility of peace is perhaps the most enduring collateral damage of July 2000.

The walls built

The second Intifada and the destruction of the peace camp (2000-2005)

Two months after the failure of Camp David, on 28 September 2000, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon — a general of war, architect of the settlements in the West Bank, a figure of the hard nationalist right — walks onto the Temple Mount, escorted by a thousand policemen and bodyguards. The visit is legal under Israeli law, which recognises the right of non-Muslims to visit the site. It is politically a calculated provocation, and Sharon knows it. The Temple Mount, Islam’s third holiest site, is also the most sacred site in Judaism, and this geographical superposition unique in the world makes every symbolic act performed there a political declaration that the other camp cannot ignore. Sharon comes there to assert Israeli sovereignty over the site at the precise moment when the Camp David negotiations have just foundered on exactly this question. The Palestinian reaction is immediate and massive.

What breaks out the following day and will last five years bears the name of the Al-Aqsa Intifada — the uprising of the al-Aqsa Mosque. If Sharon’s visit is the spark, the tensions accumulated over years are the combustible: the failure of Camp David, which had just concluded without agreement; the sense within part of the Palestinian population that Oslo had produced no tangible result in everyday life; and the conviction, cultivated by Hamas and the radical factions, that no compromise was possible or desirable. The Intifada is not orchestrated in its first weeks, expressing a real anger. But anger, however real, does not justify the violence that follows.

For Hamas quickly takes strategic control of it, and Hamas has no interest in this anger leading to anything other than the destruction of the peace process. Suicide bombings multiply at a rate Israelis had never experienced: buses explode in Jerusalem in the early morning, in crowded pizzerias on Friday evenings in Tel Aviv, in markets in Haifa, in discotheques frequented by teenagers. More than a thousand Israelis are killed in this way over five years, the majority of them civilians, in attacks designed to maximise terror in ordinary life, to make taking the bus or going out to dinner an act of courage. The psychological effect on Israeli society is profound and lasting, in a way that figures alone do not convey: an entire society learns to live with the fear of the morrow, to look at abandoned bags in public transport, to calculate unconsciously the risks of every outing. This normalisation of fear changes societies from within, slowly but irreversibly.

The Israeli response is militarily effective and politically devastating on the international level. Operation Defensive Shield of April 2002, an offensive into Palestinian cities in the West Bank to dismantle terrorist cells, includes the siege and battle of the Jenin refugee camp, and gives rise to an acute international controversy: Palestinian organisations denounce a massacre of several hundred civilians, which UN and journalistic investigations would reduce to approximately fifty dead, the majority of them combatants, in intense street fighting. The final figure does not convince the Arab publics already mobilised, and Israel’s image in the world deteriorates at a speed its leaders had not anticipated. The policy that follows, of targeted elimination of Hamas leaders — Sheikh Yassin in March 2004, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in April 2004 — raises international legal questions about the right to political assassination that jurists continue to debate.

The separation wall, whose construction begins in 2002, encapsulates in itself the ambiguity of this period: effective on the security level, since attacks diminish drastically in the zones covered, it traces in concrete and barbed wire a de facto frontier that is not that of 1967 but encompasses settlement blocs, fragmenting the Palestinian territory still further and anticipating frontiers that the final-status negotiations have never ratified. The International Court of Justice issues in 2004 an advisory opinion declaring the route illegal in the sections that deviate from the Green Line, the 1949 armistice frontier, internationally recognised as the boundary between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Israel ignores it.

The Israeli peace camp — Peace Now, the intellectuals, the former military men who had turned to dialogue, those described in the second article of this series as voices structurally silenced — is politically decimated for a generation by the combination of the failure of Camp David and the violence of the Intifada. How does one defend peace when the pizzerias and the buses are exploding? How does one argue for a Palestinian partner when twenty-one young Israelis, many of them from the former Soviet Union, are killed in the bombing of the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv on a June evening in 2001? The discourse of peace empties of its substance in the eyes of an Israeli majority who had believed in Oslo and feel betrayed. Sharon wins the elections of 2001 and then of 2003 on an unambiguous security platform.

The second Intifada will have killed not only civilians on both sides — approximately 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,000 Palestinians according to the figures of B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation — but also the political possibility of an Israeli majority for peace in the decade that followed. This particular killing is perhaps the most difficult to quantify, and the heaviest in its consequences.

The Palestinian fracture: two authorities for one people

The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza decided by Sharon in August 2005 is one of the most complex episodes of this period to evaluate honestly. On the level of facts, Sharon, the father of the settlements, the man who had built more than any other Israeli leader, orders the forced dismantlement of the twenty-one settlements of the Gaza Strip and the complete withdrawal of the army — an operation that would be carried out in ten days, giving rise to televised scenes of Israeli soldiers forcibly evacuating residents clinging to their homes.

On the level of interpretation, opinions remain profoundly divided. For some, it is a unilateral gesture of peace proving that Israel can withdraw from territories it had administered since 1967, the maintenance of control over the borders, airspace and territorial waters being justified by Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza — an organisation that has made the destruction of Israel its explicit programme and possesses real military capabilities — rockets and an offensive tunnel network, both documented. For others, this control, whatever its stated justification, constitutes an occupation that perpetuates itself by other means. This debate is ardently disputed among jurists and political scientists, and neither reading can be held to be definitively closed.

This withdrawal takes place without coordination with the Palestinian Authority, Sharon deliberately refusing to negotiate it with Abbas, arguing that there is no partner — reproducing thereby the pattern that followed Camp David. The Palestinian Authority inherits a liberated territory without having been an actor in that liberation, which further weakens its legitimacy in the eyes of a population that already accords it little credit.

The Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006 produce a result that all international observers certify as regular and that almost all had seen coming without wishing to anticipate: Hamas wins 74 seats out of 132, Fatah 45. This is not an ideological victory for Islamism but above all a protest vote against the Palestinian Authority of Arafat and then Abbas — an authority that had rotted over ten years in power: documented embezzlement, clan clientelism, ostentatious enrichment of the cadres who live in prestigious villas while the populations of the camps grow poorer, inability to produce the slightest tangible result in everyday life despite billions in international aid. Hamas, meanwhile, runs networks of schools, dispensaries and social aid that function; its social arm is its real electoral force, far more than its jihadist programme. The Palestinians sanctioned ten years of corruption, and they voted Hamas.

The Western response is a political strategy whose consequences run through to 7 October 2023. The United States, the European Union and Israel refuse to recognise the elected government, impose economic sanctions on Gaza, block fiscal transfers due to the Palestinian Authority. The democratic principle — elections are the foundation of legitimacy — is suspended because the result is displeasing. This double standard escapes no one in the Arab world, and it lastingly feeds the Hamas narrative according to which the West claims to want democracy but refuses its results when they contradict its interests. It is difficult to fault Hamas on this precise point.

What follows in 2007 is not a seizure of power: it is a civil war. Between June and July 2007, Hamas and Fatah clash militarily in the streets and buildings of Gaza with a ferocity that international observers on the ground describe as a conflict in its own right. Summary executions multiply on both sides — Fatah men thrown from building rooftops by Hamas fighters, Hamas members shot in the streets or tortured in Palestinian Authority prisons in the West Bank. The number of Palestinian dead in this fratricidal war is estimated at several hundred — a figure that the official narrative of both parties has always minimised, and which the international media barely covered, occupied as they were with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if no intra-Palestinian violence existed. At the end of these weeks of combat, Hamas controls the whole of Gaza militarily, and Abbas dissolves the national unity government, appointing a crisis government in the West Bank. The fracture is consummated.

What results is a situation without precedent in the history of this conflict and without any visible political solution: two Palestinian entities that regard each other as illegitimate, governed by ideologically irreconcilable factions, separated geographically by Israeli territory, incapable of holding elections since 2006 without one or the other contesting the result in advance. Gaza under blockade and jihadist government. The West Bank under a semi-autonomous authority whose electoral legitimacy has evaporated since Abbas’s mandate, theoretically limited to four years, has run for seventeen years without renewal. Any Israeli, American or European leader who speaks of a Palestinian partner for a final-status negotiation must answer a simple question: which one? On whose behalf? With what democratic mandate?

The fracture that results has made any negotiation with a unified Palestinian leadership structurally impossible ever since. The Palestinian responsibility in this fragmentation must be named here, without indulgence: it is not exclusively the product of external manipulation, even if Israel had an interest in this division and sometimes facilitated the conditions for it. It is also the result of a profound incapacity to build political institutions capable of transcending clan rivalries and personal power logics — a pathology that the Palestinian leadership has carried within itself since the al-Husseini years, and for which ordinary Palestinians pay the highest price.

The arithmetic of the settlements

Meanwhile, the implantation of Israeli civilians in the West Bank has continued without interruption. The figures on this subject are the most sober and irrefutable argument concerning Israeli responsibility for the progressive destruction of the two-state solution. In 1993, at the moment of the signing of the Oslo Accords, approximately 100,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank. In 2026, there are more than 700,000, spread across several hundred settlements linked by a network of reserved roads that cut the Palestinian territory into discontinuous enclaves whose geographical contiguity, necessary to any viable state, is compromised a little further with each year.

This progression is not accidental, and it is not recent. To understand its deep logic, one must go back to 1967 and the Gush Emunim movement, the “Bloc of the Faithful”, which, in the wake of the Six-Day War victory, develops a political theology of settlement that the first article of this series has analysed in detail: territorial conquest as a religious act, every dunam of the West Bank covered with a settlement as a step towards messianic redemption. This ideology, a minority position in the early years of the state, progressively becomes an organised political force, with powerful lobbies, a network of allies in the army and the administration, and a capacity to bring down governments on the question of territorial concessions. It creates on the ground settlements that become established facts, which successive governments find politically too costly to undo.

But these settlements are not only the affair of messianic religionists. They are also, for a significant portion of Israeli decision-makers, a territorial security strategy that precedes any ideological framework: in the event of withdrawal, where will the frontier run? Better to have settlements on the hills than to leave the West Bank as a territory from which rockets could reach Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion airport or Jerusalem in a matter of seconds. This security logic is sincere among some of its advocates, and it is not without foundation in a country whose width along the 1967 Green Line would not exceed fifteen kilometres at its narrowest point.

To this is added a third dimension, demographic, which Israeli leaders rarely address in public but which has structured their private calculations for decades: the fear of being demographically submerged by an Arab population with a high birth rate. In the 1960s to the 1980s, certain Israeli demographers projected that integrating the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza into a binational state would produce an Arab majority by the horizon of 2020-2030, ending the Jewish character of the state.

This demographic fear — real in its projections, partially disproved since by the fall in the Palestinian birth rate and the rise in Jewish immigration — has nourished two contradictory policies: the refusal of formal annexation, which would create Israeli citizenship for millions of Palestinians, and the refusal of withdrawal, which would create a viable Palestinian state. The result is a structural impasse — neither annexation nor withdrawal, neither equality nor independence — from which no one in successive Israeli governments has been willing to bear politically the cost of finding a way out.

This arithmetic progression, regular, continuous, accelerated under each government regardless of political colour but particularly under Netanyahu governments, follows a precise and documented cycle: after each wave of Palestinian violence, after each series of attacks or rocket bombardments from Gaza, the Israeli government, whatever its orientation, approves new housing in the settlements in the name of national security or under pressure from its right-wing allies. Palestinian violence and settlement expansion thus feed on each other in a vicious circle that the first article of this series described as the codependency of extremes: the Hamas rockets on Israeli territory since 2007, tens of thousands of launches over almost twenty years, deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, have provided every Israeli government with the political cover to approve new settlements against which the United States and Europe protest feebly before ultimately accepting them as a fait accompli. Each expansion in turn feeds the Palestinian radicalisation that justifies the next series of rockets. To name this mechanism is not to excuse the violence; it is the only way of understanding why it persists.

This is not a security policy in the military sense of the term. It is a deliberate policy of territorial fait accompli that makes it geographically more and more difficult to imagine a viable and contiguous Palestinian state. In international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention, signed by Israel, and numerous Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 2334 adopted unanimously in December 2016, characterise this policy as illegal. Israel contests this interpretation with its own legal arguments that serious jurists examine. This debate exists; but the fact that the Security Council voted unanimously — with the United States abstaining for the first time rather than exercising its habitual veto — is itself incontestable.

Arab normalisation and Iranian strategy: what 7 October set out to destroy

At this stage — Gaza under Hamas control and subject to severe restrictions, the West Bank fragmented by settlements, a Palestinian leadership fractured, an Israeli peace camp decimated — the impasse seems total and definitive. But the history of this conflict reserves one final geopolitical surprise: it is precisely when an exit from the conflict by regional diplomatic means becomes conceivable for the first time in decades that it is violently destroyed — by those who claim to be defending the Palestinian cause.

To understand 7 October 2023 in its full strategic logic, one must understand what was happening in the months and years preceding it. This attack did not emerge from a void, nor even solely from the situation in Gaza or the tensions in the West Bank. It is also, and perhaps above all, a calculated response to a regional geopolitical shift that threatened to render Hamas and its Iranian sponsors structurally obsolete.

The Abraham Accords signed in September and October 2020, under Trump administration mediation, normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. What these Accords revealed publicly was what Western chancelleries had known for years but had not dared to say: the Gulf Arab states in particular no longer possess any real Palestinian solidarity. They maintain a facade of it, kept up for internal communication — Arab populations remaining sensitive to the Palestinian cause — but their deep geopolitical interests go in a radically different direction. What truly preoccupies them today is Iran, its nuclear programme, its regional expansion through proxies, its systematic destabilisation of Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. Faced with this common threat, Israel, with its intelligence capabilities, its military technology, its missile defence systems, becomes a natural ally, far more useful than the pan-Arab solidarity of an impotent Arab League.

The Abraham Accords do not settle the Palestinian question; they deliberately circumvent it. For the first time since 1948, Arab states normalise their relations with Israel without making the creation of a Palestinian state a prior condition, breaking the Arab League consensus since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which had made this condition the key to all normalisation. This shift is of considerable geopolitical importance: it deprives the Palestinians of their traditional diplomatic lever, the one that had made their cause the obligatory passage of any relationship between Israel and the Arab world.

After these 2020 accords, something larger was being prepared in 2022-2023: a normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the most influential country in the Sunni world, guardian of Islam’s holy sites, funder of madrasas worldwide and an indispensable actor in any Islamic legitimacy. Had Saudi Arabia normalised its relations with Israel, it was the entire architecture of Arab refusal since 1948 that would collapse. The negotiations were advanced, conducted discreetly with American mediation, and the political price that Israel was agreeing to pay was precisely the resumption of a process towards a Palestinian state — a condition set by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to justify the agreement before his public opinion and before the kingdom’s religious guardians. Netanyahu, in his public declarations of the summer of 2023, seemed ready for this compromise, even if his far-right government allies, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, opposed it vehemently.

It is in this precise context that 7 October 2023 occurs. For Hamas, and even more so for Iran — which finances, arms and coordinates its regional strategy — an Israel-Saudi Arabia agreement would represent an existential catastrophe. It would have signified that Arab normalisation with Israel was possible without resolving the Palestinian question, reducing Hamas to what it structurally is: a regional terrorist organisation without diplomatic future, whose jihadist programme does not represent the Palestinians but serves the geopolitical interests of Tehran. Hamas officials themselves declared in the weeks following 7 October that the objective was to “blow up the normalisations” and to “remind the world that the Palestinian question cannot be ignored.” The brutality of the massacres committed by Hamas’s killers is inseparable from this strategic calculation: it was necessary to trigger an Israeli response of sufficient extreme violence to render it politically impossible for any Arab government to continue, under the eyes of its shocked public opinion, to normalise its relations with Israel.

The strategy has partially worked in the short term. The Israel-Saudi Arabia agreement is suspended. The Emirates and Bahrain have maintained their embassies but reduced their visible cooperation. Public opinion across the Arab world, traumatised by the images of Israel’s military response in Gaza, has rendered any normalising advance politically untenable. Hamas’s war machine has achieved its immediate strategic objective, at the cost of 1,200 Israeli deaths, hundreds of Palestinian victims killed by its own misdirected rockets, and the near-total destruction of Gaza in the Israeli riposte that followed.

Iran is the strategic sponsor of this logic. The Islamic Republic since 1979 has made the Palestinian cause the central ideological marker of its foreign policy — not out of disinterested solidarity with a Sunni people that the Shia mullahs of Tehran consider theologically inferior in their own religious hierarchy, but within the framework of a regional hegemonic rivalry with Saudi Arabia and a power policy vis-à-vis Israel and the United States. Khomeini theorised as early as 1979 that the destruction of Israel was a religious obligation — Al-Quds as a cause unifying the entire Islamic world, Sunni and Shia alike, behind the leadership of the Iranian revolution. This hegemonic ambition needs the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to exist: a Palestine at peace with Israel would empty Iranian rhetoric of its principal fuel.

The axis of resistance it has built and financed over thirty years — the Lebanese Hezbollah, created in 1982 with the Revolutionary Guards; Hamas, whose military budget it multiplied tenfold after 2007; Palestinian Islamic Jihad, directly under the command of the Revolutionary Guards; the Yemeni Houthis, who fire missiles towards Eilat and block the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb; Iraqi militias attacking American bases — is a system of low-cost proxy warfare that is extraordinarily effective. Tehran projects its power onto five theatres simultaneously without putting a single Iranian soldier in the front line, spending a fraction of what a direct war would cost, and maintaining a plausible ambiguity that allows it to deny responsibility for each incident. The question that imposes itself: does Iran have an interest in Palestinian peace? The answer, reading forty-five years of Iranian policy, is clearly no: a pacified Palestine would be the greatest repudiation of the Islamic revolution since 1979, for it would demonstrate that the cause Tehran uses as a lever of regional domination can be resolved without it, and in spite of it.

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The conflict as a matrix of conspiracism

To understand why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies a place so disproportionate in the world political imagination — far beyond its real geographical or demographic weight — one must see how it has been actively used for decades as a matrix for the production of conspiracisms that go far beyond it.

The architect of the first connection is al-Husseini himself. Returning from Berlin after the war via Cairo, he carries with him the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Nazi propaganda methods, which he diffuses in an Arab world where they had until then circulated only marginally. He translates them, commentates them, embeds them in a Quranic rhetoric, and makes of them a reading-grid of the Palestinian conflict for generations of believers. The connection between European racial antisemitism and Arab political anti-Zionism is his personal work — documented and deliberate. It is not a spontaneous drift; it is a strategy built with precise tools, to a precise timetable.

From the 1960s onward, Moscow takes the relay. The Soviet intelligence services invest massively in the production of a worldview that makes Israel the armed wing of American imperialism and the Jews the masters of a network of global domination. This vision is distributed through Western communist parties, national liberation movements funded by Moscow, and directly in the Arab countries through a subsidised press. The KGB archives published after 1991 confirm that this strategy was deliberate, planned and financed — this was not ideological spontaneity but systematised state propaganda. UN Resolution 3379 of 1975, which declares that “Zionism is a form of racism”, is the public culmination of this work. Its repeal in December 1991, a few days after the dissolution of the USSR, indicates without ambiguity who had been its driving force.

Khomeini’s Iran and that of his successors adds, from 1979 onward, a third source of nourishment to the propaganda system. The Palestinian cause is transformed there into an instrument of foreign policy exported as proof of the Judeo-American corruption of the world. Former president Ahmadinejad added Holocaust denial as a calculated provocation aimed at delegitimising the moral foundations of Israel. This rhetoric has contaminated far beyond the Shia world — Sunni currents, secular Arab nationalist movements, and even fringes of the Western left that found in this framework a reading-grid for post-September 11 American imperialism that their own ideological traditions could no longer furnish with equal clarity.

What social media has done since 2010 is to democratise and internationalise in a few years what decades of state propaganda had constructed. Islamist anti-Zionism; far-left antisemitism dressed up as anti-Zionist moral authority — a documented phenomenon in notable progression since 7 October, notably in academic circles and the radical factions of the left — and general conspiracism now find themselves on the same algorithms, sometimes in the same comment threads, producing an ideological fusion that the strategists of the twentieth century would not have anticipated. Far-right antisemitism, while always present, has experienced a relative erosion in Western Europe, where the radical left has taken over the baton under the guise of anti-Zionism.

The accusation of “genocide” levelled against Israel over the months of war in Gaza — in a context where massive civilian losses accumulate in one of the most densely populated territories in the world, Hamas having deliberately interwoven its military infrastructure into the civilian fabric, including hospital and school buildings — is a legally precise term whose application to this situation is the subject of serious and still ongoing debate among specialist jurists. Yet it circulates as a definitive judgement on the same channels as depictions of Jews as octopuses controlling the world, without those who disseminate it seeing any contradiction.

What deserves to be stated plainly: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not create global antisemitism. It furnished a pre-existing antisemitism with a politically respectable reformulation. Anti-Zionist rhetoric allows positions to be held that would be immediately recognised as antisemitic if they concerned any other group, by clothing them in the vocabulary of human rights and international law. This instrumentalisation of law in the service of hatred does not invalidate international law; it imposes a vigilance that honest defenders of the Palestinian cause should be the first to exercise.

What a hundred and fifty years of history teach

This pattern of deliberately sabotaged peace initiatives, announced from the very first line, deserves to be reread in its full historical extent. In 1937, the Peel Plan proposes an Arab Palestinian state on 67 per cent of the territory — accepted by the Jewish Agency, rejected by the Arab Higher Committee. In 1947, the UN plan proposes an Arab state on 43 per cent — accepted by the Jewish representatives, rejected by all Arab states. In 1993, Oslo proposes a process towards two states within the 1967 borders — accepted in principle but blown up by the extremists on both sides. In 2000, Camp David proposes substantial compromises — a negotiation aborted without a serious counter-proposal on one side, an imperfect offer on the other. At each stage, the outcome for the party that refused or failed is worse than what it had rejected.

This pattern does not produce an easy conclusion, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it absolves Israel of its own responsibilities, notably the systematic settlements in the disputed territories, which render the two-state solution geographically more and more difficult, the documented repression in the West Bank and the policies that have contributed to radicalising populations. These responsibilities are real and weigh heavily in the current impasse.

It would be equally dishonest to pretend that Israeli responsibilities exhaust the subject. The other face of the pattern is Palestinian, and it runs through this article from end to end: the systematic refusal of any partition from al-Husseini in 1937 to the boycott of UNSCOP in 1947; the methodical elimination of the moderate voices that might have led to a compromise; the rejection without counter-proposal of imperfect but real offers; the corruption of the Palestinian Authority that delivered Gaza to Hamas; Hamas’s strategy of destroying every peace process through bloodshed, from the attacks of 1994 to 7 October 2023, calculated to blow up Arab normalisation. None of these responsibilities is erased by Israeli faults, exactly as Israeli faults are not erased by them. Intellectual honesty about this conflict consists precisely in never using the errors of one camp to absolve those of the other — a principle that almost every commentator violates, according to the camp they have chosen.

The most painful lesson of this history is perhaps this one: peace was possible on several occasions, and it was destroyed — sometimes by strategic calculation, sometimes by ideology, sometimes by the refusal to assume before one’s own population the political cost of a painful compromise. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Northern Ireland peace process that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the Franco-German reconciliation after three wars in seventy years: these precedents prove, nonetheless, that apparently impassable dead ends can be transcended. They also prove that this transcendence always requires more than an agreement signed under constraint: it requires a transformation of national narratives, a recognition of the wounds of the other, and a leadership capable of taking its own population in a direction it does not always wish to go.

It is precisely here that politics finds its limits — and where the question changes in nature. If political solutions alone — the maps, the treaties and the road maps — have systematically failed whenever they were not accompanied by a deeper transformation, what can one seek beyond the maps? What is there, in the spiritual traditions of these two peoples, and in the memory of reconciliations that seemed equally impossible, that might nourish this transformation that politics alone has not been able to produce?

It is to this question — the only one that truly matters, now that all the observations are laid down, and the most difficult to formulate without naivety or despair — that the final article of this series will turn.

Next article: “The night of the Jabbok: seeing in the face of the enemy the face of G-d”

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

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The Waymakers · A word that circulates · 6 min
When your voices and your exchanges become articles and enrich the Dialogues.

This column, A word that circulates, is yours — the space where your texts, which resonate with the spirit of these Dialogues of the New World, find their natural place. They are the testimonies of your lives as Waymakers who, through their everyday acts and wholehearted commitment, love this world enough to hope to see it change for the better and to wish to contribute to that change in their own measure. They illuminate the path we seek together to trace, and the hope we wish to carry into the very heart of the night.

Today I am delighted to share with you the text of a reader of the French-language Dialogues — a text that is admittedly not recent, yet one she has carried and embodied throughout her entire existence.

Moreover, I recently had the good fortune to meet her, and her whole presence, simple and candid, bears witness beyond any shadow of a doubt to the light she carries day after day.

I thank her sincerely for having entrusted me with this text, which has meant so much in her journey. I have shortened it slightly, with her permission, and reset its layout so that it retains its full force in this format. It is preceded by a brief introduction she kindly agreed to write for us, sharing the circumstances of its composition.

Jérôme Nathanaël

I was twenty-eight years old, in the midst of separating from my partner and the father of my child.

I had just changed workplace, and the young people I dealt with in my new library were difficult to manage. My little girl, quite unsettled by the family situation, had become violent and prone to anger.

I had lost my bearings and no longer knew quite what meaning to give my life. A friend advised me to ask my inner guide for answers to my questions.

Which I did, sheet of paper and pencil in hand. I wrote a first question, and the answer came to me through automatic writing. And so, for approximately three months, a curious correspondence took place each evening between myself and a guide I called my guide of light.

A poem arose from all this. Here are its most significant excerpts.

Christine F.

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LOVE, AND LIFE WILL BRING YOU HAPPINESS

SHINE, AND LIFE WILL BRING YOU JOY

GIVE, AND LIFE WILL BRING YOU PEACE AND HARMONY

STRUGGLE, AND THE STRUGGLE WILL BRING YOU STRENGTH

HOPE, AND HOPE WILL GUIDE YOU ALONG THE WAY

Life is beautiful, life is good, when you find it, hidden at the depths of your universal, specific, essential soul.

Do not squander your life, do not squander your flame! The flower of your heart withers if you do not water it. Water it without ceasing!

Life belongs to those who know how to tend it, not to those who squander it to the winds.

Give love, and expect nothing in return. You will receive.

Life is a permanent exchange. When one refuses to give, one obtains nothing in return. Life is an exchange in which each partner finds in the other his own benefit.

Walk boldly without fearing the obstacles in advance. The light you cause to shine guides you and helps you direct your steps away from the ruts in the path.

Love the light, beware of darkness and death. Press ever further into Life without fearing it, and you will discover magnificent landscapes.

Life alone can overcome suffering and torment. Life is not invented; it is discovered through audacity and through courage.

You desire harmony in a world where it does not exist. You desire Life in a world that every day puts Life to death. You desire harmony in a world thrown out of balance.

Life is to be rediscovered, Life is to be reinvented. It requires imagination, it requires courage — a great deal of courage.

Life is not made in a single day; one must seek it for a long time. Life is not found by chance along the way; it is found in action and in struggle.

Life is where one least expects to find it, at the very depths of your soul, hidden beneath centuries of culture and reasoning.

Life is a strange path to climb. It seems arduous and tortuous, yet it reveals to you at moments landscapes of breathtaking beauty.

Know when to stop and admire them. Know how to contemplate the landscapes your soul unveils as it searches for itself.

Life never stops. It continues to journey irresistibly towards the discovery of yourself and of others.

Life is a poem one never ceases to sing. Life is the song of beauty and of love. Life is a book of encounters. Life is a permanent exchange. Life is not a sad place where solitudes shut themselves away.

Life is yours if you dare. Life is yours if you know how to say no to the fantasies and fears that dwell within you.

LOVE, and Life will be yours. GIVE, and Life will be given back to you in return.

Life is the gift one makes to the unfortunate. Life is the gift one makes because one is full, and because one must give in order to appease one’s heart.

You give Life and you have Life. You are miserly with your treasure, and you have death and sorrow.

Death is the way of shadow, Life is the way of light. The way of shadow is that of the absurd and of emptiness, where only sparse plants grow, where the horizon is parched and arid.

Life is not there. Flee that way and take the other — the way that leads to light.

You must choose. To be the sun or to be the moon. You must choose: to illuminate or to reflect.

Life is not the same for one who waits upon others as for one who gives. You wish to shine, yet you dread your own radiance. You wish to shine, yet you dread the consequences of the light.

Light floods those who have chosen to shine. Light floods those who have chosen to give. It makes them beautiful and bestows beauty all around them.

Fear the light no longer. Do not fear the attachment and the joy of others.

Do not sacrifice your ideal to material things. Love and trust. Matter is inert; it cannot prevent men from growing. Only uncontrolled impulses and frustrated desires can prevent them from doing so.

Do not squander life. Be Life for others, and you will have Life — the Life given to you as inheritance, the Life He gives you as inheritance.

Give without taking shelter in your tower. Give without fearing the consequences of your gifts.

Life is a game. Life is a theatre. Life is the finest way to learn to succeed. Life is given to you that you may understand.

Love LIFE. Be your own master; that is the price of Life. Life gives — TAKE!

True Life is a river that has no use for the time that passes and holds it captive. True Life flows, sweeping in its infinite course the debris of the past and fragments torn from the present, lending to man’s illusory reality the dimensions of a dream.

Life — seek it deep within yourself, in the hidden part of your being, at the depths of deep memory. Seek it resolutely so that it may pass through the narrow lock of consciousness and refresh others like a calm and beneficent water that heals wounds and makes life more beautiful.

Life is a book you must learn to read. Life is a book in which you must know how to turn the pages at the right moment. Life is an eternal new beginning.

One must know how to lay down one’s work when it no longer suits one, in order to begin one that is more beautiful and more demanding.

Life is a fabric of beautiful colours. The truth is there, in the smile of the child, in his curiosity, his thirst to learn and to know.

Be a child in your heart, always ready to wonder and to love. Be a child in your mind, in your smile, in your joy. Be a child — remain fearless and ever trusting in others.

Refuse darkness and shadows, and always prefer the light.

1980

© Christine F. - Translation from French by Jérôme Nathanaël

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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If you wish to offer a contribution of about one page on subjects related to the themes of these Dialogues, send me your proposal; it will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond in the comments and dialogue with you.

If you feel drawn to the approach of the Dialogues and would like to contribute to it or to join the community of Waymakers, I invite you to read the Opening page if you have not yet done so and then, so that we may get to know one another, to book a 45-minute video conversation — at no charge.

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The Eternal Present · Words of Life · 30 min
To read the great spiritual words as living sources.

Two thousand seven hundred and fifty years ago, in the northern kingdom, a man named Hoshea ben Beeri received a command unlike any other prophetic injunction in the Hebrew canon: lékh qakh-lékha éshet zénounim — “go, take yourself a wife of harlotry” (Hosea 1:2). No parable, no vision: a marriage of flesh. And a scandal that Hosea would carry through time and humiliation, the persistence of a love that had no reason to hold.

Hosea is a contemporary of Amos, yet the nature of his prophecy is altogether different: where Amos roars like a lion from the steppe of Tekoa, Hosea speaks from an open wound. Where Amos thunders against social injustice, Hosea groans over the rupture of the bond — that bond between YHWH and his people which the prophet will embody in his own flesh, down to his household and the very names of his children.

This text explores why Hosea has not aged a single day, and why the desert to which he invites us is precisely the place that our civilization most obstinately flees, and which nevertheless awaits it like a confrontation that cannot be indefinitely avoided.

The book of Hosea figures in the Hebrew Bible among the Twelve Minor Prophets. Read the full text in Hebrew and English.

Note on transcription: Hebrew terms follow a simplified phonetic transcription, close to that used in prayer books, rather than the academic SBL transliteration.

The man who marries the impossible

“The word of Hosea son of Beeri, which he received in vision concerning Israel, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel.” (Hosea 1:1)

The opening is sober, dated, anchored in political history, like that of Amos. But what follows is of an utterly singular strangeness. YHWH speaks to Hosea, bétékhilat dibèr YHWH béHoshéa, “at the beginning of the word of YHWH to Hosea” — and this beginning is not a vision in the Temple, not a voice in the desert, not a burning coal upon the lips: it is a marriage command. Lékh qakh-lékha éshet zénounim: “go, take a wife of harlotry.”

The word zénounim is the abstract plural of zénouna, fornication, but here it qualifies less a profession than an existential orientation: a woman who “goes after” others, who distributes her faithfulness to masters other than her husband. Hosea obeys. He marries Gomer bat Divlaim. They will have three children, and the names that YHWH imposes on these children form a cadence of progressive rupture, each name bearing a heavier weight than the one before.

The first son will be called Yizreel, from the name of the plain of massacre, the place where the house of Ahab, the idolatrous kings of Israel, was annihilated in blood (cf. 1 Kings 21 and 2 Kings 9–10): a memory of violence inscribed in the cradle. The daughter will be called Lo-Ruhamah, “not loved,” the one for whom there is no compassion — the verb rakham designating that visceral, uterine tenderness which the Hebrew language links to the word rékhem, the womb. Even a mother’s compassion is suspended. And the second son will bear the most terrible name: Lo-Ammi, “not my people” — an expression that is the exact counter-point of the founding covenant declaration, véhayiti lakhem léElohim véattem tihyou-li ám, “I will be your G-d and you will be my people,” an alliance now denied syllable by syllable, overturned like an empty cup.

This inaugural prophetic gesture demands more of us than we grant it if we read it as allegory. Hosea is not playing the role of a betrayed husband. He is a betrayed husband — in duration, in the body, in social shame — for in the culture of his time, a wife’s infidelity fell upon the husband with all the brutality of the communal gaze. It is from that place, from this lived and not simulated humiliation, that the Word erupts.

The first hermeneutical lesson of the book of Hosea lies in this fact: the knowledge of G-d of which this prophet speaks is not a theoretical knowledge acquired in the sanctuary. It is born in the wound of betrayed love, of an unconditional love to which nothing any longer responds. It is born in the experience of continuing to love someone who does not return. It is from this place, uninhabitable and yet inhabited, that Hosea speaks.

The question that then arises is as relevant as ever for our own time: among those who speak of G-d today, who speaks from a real wound? Among the managers of religious institutions, the producers of spiritual content, the architects of the mastered mystical experience — who among them has married the impossible?

The midbar: geography of dispossession

Midbar. The Hebrew word for desert carries within it a debated etymology, but one of the most suggestive readings links it to dibèr, speaking, the word, through a shared root of which the desert would be, in a sense, the primordial locus: the place where the Word becomes possible because everything else, all the chatter, has fallen silent.

The desert in the Hebrew Bible is not primarily a hostile landscape to flee. It is the place of the founding encounter. It is in the desert of Sinai that Moses hears the Voice of the burning bush. It is in the desert of the Negev that Hagar, the abandoned servant, receives a promise of a future for her son. It is in the desert of Horeb that Elijah, exhausted and suicidal, is fed and sent farther on. The midbar is the Hebrew name for the place where human mediation falls away, where the profusion of cultural, cultic, and economic intermediaries ceases to screen the person from his own depth.

Now Hosea 2 is structured around a double image of the desert. First, the desert as memory: véholékhtiha bamidbar védibarti al-libáha, “I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart” (Hosea 2:16). Israel as a woman who must be led into the desert. The reference is transparent: it is the Exodus, the crossing of Sinai, the founding moment when Israel and YHWH were alone together, before the palaces of Solomon, before the trade alliances with Tyre, before the syncretisms with the Canaanite fertility cults. The desert here is the place of the youth of the relationship — anavti lékh hésed né’ourayikh, “I remember the faithfulness of your youth” (Jeremiah 2:2, the same nostalgic register). To return to the desert is to return to the betrothal, before the habits that kill love, before the automatisms that replace presence, before the riches that cause one to forget from whom they come.

But this desert is also, in the narrative logic of chapter 2, a place of dispossession: véhinéh anokhí sag ét-darkhéh basisim végadárti ét-gederotéha, “behold, I will hedge her way with thorns and wall her in with a fence” (Hosea 2:8). Before the seduction, there is the barricade. Before the word to the heart, there is the impasse. The desert is not first of all a romantic invitation; it is the result of a forced withdrawal, the condition in which the person whose habitual roads have been cut off finds himself, whose ordinary providers of meaning and satisfaction no longer function.

It is here that the book of Hosea meets, with a disconcerting sharpness, the situation of our own era.

We live in a time that has organized, with remarkable technical genius, the flight from the inner desert. The permanently connected phone. The uninterrupted availability of content, stimulation, and entertainment. The quasi-infinite supply of substitutes for solitude, which are not remedies for assuming it but ways of never having to cross it, to sit within it, to hear what it is saying. The society of permanent distraction that the philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed long ago as the fundamental malady of humanity: “all the misfortune of men comes from a single thing, which is not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.” That society today possesses means that Pascal could not have imagined for ensuring that no one ever has to remain in his solitary room.

And yet, and this is what the book of Hosea says with an almost unbearable clarity, the midbar catches up with us. It simply takes other names. It is called depression, when the nervous system, saturated with meaningless stimuli, falls into the void that hyperactivity was supposed to fill. It is called addiction, when the escalating doses required to simulate the intensity of living reveal, in negative, the real intensity that is lacking. It is called a midlife crisis, when an accumulation of objective successes suddenly turns itself inside out to show its empty lining. It is called professional exhaustion, when the energy put in service of ends one has never truly chosen ceases to be renewable. It is called nihilism, when the narrative by which a civilization understands itself loses its capacity to convince its own members.

These contemporary deserts are not accidents along the way. They are, in Hosea’s logic, the sisim, the thorns with which YHWH blocks our familiar roads — not out of sadistic punishment, but out of stubborn love: the refusal to allow those He loves to anesthetize themselves to death and forget him.

The question this text then poses to our era is of a quiet radicality: what if all these great crises that bar our near horizons — the ecological collapse that renders untenable the logic of endless growth and consumerism, the epidemic of psychic distress that reveals the bankruptcy of happiness-through-accumulation, the disintegration of collective narratives that drains inherited certainties of their substance — were not only catastrophes to be managed, but above all prophetic sisim, dead ends that force us to lift our eyes toward other perspectives? Not that suffering is good in itself, nor that crisis is a divine programme to be embraced with gratitude. But the impasse, when looked at with lucidity rather than skirted with artifice, has the property of rendering visible possibilities that ordinary motion kept invisible: ways of living together, of producing, of consuming, of relating to the earth and to the other, that the habitual road simply did not allow one to see because one was moving too fast and in the wrong direction. The shûv of Hosea — that reversal which engages the body, the will, and one’s practices — perhaps begins there: in consenting to stop before the thorns rather than searching for the next detour.

Méfatiha: seduction as reversal

Lakhén hinné anokhi méfatiha, “Therefore, behold, I will allure her” (Hosea 2:16).

The verb pata is one of the most ambivalent in the Hebrew lexicon. It denotes at once seduction, persuasion, the act of leading into error, and even in certain contexts deception or drawing someone toward something the other would not have chosen spontaneously. The Septuagint renders it by planáo, meaning to lead astray, to cause to wander. The Vulgate by lactare, to entice, to attract by sweetness. The word resists all domestication.

The text declares that the initiative of drawing Israel belongs to YHWH, and that this initiative is not a constraint but a seduction, an attraction that passes through the other’s desire rather than against it. The midbar toward which G-d leads is not a prison: it is a stripped-down space in which it once again becomes possible to hear a voice that the ordinary din was covering.

Védibárti al-libáha, “I will speak to her heart,” literally “upon her heart.” The preposition al in Hebrew indicates here a word addressed directly to the lev, to the heart understood as the seat of interior life, of will, of intelligence and affectivity combined — not the sentimental heart of greeting cards, but the center of the person, the place where real decisions are made, where the fundamental orientations that commit one’s life take effect.

To speak to the heart is the biblical expression for amorous speech, for deep consolation. Dibarou al-lev Yeroushalayim says Isaiah (40:2): “speak to the heart of Jerusalem.” It is the language one speaks after a separation, in the intimacy regained, in the gentleness that follows after an explanation. It is neither the discourse of moral injunctions, nor the language of institutional reforms, nor the rhetoric of public persuasion. It is a word that passes beneath the most skilful defenses and reaches the central place where the other truly lives.

The promise that follows immediately is of an elliptical beauty: vénatáti lah ét-kéramehá misham véét-emeq Akhor lépétakh tiqvah, “There I will give her vineyards, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope” (Hosea 2:17). The force of this verse draws from what the valley of Achor represents in the memory of Israel. Akhor means trouble, misfortune, but the word also designates a precise and painful place. During the conquest of Canaan, after the miraculous fall of Jericho, a man named Achan had withheld a portion of the plunder subject to the sacred ban, the hérem, by which everything contained in the first conquered city was dedicated to YHWH. The transgression remained concealed, and Israel was crushed at the next battle before Ai, a tiny village, after the invincibility displayed at Jericho. This valley floor was therefore, in Israel’s memory, the place of the most bitter collective shame: not defeat before an external enemy, but betrayal from within, the concealed fault that had compromised the entire community at the very moment of its founding act. It is this very place that YHWH designates as the pétakh tiqvah, the door of hope.

This is a prophetic gesture of singular audacity. It does not say that Achor will be forgotten, erased, covered over by a happier memory. It says that Achor will be crossed, like a threshold, like the compulsory passage from one side to the other. The trouble itself becomes the matrix of renewal. The promise of the vineyards, kéramehá, “her vineyards” given back as a personal and intimate possession, is not incidental: in biblical symbolism, the vine is joy, fruitfulness, the Alliance itself. To restore her vineyards to Israel is to give back not only the land but the capacity to produce a fruit that gladdens both G-d and man.

This promise is then sealed upon an image of song: véshara sham kidmé né’ouréha, “she will sing there as in the days of her youth,” Israel will sing as on the day when she came up from the land of Egypt, that is, as at the most founding moment of her identity, at the hour of her original liberation. The people will not sing despite the crossing of the valley of Achor. They will sing through it, because it is there, and nowhere else, that the trouble will have been named, assumed, and crossed all the way through.

There is in this vision a wisdom of trial that has nothing to do with spiritual masochism or the glorification of suffering. What Hosea articulates connects with what the mysticism of all the great traditions calls the dark night or kenosis: that voluntary destitution as the condition of a renewal more radical than any simple return to a prior state. This crossing, which is neither circumvention, nor anesthesia, nor management, is the very path that the name of the Hebrew people carries, the ivrit, the one who crosses over, who changes shore. So the desert cannot be purchased, nor managed, nor confused with a game. It must be crossed on foot, in the body’s own slowness, by a being exposed to what the desert makes one hear.

But our age has produced a wellness industry that is, to a large extent, an industry for bypassing Achor. Mindfulness practices stripped of ethics, meditation as a performance tool, resilience as a managerial skill to be optimized, personal development as a self-project that carefully sidesteps the question of the self in whose benefit it is developing — all of this constructs sophisticated bridges above the valley of trouble so as never to have to descend into it. In doing so, it renders impossible the discovery that the door of hope is found there.

The ba’alim: the names we give our masters

One of the central accusations in the book of Hosea is that of azav, abandonment, expressed through the image of the ba’al. In Hebrew, ba’al, plural ba’alim, means at once the master, the husband, and the name of the Canaanite god of fertility, rain, harvests, and agricultural prosperity. It is both a title and a programme: the ba’al is the one who possesses, who disposes, who furnishes goods in exchange for devotion.

Hosea’s grievance is not that his people worship grotesque statues or manifestly absurd idols. It is that his people have slid, imperceptibly, from a relationship with YHWH toward the consumption of the ba’alim, and that this slide has occurred without visible rupture, almost without anyone noticing, through a progressive substitution of the who by the what. One no longer asks: from whom does this gift come? with whom am I in relationship? One asks: how do I obtain what I need? And the ba’alim are precisely the effective answers to that question, the providers of functional meaning who demand no conversion, no transformation, no relationship, only a ritual gesture, a calibrated offering, a respected protocol, a well-designed transaction.

Véhi lo yad’ah ki anokhi natáti lah hadagan véhatirósh véhayitshar, “and she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the new wine and the oil” (Hosea 2:10). The “she” is Israel, likened to the unfaithful wife. The text says something striking about the mechanics of spiritual unfaithfulness: it is not a deliberate act of betrayal, but a progressive forgetting of provenance. The goods continue to arrive. Prosperity continues to unfold. But the thread that linked these goods to their Source has frayed, and what remains is only a consumption of what life provides, no longer a relationship with the One who provides.

This is the precise definition of what our civilization has done with nature, with intelligence, with creativity, with health, treating them as extractable resources manageable by experts, without bearer, without subject, without mystery. But who are our contemporary ba’alim, these functional lords to whose altars we burn our offerings in exchange for an illusory fertility?

There is the ba’al of economic growth, from which we expect the resolution of the problems that its own logic has engendered, sacrificing on its altar billions of hours of human life, square kilometres of ecosystems, decades of cultural capital, in the hope that the escalation of gifts will eventually produce what earlier generations called a sense of meaning. There is the ba’al of technology, whose perpetual promise is that of the Canaanite ba’al: rain on demand, assured fertility, control over what escapes. There is the ba’al of visibility, that strange new god whose altar is the screen and whose rite is self-exposure, which demands that one convert one’s own interior life into consumable content in order to extract from it the currency of recognition. And there is the ba’al of spiritual efficacy itself, that mercantile version of the inner quest which promises calibrated altered states of consciousness, meditation retreats with performance indicators, a spirituality without kenosis, without darkness, without crossing of the desert.

Hosea does not condemn these ba’alim because they are malevolent. He says something simpler and more disturbing: they cannot give what they promise. They can furnish grain, wine and oil, but they cannot give the da’at Élohim, the knowledge of G-d, which is the Hebrew name for the fullness of existence. And because they cannot give it, their cult always leaves a residual lack that one attempts to fill with an additional offering — until exhaustion, until the desert.

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Yada: to know or to consume?

Ki hésed khafátti vélo-zévakh, védá’at Élohim méolot, “For it is faithfulness I desire and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of G-d rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).

This verse is to Hosea what Amos 5:24 is to Amos: the dense, central formulation, almost impossible to fully unfold. Two terms condense within it the essential of what can found a spiritual civilization.

Hésed — a word that no one translates the same way twice: love, goodness, mercy, faithfulness, loving loyalty, persisting grace. Hésed is fundamentally a faithfulness that persists beyond what formal obligations require, a love that continues when it could legitimately stop. It is Hosea’s faithfulness toward Gomer, the woman of fornications, incomprehensible in the world’s eyes, disproportionate, costly, non-profitable, as the image of YHWH’s faithfulness toward Israel. Hésed is not the application of a rule. It is an orientation of being.

Da’at Élohim, the knowledge of G-d. But the verb yada, to know, in Hebrew, possesses a richness that the English “to know” does not exhaust. Yada denotes intimate, experiential, relational knowledge, for the same root also describes the carnal union (véhaadam yada ét-Khavah, “and the man knew Eve,” Genesis 4:1). Yada is the knowledge that engages the whole knowing subject, that transforms the one who knows, that leaves a trace in both directions, knowing and being known. Its opposite is not ignorance in the sense of a lack of information: it is non-relation, the act of treating the other as an object from which data is extracted without entering into contact with him.

In Hosea 6:6, the parallel is relentless: hésed versus zévakh (sacrifice), da’at versus olah (burnt offering). Sacrifice and burnt offering are not condemned in themselves; they stand in continuity with the same critique as in Amos 5:21: they are condemned insofar as they function as substitutes for relationship, as transactions that allow one to consider oneself discharged at minimal cost. The zévakh as payment of a debt in order to continue not changing. The olah as a ritual performance that discharges the conscience without modifying behaviour.

This critique reaches something precise in our contemporary relationship to knowledge. We live in a civilization that has a quantitatively prodigious and qualitatively impoverished relationship to knowledge. We know more than any previous generation: we know what our food contains, what the environment is undergoing, what populations exposed to our chains of production endure, what inequalities produce in the brains of children. This knowledge is available, made public, accessible in a few seconds on any screen. And it changes nothing, or almost nothing, in our collective attitudes and practices.

Because this knowing is not yada. It is information processed at a distance, without the subject receiving the information himself being put at stake in the transaction. Yada, in Hosea’s sense, is a knowledge that exposes: it exposes the knower to the reality of what he knows, it does not allow him to remain sheltered behind a dashboard, and it demands a response in the body, in one’s choices, in daily life. It is the knowledge that transforms because it implicates, because it creates a bond, because it engages a responsibility in the etymological sense: the capacity to respond.

The absence of da’at in our relationship to the world is not ignorance. It is something more grave: the capacity to treat the reality of the other — human, animal, ecosystemic — as a consultable datum, without ever being touched in the sense that Hosea understands the lev, that is to say at the heart, at the center, where it truly matters.

Hésed: the love that does not resemble love

Ékh éttenékha Efráïm, amaguénékha Yisraél — ékh éttenékha kadAdma, asimékha kifTSevoyim — nakhpakh alay libi, yakhad nikmrou nikhomáy — “How could I give you up, Ephraim! How could I hand you over, Israel! How could I make you like Admah, set you like Zeboiim! My heart recoils within me; all my compassions are inflamed together” (Hosea 11:8).

This is one of the most arresting texts in the entire Hebrew Bible, and one of the least known. YHWH speaks in the first person, and what He expresses is not the cold sovereignty of an impassive god but the anguish of a love that cannot bring itself to abandon the beloved.

Nakhpakh alav libi, “my heart recoils within me.” The verb haphak is the verb of radical overturning; it is the same verb that describes the annihilation of Sodom by divine fire (Genesis 19). What the text says is that YHWH is himself overwhelmed by his own compassions. He cannot do what the logic of judgment would require, namely surrender Israel to the fate of Admah and Zeboiim, the cities destroyed with Sodom. He is, in a sense, held by the hésed, by that faithfulness which exceeds the formal rights of the contract, which refuses the logical conclusion of repeated betrayal.

Hosea 11 opens with the image of the parental relationship, one of the founding metaphors of the bond between YHWH and Israel: ki-naar Yisraél vaohavéhou oumitsraïm qaráti livni, “when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). The image of the father who teaches the child to walk (vaanokhi tilálti léEfráïm, “I taught Ephraim to walk,” 11:3), who carries him in his arms, who bends down to feed him — these images do not function as metaphors in the sense of a distant comparison. They operate as a phenomenological description of what a real love relationship is: patient apprenticeship, physical proximity, an asymmetrical responsibility assumed without calculation.

The verdict falls, brutal: vélo yad’ou ki réfaïtim, “and they did not know that it was I who healed them” (Hosea 11:3). The same blindness to the provenance of gifts as in Hosea 2: the incapacity to perceive the bond between the care received and the One who lavishes it.

Now the book of Hosea says here something that our era has difficulty hearing: the forgetting of the provenance of the care received does not prevent the care from continuing. Hésed will not allow itself to be conditioned by reciprocity. It continues even when it is not recognized, even when it is actively replaced by other attachments, even when it is structurally ignored. It is this unconditional persistence that makes the text of Hosea so disturbing for a time such as ours — a time that has made tangible reciprocity and performance the implicit condition of every relationship, including its most intimate forms.

Our civilization has produced a vision of love that is structurally conditional, founded on exchange, mutual satisfaction, a cost-benefit analysis regularly revised and corrected. Contemporary marriage contracts, in their most candid version, are agreements between stakeholders who commit for as long as the conditions of satisfaction are maintained. This is not a moral critique but the description of a dominant logic. This logic, when deeply internalized, produces a constitutive incapacity to receive or to give an unconditional love, because such a love would seem either impossible or suspect: either the other has not understood that love is negotiated like everything else, or he wants something in return that one has not yet identified.

Hosea says: what is true of YHWH, this persistence of hésed despite Israel’s repeated infidelity, this refusal to draw the logical conclusion from the broken contract, is what must serve as the model for the human community. Ki hésed khafátti vélo zévakh — “For it is faithfulness I desire and not sacrifice”, this is not only a description of YHWH’s love for a people. It is also an anthropology, an injunction about what human beings are called to be for one another and to maintain in their relationships.

Lo-Ammi: without name and without anchor

Hosea and Gomer’s three children bear names that constitute a programme of progressive exclusion: Yizreel, memory of violence; Lo-Ruhamah, no more maternal compassion; Lo-Ammi, no longer my people. These three names form a coherent descent: from historical violence to the extinction of tenderness, from the extinction of tenderness to the rupture of the Alliance itself. Each name withdraws something more fundamental than the last — first the collective memory, then the maternal sentiment, finally the constitutive bond between YHWH and his people.

But the promise of chapter 2 is that of a reversal of these names, and the manner in which this reversal is effected deserves to be examined closely. Véamartém léakhikhem Ammi, véla’akhotékhem Rouhamah, “you will say to your brothers: My people, and to your sisters: Beloved” (Hosea 2:3). The operation is of a disconcerting simplicity in the Hebrew text: the prefix lo, the negation, two letters only, is removed. Lo-Ruhamah becomes Ruhamah. Lo-Ammi becomes Ammi. It is the same reality, stripped of its negation — not a new identity substituted for the old, but a deep identity at last freed from what had been covering it.

This grammatical gesture is also a wisdom of time: the promised reversal does not erase the past. The history of rupture, of betrayal, of dispossession remains inscribed. But the lo that defined it is lifted, and what remains is Ammi, as if the deep reality had always been there, waiting beneath the negation. In Hebrew thought, the shem, the name, is not an arbitrary label: it speaks identity, vocation, one’s place in the fabric of real relationships. To bear a name of negation is to bear the absence of a name, and therefore the absence of oneself.

What is then remarkable is that this reversal of the name does not begin with a divine decree descending upon passive individuals. The imperative véamartém, “you will say to your brothers,” is addressed to the community, and its first recipients are horizontal — brothers, sisters — before the divine promise of renewed betrothal comes to seal what the community will first have accomplished among itself. It is the community that first removes the lo in the way it names its own members. The suppression of the negation is a communal orthopraxis before it is a divine ratification: to say you are my people to the one whom society designates as lo-ammi, to say you are beloved to the one whom the structures of power have rendered invisible. The restoration of identity does not fall from the sky. It begins in the gaze that a community casts on its most vulnerable members, and in the way it names them.

Lo-Ammi is perhaps the most contemporary name in the entire Hebrew prophetic corpus. Not my people. Not identifiable to a group that bears collective meaning. Not connected to a history larger than one’s own. Not inscribed in a transmission. The contemporary lo-ammi does not result from a divine decree but from a cultural logic — that of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual, consumer of his own life as a personal project to be optimized, detached from any belonging that would precede and exceed his own choices.

The sociologist Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, his penetrating analysis of North American culture, was already describing in the 1980s what he called the “manager self,” the individual whose relationships have only two registers available: the therapeutic, centred on his own fulfilment, and the contractual, based on a freely agreed arrangement between parties, with no place for an inherited belonging, for a we to which one would belong before ever having chosen it. Forty years later, this model has been universalized and intensified. Identity is constructed in the mirror of social networks, documented in real time, optimized for engagement. The self becomes a brand, and the brand must differentiate itself to survive in the attention economy. Lo-ammi is the default condition of such an existence: a radical atomization, a foundational solitude that permanent connectivity does not resolve but merely exhibits.

But Hosea goes further. Lo-Ammi is not only a social condition; it is also a spiritual condition, the condition of the person who has lost the thread of his own origin, who no longer has access to the memory of where he comes from nor to the vision of where he is going, and who drifts in the perpetual present of immediate stimulation. The dispossession of the shem is in Hebrew culture the worst of violences: to lose one’s name is to lose the awareness of being in relationship with anything that surpasses one’s own biography.

And it is precisely in this place of dispossession that the promise is pronounced, bimaqom, “in the very place” of negation, not elsewhere, not after a move toward a different life: véhaya bimaqom ashèr yéamèr lahem lo-ammi attem yéamèr lahem bnéy El-khai, “and it will come to pass that in the place where it was said to them: you are not my people, it will be said to them: sons of the living G-d” (Hosea 2:1). It is the same logic as the valley of Achor: the door of hope opens in the precise place of collective shame, not elsewhere, not after the wound has been forgotten. This reversal is not a reward for good conduct. It is the revelation of what was there all along, a belonging that infidelity had rendered invisible without ever destroying it. The deep identity — to be bnéy El-khai, sons and daughters of the living G-d — precedes all performance and resists all betrayal.

The desert that catches up with us

There is today a desert that catches up with us, even on our digital ivory couches, even in our flows of images and sensations calibrated never to allow silence.

We hear it in the epidemic of depression that now touches adolescents in all industrialized cultures, whose hyper-connected brains have never learned to inhabit their own silence. We hear it in the rise of identity extremisms, that desperate search for an ammi, a people, a belonging to cling to, however brutal, against the void of the individualist lo-ammi. We hear it in the saturation of the wellness market, paradoxically inverse to any improvement in actual wellbeing, as if each new meditation application confirmed the growing incapacity to encounter oneself without an intermediary. We hear it in the waiting lists of therapists that have never been so long — not because human beings have become more fragile, but because the inner midbar, repressed by decades of collective stupefaction, demands with increasing insistence its right to be crossed.

Lakhén hinné anokhi méfatiha — the Text says: “therefore, behold, I will allure her.” The desolation is not an accident that could be prevented with the right stress-management tools. It is the logical consequence of a regime of existence that has systematically barred access to depth, and it is also, in Hosea’s reading, the paradoxically necessary space of encounter with oneself.

This desert that we flee is precisely the place where the word can be heard, because it is the only place where the noise of the ba’alim has fallen silent. It is the only place where the question — from where does the good in my life come? — can be asked without immediately being drowned in the flow of functional answers. It is the only place where the yada, that intimate and transforming knowledge, is possible, because the person is at last sufficiently stripped down to be touched by what he or she encounters.

And yet...

We have produced an industry of desert processing that neutralizes its very virtue. The silent retreat on a corporate seminar budget. The five-day digital detox between two quarterly reviews. The eight-week certified mindfulness-based stress reduction programme. These offerings are not all without value; some even open genuine doors. But their dominant logic is that of the ba’alim: to extract a valorizable resource from interior experience, to return from the desert more productive, to transform Achor into a managerial asset. In doing so, they make the real crossing more difficult still — the one that has no guaranteed duration, that produces no measurable return on investment, that demands sitting in the valley of trouble without knowing whether, or when, the door of hope will come into view.

Védibarti al-libáha, “and I will speak to her heart.” This promise is not addressed to the manager of his own interiority. It is addressed to the one who has ceased to manage, to the one who no longer has the resources to maintain the façade, to those whom the desert has dispossessed of enough illusions to allow them to hear something truer than their own projections. Hosea is not a prophet of spiritual performance. He is the prophet of stubborn love, of disproportionate faithfulness, of the word spoken at the heart of a broken reality — not after repair, but within the fracture itself.

Hosea, or the question of the broken bond

What Hosea brings to Amos is not another programme. It is another depth. Amos says: justice must flow like a perennial torrent. Hosea says: before justice even, there is the question of the bond, of the relationship between the human being and what founds him, between the love received and the love transmitted, between the intimate da’at and the practices that express it in the world. Amos diagnoses the barbarity that wears a suit. Hosea diagnoses the inner desert that produces that barbarity — not as an excuse, but as an additional depth: a civilization that has lost the yada can only treat the other as a resource, because it no longer knows that it is knowing the other that constitutes the relationship.

The ultimate hermeneutical question posed by the book of Hosea is perhaps this: are we capable, individually and collectively, of descending into our own valley of Achor, into those places of trouble, failure, shame and disorientation that our architectures of distraction exist solely to avoid, and of remaining there long enough to hear the word that addresses itself to our heart?

Véirastikh li le’olam véirastikh li betsédèq ouvémishpat ouvéhésed ouvérakhamim — véirastikh li béemounah véyadá’at ét-YHWH — “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in justice, in right, in hésed and in compassion — I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know YHWH” (Hosea 2:21–22).

The final promise is not a reward for those who would have successfully completed the crossing according to verifiable criteria. It is a promise of betrothal, éroussim, the term for Hebrew betrothal, that is, of a committed relationship, sealed, oriented toward a shared future. The last word of the promise is yada’at, “you shall know” — not obedience to the commandments, nor the perfecting of ritual practices, but: you shall know, that intimate, transforming, reciprocal knowledge that the desert will have made possible by dismantling everything that had been blocking it.

The barbarity that Amos denounced wears a suit. The desert that Hosea names wears our faces. The door of hope is found, says the Text, in the very place we do not wish to descend.

Méfatiha. I will allure you. Bring you back to yourself by bringing you back to the beginning.

The question now is whether we consent to be led.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 48 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

Series: Israel-Palestine: beyond the war of narratives | Article 2 — The silenced voices: the other Zionism and the other Palestine

“It is not enough for our people to settle in Palestine — its settlement must take place in dignity, in wisdom, and in peace with its neighbours.” — Ahad Ha’Am, Lo Zeh ha-Derekh, 1889

“Arabs and Jews [...] in the spirit of the most cordial goodwill, will cooperate for the development of Palestine.” — Emir Faysal ibn Hussein, agreement with Weizmann, 3 January 1919

There was another path

The previous article in this series described how Hamas and the Israeli far right feed each other, each supplying the other with the justification for its existence, each drawing from their opposition an energy it could not sustain alone. It ended on an implicit promise: somewhere in this history there had existed other voices, minority voices but living ones, clear-sighted and courageous, which had chosen another direction, among the least known and most instructive in this conflict, and whose fate deserves to be told.

Here is that account. Not to soften the picture, nor to offer the easy consolation of an idyllic counter-narrative, but because one cannot honestly account for what happened without first measuring what might have happened. To declare inevitable what was simply chosen, by those who had an interest in keeping peace out of reach, is already a way of vindicating them after the fact.

What one finds in tracing back to the origins of the conflict is troubling in more than one respect. Both peoples had, from the earliest decades of the twentieth century, thinkers and activists who saw with clear eyes the dangers into which their own camps were heading. These voices were not naive: they were often the most direct witnesses to the real tensions. They were simply capable of looking at the other without reducing him to a threat. That is why they were silenced.

The mirror this article holds up is therefore the inverse of the previous one's: not two extremisms converging in destruction, but two currents of clear-sightedness that the same mechanisms marginalised on both sides : the pressure exerted on moderates to reduce them to silence, the successive wars that narrowed the space for nuance, and the implacable logic of the extremes which demanded total loyalty, to which no prospect of coexistence was in any position to subscribe.

The urgency against depth: the founding debate of Zionism

Herzl: the state first

Theodor Herzl is not a fanatic. The point bears stating, because the temptation of anachronism, re-reading founding fathers in the light of abuses committed in their name by later generations, is one of the principal sources of intellectual distortion in this debate. Herzl is a Viennese journalist of the late nineteenth century, assimilated, liberal, deeply secular, who witnessed in 1894 in Paris the public degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus before a crowd shouting “death to the Jews,” and drew from it a clear conclusion: if antisemitism can express itself thus, with that virulence, in the birthplace of the Rights of Man and the French Revolution, then the project of Jewish emancipation in European societies is an illusion with a limited lifespan, and the only worthy response is the political sovereignty of the Jewish people in an independent state.

Der Judenstaat, published in 1896, is the manifesto of that conviction. Its logic is one of urgency: Jews in Europe are in danger, they need a refuge that is also a state, and Palestine, with its symbolic and historical weight and a continuous Jewish presence since Antiquity, is the obvious territory for this project. The question of the relationship to those already living there is not ignored, but it remains peripheral in Herzlian thought: Herzl reasons first in diplomatic and political terms, seeking to persuade the great powers and Jewish philanthropists to support his project. This is not a colonial conquest in the strict sense (no Jewish state power existed to order it) but an enterprise of negotiated establishment with the sovereigns in place, described in terms of development and modernisation, Herzl being convinced it would bring mutual economic benefits to a land he perceived, with the myopia of his era, as underdeveloped.

This thought carries within it a tension that Herzl does not resolve. His early death in 1904, at forty-four, perhaps leaves him no time; the nature of his project perhaps gave him no structural invitation to do so. He thinks for the Jews and conceives of the relationship to the other in terms of economic transaction rather than mutual recognition. His Zionism is not that of Greater Israel: he never claimed biblical borders, never presented Palestine as an inalienable divine gift. But it is a Zionism centred on itself, in which the other is present without being truly seen.

Ahad Ha’Am: ethics first

Asher Ginsberg, who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha’Am, one of the people in Hebrew, is the conscience that Zionism carried within itself without always heeding it. An essayist of uncompromising rigour, he represents a Zionism that wanted not merely a Jewish state, but a state worthy of being Jewish.

His founding text on this question, published as early as 1891 after a journey to Palestine, Emet me-Eretz Yisrael (Truth from the Land of Israel), remains one of the most prescient documents in the entire history of this conflict. He observes the pioneers of the early aliyot with a gaze that is not hostile but deeply anxious, and formulates a critique that has lost none of its precision a century and a half later: “We are accustomed to believe abroad that the Arabs are all desert savages, a people like the donkey, who neither see nor hear. But this is a great mistake. The Arabs, especially those of the towns, see and understand what we are doing and what we intend, and they keep silent but wait for the moment when they can act in a way that gives them maximum advantage.”

What Ahad Ha’Am perceives is not simply a conjunctural tension linked to the excesses of a few ill-prepared newcomers: it is a structural blind spot in the Zionist project as it unfolds on the ground. Palestine is not an empty land, nor an exclusively Arab land. It is a land of multiple and ancient presences, where the Jewish yishuv had existed continuously in the holy cities well before the modern aliyot, and where the Arab population, a majority in the countryside, had developed its own rootedness that new arrivals frequently ignored with a casualness Ahad Ha’Am judged both morally faulty and politically suicidal. Recognising Arab reality as a political and moral fact of the first order, not as an obstacle to be circumvented by diplomacy or economic argument, but as a human presence to be treated with the same dignity that Jews claimed for themselves, was, in his eyes, the sine qua non of any durable enterprise.

His response to this blind spot is not the abandonment of the Zionist project, of which he was one of the most serious theorists, but its refounding on radically different bases. Rather than a state that would reproduce European national structures with their exclusivisms and jealous sovereignties, Ahad Ha’Am envisages a spiritual centre, the hearth of a cultural, ethical and intellectual renewal of the Jewish people, in a relationship of honest and respectful neighbourliness with the Arab populations of a land to which both peoples could legitimately lay claim. This vision was less spectacular than Herzl’s; it promised no immediate refuge to the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, those subjected to the pogroms of an antisemitic Russia, and it is this that earned it the charge of insufficiency in the years of urgency. Yet it was incomparably more lucid in its understanding of what it means to strengthen a presence in a land that is both ancestral and shared.

The disagreement between Herzl and Ahad Ha’Am was therefore not a mere academic debate about the modalities of a national project: it was the confrontation between a politics of urgency and a politics of depth. One asked how to create a state; the other asked first which state deserves to be created. These two questions were not mutually exclusive, but under the conditions of the first half of the twentieth century, with European antisemitism mounting towards its genocidal paroxysm, it was urgency that dictated its terms to depth, and not the reverse.

Brit Shalom: ethics seeks a state

Ahad Ha’Am’s thought did not remain confined to the pages of his essays. In the years 1925–1942, it found political expression in a current of remarkable intellectual coherence but deep political solitude: Brit Shalom, the Covenant of Peace, founded in Jerusalem by Arthur Ruppin, an economist and sociologist who had organised a large part of Jewish immigration to Palestine and who, precisely for that reason, understood better than anyone what that immigration implied from the other’s point of view.

Its ranks gathered names that have become major references in twentieth-century Jewish thought: Martin Buber, whose philosophy of dialogue, the I-Thou relationship as the foundation of all authentic human existence, was the metaphysical aspect of what Brit Shalom sought to realise politically; Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, who saw in the contempt for the other the symptom of a spiritual degradation; and above all Judah Leon Magnes, an American Reform rabbi, pacifist during the First World War, and first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution founded on the idea that Jewish presence in Palestine should be first and foremost a cultural and intellectual presence.

Judah Leon Magnes is the most audacious and most exposed figure of this current. His proposal, developed with remarkable institutional precision in his testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946, was that of an Arab-Jewish commonwealth founded on political parity: two peoples, a single state structure, equal representation in all institutions, Jewish immigration maintained but governed by a joint council in which Arabs and Jews would have symmetric oversight. “We are not only concerned with the establishment of a home,” he said, “but with the character of the home we are building. Palestine is neither solely Jewish nor solely Arab.”

These positions earned him attack and jeering from a large part of the Jewish community, in Palestine as in the diaspora. At the hour of the Shoah, of the absolute urgency of a refuge for the survivors of the camps, proposing to negotiate Jewish immigration with an Arab-Jewish council, the Arab side having actively supported the Nazis in the person of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, appeared to many as a moral obscenity. Magnes was not unaware of that reality; he named it and measured its full weight. But he maintained that urgency alone could not found a viable future project: building a state after the Arab refusal of all partition plans proposed from the Peel Commission to the United Nations, and moreover in the tension of a war of survival, left unresolved the question of the political status of the Arabs who remained on the territory. This question would, however, be partially resolved by the integration into the new state of an Arab community endowed with the same civic rights as Jewish citizens, representing today twenty per cent of the Israeli population. But Magnes saw it, in his lifetime, as an incomplete foundation. He died in 1948, five months after the proclamation of the State of Israel, without having seen his project succeed and without having abandoned it.

What Brit Shalom and Magnes represent in the history of Zionism is the awareness that military and political victory does not close the questions it leaves open: a state can secure its survival in war and discover, decades later, that the conditions of durable peace remain to be built. This awareness, not a charge against the founding of Israel, but a lucidity about what the founding had had neither the time nor the conditions to resolve, was a minority position in the nineteen forties, drowned in the clamour and urgency of the fighting. It was to become a question that later generations of Israelis, those who no longer simply wanted to exist but to live in peace with their neighbours, would pose with growing acuity.

The Palestinian current of coexistence: a silenced history

Ordinary coexistence: when two peoples still shared a land

Before politics radicalised relations between the two peoples, before the grand declarations and competing national claims structured each camp’s perception of the other, there was simply a possible coexistence. The first waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, from 1882 onward, swelled the ranks of the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron that had existed continuously for centuries; the newcomers were joining an ancestral presence rather than settling virgin ground. These immigrants, most of them educated and idealistic young people from Eastern Europe, bearers of a solid education and a project of collective renewal as much cultural as agricultural, encountered an Arab population composed largely of peasants, artisans, merchants and notables who regarded their arrival with curiosity mixed with economic pragmatism and growing anxiety, in proportions that varied according to place and year.

What the archives of this period reveal, if one reads them without the filters of the nationalist narratives constructed after the fact, is a complex but often fruitful reality. The concrete contributions of the early aliyot were real and measurable, and they touched on two distinct domains whose effects spread well beyond Jewish communities alone.

On the agricultural front first: the modern agronomic methods introduced by these immigrants, irrigated crops, intensive citrus growing (the famous Jaffa orange would become a worldwide symbol), arboriculture techniques and varietal selection transformed lands considered unproductive and diffused know-how that benefited populations well beyond Jewish holdings. Exchanges went both ways, and the markets where the two communities traded testified to an economic interdependence that neither side had an interest in rupturing.

On the public health front, the benefits were still more marked: the dispensaries and hospitals created by the new communities, foremost among them the Hadassah institutions, brought a modern medicine largely absent from the region and received Arab patients as readily as Jewish ones. The Zionist anti-malaria campaign, conducted from 1922 by microbiologist Israel Jacob Kligler from the Hadassah laboratories, constituted the most decisive and best-documented contribution. The first national campaign to eradicate malaria successfully in the history of world public health, it relied on the methodical draining of coastal marshes and the Jezreel Valley to eliminate in less than a decade a scourge that had decimated both communities for generations. The British Mandatory administration itself attested to this in a 1936 memorandum to the United Nations Special Committee: the campaign had been a direct factor in the growth of the Arab population in Palestine. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1946 confirmed that the decline in Arab mortality under the Mandate, particularly infant mortality, was closely linked to the disappearance of malaria as a major cause of death in those districts. These are incontestable primary sources, not ideological arguments.

This ordinary coexistence was not an idyll: tensions over cultivable land genuinely existed and must be named with precision. The land purchases concluded by Jewish arrivals from landowners residing largely in Beirut or Damascus were legal transactions at prices willingly accepted, but these transfers of ownership ended customary tenancy arrangements, and nothing in the terms of sale had been foreseen by sellers or buyers to protect former sharecroppers. This was therefore not the colonial dispossession that some narratives constructed after the fact, but a human reality that the most clear-sighted voices of the Zionist movement, Ahad Ha’Am first among them, signalled as a source of resentment that should have been addressed differently.

What this period reveals, and that neither the caricature of an irreducible Arab hostility nor that of an idyllic harmony can describe without distorting reality, is that these two peoples could have shared a territory, in conditions that were at times tense, without their relationship being necessarily one of war, and that what existed then was not merely a precarious coexistence but a living fabric of exchanges and interdependencies that carried within it the possibility of deepening. It was politics, the great powers, unilateral declarations, contradictory promises and the fanatics on both sides that cut this thread before it could become a true bond, transforming into an existential conflict what might have become a foundation.

Khalil al-Sakakini: educating a human being before educating an Arab

The Palestine that Sakakini inhabited was one of a territory in profound recomposition: after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, the region had passed under British Mandate in 1920, a tutelary administration entrusted by the League of Nations to London, charged with developing the institutions of a future state whilst managing the contradictory promises made to the Jewish and Arab communities, an unstable framework that was to structure, and ultimately ignite, the decades that followed.

In this context of dying Ottoman and then Mandatory Palestine, Khalil al-Sakakini (1878–1953) ranks among the most overlooked intellectual figures in Palestinian history, and that neglect is not accidental. Teacher, poet and pedagogical reformer, he embodied that current of the Arab Nahda in its Palestinian and Jerusalemite expression. His pedagogical writings posited universal humanism rather than ethnic or confessional belonging as the foundation of all human formation: “One does not educate an Arab, a Christian or a Muslim, one educates a human being, and it is only at that scale that education has meaning.”

But the actual trajectory of Palestinian education after 1948 rapidly took a direction radically opposed to this philosophy. Under Jordanian and then Egyptian administration, under the PLO, Fatah and finally Hamas, school curricula constructed an identity built on conflict, martyrdom and the exclusion of the other, precisely everything Sakakini had refused. A single example: the doctoral thesis that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority since 2005 (his mandate having lapsed in 2009 without his having been submitted to any election since), defended in Moscow in 1982 under the title The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. It contested the number of Jewish victims of the Shoah, posited a collaboration between Zionists and Nazis to accelerate immigration to Palestine, and thus laid the foundations for an assimilation of Israelis to Nazis, a discourse that has not ceased to spread in certain pro-Palestinian circles since then. It says on its own what the dominant Palestinian intellectual leadership produced in place of Sakakini’s humanist heritage. Abbas did publicly describe the Shoah as the “most heinous crime of the modern era” in 2014, but that belated declaration does not rewrite the thesis. Sakakini was not merely without influence: he was deliberately sidelined. That is why he finds his place in this article.

It should be recalled that before the First World War, his relations with certain Zionist cultural circles were marked by a mutual esteem that his journals document with a candour contrasting sharply with the official postures of the time. He was not naive about the political tensions taking shape, nor ignorant of the land and demographic stakes, but he refused to allow these to define the totality of his relationship with men and women he respected as thinkers and as individuals. This capacity to distinguish persons from the political projects they carry is precisely what times of crisis make most difficult to maintain, and what Sakakini maintained for as long as conditions permitted.

In the Palestinian gallery of voices favouring coexistence, Sakakini holds the role that Ahad Ha’Am holds in the Zionist current of clear-sightedness: an intellectual who posed the cultural and ethical question before the political question, and who paid for that priority with the price of his progressive marginalisation as politics took precedence over everything else.

The Faysal-Weizmann agreement: what the great powers destroyed

On 3 January 1919, on the margins of the Paris Peace Conference that was redrawing the world order in the aftermath of the Great War, Emir Faysal ibn Hussein and Chaim Weizmann signed an agreement that few textbooks mention. Faysal was the son of the Sharif of Mecca and the recognised spokesman for Arab aspirations to independence; Weizmann, a chemist of genius and president of the World Zionist Organization. Their text, the Faysal-Weizmann Agreement, committed both parties to cooperate in the spirit of what it called “the most cordial goodwill”: to encourage large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine while protecting the rights of Arab peasants, guarantee freedom of worship for all faiths, entrust the Muslim Holy Places to Muslim control, and build an Arab-Jewish relationship founded on mutual recognition rather than opposition.

The very existence of this document should invalidate any reading that would present Arab opposition to Zionism as a natural and inevitable given. This is not an agreement wrested under duress, nor a capitulation: it is the explicit and formal recognition, by the most legitimate Arab representative of the time, that the Zionist project could be articulated with Arab aspirations within a framework of mutually beneficial cooperation.

But the agreement contained a clause that left it suspended on a condition external to the will of either signatory: it was contingent on the Arab independence promised by the British during the war, that promise which Lawrence of Arabia had carried through the sands of the Hejaz, not knowing that London was already betraying it on two fronts. For the British government was simultaneously conducting three contradictory policies, none of the parties being aware of the other two: in 1916, the promise of a vast independent Arab kingdom made to Sharif Hussein in exchange for his uprising against the Ottoman Empire; that same year, the secret Sykes-Picot agreements which carved that same kingdom into Franco-British spheres of influence; then in November 1917, the Balfour Declaration promising the British Jewish community London’s support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, London thereby seeking to rally to its cause the influential Jewish communities of Great Britain, the United States and Russia, at the cost of a territorial promise on a country it had already distributed twice. Arthur Koestler summed up this triple betrayal in a single sentence: “One nation solemnly promised to a second the territory of a third.”

When France installed itself in Syria in the spring of 1920 and London stood aside, the promise of independence made to the Arabs collapsed definitively. Faysal then added a handwritten annotation in Arabic at the foot of the agreement signed with Weizmann, rendering it null and void under those conditions: “If the Arabs are not granted their independence, I am not bound by anything.” This architecture of contradictory commitments, whose full extent Lawrence himself only discovered after the war, at the cost of a disillusionment that would haunt him until his death, constitutes one of the most thoroughly documented diplomatic betrayals of that period, whose consequences the next article in this series will measure in full.

What ended the possibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence in 1919 was not the fundamental incompatibility of the peoples: it was Western geopolitics, which liquidated in a few months what two leaders had laboriously built. This reality diminishes in no way the proper responsibilities of each camp in the decades that followed, but it should weigh heavily in any judgement about what was or was not possible.

The Nashashibis: when Palestinian moderates died for having sought compromise

Palestinian society in the years 1920–1948 was not the unanimously anti-Zionist community governed by a homogeneous collective will that certain narratives have constructed. Palestinian political reality in this period was structured by a deep rivalry between two great notable families of Jerusalem whose political orientations differed on the central question of the relationship to the Jews and to the British Mandatory administration: the Husseinis, politically dominant under the charismatic and fateful leadership of Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, of whom the previous article in this series recalls that he went so far as to ally himself with the Nazis by creating in Bosnia a Muslim SS division that massacred civilians, and the Nashashibis, more pragmatic, more open to negotiation and compromise, but progressively eliminated by a combination of political terror and events that stripped them of any room for manoeuvre.

Raghib Nashashibi, mayor of Jerusalem from 1920 to 1934 and the leading figure of the moderate current, carried during his years in office a political pragmatism that was courageous in the context of mounting radicalisation surrounding him: he sought territorial and economic accommodations, rejected the scorched-earth policy, and maintained channels of communication with the Mandatory administration and with Jewish representatives, channels the Mufti sought to close by every available means. His nephew Fakhri Nashashibi went further still, too far to survive: in the years 1936–1939 he organised militias to counter al-Husseini’s armed groups, actively sought arrangements with the British authorities and Zionist representatives, and remained, until his assassination in Baghdad in 1941, the most exposed and most determined figure of this anti-radicalisation current.

The story of Fakhri Nashashibi has an ordinary horror to it: he was killed not by Israeli soldiers, the State of Israel did not yet exist, but by the Mufti’s partisans, abroad, as a traitor. This phenomenon of internal terror, Palestinian moderates physically eliminated by their own camp for having sought compromise, is one of the most constant factors in the Palestinian history of this period, and one of the least often named. It does not on its own explain all subsequent developments, but to pass over it in silence would be to distort the picture: Palestinian moderation was not only a minority position, but mortally dangerous for those who embodied it.

On the Jewish side, Magnes was jeered and isolated, Brit Shalom was ridiculed, but its members were not assassinated. This difference in degree of violence exercised against the moderate voices on each side is an element of the real asymmetry between the two situations that the word mirror in this series must never entirely obscure.

Musa Alami: from firm dialogue to prophetic self-criticism

Musa Alami (1897–1984) is perhaps the Palestinian figure whose course best illustrates what it means to choose construction where defeat pushed others towards destruction. His trajectory is that of a man who moved from firm negotiating positions to prophetic self-criticism, without ever abandoning either the method of dialogue or the demand he placed on his own camp.

His roots in Jerusalem were among the deepest of his time: his grandfather and father had both been mayors of the city, and his maternal family, the Ansari, descendants of a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, had for eight centuries kept watch over the al-Aqsa esplanade. His attachment to the land was not ideological: it was existential and spiritual, which made his engagement in dialogue all the more significant. As a child he had studied at the avant-garde school founded by Khalil al-Sakakini himself, creating thus a direct, biographical and intellectual link between the two central figures of the Palestinian humanist current that this article documents. He completed his legal education at Cambridge, graduating in 1924.

A brilliant lawyer and senior official of the British Mandatory administration, he was appointed as early as 1933 by High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope to meet with Zionist leaders. His direct conversations with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, whose substance the historian Walter Laqueur has recorded, constitute one of the rare moments of Palestinian-Zionist political dialogue of that period, and their reciprocal candour deserves to be conveyed without embellishment. Ben-Gurion submitted a generous vision: the Zionists would develop the land for all its inhabitants, within a federation including Palestine, Iraq and other Arab states. Alami replied with disarming frankness: at best the Jews could hope for an enclave around Tel Aviv within a Muslim Palestine, and he would prefer the land remain undeveloped for another hundred years rather than see it developed by anyone other than the Arabs themselves. Ben-Gurion left these conversations speaking of an “experiment that failed.”

His positions were firm, to be sure, but Alami held them within a framework that the great majority of Arab leaders of the time refused: that of direct negotiation, honest face-to-face exchange, the trading of arguments rather than prior rejection. Where Amin al-Husseini imposed silence and intimidation on anyone who ventured to speak with the Jews, Alami sat at the table, set out his positions without evasion, and listened to the arguments of the other camp. It is not concession that makes him a moderate, it is the method, and the conviction that dialogue was better than armed silence.

But the consequences of his candour were immediate: Zionist leaders pressured the British to have him dismissed, which was achieved as early as 1934 and again in 1937, this time with a forced exile to Lebanon. His independence of mind, he was, according to the historian Nadi Abusaada, “the only leader of the required calibre who belonged to no party and could therefore represent them all”, nonetheless allowed him to represent Palestine at the London Conference of 1939, to participate in the preparations for the Arab League in 1944, and to found the Arab Office to defend the Palestinian cause before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1945–1946.

That same independence made him vulnerable in his own camp: Amin al-Husseini, distrustful of any free spirit, launched in 1947 on the eve of the war, through the Arab Higher Committee he presided over, an active campaign against the Arab information offices that Alami had patiently established in Jerusalem, London and Washington, leading to the withdrawal of Iraqi funding, the only Arab state to have made any real contribution, and thus condemning these offices to closure for lack of resources. This mechanism of double strangulation, in which Alami was marginalised both by the adversary’s pressure on the Mandatory authorities and by the radicalisation of his own camp, deserves to be named as such.

It was after the Nakba of 1948 — the Arabic term meaning the catastrophe, designating the dispersion of some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs driven out or having fled in the context of the first Arab-Israeli war, and the collapse of Palestinian society as it had existed for generations, that Alami formulated what few political figures in history have the courage to assume after total defeat: he criticised his own camp with unsparing rigour. In April 1949, barely eleven months after this seismic event, he published in Beirut ‘Ibrat Filastin (The Lesson of Palestine), a text of ninety-eight pages that stands as one of the most courageous intellectual acts in Palestinian history. Alami asserts without equivocation that this collective shipwreck was not inevitable, that it was the Arabs themselves, through their internal divisions, their insufficient modernisation, the mediocrity of their regimes and their chronic inability to build genuine political unity, who had failed: “The Arabs were confronted with a challenge, the first since their liberation from foreign domination; and they did not rise to it.” He seeks no scapegoat, neither in Zionism nor in British imperialism. He simply holds the mirror before his people and asks them to look.

What distinguishes Alami from the other Palestinian political figures of his time is that his thought did not fossilise in defeat but deepened on contact with it, exactly what Ahad Ha’Am had done in the face of the excesses of the early aliyot pioneers in 1891. The two men, from opposing shores and decades apart, were posing the same fundamental question: what is lost when a people chooses intransigence without ethical depth? And both paid the same price for having posed it: isolation in their own camps.

He then devoted the second half of his life to the Arab Development Society, which he founded near Jericho on five thousand acres of arid land wrested from the desert, where he built wells, farms, a school, a clinic and housing for refugee orphans. Over seventeen years the project reached forty thousand acres, offering a response to the Nakba through autonomy and productive dignity, the exact opposite of the rhetoric of victimhood that the rest of the Arab world cultivated. But in 1967 the Israeli army invaded the ADS lands, destroyed twenty-six of the twenty-seven wells and annihilated the livestock. Alami, then in Europe, returned to rebuild everything by hand. In 1979 he confided to British historian David Gilmour: “I no longer take any pleasure in this place. I stay here out of duty. I know the Zionists have wanted us to leave for years. But I have a duty to my people.” He died in Amman on 8 June 1984 and was buried in Jerusalem, in the Bab al-Sahira cemetery.

He embodies the type of figure whom wars grind down but whom history ultimately recognises: a negotiator without illusions but without hatred, a builder where others had chosen destruction, faithful to the end to a land he had never reduced to a political programme.

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The convergence nobody wanted to see

The same diagnosis from opposing shores

If one sets side by side the texts of Ahad Ha’Am, Magnes and Buber on the one side, and the positions of Alami, Sakakini and the moderate Nashashibis on the other, something strange appears: these men, who did not speak to one another directly, who wrote in different languages for different audiences, and whose political projects were often in opposition, were formulating in their respective terms the same fundamental diagnosis.

Ahad Ha’Am, as early as 1891, warned that the arrogance of those who settle while ignoring those already there prepares conflicts that diplomacy will not be able to extinguish. Alami in the nineteen thirties showed that an economic argument cannot purchase the dignity of a people for whom land is a place of belonging before it is a factor of production. Magnes in the nineteen forties warned that building a state in the urgency of survival without resolving the question of political coexistence would be to prepare decades of conflicts that neither military force nor diplomacy could probably settle. The Nashashibis in the nineteen thirties sensed that Husseini radicalisation would close windows that might never reopen. As for Martin Buber, he affirmed throughout his life that the I-Thou relationship, the recognition of the other as a person and not as an obstacle, is the only foundation on which something durable can be built between peoples condemned to share a territory.

These convergences are not coincidences: they reveal that a sound understanding of the situation and its stakes was accessible to those willing to look without turning away. It was not the absence of a diagnosis that led to the impasse, it was the refusal to let that diagnosis inform political and human choices. And that refusal came, in both camps, from the same source: the conviction that force, whether military, demographic or terrorist, could resolve quickly what negotiation did not seem able to accomplish easily.

The war of 1948, launched in the immediate aftermath of the proclamation of the State of Israel in a combined attack by the armies of five Arab countries that had rejected the United Nations partition plan, confirmed the fears of the most clear-sighted. It concluded in a double reality that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian narrative can exhaust alone: on one side the survival and military victory of the young state, what Israelis call the War of Independence; on the other the Nakba, the catastrophe in Arabic, a term introduced as early as 1948 by the historian Constantin Zureik to designate the dispersion of some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, driven out or having fled in a context of war, a Nakba whose responsibilities remain the subject of serious historiographical debate. The Israeli “new historians”, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, established from Israeli archives that expulsions were deliberately orchestrated in certain sectors; Morris maintains, however, that the exodus was to a large extent a by-product of the war and its terrors; Pappé goes further in speaking of planned ethnic cleansing. This debate is not closed, and any honest treatment of this period must name it as such, without denying the real suffering of a civilian population caught in a war it had not chosen, nor absolving the responsibilities of the Arab states that had launched it.

It is in the light of these events that Alami’s voice takes on its full dimension. Where the Nakba validated retrospectively the arguments of those who had said that coexistence was an illusion, Alami chose in ‘Ibrat Filastin the exact inverse path, that of unsparing self-criticism: holding the mirror before his own people rather than seeking a scapegoat. What no Arab leader of the time, and very few since, had the courage to formulate, which makes him, in the gallery of this article’s buried voices, perhaps the most solitary and most necessary figure.

This war of 1948 also had a largely unknown consequence, symmetrical to the Nakba, which it would be dishonest to pass over in silence. It triggered a movement that the war of 1967 was to amplify and accelerate: the forced departure or expulsion of virtually all Jewish communities from Arab and Muslim countries, communities whose presence in those lands went back, for some, more than two millennia, well before Islam itself. Some 800,000 people thus left Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria and other countries, under the compulsion of pogroms, denaturalisation laws, confiscation of property and persecutions linked to the rise of Arab nationalism. These Jewish refugees, whose fate is rarely mentioned in international debates on the conflict, and whose number is comparable to that of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, or greater, depending on the estimates, came massively to settle in Israel, profoundly transforming the demography and sociology of the country.

This reality made and continues to make any negotiation over territorial cessions or a hypothetical right of return for Palestinian refugees incomparably more difficult: in both cases, hundreds of thousands of displaced families carry claims of legitimacy over lands and possessions that history has wrenched from them, on both sides of a border that did not yet exist when their tragedies began.

Why did these voices lose?

The most useful question one can pose today about these moderate voices is not “why were they right?” They were right, and history has demonstrated this at a dreadful price. The question is: “why did they lose?”

On the Jewish side, the marginalisation of the voices of Ahad Ha’Am, Magnes and Brit Shalom comes down to three factors, none of which alone suffices to explain the whole. The first is the inexorable rise of European antisemitism: in the nineteen thirties and forties, Nazi persecution made the urgency of refuge incomparably more pressing than the nuances of the binational project, and those who proposed to negotiate immigration with an Arab-Jewish council faced the overwhelming moral force of millions of Jews who needed habitable land immediately — a reality that became decisive after 1945 with the discovery of the full extent of the Shoah. The second is Arab resistance, particularly that orchestrated by the Mufti, which rendered the binational project politically inaudible by stripping it of any credible Arab interlocutor after the elimination of Palestinian moderates.

The third factor, deeper still, is the logic of state nationalism, and its emergence is not abstract but directly linked to the successive Arab refusals of any shared solution. From the Peel Plan of 1937, which proposed a partition of Palestine into two states, the Arab leadership under the Mufti’s direction categorically rejected any territorial division. The United Nations partition plan of November 1947, which allocated a state to the Jews and a state to the Arabs on demographic grounds, was accepted by the Jewish Agency and rejected by the Arab League, which immediately launched hostilities. These successive refusals produced a decisive political effect: they legitimised in the eyes of the international community the claim to a sovereign Jewish nation-state, the only model that international law at the time recognised as a valid response to the absence of a negotiated solution. Once this form had been imposed as the only viable horizon, any alternative vision, binationalism, federation, shared commonwealth, was doomed to appear irremediably utopian. The Arab side, in refusing partition, had paradoxically helped render inevitable precisely what it sought to prevent.

On the Palestinian side, the mechanisms were more brutal and more direct. Husseini internal terror (assassinations, intimidations, ostracism) physically eliminated a part of the moderates and forced the others into silence or exile. Successive wars then each time reduced the space in which a nuanced position could be expressed, but each in its own way and with its own effects. The war of 1948 shattered Palestinian social and political structures, carrying away with them the class of educated and pragmatic notables, the Alamis, the Nashashibis, who constituted the natural interlocutor of a negotiation. The Palestinian leadership reconstituted itself in refugee camps and in exile, under conditions in which radicalism was not only understandable but structurally inevitable. Peoples do not construct their memory from archives; they construct it from their wounds.

The war of 1967 produced on the Israeli side its own perverse effect, as the previous article in this series observes: the conquest viewed as near-miraculous of the West Bank and Gaza opened for ultra-religious nationalists an ideological space in which territorial messianism could deploy. The settler movement gathered momentum, transforming the provisional military occupation into a permanent implantation project and rendering any future territorial concession politically and religiously more costly.

Paradoxically, the first Intifada (1987–1993) briefly reopened a window of hope, as it forced both camps to seek a political way out and led to the Oslo Accords, a major opportunity whose dimensions and causes of failure the next article will measure in full. But the second Intifada (2000–2005), with its suicide bombings in the cafés and buses of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, brutally closed that window by anchoring in Israeli society the conviction that any territorial withdrawal would engender an immediate existential threat, which durably discredited, in both camps, those who had staked their hopes on peace. In times of total war, compromise can be assimilated to treason, and in societies where every conflict has ended in human and territorial losses that are real and not abstract, the logic of all-or-nothing commands an emotional and political force that nuance, however well-founded, cannot easily counterbalance.

What this symmetry reveals is that the marginalisation of moderate voices in both camps is not the result of any intrinsic inferiority of their ideas. Their ideas were, and remain, the most pertinent this conflict has produced. It was the configuration of forces in play that defeated them, but a configuration of forces can change. Not easily, not quickly, not without sacrifices, but it can change. Several times in the history of this conflict, moments of opening have existed that show fatality is not its definitive law, even if it is sometimes its appearance.

The heirs: a fragile but living infrastructure

There is a persistence that violent current events tend to render invisible: each war, each attack, each disillusionment has attempted to extinguish the voices of coexistence on both sides, but each time these voices have reconstituted themselves in new forms, often more concrete and more anchored in everyday life than the preceding ones. This persistence confirms one clear thing: fatality is not a law, but a succession of deliberate choices.

When four hundred thousand Israelis said no

The Peace Now movement (Shalom Achshav), born in March 1978 from an open letter signed by 348 reserve officers asking the Begin government to seize the peace opportunity offered by Sadat's visit, constitutes the most direct expression of a pacifism rooted in liberal Zionism itself. Its central argument was profoundly Israeli: prolonged occupation would corrupt the state from within, destroying the Jewish and democratic character it claimed to defend. In September 1982, in the immediate aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre — perpetrated by Lebanese Phalangist militias in camps under Israeli military control, but for which the Kahan Commission, constituted by the Israeli government, attributed indirect responsibility to Israel and to the serious negligence of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon — Peace Now assembled 400,000 demonstrators in the streets of Tel Aviv, representing ten per cent of the Israeli population at the time. That figure alone testifies that a large part of Israeli society was demanding from its leaders a moral accountability that the Kahan Commission itself was to formalise.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz: orthodoxy against occupation

This movement found its most powerful intellectual counterpoint in the figure of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, biochemist, neurologist, Talmudic commentator and perhaps the greatest Israeli public intellectual of the twentieth century. An observant Orthodox Jew, but fiercely opposed to any instrumentalisation of religion by political power, he had formulated as early as 1967 with a clarity that proved genuinely prophetic what occupation would do to Israel: it would denature the state, transform the IDF into an occupation police force, and destroy the ethical character of the Zionist project. An antagonistic figure to the messianic rabbis of Gush Emunim who sacralised territorial conquest, he explicitly supported the soldiers of Yesh Gvul (There is a limit) who accepted prison rather than service in the territories, embodying the ethics of personal cost that Magnes had demanded of his own contemporaries. He declined the Israel Prize in 1993 after his nomination had provoked a political crisis. His voice remains one of the most necessary and least heard in this entire history.

Nusseibeh, Ayalon, Beilin, Abed Rabbo: the peace the governments refused to sign

The years 2002–2003 saw the simultaneous emergence, at the very heart of the violence of the Second Intifada, of two civil initiatives of remarkable ambition. On one side, Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher trained at Oxford and Harvard, president of Al-Quds University and descendant of an Islamic family that had kept watch over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for centuries, and Ami Ayalon, former director of the Shin Bet who concluded from his entire security career that force alone was a dead end. Their six principles of the People’s Voice surgically cut through the Gordian knots that Oslo had skirted: the 1967 borders, Jerusalem as the capital of both states, guardianship of the Holy Sites rather than sovereignty — thus separating spiritual administration from political domination — and explicit renunciation of the right of return to Israel. More than 800,000 people signed the petition. On the other side, Yossi Beilin, former Israeli minister and architect of the Oslo Accords, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian Minister of Culture, were secretly negotiating in Geneva a complete and detailed agreement, article by article, covering all the points that official negotiations had always left pending (borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security), signed symbolically in December 2003.

Two distinct approaches, therefore: one popular, carried by a former head of the intelligence services and a philosopher who called directly on citizens to sign; the other diplomatic and technical, conducted by two former ministers who produced what no government had dared to draft. Both converged on the same conclusion: a negotiated peace was formulable by the two civil societies simultaneously. The Sharon and Arafat governments chose carefully to ignore them. These missed opportunities will be examined in detail in the next article in this series.

Mustafa Barghouti: Palestinian resistance without weapons or hatred

On the Palestinian side, a current of structured non-violent resistance exists, and its political marginalisation despite genuine media visibility is itself a political fact. Mustafa Barghouti (not to be confused with Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Tanzim militias during the Second Intifada), a doctor and former Fatah official, founded in 2002 Al-Mubadara (the Palestinian National Initiative), a movement that refuses both the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and the violence of Hamas, advocating a popular resistance rooted in the principles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Its platform articulates an end to occupation and internal democracy, women’s rights and social justice, exactly what Sakakini would have recognised as his own. In the Palestinian presidential elections of 2005, Barghouti obtained 19.8% of the votes against Mahmoud Abbas, a remarkable result for a candidate without a party apparatus, testifying that the Palestinian moderate current is not marginal when given a space to express itself. He became a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 and briefly Minister of Information in 2007; he remains today secretary-general of Al-Mubadara and one of the most visible Palestinian voices in the international media, even though his positions after 7 October 2023, notably his justification of the attacks, considerably complicated his standing in the camp of advocates of strictly non-violent resistance.

Combatants for Peace and the others: peace through practice

After the collapse of Oslo, the heirs of the currents that had given rise to it reconfigured themselves in more bilateral forms, closer to everyday life. Combatants for Peace, founded in 2006 by former fighters from both sides who had met clandestinely, organises binational memorial ceremonies and trains young people in joint non-violent resistance. Standing Together (Omdin Beyahad), co-directed systematically by a Jewish-Arab duo, articulates social struggle and the struggle for peace, reaching a mainstream Israeli public inaccessible to other movements. A Land for All develops an original constitutional proposal (two states, a confederation, with free movement of citizens and Jerusalem as a shared capital), transcending the logic of strict separation that the interlocking realities on the ground have rendered inoperative.

Women Wage Peace, born the day after the 2014 Gaza war and co-founded with Women of the Sun, its Palestinian counterpart, is perhaps the movement most deeply rooted in civil society of this generation. Its founding march of October 2016, crossing Israel and the West Bank to culminate in a joint Jewish and Muslim prayer on the Jordan River, brought together 4,000 women from both communities. In 2017, a new march gathered 30,000 people in Jerusalem. The movement today counts more than 25,000 members.

In the cultural register, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded in 1999 by conductor Daniel Barenboim and philosopher Edward Said (an Argentinian-Israeli Jew and an American Palestinian, two of the most prominent intellectual figures of their era), brings together Israeli and Arab musicians around a shared repertoire, embodying what Ahad Ha’Am called a cultural centre rather than a balance of power. The Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa has for thirty-five years produced plays performed in Hebrew and Arabic by mixed companies.

In the medical domain, coexistence takes an even more concrete form: lives saved together. Road to Recovery has since 2010 provided daily transport for Palestinian patients from Gaza to Israeli hospitals. One Heart for Peace, founded at Hadassah Hospital by cardiologists from both camps, saves children together, often those of the enemy, in operating theatres where politics no longer has a place.

The sociology of these movements has profoundly evolved, as the League of Human Rights analyses in its November 2025 synthesis: mixed organisations today federate more widely than the old left-wing Zionist movements, because they articulate struggles that concern all citizens (cost of living, ecology, discrimination, democracy), and no longer solely the grand geopolitical questions. The narrative being written is post-identitarian and post-statist, founded on concrete coexistence rather than abstract negotiation — exactly what Ahad Ha’Am had called for: not first a state, but first a lived ethics.

Living together as a political act

Beyond diplomatic initiatives and militant movements, a quieter and more enduring coexistence has been built into the very fabric of the societies. Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam (the Oasis of Peace), a village founded in 1972 on lands belonging to the Latrun abbey, has survived every war and every intifada: Jewish and Arab Israeli families have lived there together voluntarily for more than half a century, with bilingual schools, shared governance structures and a training centre open to groups from both communities.

Hand in Hand (Yad be Yad), co-founded in 1997 by an Arab Israeli educator and an American-Israeli educator with fifty children, has built the only growing network of integrated bilingual schools in Israel: six campuses today, in Jerusalem, Galilee, the Wadi Ara, Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Kfar Saba, more than 2,000 Jewish and Arab pupils taught together in Hebrew and Arabic by mixed teaching teams, with hundreds of families on waiting lists. Each class has two teachers, one Jewish and one Arab, and the values inscribed at the entrance of each school are the same in Hebrew and in Arabic: equality, empathy, responsibility, respect. During the 2024–2025 school year, under bombs and the pressure of war, all establishments completed their full year, what their director describes as the fruit of “muscles developed over years that the rest of Israeli society does not yet possess.”

The Parents Circle Families Forum, founded by Yitzhak Frankenthal whose son was killed by Hamas, brings together Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost someone close and who have chosen not to transmit their pain as a weapon: their cross-testimonies constitute one of the most authentic and most tested forms of dialogue ever developed between the two peoples.

Finally, ALLMEP (Alliance for Middle East Peace) today federates more than 160 organisations from both civil societies, maintaining the fabric of dialogue where official politics has torn it apart.

7 October: when night falls on the peacebuilders

On 4 October 2023, three days before 7 October, Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun organised in Jerusalem a joint march, presenting a Mothers’ Appeal jointly signed: “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to put an end to the vicious cycle of bloodshed.” Three days later, Vivian Silver, co-founder of Women Wage Peace, was murdered by Hamas in her kibbutz at Be’eri. This atrocious coincidence says everything about what 7 October did to these movements: it struck at the very heart of those who refused the logic of violence.

The war that followed in Gaza subjected these organisations to an existential ordeal. Their members found themselves torn between loyalties that tragedy rendered simultaneously compelling and incompatible. Some of those bonds broke. But others held: Standing Together secured humanitarian convoys and organised marches towards Gaza in 2025, in a context where aid delivery was severely restricted, whether through the limitations imposed by the Israeli authorities for security reasons or the diversions documented by Hamas. Road to Recovery continued its transports under extremely difficult conditions. ALLMEP maintained its bilateral dialogues in digital format. The film No Other Land, co-produced by a binational team filming under threats, received the Oscar for best documentary in 2025, and its very existence in this context is a political act.

These voices are today more inaudible than they have been at any point since the darkest years of the conflict. But they have not disappeared. And this obstinate presence, without any logic of immediate result, without visible political reward, sometimes at the cost of life, perhaps says the essential: there exist, in both societies, men and women who have decided that the other is a person before he is an enemy, and that this decision does not revoke itself under bombs.

The night of the Jabbok and interior transformation as necessity

There is, in the story this article has attempted to tell, something that surpasses politics and that politics alone cannot formulate. All these men and women (Ahad Ha’Am, Magnes, Buber, Leibowitz, Alami, Sakakini, the moderate Nashashibis, Barghouti, Nusseibeh, Ayalon, Beilin and Abed Rabbo, the soldiers of Yesh Gvul, the mothers of Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun), had in common, beyond their considerable differences, one characteristic that their respective adversaries did not share: they had traversed a night that had changed them and made them more human. Not in the convenient metaphorical sense, but in the sense that the biblical tradition gives to that ordeal: a real transformation that breaks and refounds, that leaves traces in the body and in the soul.

Ahad Ha’Am had traversed the reality of the pioneers of the early aliyot and refused to lie to himself about what he saw, including and especially when it was uncomfortable for the project he defended. Magnes had traversed the jeering of his own community during the most painful years of modern Jewish history and maintained his conviction not through stubbornness but because he had verified it in his own flesh. Leibowitz had traversed the official ostracism of the state he loved, refusing until his last breath to separate Judaism from ethics. Alami had traversed the Nakba, the annihilation of Palestinian society as he had known it, and chosen in ‘Ibrat Filastin the most difficult path: to turn against his own camp with the same rigour that Ahad Ha’Am had turned against his, posing the same fundamental question from the opposing shore — what is lost when a people chooses power without ethical depth? Mustafa Barghouti had traversed Israeli prisons and the corruption of his own political authority without choosing either hatred or resignation. Nusseibeh and Ayalon had traversed together the night of the Second Intifada, one a Palestinian marginalised in his own camp, the other a former head of Israeli intelligence convinced that his entire life dedicated to security through force had produced insecurity, and emerged from it with six principles of peace that 800,000 people had signed. Beilin and Abed Rabbo had traversed the failure of Oslo without concluding that peace was impossible, producing in Geneva the most complete agreement ever drafted between representatives of the two peoples.

This is why this series is placed under the sign of Jacob and Esau, those two twin brothers whom the betrayal of a stolen inheritance and twenty years of exile had turned into mortal enemies. The night of the Jabbok, in which Jacob wrestles with a mysterious being until dawn and emerges transformed, broken in one part of himself but capable for the first time of meeting his long-time enemy-brother, is not a comfortable allegory about dialogue and reconciliation. It is a precise description of the process by which a person, or a people, exits the logic of domination and exclusion to enter another logic, more difficult, more costly, but the only one that makes possible a life worthy of that name. And what is striking in the story this article has told is that this night was sometimes traversed together: a former head of the Shin Bet and a Palestinian philosopher, an Israeli negotiator and a Palestinian minister, soldiers and former fighters from both camps, Jewish and Arab mothers marching side by side on the Jordan. The Jabbok is not solely an interior metaphor — it can also be a meeting place.

The voices this article has sought to name, voices of peace from both camps, silenced by violence, by history, by the complicity of the powers and the rage of the fanatics, are the voices of those who, each in their own way, have traversed that night. They did not win. Not yet. But what they said remains true, and what they did remains real: Alami’s wells, Hand in Hand‘s schools, the scores of the West-Eastern Divan, the signatures of 800,000 strangers who wanted to live in peace. That will not be lost. These are landmarks for all those who, tomorrow, will want to make of this land what it should be.

The next article in this series will examine how peace opportunities have been systematically sabotaged over these one hundred and thirty years — not by fatality, but by identifiable actors who needed this conflict to continue for reasons that will need to be named without euphemism. Then the last article will open a direction for the future by returning to Jacob and Esau, in order to recount the steps that Jacob had to take before the night of the Jabbok and the morning when he could say to his brother, in a breath that sums up everything this article has attempted to document, “to see your face is to see the face of G-d”: the interior struggle first, then the crossing of the ford, then the humility of the one prostrate before him he had betrayed, then the gift offered without guarantee of response, and finally, only then, recognition.

For this is what these silenced voices, those of both camps, had understood: that there is no shortcut between fear of the other and peace with him, but an exacting path that both peoples will need to travel in parallel, each crossing its own night, for neither can cross the Jabbok in the other’s place, nor claim to have crossed it as long as the other has not crossed it too.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

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The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 26 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Stage 7 — Spiritual sovereignty
Previous article: Inner stability

The accomplished tree

There are moments, on a path of inner transformation, when something has grown sufficiently stable within us for the gaze to turn back and survey the distance travelled. Not out of self-indulgence or nostalgia, but in order to measure, with the lucidity of the walker who reaches the edge of a mountain pass, what each stage has deposited in him and how these successive deposits have ended by altering not only what he does, but what he is.

The seven-week journey we undertook from the beginning of April has followed the structure of a tree that unfolds slowly from its deepest underground roots to the very summit where it may at last bear its fruit. Love was first recognised as that infinite energy, the primordial sap that irrigates the universe and can flow through us if we consent to open a passage for it in the very flesh of our existence. Discipline then gave it its form, its bed and its bank, transforming a generous yet diffuse impulse into a directed force, capable of acting with precision amidst the rougher circumstances of daily life. Compassion broadened our gaze beyond our own borders, teaching us to bear the suffering of others without losing ourselves in it, in that delicate equilibrium between touching and holding. Constancy taught us that deep transformation does not arise in great surges of energy but in fidelity to small steps, that silent perseverance which makes all the difference between the one who begins and the one who sees things through to completion. Humility restored us to our rightful place in the great fabric of living things, neither crushed by our insignificance nor inflated by our sense of importance, and it was then that inner Stability could at last settle in — that living trunk around which the storms of existence may revolve without sweeping us away.

We have now arrived at the seventh stage, the one in which all these qualities converge and integrate into a reality that can no longer quite be called a quality, for it is no longer an activity or an effort, but a state of being: spiritual Sovereignty. It is not one more step to climb, it is the blossoming — the full expression of that for which the tree exists.

The influences that shaped us

When we begin to observe our own workings with sustained and unsentimental attention, we discover with growing astonishment the multitude of influences that have moulded us, and how deeply our personality has developed out of a need to adapt to the society which becomes ours by birth and whose customs and habits we must adopt in order to find our place within it. This adaptation is neither weakness nor betrayal: it is a vital necessity, the very condition of our survival and our integration into a social fabric without which no human being can develop. Yet it carries a cost we rarely measure at its true worth: the progressive smothering of what is most intimate and most precious within us.

For as observation sharpens, we become aware that our most intimate dimension, that which makes us ourselves in our irreducible uniqueness, our essence, which still expressed itself with remarkable freedom when we were children, has had to fall gradually silent to make way for what we had to do and become in order to exist in our world, to conform to the external models we followed in order to succeed within it, and to satisfy the expectations of those upon whom we depended affectively. The approving or disapproving gaze of the father, the silent fears of the mother, the merciless hierarchies of the school playground, the norms of success of a society that measures a person’s worth by productive utility: so many conjugated forces that have sculpted our personality from a material not necessarily our own.

Or, conversely, we have rebelled against these models and injunctions, imagining that through such rebellion we were asserting our singularity; yet ultimately, this opposition itself is merely another form of dependence upon the world against which one erects oneself, a refusal that still defines itself in relation to what it refuses, rather than from what it truly is. In either case, submission or rebellion, something in our development seems not to belong to us, not to depend on who we genuinely are in our original depth.

We thus observe, sometimes with a sadness we dare not quite name, that our deeper self lies as if asleep, covered over by strata of habits, postures and automatic reactions that constitute a carefully maintained façade which expresses our true essence hardly at all. We are not sovereign in our own kingdom, for ruling over it is an entire assembly of unchosen inheritances, unexamined fears and borrowed desires, which stands in the place of what we might have been had we succeeded in unfolding freely from our centre.

This very observation, set down with lucidity and without self-indulgence, is already the first act of our recovered freedom. For it is in becoming thus conscious of the genealogy of our being under the sway of family inheritance, the codes of the age and of human history, which have determined the formation of that rigid personality that imprisons rather than serves us, that we enter into a slow process of inner awakening and profound transformation, one that will allow us, through discipline, humility and constancy, to attain that inner stability conducive to reducing our inner disorder and gradually reconstructing a harmonious working of our faculties and our gifts. By thus activating our most sublime capacities of presence, love and wisdom, which restore our connection with every aspect of the universe, we recover true sovereignty over our inner kingdom and accomplish at last our genuine spiritual nature.

The genealogy of our being

To recover our sovereignty, that is to say, to be truly ourselves, with all our dimensions in accord with our most just intuitions when we inhabit that inner place of absolute sincerity with oneself, that place no longer troubled by the need to appear and the fear of judgement, we must become conscious of the genealogy of our being and voluntarily resume its development. It is not a matter of erasing what we have become, still less of rejecting our history wholesale, but of performing a kind of living discernment: recognising what, within us, proceeds from our essence and may therefore unfold freely, and what proceeds from an adaptation, sometimes too costly, to demands that were not our own.

This work of inner genealogy is precisely what we have undertaken since the beginning of this journey. It is a matter of re-creating oneself from the stable and conscious place of presence to oneself, from which we may begin to act more freely, to make choices that truly emanate from our deepest being, and to win back, step by step, the reconquest of ourselves. Not through a heroic and solitary act, but through this patient and daily work of observation and discernment, which progressively shifts the centre of gravity of our existence: from the agitated periphery of the ego towards the silent nucleus of our essence.

In thus progressing in self-knowledge through the practice of attentive observation, we cast an ever brighter light upon the impostures of the ego and its pretensions to usurp our real identity. Other forces rise within us, reinforcing our will to express our intimate being and to restore the ego to its true role: no longer the tyrant who unduly occupies the throne, but the competent servant of a nobler cause. For the ego is not the enemy to be destroyed; it is the instrument we must restore to its proper place, within the inner hierarchy of a being who has rediscovered its centre.

The awakening of the inner fire

This journey towards the encounter with oneself, which we undertook when, through a kind of personal revelation or in the course of an existential shock, we glimpsed the possibility of a more authentic and more expansive life, is none other than the path that will lead us to accomplish our spiritual vocation by incarnating our human nobility. So long as our life remains entirely subject to the demands of our ego, which developed in adaptation to the world and to ensure our survival, our energies and resources feed its quasi-automatic and unconscious functioning, and we identify in turn with each of the characters composing it according to the role we happen to be playing at any given moment: the ambitious one, the wounded one, the seducer, the judge, the fearful one, the one who feigns generosity.

We only access our most intimate being, our living essence, the repository of the unique gifts that characterise us, in those rare moments when we are suddenly confronted with the unexpected and deprived of immediate recourse to our habits and our protections. This is why life’s accidents — bereavements, separations, illnesses, the collapse of certainties — are so frequently the occasions that bring us back to ourselves by destabilising the precarious balance of our inner scaffoldings. They are not punishments or misfortunes, but sometimes brutal invitations to inhabit at last what we are, beyond what we pretend to be.

But in responding to the desire for being that has moved through us and impelled us towards change, we have begun to develop a presence to ourselves that reactivates this essence and draws it from the sleep in which it was enclosed, without waiting for the next shock to reconnect with it. It is in continuing to allow ourselves to be traversed by those spiritual intuitions that open us to a near-cosmic consciousness of that universal life of which we are the advancing point upon earth, and in pursuing our work upon ourselves to refine ourselves and grow more sensitive to it, that we recover our spiritual sovereignty little by little.

The celebrated formula from the Rig-Veda that I am fond of citing then begins to take on meaning in this progressive experience of awakening to another perception of ourselves and the world: “O Fire, thou art the son of Heaven through the body of the Earth.” In perceiving, beyond the mechanisms of the multiple personality acquired through mimicry, that there subsists within us something like the embers of an intimate fire, that free essence which founds our uniqueness, our desire to become truly ourselves is kindled; and we now understand more clearly that this inner wealth must, in order to grow, be exercised in the reality of our earthly condition whilst guiding itself upon the celestial horizon that allows us to orient ourselves in our quest. Son of Heaven through the body of the Earth: the spiritually awakened human being is precisely that, that living junction between matter and the infinite, that place where the eternal is incarnated in the temporal to give it its meaning.

The ascent: nobility and metamorphosis

The further we advance with vigilance and exacting attention in our inner transformation, connecting ever more deeply to our essential being, gradually loosening our grip on the demands of the greedy ego and patiently reorganising our inner theatre around our will towards progress, the more our spiritual intelligence awakens. Intuitions multiply, helping us to broaden our gaze and gain perspective over the constraints of daily life. It also becomes easier to improve the quality of our self-observation and to sustain for longer a true presence to ourselves and to the world, without being constantly swept away by the least external solicitation or the slightest fluctuation in our psychological state.

The inner space of stability expands within us, and it becomes possible to gain some distance from our emotions so as to master them when they might formerly have tended to run away with us, like a skilled coachman who knows how to rein in his horses when the road becomes dangerous. In refining our sensitivity and our reflection, we perceive ever more clearly how crude language is in relation to the subtlety of life, and how often words fall short in rendering a feeling or an intuition that touches something essential within us. We discover thus to what extent certain of our opinions, which seemed so definitive and so well-founded, sometimes lose their importance, for we are now capable of approaching any question from multiple angles, without immediately identifying with our inner chatter and our habitual certainties.

This nobility of the human condition, lived by the one who climbs the mountain step by step, is accompanied in this ascent by the transformation of the heart, which opens itself to the fullness of love. For the spiritual essence knows the ultimate goal not through intellectual knowledge, but through living knowledge: in the slow ascent, it is as if drawn towards those lofty summits that bring it closer to its celestial origin, to that kinship with the infinite where love has no more barriers or prisons, but expresses itself freely in the circulation of energies and the permanent transformation of all that is living.

One must nevertheless harbour no illusion about the nature of this ascent: it is not a straight line upward, and metamorphosis is almost never as sudden as the passage from one dwelling to another. It occurs progressively and in stages, with periods of mutation in which the person undergoes inner changes that may sometimes take the form of difficult crises, moments of disorientation, deep doubt, apparent regression, or demanding renunciations that sometimes feel like losses before revealing themselves as liberations. This path demands vigilance to avoid the tenacious snares of illusion and self-deception, and a constant effort to develop our quality of presence, to observe ourselves attentively and to call ourselves into question with an unfailing regularity. But if our desire for being is powerful and nourishes the constancy and courage of our step, then we shall advance little by little up the sometimes steep slopes of the mountain, and the higher we rise, the more we shall activate our potentials and discover the freedom and nobility of our human condition.

The great reversal

When we awaken our most intimate being, that spiritual essence which is the free and unique occurrence of living forces, qualities of consciousness, love and creativity, to place it at the centre of our existence and make it the true master of our ego and of the multiple aspects of our personality, something fundamental shifts in our relationship to ourselves and to the world. Little by little, we succeed in unifying and ordering the characters that compose our inner theatre, in making them work together rather than allowing them to compete for the stage according to circumstances, and we then re-integrate our true human vocation, recovering the dignity linked to our spiritual sovereignty.

Dethroning the ego: the phrase may perhaps sound violent, and it is therefore worth spelling out carefully what it actually means, for one of the most common errors of the spiritual life is to believe that awakening consists in annihilating the ego, in crushing it or in being ashamed of it. That is not the case. The ego is a sophisticated instrument, indispensable to life in the world; it enables us to name, to act, to decide, to protect ourselves. What we seek is not its destruction but that it should serve the essence rather than supplant it, that it should be the skilled arm of a deeper intelligence rather than the blind master of an existence reduced to its own fears and its own appetites.

Step by step, small progress by small progress, we begin to succeed in acting concretely in our existence whilst remaining centred in that still and tranquil place of our deep being. It is a total transformation of existence: from the state of thinking animality living in fear of want and death, contracted in the avidness of an ego that has built itself through mimicry as a citadel of protection against the risks inherent in societies of falsehood, violence and injustice, we accede to the open and luminous consciousness of a being incarnated in the materiality of the terrestrial world, whose spiritual part borders upon the eternity of the living and who perceives itself as bound to and participant in every aspect of reality: the natural world, our human brethren, and more broadly the invisible world and the totality of the universe. A new life becomes possible, in which our most sublime potentials begin to reveal themselves and to unfold within our daily presence.

The open heart: love, freedom and the repair of the world

Every fragment of the living, every thing that appears infinitesimal, is rich with the totality in which it participates, and it is this state of consciousness, on a human scale, that expresses and diffuses itself in the being when its spiritual essence becomes awakened and active within it. It re-integrates itself into the unified and conscious continuum of the living, and in this subtle communication, Love circulates once again. For it is indeed Love, that very substance of the living, which, when it no longer encounters the obstacles of an avid ego held in check by the awakening of the spiritual essence, may permeate the entire being and open its heart, free then to overflow with love for the world.

This is a profound synergy: the effort to transform oneself and awaken one’s spiritual dimension, in liberating and developing our essence, gradually clears the channels of communication through which the abundance of life may pour into our being. Then, in the receptacle of the heart, it is transmuted into spiritual love, that is to say, into an inner disposition to bond with all and to share with them that abundance of which we are the heirs. This does not make of the person a naïve dreamer detached from the realities of the world, but it replaces the closure of the ego and its latent violence with the lucid possibility of actively participating in the repair of the world and transforming it into creative human brotherhoods, what the Hebrew sages call tikkun olam, the repair of the world, which constitutes perhaps the most beautiful definition of that to which we are called in our collective dimension.

In progressively reorienting our existence towards the development of our most sublime potentials, we begin to recover our spiritual dignity and to become bearers of light and hope for the world. Not through pride or proselytism, for authentic spiritual sovereignty has no need to be proclaimed, but because something is modified in our manner of being present, of looking, of listening, of responding. A face that has found its inner axis radiates without effort, and this is perhaps the most discreet and most reliable sign that sovereignty has truly settled: not in grand declarations, but in the quality of a presence that quietly, steadily, gives the other the desire to be himself.

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One kingdom, a thousand faces

Within the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, this sovereignty of the accomplished being, this state in which the inner essence reigns freely over the whole of the personality and diffuses its light in the world, has received different names and faces according to languages and cultures, but its deep reality is everywhere the same: the being who has governed himself may at last govern his life with nobility.

In Stoic philosophy, this conviction attains a formulation of striking clarity: only the sage is truly king, for only he possesses mastery over himself. Epictetus, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius each developed the idea that true royalty is not that which titles and thrones bestow, but that which a man conquers over his own passions and his own fears. “What is slavery? The bondage of one’s desires,” says Epictetus. The free man, the inner king, is precisely the one who is no longer the plaything of his impulses but their conscious master.

In Hebrew Kabbalah, this reality receives the name of Malkhut, the Kingdom, the seventh and final emotional sefira of the Tree of Life, the one which concludes the journey of the Sefirat HaOmer that we have traversed in parallel with this series. Malkhut is not an additional quality: it is the receptacle and the actualisation of all the preceding ones. It has nothing of its own, the sages say, except what it receives from the six sefirot that precede it, and it is precisely in this that it is the highest, for it is the integral incarnation, the point at which all spiritual qualities manifest in the concrete reality of life. Malkhut is the world, and the being who has accomplished it within himself becomes, as the tradition says, an Adam Kadmon, a primordial man, a being on the scale of the whole of humanity.

In the Christian tradition, spiritual sovereignty finds one of its most intense expressions in the notion of accomplished divine filiation: to be a “son of God” not by the letter but by the Spirit, to carry within oneself the Kingdom, the basileia, not as an external territory but as a transformed inner state. The apostle Paul speaks of the pneumatikos, the spiritual man, who “judges all things” and is himself judged by no one, not through arrogance, but because he acts from a level of consciousness that surpasses ordinary oppositions. Meister Eckhart, several centuries later, would say that the soul which has accomplished its union with God becomes “queen in its own kingdom.”

Sufism names this state Insan al-Kamil, the Perfect or Accomplished Human Being, the one who, having traversed all the stages of the spiritual itinerary, has become the polished mirror in which divine light is integrally reflected. Ibn Arabi, who developed this concept with the greatest depth in his writings, specifies that this perfection is not a moral superiority in the ordinary sense, but a transparency: the Perfect Human no longer interposes himself between the light and the world; he allows it to pass through him. He is khalifa, the conscious vicegerent of the divine, not through a hierarchical function but through the quality of his presence.

Hinduism designates this realisation under the name of Jivanmukta, the “living liberated one,” the being who, whilst remaining in a body and in the ordinary world, has transcended the conditionings of the ego and realised the identity of his Atman, his essence, with the universal Brahman. This is not a retreat from the world but a presence to the world of a radically different quality: the Jivanmukta acts, speaks and lives, but from a centre that no longer wavers, for he has recognised within himself that which is beyond all birth and all death. The Bhagavad-Gita says of him that he is troubled neither by misfortune nor moved by the desire for happiness; free of attachments, fear and anger, he is called a sage of steady vision, sthitaprajna.

Buddhism approaches this sovereignty through the notion of Tathagatagarbha, literally “the womb of the Thus-Come,” the Buddha-nature present in seed form within every living being. To awaken this nature is to recognise and actualise a primordial dignity that has never been absent but only veiled by the obscurations of the ego. The Dhammapada, that anthology of verses attributed to the Buddha himself, cornerstone of the whole of Buddhist literature, opens with this conviction: “The mind is the forerunner of all actions. The mind is their master; the mind is their maker.” To govern one’s mind is to govern one’s life. The Buddha himself is sometimes named Dharmaraja, the King of the Dharma, not because he exercises power over human beings, but because he reigns fully over his own awakened nature.

Confucianism has elaborated over centuries the ideal of the Junzi, sometimes translated as “the noble man,” “the man of quality,” or “the gentleman” in a profound sense far exceeding any social connotation. For Confucius, the Junzi is the one whose inner rectitude radiates naturally upon the city and upon human relations. He does not govern through constraint but through example and virtue: “If you govern through virtue, you will be like the North Star which remains in its place while all the other stars turn towards it.” His sovereignty is a radiance, not a power.

In Taoism, this reality takes the form of the Zhenren, the true man or the authentic man, a figure celebrated notably by Zhuangzi. The Zhenren reigns without reigning; his authority is that of the empty hub of the wheel, immobile and stable, around which everything turns without sweeping it away. Far from imposing himself upon the world, he accords himself with it through wu wei, action without effort, the doing that follows the natural grain of things. His sovereignty is not a conquest but a return to the original nature, like water finding its true level after all agitations have passed.

All these traditions converge towards one and the same deep conviction: spiritual sovereignty is not a privilege reserved for a few elect souls, but the accomplishment of what every human being carries within as his highest possibility. It is neither granted nor imposed; it is earned through the patience of the journey and recognised in the quality of a presence that has ceased to be at war with itself.

A few makers for the path

These reflections on spiritual sovereignty are not intended to transform us into solemn and imperturbable personages, elevated to the heights of some inaccessible wisdom. Their purpose is to help us recognise and cultivate that inner sovereignty from which life may be fully inhabited, from which we may at last act from what we truly are rather than from what our fears and conditionings make of us. If Love from the first stage was the sap, Discipline the form, Compassion the fruit, Constancy the root, Humility the soil and Stability the trunk, then spiritual Sovereignty is the crown: not an ornament, but the full expression of that for which the tree has existed.

Take a moment of calm and interiority. Allow each of these questions to descend within you without seeking an immediate response. What surfaces with a slight resistance is often what most deserves to be looked at.

1. A few questions to let resonate

On the reality of my inner sovereignty
Is there within me a deep being, an inner instance that I recognise as truly myself, distinct from my moods, my roles and my habitual characters? When I stop and fall silent, do I touch something stable and living, or do I hear only the noise of my preoccupations and my passing identifications? Is my life genuinely governed from this centre, or am I the plaything of circumstances that I undergo rather than orient?

On the manner in which I exercise my authority
How do I exercise my authority, in my family, in my work, in my relationships? Do I lead with benevolence and warmth, or do I impose without always measuring the cost to the other? Do I recognise the limits of my competence and my authority, or do I take firm positions where I have neither the legitimacy nor sufficient vision? Before pronouncing on a matter that concerns others, do I take the time to verify whether I truly have the right and the capacity to exercise that particular authority?

On my capacity to endure in my convictions
Am I able to defend what I truly believe, or do I yield easily to group pressure, to the fear of conflict, to the desire to be approved? Does my sovereignty withstand the test of time and periods of doubt, or does it vanish at the first difficulty? Does my lack of endurance conceal an older wound of self-trust that I have not yet faced honestly?

On the humility of my sovereignty
Does my sovereignty, this consciousness of my own worth and dignity, open me or close me? Does it make me more attentive to others, or more centred upon myself? Is my dignity a sincere rootedness or a façade that protects deep insecurities I dare not acknowledge? Do I feel gratitude for the gifts that life has accorded me, or do I take them so much for granted that I no longer see them?

On my relationship to connection and openness
Does my sovereignty allow me to bind myself truly to others, to let myself be touched, to let myself be enriched by their difference, or does it become a fortress that isolates me under the guise of independence? Do I perceive, in the beings I encounter, their own inner royalty, that fundamental dignity which belongs to every human being whatever his apparent condition?

2. A few gestures for the week

Exercising one’s sovereignty through benevolence
This week, identify a person who depends upon you, or who is close to you within your circle of responsibilities: a child, a colleague, a friend in difficulty. Do something for him or her that is concrete, generous and unexpected, not out of obligation, not in order to be recognised, but because true sovereignty expresses itself first in kindness towards those who place their trust in you.

Checking one’s legitimacy before speaking
Before taking an authoritative position on a question, in a conversation, a meeting or a relationship, pause for a moment and ask yourself inwardly this double question: do I truly have sufficient knowledge to pronounce on this? Do I have, in this situation, the legitimacy to exercise this influence? If the answer to either question is no, consciously choose to listen rather than to assert.

Polishing a domain of one’s inner governance
Identify a domain of your life, a relationship, a habit, a daily organisation, where your manner of acting is still too reactive, too disorderly or too little in harmony with what you know to be right. Without judging yourself, examine it attentively and seek a concrete adjustment, even a modest one, that renders your action in this domain more coherent with your deepest values.

Acting upon a deferred conviction
Is there something you believe in deeply, a course of action to undertake, a word to be said, a commitment to be made concrete, that you have been putting off for too long, through excessive prudence, through fear of others’ judgement, or through doubt of yourself? Choose this week to take a step in that direction. Not everything, a single step. The first is always the most difficult, but it contains within it the essence of the decision.

Giving thanks for one’s own dignity
Take a moment of silence, each morning if possible, to recognise with gratitude that you have been created with a dignity and with singular gifts that belong to you alone. Not in the pride of one who believes himself superior, but in the humility of one who receives and wishes to be worthy of what he has received. This simple recognition, daily renewed, is one of the most nourishing practices there is for consolidating our inner sovereignty.

3. Celebrating this stage, and the path travelled

At the conclusion of this seventh stage and of the entire journey, a closing gesture is called for that is worthy of the path accomplished. Take a real span of time, an evening, a morning, a space you offer yourself deliberately, to pass in thought through the seven stages you have traversed since the beginning of spring.

Return to what you were or thought during the first week, when you asked yourself whether you were truly dwelling in the abundance of love. Measure, without complacency but also without severity, what has shifted within you. Identify a concrete transformation, even a modest one: a bond strengthened, a reaction mastered where you would formerly have let yourself be carried away, a conviction affirmed that you would have silenced, a care given to someone from genuine kindness rather than from obligation. Note it in a notebook, or say it aloud, for what we name and celebrate with just attention, we invite to continue growing.

Then become aware of this: this journey ends, but the path itself does not end. Spiritual sovereignty is not a destination one reaches once and for all, as one plants one’s flag at the summit of a mountain. It is a direction of life, a permanent orientation of gaze and desire, a quality of presence to be cultivated each day in the thousand ordinary occasions that life offers us. The tree, when it has borne its fruit, does not cease to live: it begins again, season after season, to draw from its roots and to reach towards the light.

Good journeying to all.

Jérôme Nathanaël

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 60 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

Series: Israel-Palestine — beyond the war of narratives | Article 1 — Fanaticism in the mirror: when the extremes feed each other

There is a way of speaking about this conflict that serves no purpose whatsoever — the way of most public debates: each side brandishes its victims, designates its executioner, selects its quotations, and produces not understanding but confirmation. Everyone departs with their convictions intact, having heard not what is true but what they wished to hear. This war of narratives, a war within the war, proves ultimately as lethal to minds as the other is to bodies.

Palestine before Israel was neither a land without a people nor a land without Jews

This series begins from a premise that many of these debates refuse to state, because it immediately invalidates the one-sided narratives of both camps: Palestine before Israel was neither a land without a people nor a land without Jews. A Jewish presence has been uninterrupted there since Antiquity; the communities of the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron and Tiberias attest to a continuity that two millennia of diaspora never broke, and by 1880 Jews constituted the majority of Jerusalem’s population. But an Arab population had also lived there for centuries, rooted in its villages, its towns and its land. Both these presences are real, documented and legitimate, and it is precisely because they are both so that this conflict is tragic rather than simple, and that it demands a clarity of vision that one-sided narratives are structurally incapable of producing.

It is on this foundation that this series deliberately chooses a different approach. It opens today with the most urgent diagnosis — the two extremisms that feed each other and paralyse any prospect of peace — before tracing back in the next article to the founding choices of both sides. On the Zionist side, Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’Am laid down, at the turn of the twentieth century, the terms of a debate that history has never resolved: Herzl, founder of political Zionism, bore the necessity of a refuge-state for the persecuted Jews of Europe; Ahad Ha’Am, founder of cultural Zionism, bore the ethical demand for a spiritual homeland that also had to respond to the moral obligation toward the Arabs who inhabited that land, along with the warning that ignoring this obligation would produce a catastrophe. On the Arab and Palestinian side, voices seeking coexistence did exist, borne by Palestinian notables, mayors, intellectuals and religious figures, some of whom were precisely assassinated for having explored pathways of accommodation. These moderates openly acknowledged that the first waves of Jewish immigration were concretely improving the living conditions of Arab populations, a tangible reality they might have carried politically as the foundation of a lasting coexistence.

Two missed choices: that of Zionism and that of Palestinian nationalism

These two missed choices, that of Zionism and that of Palestinian nationalism, constitute the heart of the second article: understanding what could have been different is the condition for understanding what might still be. The series then traverses in the third article a century and a half of missed opportunities, refused partitions and deliberately sabotaged peaces: the Arab rejection of the Peel Plan in 1937, then of the UN partition plan in 1947, the failure of Camp David in 2000, the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli fanatic in 1995, the continuous expansion of settlement, the Iranian sabotage of any regional normalisation, so many events in which identifiable actors, driven by identifiable interests, preferred the perpetuation of the conflict to its resolution, and which intellectual honesty compels one to name without false balance but without absolving any camp. The last article will conclude on a double opening: what the profound spiritual traditions of both peoples, the Torah and the Quran in their prophetic and mystical currents, carry as resources for reconciliation that politics alone has not known how to mobilise; and the search for the lucid voices that still exist, minority but real groups who, in both camps, refuse the logic of the extremes and who could, if supported and heard, produce a credible alternative to a conflict that nothing obliges us to consider eternal.

The road from Jacob to Esau must be travelled by both camps

Four articles, four Fridays. And one guiding thread: the road from Jacob to Esau, the two twin brothers and grandsons of Abraham, whom the betrayal of a stolen inheritance and twenty years of exile had turned into mortal enemies. From their separation to the night at the Jabbok that transforms Jacob, from that night to the morning of his encounter when Esau, the reconciled enemy, appears to him as the face of G-d — it is this road that each camp will have to travel, as Jacob did, for a genuine and well-founded peace to become possible one day. Because certain truths that political analyses do not know how to formulate have been spoken for millennia in the narratives of peoples, and this conflict, more than any other, demands that we listen to them.

These texts choose neither camp, or rather they choose two camps — that of the peoples, the Israeli and the Palestinian, and not that of their leaders. They choose empathy for both their sufferings, clarity to understand both their histories, and the long patience to find once more the direction of what is right.

“The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of the Islamic Conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.” Hamas Charter, Article 11, 1988

“A Jewish state implies Jewish sovereignty and control over its destiny. This can only be achieved with a permanent Jewish majority and a small, insignificant, and docile Arab minority. But the Arabs will certainly make violent demands for more power, including ‘autonomy’ in various areas of the country. If we hope to avoid this terrible scenario, there is only one course of action: the immediate transfer of the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael to their own lands. For the Arabs and Jews of Eretz Yisrael, there is only one solution: separation — Jews in their land, Arabs in theirs.” Meir Kahane, They Must Go, 1981

The temptation of choosing sides

Faced with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, there is a temptation to which yielding is infinitely more comfortable than resisting it: choosing a side, designating a culprit, filing away one’s good conscience into a neatly identified category. Media, social networks and demonstrations push in this direction with mounting pressure. Every new event becomes the occasion for a fresh summons: are you for Israel or for Palestine? Do you condemn Hamas or the occupation? The question posed in these terms calls not for an answer but for an allegiance. And any allegiance, in this conflict more than in any other, is the first step toward blindness.

This article, and those that follow, refuses this summons — not by evasion, but because looking lucidly at reality requires precisely that one resist it. What we shall examine today are two extremisms whose most troubling characteristic is not their respective violence, real and documented as it is, and which will be named without euphemism, but their functional relationship: they do not simply oppose each other; they construct each other, lend each other legitimacy reciprocally, and draw from this relationship an energy that neither could sustain alone.

A clarification is immediately necessary. Criticising the Israeli far right with the same rigour one applies to radical Palestinian Islamism is not antisemitism, nor a challenge to Israel’s existence; it is the exact opposite of a mode of thinking that would treat Israel differently from other states on the pretext that it is Jewish. Antisemitism would consist in holding the Jewish people collectively responsible for the acts of its government; political clarity consists in distinguishing a people, its diaspora, its millennial tradition, and the positions of a governing coalition.

Anti-Zionism, beneath which antisemitism today likes to veil itself with a moral pretext — in circles whose radicalism echoes, mirror-like, that of the Israeli far right — consists in delegitimising the very existence of a state. Not its policies, not its leaders, but its right to exist, in the name of a moral requirement that its detractors apply to no other government on the planet. This selective delegitimisation is precisely what distinguishes it from legitimate criticism: one does not call into question France’s right to exist for its colonial crimes, nor Russia’s for its wars, nor China’s for its camps.

These distinctions, which all serious debate ought to have had the decency to uphold, are today more necessary than ever in a context where the wave of international antisemitism, often veiled in performative anti-Zionism, seeks precisely to dissolve them — by making it appear that criticising Ben Gvir and Smotrich justifies attacking all Jews, that solidarity with the Palestinian people implies supporting Hamas, or that reducing Israel to Nazism would license calling for its disappearance. These conflations are falsehoods: naming them for what they are is the condition of any serious thought on this subject.

One must also name an asymmetry that the word mirror in the title must not conceal. These two extremisms are not symmetrical in their institutional position. Hamas is an organisation designated as terrorist by the European Union and the United States, which has exercised total and coercive control over the Gaza Strip since 2007. Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, respectively Minister of National Security and Minister of Finance with an additional post in the Ministry of Defence responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank, are serving ministers of a democratically elected and internationally recognised state. This asymmetry does not exonerate the one so as to indict the other: it obliges one to think with precision rather than with convenient equivalences.

Radical Palestinian Islamism: when the land becomes theology

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law upon all nations and to extend its power over the entire planet.” Hassan al-Banna, Majmuʿat Rasāʾil (Collected Epistles).

“The Jews will always be a subversive element on earth, prone to fomenting intrigues, provoking wars, and setting nations against one another.” Haj Amin al-Husseini, speech at the inauguration of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, 18 December 1942.

The three founding fathers

Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) is directly descended from the Muslim Brotherhood, of which it has constituted the Palestinian branch since its founding in 1987. This movement must be situated immediately within the Islamic landscape in order to avoid a confusion whose consequences would be grave: the Muslim Brotherhood does not represent Islam in its millennial diversity, that of contemplative Sufism, of the great classical legal traditions which always maintained a distinction, however imperfect, between religious authority and political power, or that of the ordinary piety of hundreds of millions of believers who practise their faith without ambition to govern the world according to Quranic law.

They represent a precise political ideology, a minority one, profoundly contested within Islam itself, born in the specific context of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the suppression of the caliphate by Atatürk in 1924, and the shock of colonial humiliation. It is a crisis response to a modernity experienced as aggression, and, like all crisis ideologies, it carries a radicalism entirely foreign to the traditions it claims to defend in their classical expression.

Al-Banna and al-Husseini: the founders of the axis

Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, did not reinvent the combination of politics and religion. Classical Islam, from the first caliphates of the seventh century, had always articulated both dimensions. What is historically unprecedented in his doctrine is the transformation of this articulation into a totalising political ideology in the modern sense of the term, constructed on the model of the great twentieth-century ideologies — fascism, communism — which claimed to furnish a complete and definitive answer to every question of human existence.

The classical Islamic tradition, even in its most political expressions, left considerable room for ijtihad — the effort of human interpretation, jurisprudence adapted to circumstances, the pragmatic flexibility of the schools of law. The great caliphates governed with this flexibility, tolerating diverse local practices and recognising limits to the application of religious law.

Al-Banna breaks with this founding flexibility: Islam is no longer a living, evolving framework but a closed, perfect, total system, simultaneously political, juridical, social, economic and military, which no human adaptation can legitimately touch without committing apostasy. His founding formula — “Islam is the solution” — says precisely this: not Islam illuminates, not Islam guides, but Islam resolves everything, which by definition forbids any compromise with a reality that does not conform to it perfectly.

To this doctrinal rigidification he adds a distinctly modern organisational innovation: a mass structure equipped with branches, subscriptions, a social wing, a military wing, a political wing, applying the organisational techniques of the twentieth century to the service of a theocratic project. It is this crossing of a modern totalising ideology with contemporary mobilisation techniques that constitutes the true rupture, and which explains why the Brotherhood has produced descendants such as al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas, whom the historical caliphates would neither have recognised nor approved.

From the 1930s onwards, al-Banna made the Palestinian cause an explicit priority and, in 1948, sent volunteers to fight against the creation of the State of Israel. He found in Palestine a natural ally with whom he shared the objective of a total Islamisation of the conflict.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem appointed by the British in 1921, was this ally. His trajectory is inseparable from the ideological genesis of Hamas, and it is of a darkness so consistently minimised by the dominant narratives of the conflict as to render it almost unrecognisable. Al-Husseini is the man who Islamised the Palestinian conflict, transforming what might have remained a nationalist and territorial dispute into a holy war of absolute theological dimensions, while contaminating it with a racially inflected antisemitism of Nazi inspiration whose echoes can still be read, thirty years after his death, in the Hamas Charter of 1988.

His collaboration with the Nazi regime is not a wartime parenthesis dictated by circumstance: it is the very heart of his political project. He met Hitler on 28 November 1941 in Berlin, in a documented and subsequently published meeting, in which the Führer laid out the objective of annihilating the Jewish element in the Arab world, finding in al-Husseini an interlocutor not merely receptive but actively engaged. He met Himmler and Eichmann, the architects of the Shoah, and maintained a sustained correspondence with them. He recruited and commanded a Muslim division within the Waffen-SS in Bosnia and Herzegovina — the 13th Handschar Division — whose role in the massacre of civilians is well attested. He broadcast Arabic-language radio programmes from Berlin explicitly calling for the murder of Jews wherever they could be found.

And above all, the least known and most revealing fact of his active complicity in the Final Solution: he intervened personally and in writing with the Bulgarian, Romanian and Hungarian governments to oppose any transfer of Jewish children to Palestine, demanding that they be sent to Poland — that is, to the extermination camps. These letters exist, have been published, and constitute direct and deliberate participation in the Shoah on the part of a man who knew precisely what he was requesting.

This context illuminates his role in the missed opportunities for partition, which Article 3 will examine in detail but which must be anticipated here in order to understand the depth of the refusal. In 1937, when the Royal Peel Commission proposed an Arab Palestinian state on 67% of the territory, with borders incomparably more favourable than any subsequent proposal, al-Husseini led the Arab Higher Committee that rejected the whole without counter-proposal. His objective was not a viable Palestinian state within a framework of coexistence: it was the total absence of any sovereign Jewish presence. In 1947, he organised and coordinated the Arab League’s rejection of the UN partition plan, transforming this refusal into a preventive military mobilisation. From November 1947, even before the proclamation of the State of Israel, he coordinated the first armed attacks against Jewish communities in Palestine and helped forge the military alliance — Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon — that invaded the territory on the day following the declaration of independence of 14 May 1948, with the explicitly declared objective of destroying the Jewish state in its first hours.

Al-Husseini’s trajectory says the essential: the repeated refusal of all partition is not the rejection of an imperfect solution pending a better one; it is the absolute ideological refusal of any legitimacy of sovereign Jewish presence in Palestine, nourished by a racial antisemitism borrowed from Nazism and grafted onto an Islamist fundamentalism. His direct legacy runs through the 1988 Hamas Charter in its antisemitic formulations, in its Article 11 on the inalienable waqf, and in its Article 13 on jihad as the sole response. The lineage is documented, intellectual and political.

Qutb: the radicaliser

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) arrives afterwards, as the intellectual heir of an already constituted Palestinian politico-Islamist axis, to push its logic toward its most radical conclusion. Imprisoned then executed by Nasser, he developed in prison a doctrine whose influence on global political Islam would be immense and lasting. His central concept, jāhiliyya — pre-Islamic ignorance — applied to the entirety of the contemporary world, legitimises offensive jihad against every existing regime without exception, including against Muslim societies that do not govern themselves according to sharia.

This intellectual gesture is the hinge between the political activism of the Muslim Brotherhood and global armed jihadism: his writings would furnish the ideological matrix of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and all the jihadist organisations of the following half-century. Where al-Banna had founded the system and al-Husseini had Palestinised it by contaminating it with racial hatred, Qutb furnished it with the mechanics of total and permanent war.

The 1988 Charter: a theology of absolute exclusion

Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) was officially born in December 1987, on the first day of the First Intifada, as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founding charter of 18 August 1988 is the direct heir of this triple lineage — al-Banna, al-Husseini, Qutb. It is not a political programme: it is a theology of absolute exclusion.

The waqf, the Dar al-Islam and the dhimmis: why peace is theologically impossible

Article 11 constitutes its core: the land of Palestine is, in the charter’s own words, “an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day.” The waqf, an Islamic mortmain, definitively consecrated and by nature inalienable and imprescriptible — which no one may sell, purchase or transmit by inheritance — transforms a territorial claim into a religious absolute withdrawn from all political negotiation. But this waqf is rooted in a wider theological architecture that must be named in order to understand why Hamas’s refusal is not a posture liable to evolve with circumstances: it is a structural and definitive religious impossibility.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence divides the world into Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, the lands governed according to Quranic law, and Dar al-Harb, the House of War, the lands not yet so governed. This partition carries within it a central principle in the fundamentalist reading: a land that has once entered Dar al-Islam cannot legitimately depart from it. Palestine having been under Islamic governance from the Arab conquest of the seventh century until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 — a period of more than thirteen centuries — belongs in this logic permanently and inalienably to the House of Islam.

To this impossibility a second is added, of even more precise bearing: the status of the dhimmis. In classical Islamic legal tradition, the People of the Book — Jews and Christians — could reside on Islamic lands under a status of subordinate protection, in exchange for the payment of the jizya and the explicit acceptance of their inferior position. This status rests on an absolute condition: the dhimmis may exist under the protection of Islam, but they may in no case exercise sovereignty or govern lands that have belonged to Dar al-Islam. The very idea of a sovereign Jewish state on the land of Palestine is therefore, in this reading, a double theological transgression: it withdraws an Islamic land from the House of Islam, and it places dhimmis in a position of sovereignty over a land they have no right to administer.

This reading is not that of classical Islam in its historical plurality: thousands of ulema have proposed incomparably more nuanced approaches, and Sufism as well as the reformist currents explicitly repudiate this political totalisation of the religious. What Hamas mobilises is not Islam in its richness, but a selective fundamentalist reading of the twentieth century that wrenches classical juridical concepts from their context to absolutise them beyond what their original formulations authorised.

One does not negotiate with a divine obligation. One does not compromise on an inalienable waqf. One does not recognise the legitimacy of a state of dhimmis on an Islamic land. This is why, since its founding, Hamas has never presented a serious territorial counter-proposal — not for lack of diplomatic competence, but because its own doctrine structurally forbids it from doing so. Peace within this framework is not an insufficient option: it is a theological betrayal.

Article 13: jihad as the sole response

Article 13 of the charter draws the logical consequence of this edifice with a clarity that forecloses any misunderstanding: “initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction with the principles of the Movement. There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” This rejection is not a tactical posture; it is a structural theological position inherited from al-Banna, contaminated by al-Husseini’s racial antisemitism and intellectually armed by Qutb.

The Protocols and Khaybar: the weapons of a genocidal programme

The charter’s antisemitism deserves to be named without attenuation, and its references explicated for readers who may be unfamiliar with them: it cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a serious source documenting the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

The Protocols are a forgery fabricated by the Russian Tsarist secret police around 1903, presented as the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders planning world domination. This document was definitively exposed as a crude fabrication as early as 1921 by the Times journalist Philip Graves, who demonstrated that it was largely plagiarised from a nineteenth-century French political satire, Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which made no mention of Jews whatsoever. Despite this public and documented refutation, the Protocols were massively disseminated and used by Nazi propaganda as the theoretical justification for the Shoah.

Their life did not end with the defeat of Nazism in 1945. Translated into Arabic from the 1920s onwards, they are today the object of a massive and organised dissemination throughout the Arab-Muslim world, in bookshops, on markets, in mosques, and even in the school curricula of several countries. Hamas and all the Islamist organisations have made them a central propaganda tool, distributed free of charge, taught to children, cited in Friday sermons. In 2002, Egyptian television broadcast Faris bila Jawaad (Knight Without a Horse), a forty-one-episode serial directly inspired by the Protocols, watched by tens of millions of viewers across the Arab world during Ramadan.

This dissemination serves a precise and murderous ideological logic. If Jews truly control governments, banks, the media and world wars as the Protocols claim, then combatting them is not hatred — it is self-defence. The thesis of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy is the theoretical justification for the call to eradication: it transforms the genocidal project into a moral obligation, even a religious duty. This is why this organisation, founded in 1987, sixty-six years after this document had been definitively established as a forgery, cites it in its charter as a reliable source. It is not ignorance: it is a deliberate ideological choice in the service of a programme of eradication.

The charter also calls for the massacre of Jews with reference to the episode of Khaybar. Khaybar is the name of an oasis in Arabia where, in 628 CE, the forces of the Prophet Muhammad besieged and defeated a Jewish community, in the course of a battle in which many Jews were massacred, their leaders executed, their lands confiscated, and the survivors reduced to the status of tributaries compelled to surrender half of their harvest to their conquerors, before being finally expelled under the Caliph Omar. In the contemporary use made of it by Hamas and the jihadist movements, Khaybar is not a neutral historical reference but an explicit threat of repetition.

The chant “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, jaych Muhammad sa ya’ud” (Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return), intoned at rallies in support of Hamas in Europe and throughout the Middle East, does not merely say we shall defeat you: it says we shall massacre you as your ancestors were massacred at Khaybar. It is a genocidal threat dressed in Quranic reference, whose rhetorical efficacy in jihadist propaganda draws precisely from the brutality of the original message. To cite it in a founding charter in 1988 is to inscribe from the outset the annihilation of Jews — not their political defeat but their physical annihilation — within the programme of the movement.

The charter finally designates the Jews as a people — not Zionists as a political movement — as responsible for the world wars and the great catastrophes of modernity. This slippage from political anti-Zionism to ethnic antisemitism is not a rhetorical clumsiness: it is al-Husseini’s signature inscribed in the founding texts of the movement thirty years after his death, the Nazi contamination operating from beyond the grave, transmitted from generation to generation in the textbooks read by the children of Gaza.

The 2017 revision: a cosmetic adjustment, not a conversion

The new charter published from Doha in May 2017 abandons the explicit references to the Muslim Brotherhood, removes the openly antisemitic passages, and formally recognises the State of Palestine within the 1967 borders. Most specialists of the movement read it as a diplomatic adjustment designed to improve relations with Qatar, whose financial patronage required a Hamas capable of presenting a respectable face to the world, and not as a fundamental ideological transformation. The most compelling argument: the 2017 charter maintains that Palestine is an Arab Islamic land, still does not recognise the State of Israel, and the clause of the inalienable waqf remains intact in substance. Hamas’s positions after 7 October 2023 confirmed that the 2017 revision was indeed cosmetic, and that the theological architecture of al-Banna, al-Husseini and Qutb remains the movement’s operational doctrinal foundation.

In addition: Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iran’s proxies

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement deserves more than a passing mention, for it illustrates with almost pedagogical clarity what Hamas still partly conceals behind its governmental and social dimension: jihadism in its pure state, stripped of all governing ambition, reduced to its sole military function.

Founded in the early 1980s by Fathi Shaqaqi, a Gazan physician deeply marked by Sayyid Qutb and electrified by Khomeini’s Iranian revolution of 1979, of which he published an enthusiastic apologia in that very year, the movement distinguishes itself from Hamas on several essential points. It has no political wing, offers no social services, does not seek to govern: for it does not wish to build — it wishes precisely to destroy the State of Israel by armed means alone. This nihilistic purity confers upon it a radicalism that even Hamas cannot always afford without compromising its electoral base and its funding. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad rejected the Oslo Accords in 1993 with a rhetorical violence that has never weakened, considering any negotiation an absolute theological betrayal.

Its dependence on Iran is total and declared, unlike Hamas, which maintains a relative autonomy and diversifies its funding between Qatar, Iran and its own sources. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is directly funded, armed and often strategically directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Its military operations frequently serve the tactical needs of Tehran rather than the interests of the Palestinian people; Iran can activate this lever at any moment to generate an escalation, divert international attention, or derail a diplomatic process that does not suit it — a spoiling role well attested across several cycles of escalation in Gaza.

Shaqaqi was assassinated in Malta in October 1995, in all likelihood by the Mossad, in what appears to have been an Israeli response to a wave of lethal suicide bombings. His successors, Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, then since 2018 Ziyad al-Nakhalah — today at the head of the movement from Beirut — have maintained the line: no negotiations, no lasting ceasefire, no recognition of Israel in any form whatsoever. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is living proof that even were Hamas to moderate its position — a hypothesis whose limits the 2017 revision has already exposed — there would always exist within the Palestinian armed sphere an organisation to refuse any compromise and perpetuate the logic of total war. It is also proof that behind the visible actors of the conflict stand regional powers, Iran first among them, whose strategic interest is precisely that peace should never be made.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is, moreover, merely the smallest instrument of a wider regional architecture that Tehran has methodically constructed since 1979, and that events since 7 October have made visible to the world: the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” Its components are well known: Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north of Israel, a Shia militia with a considerable arsenal of missiles and rockets, founded in 1982 with the direct support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which opened a northern front from October 2023 onwards, firing daily on civilian communities in Galilee; and the Yemeni Houthis to the south, a Zaydi Shia movement that has controlled northern Yemen since 2014 and which, since 7 October, has multiplied ballistic missile and drone strikes against Israel while at times blocking commercial traffic in the Red Sea, partially paralysing world trade in the name of solidarity with Gaza.

This architecture presents a paradox that must be named: Hamas is a Sunni organisation of Muslim Brotherhood origin, and its most powerful strategic allies — Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis — are Shia. This crossing of the confessional divide, which has nonetheless drenched the Arab world in blood at least as much as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says the essential about the true nature of this axis: it is not a theological alliance but a geopolitical one, whose sole cement is the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of American influence from the Middle East. Article 3 will examine in detail Iran’s role as the systematic saboteur of every peace process for more than forty years, for understanding why peace has been sabotaged requires looking beyond the Palestinian and Israeli actors to the regional powers which have every interest in ensuring it never comes to pass.

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Jewish extremism and Greater Israel: when the Bible becomes a land registry

“Where is our Hebron — have we forgotten it?! Where is our Shechem? Our Jericho? Where are they? And the entire bank of the Jordan — every clod of earth, every region, every hill, every valley, every parcel of the Land of Israel — do we have the right to give up even one grain of G-d’s Land?” Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Lintevot Yisrael.

“There are times when we wish to harm innocents directly. And their presence and their killing are in fact beneficial and help us. For example, harming the babies of the wicked king who are currently innocent; killing them benefits us in wounding and paining the king so that he stops fighting us.” Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, Torat haMelekh.

Abraham Isaac Kook: the sanctified land, humanity transfigured

To understand the depth of the betrayal that this Jewish extremism of Greater Israel represents, one must first measure the greatness of what it claims to prolong. This current claims as its intellectual matrix the work of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, but this lineage is already, in itself, a misreading: Rav Kook was a universal mystic whose thought has been radically distorted by his heirs, to the point that several specialists of his work affirm he would have been horrified by the political uses made of his thought in his name.

Abraham Isaac Kook was first and foremost a contemplative in the most demanding sense of the term, and a philosopher of considerable culture, profoundly rooted in Lurianic Kabbalah and the Hasidic tradition of the Baal Shem Tov, heir to the Maharal of Prague, nourished at the same time by Hegelian philosophy and contemporary science. His thought was not a closed system but a living, poetic, dialectical meditation, resting on a fundamental tension between two ideas he considered consubstantial with human existence: the divine idea — the consciousness of our finitude and the aspiration to confer meaning upon it — and the national idea, the irreducible belonging of the individual to a historical community. Founder of the Merkaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem, he trained a whole generation of disciples in this open dialectic.

His deep approach was that of an actualisation: how to read, in the authentic categories of the Torah, a radically new situation in Jewish history — that of the return toward the land of its memory of a people who had been in exile for two millennia, a return then carried not by religious devotion but by a secular, agnostic, even atheist movement. For Rav Kook, the Exile, the galut, is not primarily a divine punishment but a historical therapy, painful as all therapy is. By tearing the Jewish people away from its land, it provoked a dissociation between the two ideas Kook considered consubstantial with human existence: the divine idea took refuge in interior spiritual life — Torah, prayer, study — but cut off from collective history, it shrank into mere observance, losing the prophetic dimension it had possessed in the age of the kings and the prophets. The national idea survived as an attachment to a people and a memory, but without soil or sovereignty, it emptied of its prophetic substance to become ordinary communal administration. The return to the Land of Israel is therefore, in his vision, the chance to reunify these two ideas that exile had separated and diminished — not an ordinary nationalist fact, but the beginning of an eschatological fulfilment of universal scope.

His response to the secularism of the pioneers is remarkable in its audacity: the atheist pioneers who drained the swamps, built the kibbutzim and spoke Hebrew without Torah did not know what they were doing spiritually, but G-d did. Rav Kook called this dynamic the orot hatohu, the lights of chaos — those intense spiritual forces that manifest in apparently disordered or profane forms but carry within them a real divine energy. His reading was essentially dialectical and inclusive: it integrated the apparent adversary, the secular pioneer, into a larger teleological movement. And this redemption, for Rav Kook, was not merely national but cosmic and universal: the divine light radiating from a restored Israel was to benefit all of humanity. Zionist politics was for him only an instrument, never an end in itself.

One must nonetheless honestly acknowledge an ambivalence in his work, for it is precisely this ambivalence that his son, also a rabbi, would exploit after him. Rav Kook, in his ardour to integrate Zionism into his metaphysics, already held firm nationalist positions regarding sovereignty over Eretz Israel and rejected any idea of territorial compromise that would entail renouncing any part of the country. His sacral vision of the relationship between the Jewish people and the land posed, alongside the universal mystical openness, a claim of national election that could be read selectively. It is these two poles in tension — universal prophetic openness on one side, exclusive national attachment on the other — that will constitute the raw material his son would exploit with a radical but reductive coherence.

Kook the son: when mysticism becomes a programme of exclusion

His son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982), performs a transformation that inverts the deep movement of his father’s thought. What the father had conceived as an open, universalist, dialectical mysticism, the son closes, hardens and politicises. The victory of June 1967 — the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights in less than a week — furnishes him with the trigger: he reads it as the spectacular confirmation of his father’s thought, retaining from it only one pole — the exclusive national attachment — while deliberately effacing the other, the prophetic universalism. The Land of Israel in its maximum borders then becomes an absolute requirement, independent of any ethical condition, of any consideration for the non-Jews who inhabit it, of any openness towards humanity as a whole.

In the theses of Kook the son, the non-Jew is no longer a human being whose dignity calls for treatment in conformity with tzedakah and the love of the stranger prescribed thirty-six times by the Torah; he structurally becomes an obstacle to Redemption, a territorial problem to be resolved. The universalism of Kook the father — the redemption of Israel as the first light of a universal human redemption — disappears entirely, replaced by an absolute territorial particularism in which the presence of the other on the Land of Israel becomes problematic by definition. Zionist politics, which Kook the father had carefully positioned as instrument and never as end, becomes in his son’s work the end itself. This is precisely what Hamas does with the Islamic tradition: taking authentic concepts, wrenching them from their context and their dynamic depth, and making them ideological weapons in the service of a programme of exclusion. The mechanics of reduction and betrayal are identical, even if the traditions and the historical contexts differ profoundly.

Four halakhic concepts instrumentalised

This instrumentalisation rests on four halakhic concepts — Halakha denoting the Jewish religious corpus governing practical life — which the ideology of Greater Israel mobilises with the same selectivity that Hamas brings to the waqf, to Dar al-Islam and to the status of the dhimmis: by wrenching each from its original spiritual depth in order to make it an instrument of absolute territorial claim.

The brit: when the Covenant becomes a title deed

The first is the brit, the Covenant, one of the most fundamental concepts in Hebrew spirituality. In its original meaning, the brit is not a notarial act: it is a living relationship between G-d and the people of Israel, carrying reciprocal obligations. The Abrahamic brit (Genesis 15 and 17) promises a land, but it presupposes above all a dynamic of ethical commitment. It is because Abraham takes upon himself the call to embody justice and peace that this promise unfolds. The prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — constantly invoke the brit not to claim territorial rights but to recall that fidelity to the Covenant is measured by justice rendered to the poor, to strangers, to widows and to orphans. Jeremiah even announces a brit hadasha, a new Covenant engraved upon hearts, definitively shifting the centre of gravity of the Covenant towards spiritual interiority.

It is this richness that the fundamentalist reading amputates by retaining only the single territorial aspect. Where G-d promises Abraham a land “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” — not as an unconditional title deed but as the locus of an ethical vocation — this promise becomes in the extremist discourse a permanent and inalienable title transcending all human political arrangement, and the conditions that the prophets placed upon the inhabiting of this land disappear entirely from the picture. The brit thus truncated is the exact counterpart of the Islamic waqf: in both cases, a human claim is withdrawn from the register of the political to be elevated to that of the divine absolute, where compromise becomes sacrilege.

The qedushah ha’aretz: when holiness becomes an idolatry of the land

The second concept is the qedushah ha’aretz, the holiness of the Land of Israel. The Hebrew root Q-D-SH — קדש — means first to separate, to set apart: it is the same root as kiddush, the sanctification of the Sabbath, or kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of the Divine Name through the uprightness of one’s conduct. Holiness, in the Hebrew tradition, is first an ethical quality: “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), a founding commandment immediately followed not by territorial prescriptions but by ethical demands: not to steal, not to lie, not to oppress one’s neighbour, to love the stranger as oneself. Holiness is not a place; it is a manner of inhabiting the world.

This holiness is real in Jewish tradition, but conditional: Leviticus (18:28) states with disarming clarity that the land vomits those who defile it by immoral conduct. By absolutising the physical holiness of the territory at the expense of the moral holiness of those who inhabit it, fundamentalism inverts the very structure of the concept it claims to honour: the qedushah ha’aretz becomes an idolatry of the land, a sacralisation of a geographical object that substitutes itself for the ethical demand that this same concept poses.

The mitsvat yishuv ha’aretz: when spiritual presence becomes colonisation

The third concept is the mitsvat yishuv ha’aretz, the commandment to settle the Land of Israel. In its authentic meaning, it does not designate an obligation of conquest but a spiritual vocation: to inhabit this land is to give oneself the possibility of living the totality of the Torah there and of fulfilling the agricultural commandments — terumah, ma’aser, shemitta — which can only be observed on this soil.

The rabbinical debate on this commandment is revealing: Maimonides did not include mitsvat yishuv ha’aretz in his list of the 613 commandments, considering that it did not constitute a direct biblical obligation; Nahmanides (Ramban) argued the contrary. This divergence between two giants of the tradition alone demonstrates that we are not dealing with a univocal certainty. The tradition has moreover always been prudent in the face of the temptation to force the end, to hasten the coming of the Messiah through human acts, seeing in this a dangerous act of presumption. In this reading, the settlement of occupied territories is no longer an act of devotion but a transgression of trust in G-d and a violation of international occupation law, qualified as illegal by the Fourth Geneva Convention and multiple Security Council resolutions.

Lo tuchanem: a verse wrenched from its context to legitimate expulsion

The fourth concept is the most radical: lo tuchanem, drawn from Deuteronomy (7:2): “you shall grant them no favour.” This verse is set within a very specific passage concerning the entry into Canaan after the Exodus and seven precisely named peoples. Its concern is spiritual — to preserve Israel from idolatrous practices — and not racial. The rabbinical tradition has established that this commandment has no contemporary application whatsoever: Maimonides explicitly states that the Assyrian king Sennacherib mixed all nations together, rendering impossible any identification of the seven Canaanite peoples.

But the Torah itself contradicts this reading through a far more powerful voice: “You shall not oppress the stranger; you know the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9), a formulation that appears thirty-six times in the Torah, more than any other commandment. By extracting lo tuchanem from its context to apply it to the Arabs of contemporary Palestine, the fundamentalist reading — whose political incarnation in Meir Kahane we shall see in the following section — simultaneously ignores a halakhic consensus of two millennia, the teaching of Maimonides, and thirty-six commandments concerning the love and protection of the stranger. It retains the verse that suits it and falls silent on everything that contradicts it: the exact definition of the manipulation of a sacred text.

From doctrine to deeds: Gush Emunim, Kahanism and their heirs

The Gush Emunim: the settlement as faith in action

The Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, founded formally in 1974 in the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, is the first major movement to translate the doctrine of Kook the son into systematic action on the ground. It settles deliberately in the West Bank, which it always calls Judea and Samaria, refusing the modern geographical designation in order to impose the biblical one that prejudges the conclusion. It creates irreversible facts on the ground before Israeli governments whose postures ranged from active encouragement under Likud governments to feeble resistance or partial freezes under certain Labour governments, but none of which, regardless of its political stripe, proved willing or able to bring this dynamic of expansion durably to an end.

Although the movement no longer exists in any formal sense, its legacy runs through the entirety of the settler movement, whose population has grown from approximately 100,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993 to more than 700,000 today — an arithmetic progression that renders the two-state solution geographically ever more difficult to conceive.

Kahanism: an assumed radicalism and its return to power

If the Gush Emunim represents the translation into deeds of the doctrine of Kook the son — patient, methodical, working through facts on the ground — Kahanism constitutes its most explicit political formulation: the one that states without circumlocution what the settler movement often applies without wishing to name it.

Meir Kahane, an American-Israeli rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League in New York in 1968 — an organisation responsible in the United States for bombings against Soviet diplomatic representations and Arab-American organisations — and subsequently the Kach party in Israel in 1971, represents the most explicitly racist version of this ideology. Kahanism rests on three pillars: Greater Israel within its biblical borders as a binding divine commandment, the physical expulsion of all Arabs from the territory without exception based on the radical reading of lo tuchanem, and the establishment of a theocratic state governed by Halakha. Elected to the Knesset in 1984, Kahane tabled segregationist bills of such brutality that Parliament amended its rules of procedure to prevent him from speaking in plenary session.

The Kach party was declared a terrorist organisation and banned in Israel in March 1994, in the weeks following the massacre perpetrated by his follower Baruch Goldstein, who had murdered 29 Muslim worshippers at prayer in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The United States Department of State and the European Union did likewise that same year — a tripartite designation that says the essential: it was not merely a reprehensible ideology that was condemned, but acts of organised violence meeting the legal criteria of terrorism. This formal prohibition seemed to close a parenthesis.

It did not. Itamar Ben Gvir, today Minister of National Security in the Netanyahu government, displayed in his home the portrait of Baruch Goldstein. He was convicted of incitement to racism and support for Kach in 2007, and declared unfit for military service by the Israel Defence Forces on the grounds that his extremist positions threatened unit cohesion. This man — convicted of racism, declared too extreme to wear the Israeli uniform, public admirer of the Hebron terrorist — became in December 2022 a minister with authority over the police, the border forces and the domestic security policy of a democratic state.

As for Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance and minister with delegated responsibility for civilian affairs in the West Bank, he has publicly declared that the Palestinian people does not exist, that the whole of historic Palestine belongs to the Jewish people and must be annexed to it, and presides over an acceleration of settlement construction unprecedented since the 1990s.

The presence of Ben Gvir and Smotrich in government is not an accident of circumstance: it is the political culmination of a radicalisation for which Torat Hamelekh had already furnished, a decade earlier, the halakhic justification.

Torat Hamelekh: the doctrinal culmination of a radicalisation

In 2009, two rabbis close to the settler movement published Torat Hamelekh, the Law of the King, a work in which they develop halakhic arguments justifying the killing of non-Jews in certain circumstances, including children. The book provoked a scandal in Israel, several of its supporters were prosecuted, but it continues to circulate.

It is not the product of individual madness: it is the logical culmination of a conception that took several decades to radicalise, moving from the mysticism of Kook the father to the political radicalism of Kook the son, from the political to the activism of the Gush Emunim, from activism to the crimes of Goldstein, and on to the ministerial posts of Ben Gvir and Smotrich today.

Judaism in its millennial plurality: a tradition these readings betray

These readings do not represent Judaism in its millennial plurality. The classical rabbinical tradition, moderate Orthodox Judaism, the conservative and liberal currents, the great majority of contemporary halakhic authorities reject fundamentalist interpretations as distortions of the sacred text. The Talmud itself, with its tradition of contradictory debate and permanent interpretive revision, is structurally the antithesis of literalist fundamentalism. What extreme nationalist religious Zionism mobilises is not Judaism in its hermeneutic richness, but a selective political reading of the twentieth century that sacralises a territorial claim by wrenching texts from their context with the same intellectual violence that Hamas visits upon the Quran.

What took place between 1994 and 2022 deserves to be named without circumlocution: what was yesterday marginal, banned and morally ostracised is today at the heart of power in a democratic state. This trajectory is not accidental; it is the product of a progressive normalisation. The thought of Kook the son, which in 1967 appeared to be a minority mystical vision, has produced in sixty years the settler movement, the Gush Emunim, Kahanism, Torat Hamelekh, and finally ministers who govern the State of Israel with convictions that the Torah itself, in its most fundamental prophetic formulations, condemns.

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When the extremes pave the way for catastrophe: 7 October, war and codependence

7 October: first a crime, then a fatal mechanism

On 7 October 2023, at dawn, Hamas commandos breached in force the security barriers surrounding Gaza. What followed belongs to the category of facts that admit neither euphemism nor prior analytical distancing, and which demand to be named with a precision that decency does not attenuate but that decency commands.

Let us begin by dispelling a lie that circulates with a persistence that only bad faith can explain: what occurred on 7 October was not an act of resistance. Resistance, in all its historically legitimate forms — the French Resistance against the Nazi occupier, the national liberation movements documented by international law — targets armed forces, military installations, the structures of occupation. It does not massacre families in their homes at dawn, does not rape women in a festival field, does not burn elderly people alive in their kibbutzim, does not abduct infants from their cradles. These acts have a precise name in international law: they are war crimes and crimes against humanity. To dress them in the word resistance is a moral falsification that simultaneously insults the genuine resistances of history and the victims of that day.

The facts, as established by Israeli investigators, international forensic teams and the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, are of a darkness that recalls hours humanity believed it had left behind. One thousand two hundred people murdered within a few hours, the great majority of them civilians. Systematic rape deployed as a weapon of war, documented mutilations, assaults committed before witnesses or filmed. Decapitated bodies, entire families burned alive, children murdered before their parents. The UN Special Representative publicly confirmed these sexual violations, breaking with the habitual caution of international institutions. Several qualified observers — forensic pathologists and genocide historians — employed without hesitation the formulation: the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. This qualification is not rhetorical; it is documentary.

What further distinguishes these acts from any ordinary war crime is the deliberate and organised jubilation that accompanied them. The killers filmed in real time from their GoPro helmet cameras, not for tactical reasons, but to share their deeds with their families. A telephone call, which has become emblematic, records a man calling his mother to tell her of his pride at having killed. In Gaza, 7 October was a day of celebration: crowds in the streets, scenes of jubilation, distributions of sweets. Among those who had breached the perimeter, not all were operational members of Hamas — Gazan civilians had joined the movement to participate in the abductions and the looting. This porousness between the terrorist organisation and a part of the population is the measure of the anthropological damage that sixteen years of indoctrination and unchallenged rule inflict upon an entire generation.

Some 250 hostages were taken to Gaza — infants, children, adolescents, adults, elderly people, among them several survivors of the Shoah. The testimonies of those who returned describe months spent in the darkness of underground tunnels, deprived of light and movement, inadequately fed, subjected to physical and psychological violence. The released hostages arrived in Israeli hospitals in a condition that doctors compared to that of concentration camp survivors. But more than eighty have not returned, among them the Bibas family — Shiri and her two children, Ariel, four years old, and Kfir, nine months old on the day of his abduction, who became with his red hair the global symbol of an absolute innocence swept into horror. When their bodies were returned in February 2025, forensic examinations established that neither an Israeli bombardment, as Hamas had mendaciously claimed, nor any circumstance of war explained their deaths: Shiri and her two children had been deliberately murdered by their captors, the children strangled with bare hands. In August 2024, six further bodies were found in tunnels in Rafah, executed with a bullet to the head — among them Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents had become the global faces of the campaign for the hostages, killed as a rescue operation was closing in.

The exchange of November 2023 had freed 105 hostages in return for 240 Palestinian prisoners — a considerable price, but not without precedent. In 2011, the release of soldier Gilad Shalit had cost 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, among them Yahya Sinwar, convicted for the murder of twelve Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, whose brutality had earned him the nickname the Butcher of Khan Younis. Released by a democratic state in a humanitarian exchange, he became the principal architect of the massacre of 7 October 2023, before being killed by Israeli forces in October 2024. This trajectory speaks to the infernal logic in which this conflict is entrapped, where every decision, even one taken with the best of intentions, can produce consequences that no one had foreseen.

The regional strategic dimension illuminates with stark clarity the cold calculation underlying this attack. In the autumn of 2023, in the wake of the Abraham Accords of 2020 which had brought Israel closer to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia had reached an advanced stage — an agreement was described as imminent by several well-informed sources. For Hamas and for Iran, this prospect was an existential threat: were Saudi Arabia to normalise its relations with Israel without the Palestinian question being resolved, the Palestinian cause would lose its central lever and Hamas would lose the justification for its existence. The 7th of October achieved precisely what Hamas sought: to render Saudi normalisation politically impossible, to compel Riyadh to suspend negotiations, to restore the Palestinian question to the centre of the regional agenda. This strategy is of an absolute cynicism, for it sacrificed thousands of lives to preserve the political position of an organisation whose leaders were negotiating from their palaces in Doha. Former directors of the CIA and the Mossad have publicly confirmed that this objective formed part of Hamas’s calculation and that of Iran.

All these facts constitute a crime against humanity in the most precise sense of the legal term, and any analysis of what preceded them or of what they unleashed can only come after this qualification, never in its place. It is only once this point has been established without ambiguity that analysis becomes possible — and necessary, for to understand is not to excuse.

The Israeli military response: between legitimate retaliation and instrumentalised war

The Israeli military response to 7 October must be examined with the same factual rigour as the attack itself — neither minimised in the name of unconditional solidarity, nor deployed in the service of a delegitimisation of Israel whose mechanism we have already named. The declared objective, destroying Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities, was legitimate in principle: a terrorist organisation had just committed the most murderous massacre in the country’s history, and no democratic state would have tolerated its perpetrators remaining in power a few kilometres from its territory. Proportionally, Israel counting approximately 7 million Jewish citizens against France’s 68 million, it is as though France had suffered an attack causing nearly 12,000 deaths and more than 2,400 hostages. One is entitled to doubt that the European populations so mobilised against the Israeli response would have accepted, in comparable circumstances, that their own armies stood by with weapons at rest.

The difficulty of such a response does not, moreover, belong to Israel alone. When the American-led coalition conducted the Battle of Mosul between October 2016 and July 2017 to eradicate ISIS from a city of one million inhabitants — a tactical situation comparable to Gaza in its density, its tunnels and the intermingling of combatants within the civilian population — between nine thousand and eleven thousand civilians were killed according to the most widely cited estimates, with certain Kurdish estimates reaching as high as forty thousand. The coalition received the congratulations of President Macron, the thanks of President Putin and the tributes of the international community, without lasting global protest, without repeated emergency resolutions of the Security Council, without any challenge to the legitimacy of the United States to exist. This asymmetry of treatment deserves to be named — without, however, making of it a blank cheque for Israel.

For what took place in Gaza raises questions that go beyond the comparison with Mosul. Israel did practise warnings before strikes — preliminary roof-knocking, telephone calls, alert messages — whose unusual character in the history of urban warfare military observers acknowledge. It opened evacuation corridors. But the designated zones were themselves struck in several documented cases, among them the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone, and the destruction exceeded what the military objective could reasonably justify. The United Nations Satellite Centre established in December 2024 that nearly 70 per cent of Gaza’s structures had been damaged or destroyed — more than 170,000 buildings; its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that 88 per cent of school buildings had been affected; the WHO that 443 attacks against health infrastructure had reduced to 12 out of 36 the number of hospitals still partially operational in April 2024. In April of that same year, a strike on a clearly identified World Central Kitchen convoy killed seven humanitarian workers — an incident that the Israeli army itself described as a grave error.

But it is the human toll that poses the most fundamental ethical question. The most serious estimates record several tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths — around 75,000 according to the direct count, more if one includes indirect deaths linked to the collapse of the health system — the majority of them women, children and elderly people. Yes, combating a Hamas deliberately intermingled with the civilian population produces destruction bearing no comparison with a confrontation between regular armies. Yes, Hamas prolonged the war by refusing to return the hostages. Yet these realities do not dispense with another: beyond a certain threshold of destruction, an Israel faithful to its own founding values — those of a democracy nourished by the memory of the worst that humanity can inflict upon a people — ought to have had the courage to stop. Even at the cost of negotiating without total guarantees. Even at the cost of leaving Hamas partially intact. Even at the cost of assuming the domestic political consequences. This choice would have been risky. It would also have been the only one consonant with the ethics implied by a state claiming allegiance both to democracy and to the values of the Torah — and that the memory of the Shoah ought to have inspired.

Intellectual honesty and spiritual sensitivity demand that both these realities be named simultaneously, without dissolving the one into the other: the legitimacy of the principle of the military response, and the ethical obligation which ought, at a certain stage, to have bounded its duration and its extent.

Yet the causes of the prolongation bear the marks of both camps. On the Hamas side, the strategy is transparent: every additional week of war produced images of destruction mobilising world opinion against Israel, fuelling recruitment and justifying Iranian funding. Several ceasefire agreements in 2024 were refused or scuttled in conditions that the Qatari and Egyptian mediators described with mounting frustration. The Hamas leadership did everything in its power to complicate the distribution of humanitarian aid — taxing it, partially diverting it — and to discourage civilian evacuations even when Israel announced the imminence of strikes. Sinwar calculated that every additional Palestinian death was a strategic investment. A population kept under bombardment is, in this chilling logic, more useful than a population in safety.

On the Israeli side, the prolongation also bears a political signature. When it became evident, by the spring of 2024 at the latest, that the total destruction of Hamas was militarily impossible without a permanent occupation of Gaza, the question of halting the operation arose with acute force. Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, several former generals and former heads of the Shin Bet publicly affirmed that Netanyahu was prolonging the war for his own domestic political survival: his trial for corruption continuing, his coalition with Ben Gvir and Smotrich contingent upon the continuation of operations, the end of the war risking the opening of an inquiry into the failures of 7 October whose conclusions he dreaded. This thesis, attested by first-rank sources and not established judicially, is sufficiently solid to be named — and it says, once again, that the civilians of both peoples paid the price of a political calculation of which they were not the beneficiaries.

Codependence: a documented mechanism

The central thesis of this article — that the two extremisms feed each other in a logic of reciprocal survival — is not theoretical speculation. It is documented in the facts, and in the sometimes involuntary admissions of its actors.

Hamas: governing through misery, fighting through the dead

On the Hamas side, the logic is as cynical as it is transparent — and among the most systematically passed over in silence in the public debates that claim to defend the Palestinian cause.

Since 2007, Gaza has received tens of billions of dollars in international aid — from the European Union, Qatar, the United Nations, the Gulf states, and the United States before the Trump years. A substantial fraction has been systematically diverted: institutionalised racketeering on goods entering Gaza, construction materials redirected towards the underground military tunnel network — 500 kilometres, more than one billion dollars, funded by European taxpayers who believed they were rebuilding homes and schools. Tens of billions have transited since 2007, enough according to the economists who have studied the file to have built a viable economy there; these funds instead fed the personal fortunes of the leadership and financed the tunnels. Khaled Meshaal is reported to dispose of more than two billion dollars, Ismail Haniyeh is said to have accumulated approximately four billion, Mousa Abu Marzouk is likewise estimated to be a billionaire — fortunes built while the population lived under blockade with an average unemployment rate of 45 per cent. This unemployment is not the consequence of the Israeli blockade: it is the calculated result of diversion. For misery is not, for Hamas, a problem to be solved; it is an instrument of government. Hamas does not administer Gaza; it holds it captive.

Its military strategy obeys the same logic of exploitation — not through negligence but by doctrine. Rockets are fired from densely populated neighbourhoods, arsenals stored in mosques and hospital basements: the operation at Al-Shifa hospital in November 2023 revealed military tunnels accessible from the medical facilities, weapons in hospital rooms, command equipment in areas protected by international humanitarian law. Command centres are deliberately buried beneath civilian buildings so that every Israeli strike automatically produces civilian casualties transformed into political capital. This strategy has a name: the use of human shields — a war crime explicitly prohibited by international humanitarian law. The death of Palestinian civilians is not a regrettable side effect of Hamas’s operations: it is one of their calculated functions. Hamas needs its civilian dead; they are its international political currency.

To this double exploitation — economic and military — is added ideological confinement. Press freedom is non-existent in Gaza: any journalist challenging the leadership or the military strategy would risk his life. In sixteen years of unchallenged rule, Hamas has constructed an ideological prison in which an entire generation has grown up without ever hearing any voice other than that of resistance, martyrdom and hatred of Jews. The polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research — an independent Palestinian body recognised by both camps — measured its extent in the weeks following 7 October: 75 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank expressed support for the attack. Prolonged indoctrination works — this is an anthropological observation, not an excuse. And this generational damage is perhaps the most difficult to repair in any prospect of lasting peace.

The Israeli hard right and the mechanics of instrumentalisation

On the Israeli extremism side, the symmetry with Hamas is less cynical in its public formulation — one does not film one’s victims to send the footage to one’s parents — but equally real in its political effects, and equally documented for anyone willing to look squarely at the electoral archives and the testimonies of the actors.

The pattern has been legible as a constant for thirty years: every wave of attacks produces a measurable shift in opinion towards the security right, to the systematic benefit of the currents that had asserted in advance that peace was a dangerous illusion. Netanyahu’s first election in May 1996 is the clearest illustration: he defeated Shimon Peres by fewer than thirty thousand votes, in the weeks following a series of particularly deadly Hamas suicide bombings. The chronology between terrorist attack and hard-right electoral victory repeats itself like a political law: the Second Intifada and the election of Sharon in 2001, fresh waves of rockets and the consolidation of the right at every ballot, through to the sixth Netanyahu government of 2022.

This mechanism marginalises the peace activists a little further each time. The word left has gradually become a political insult in Israel. Yesh Gvul, Breaking the Silence, Peace Now — their members are ostracised, their foreign funding subjected to restrictive legislation, their audience eroding election after election. Israeli pacifists have never received official government support, even under Labour governments, which built settlements while verbally endorsing a peace process.

The 7th of October 2023 brought this tragedy to its culmination: the kibbutzim martyred that morning — Be’eri, Nir Oz, Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz — were historic bastions of the pacifist left, populated by activists who had deliberately chosen to live on the edge of Gaza out of conviction, employing Gazan workers and organising transport for sick Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. Vivian Silver, co-founder of Women Wage Peace, murdered at Be’eri, became its global symbol. Their deaths were used by those who had always maintained that there was no partner to justify the claim that any attempt at dialogue was not merely futile but dangerous.

The counterpart of this dynamic — less often articulated but no less real — is internal Israeli radicalisation. The yeshivas of the settler movement and the settlement environments where Arabs are encountered only as threats or as invisible labour produce a radicalisation that the polls measure: significant fractions of religious Israeli youth today express positions of exclusion that would have been considered marginal in the 1980s and which are today represented in government. The mechanism of radicalisation through ideological saturation is the same on both sides — even if the conditions and the acts it produces are not morally equivalent.

The strategy of “there is no partner” deserves to be named for what it is: not a conclusion drawn from the facts, but a political tool permanently reactivated to justify immobilism and settlement expansion. Launched by Ehud Barak after Camp David in July 2000, amplified over two decades, it has functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy: by asserting that no credible partner exists, one justifies not building the conditions that would make a partner possible; by pursuing settlement, one creates the radicalisation that eliminates Palestinian moderates and retrospectively validates the argument. This circle is perfect in its circularity: the absence of a partner justifies the settlements, the settlements produce radicalisation, radicalisation eliminates the moderates, the absence of moderates validates the absence of a partner.

This logic includes the deliberate maintenance of the Hamas/Fatah division. The thesis that Netanyahu deliberately allowed Hamas to consolidate its control over Gaza — by authorising Qatari fund transfers estimated at several hundred million dollars annually in order to prevent the emergence of a unified Palestinian leadership — is no longer a researchers’ hypothesis. It has been publicly formulated by former prime ministers of both camps, by former heads of the Shin Bet, and by several members of the Knesset following 7 October. The Knesset member Tzvi Hauser declared before the Knesset that the policy of buying calm with Hamas had failed — a formulation that implicitly acknowledges the existence of this policy. The Haaretz investigation and several inquiries by the Times of Israel have documented its concrete mechanisms.

This thesis is a serious allegation, supported by first-rank sources, contested by Netanyahu, but not established judicially. Its weight is nonetheless sufficient that it cannot be ignored without betraying the intellectual honesty this series claims for itself. For were it to be confirmed, the very nature of the conflict would be transformed: one would no longer be in the presence of the tragic confrontation of two peoples condemned to oppose each other, but of a deliberate manipulation of the impossibility of peace by actors who need this conflict to continue for their political survival or personal enrichment. Hamas and Netanyahu would then share something essential: the objective interest in peace never being made.

The price paid by the moderates — and by the victims

The symbiosis of the extremes has direct victims and collateral victims.

The direct victims are to be counted in both camps, and their number obliges one to step outside any partisan calculation. On the Israeli side: the 1,200 people murdered on 7 October, the families of the 250 hostages many of whom never saw their loved ones again alive, the communities of southern Israel traumatised for generations. On the Palestinian side: the several tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza in the months that followed, among them a documented proportion of children and non-combatants, in conditions of urban destruction exceeding anything the region had known for decades.

The collateral victims are those of whom less is said, but whose crushing by the extremes is perhaps the most eloquent sign of the state of the conflict: they are the moderates of both peoples. Yitzhak Rabin, murdered in November 1995 by an Israeli fanatic who had decided that peace was a betrayal — not by an Arab enemy but by a compatriot nourished on the ideology of Greater Israel. The Palestinian negotiators of Oslo, disqualified by Hamas as traitors to the cause from the moment the accords were signed. The Israelis who demonstrate against their own government and are treated as traitors by their own camp. The non-violent Palestinians of the West Bank who seek a political space between Hamas and the occupation, and find only the vice.

What the two extremisms share most deeply is this property: they kill their own moderates first — physically sometimes, politically always.

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Refusing the abyss as destiny

In 1919, on the eve of all that was to follow, David Ben Gurion spoke before the Va’ad Zmani, the representative body of the Yishuv, with a radical frankness that Tom Segev unearthed from the personal archives of the future founder of Israel: “I do not know a single Arab who would accept Palestine being entirely under Jewish control.” The conclusion he drew was of a disarming lucidity: there is no solution — there is an abyss that no one knows how to cross. He was wrong about the impossibility of the crossing — history has shown apparently deeper abysses traversed by generations who refused to accept them as destiny. But he saw clearly on this point: this abyss does not close of itself. It demands an effort of a different nature from ordinary diplomacy or military victory.

What the two extremisms we have just examined share, beyond their differences of nature and position, is this: they work actively to render this abyss permanent — to sacralise it, to inscribe it in the destiny of their respective peoples, to disqualify as naïve or treacherous those who still believe it can be crossed. In this sense, they do not oppose each other: they collaborate. Their war is their symbiosis.

If the extremisms that today paralyse peace are the terminal stage of an identitarian and political logic, the question imposes itself with equal force upon both camps: when did these logics begin, and were they inevitable?

On the Zionist side: did the movement that founded the State of Israel carry from its very origins the seeds of the drift we have just examined, or did it have a choice — a real choice, documented, articulated by voices that historical urgency reduced to silence but did not extinguish? Herzl and Ahad Ha’Am laid down at the turn of the twentieth century the terms of a founding debate that the urgency of the Shoah settled by force of circumstance, without ever resolving it in its implications. It is to this debate that the next article returns.

On the Palestinian and Arab side, the same question deserves to be posed with the same honesty: was the trajectory of radical refusal — the alliance with Nazism, the rejection of the Peel Plan in 1937, the organisation of the war of destruction of 1948 — the only possible response to the Zionist project, or was it the product of specific choices made by specific actors, for which other, more pragmatic Palestinian voices paid with their lives for having dared to explore alternatives?

These two questions — the missed choice of Zionism and the missed choice of Palestinian nationalism — constitute the guiding thread of the next article. Because if peace has a future, it necessarily passes through the capacity of both peoples to look squarely not only at what the other has done to them, but at what they themselves might have chosen to do differently.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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The World We Cross · Two quills · 40 min
Dialogues written in two voices, in the tradition of humanist exchange.

From a spark, a column

Writing is sometimes the occasion for particularly fertile encounters — those sparks that arise in the space of a comment, a reply, a thought that bounces off another and illuminates it by shifting it. It is in this precious interstice, at the confluence of two distinct voices, yet drawn to question together, that the idea for this column was born.

Two quills will gather dialogues written in two voices, in the tradition of humanist exchange — that of Erasmus and Thomas More, of Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano, and of all those who understood that certain encounters call neither for interview nor testimony, but for something of an altogether different nature: a space where two voices engage as equals, respond to one another, sometimes contradict one another, and journey together towards what neither would have reached alone. In an age when public debate has largely reduced itself to jousting and the parallel monologue of solitary opinion pieces or posts that pass one another without ever really touching, claiming the tradition of patient, constructed, written dialogue — where two minds consent to let themselves be transformed through contact with one another — is a gesture of civilisation as much as an editorial choice.

It is Alexander Djis — author of La Voix arc-en-ciel, a French-language publication — who gave me the joy of inaugurating this column. His contributions, of rare depth, left as comments on my texts from the Dialogues du Nouveau Monde — the French-language version of this publication — awakened in me the desire for a written dialogue in two voices, so that we might together extend and unfold what had until then only been sketched in the too-narrow space of our first resonances. I am profoundly grateful to him, for it is precisely this kind of encounter — a friendly confrontation conducted in the frame of mind of one who accepts being changed by the thought of the other — that these Dialogues have always sought, ultimately, to make possible. His voice, in this exchange, led me further than I could have gone alone, and the perspectives we opened together far exceed these pages, which may constitute only their first circle.

Jérôme Nathanaël

Two voices

The dialogue that follows took flight from the exchanges prompted by Jérôme Nathanaël's text (originally published in French): “Where I write from: legacies, inner freedom, and Words of Life”. It is there that the central question around which it is organised crystallised: “What are our universes of meaning responsible for?”

Universes of meaning — religious, political, ideological — do indeed act as symbolic frames of reference, more or less conscious, that configure our conduct, structure our societies, and render certain forms of coexistence possible or impossible. It thus becomes urgent to grow conscious of and interrogate the symbolic constructs that sustain us, in order to understand what they compel us to embody, what they authorise us to ignore, and what social consequences ensue.

We are pleased to share with you today the fruit of this long dialogue.

Jérôme Nathanaël and Alexander Djis

Our two quills in dialogue

Jérôme Nathanaël:

Alexander, following my text “Where I write from: legacies, inner freedom and Words of Life,” our exchanges — which readers will find in the comments of the French version of that text — gave rise to a line of questioning that appears today more necessary than ever: if we acknowledge by common accord that no symbolic frame of reference can exhaust the complexity of the reality it attempts to map in order to make its exploration possible, then the urgency will be not only to interrogate and confront our symbolic constructs, but above all to examine what choices they entail for our conduct and what concrete social effects they produce when they are extended to the collective level.

It is therefore from this first conclusion of our reflections that I undertake this new dialogue with you. I shall begin by laying out for our readers a kind of framework that will allow the various dimensions invoked here to be more readily grasped.

Let us recall first, as a simple but too-often neglected truth, that our inner lives never rest on a simple face-to-face between an isolated individual and a supposedly neutral reality: they unfold within universes of meaning — religious, political, ideological, cultural — that act as genuine symbolic constructs, orienting our perceptions, our judgements and our most everyday choices.

It then becomes clear that these symbolic frames of reference, whether explicitly professed or deeply unconscious, configure our personal ethical conduct; and that when these behaviours multiply and combine, they become the effective foundations of our societies, with very concrete effects on the way we organise power, justice, the place of the other, the legitimacy of violence, or even the very possibility of coexistence. This is why it becomes decisive to grow conscious of and interrogate the symbolic constructs that sustain us: to understand what they compel us to embody, what they authorise us to ignore, and what social consequences follow.

In this regard, the symbolic frames of reference of the three monotheisms offer a particularly illuminating field of observation: a limit-symbol open to the infinite in Judaism; a Christian universality centred on the call to perfection and unconditional openness; a closed Quranic text articulating, from its very origin, guidance, favour and the exclusion of the “errant ones.” Each of these universes of meaning produces a certain style of personal ethics and, aggregated at the collective level, a certain type of world — habitable, or sometimes barely habitable — for those who live within it and for those who attempt to coexist within it.

If we now examine the three Abrahamic monotheisms more closely, we perceive with particular clarity how distinct symbolic foundations produce divergent ethical and social trajectories.

In Judaism, the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton institutes a limit-symbol deployed on a field open to infinite interpretation: “I have set before you life and death, choose life” embraces both positivity and negativity without definitively assigning them to human groups. This fosters an ethic of creative tension, of wrestling with the divine, and a perpetual quest for meaning which, collectively, engenders societies attentive to hermeneutic nuance and to responsibility in the face of uncertainty.

Christianity, by contrast, brings God down upon the mediating figure of Jesus and his injunction “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect,” orienting the individual towards a quest for perfection that can tip into narcissism, accompanied by an unconditional openness to the other — “turn the other cheek” — without a protective guardrail. At the collective level, this translates into expansive universalisms, culminating in the contemporary secular progressivism that absorbs otherness without questioning its own project, sometimes producing a strategic naivety in the face of competing dynamics.

Islam, finally, entrusts the total divine word to a closed text borne by Muhammad, with an inaugural dichotomy between “those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favour” and “the errant ones” applied directly to human beings, and the call to “establish the kingdom of Allah” articulated as a struggle against the unbeliever. This gives rise to an ethic of faithful application and a project of universal conquest which, aggregated socially, aims at the geographical and human totality of the globe, rendering coexistence with other frameworks particularly arduous as long as they remain unstated.

Obviously, it is indispensable in this process of reflection to insist on a clear distinction: on one side, the analysis of a symbolic construct, its internal logic and its fundamental messages (particularly when the object is a sacred text); on the other, the concrete individuals who refer to it, with very significant interindividual variation, differing degrees of adherence, and singular histories. To forget this would risk essentialising, even stigmatising, groups of individuals. The analysis of a symbolic frame of reference, of its texts, its dynamics and the signals it sends, does not imply that all who refer to it literally adhere to all its implications, nor that they are deprived of freedom in relation to it.

Yet these fundamental symbolic constructs allow us to understand decisive chains of consequence: from textual grounding to personal act, from act to the collective world, where each frame of reference compels us to embody certain virtues, authorises certain blind spots, and renders possible or impossible specific forms of living together.

Alexander Djis:

Dear Jérôme, thank you for this clear and rigorous introduction. It places us at once before a question that is not theoretical but vital: what are the symbolic universes we inhabit responsible for? Responsible for our gestures, our laws, the worlds we render possible.

Your reading of the three Abrahamic monotheisms shows with clarity that a symbolic frame of reference does not merely orient an interiority. It structures a shared horizon. It draws the contours of the permitted, the just, the thinkable. It shapes a manner of inhabiting the earth.

I would note, however, that we are speaking from a situated position: that of the matrices born around the Mediterranean basin. Other civilisations have forged other architectures of meaning — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto. They structure the relationship to the divine, to the living and to the collective differently. Our perspective is partial, and this lucidity is necessary, as much for ourselves as for the reader.

You underline the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion specific to the monotheisms. But I believe we must go further: every symbolic universe traces a line. No human community lives without a symbolic border.

The question, therefore, is not whether there is exclusion — for there always is — but where the border lies. How is it justified? Is it permeable or locked? Is it ontological, moral, political? Does it allow coexistence or prepare confrontation?

The Abrahamic traditions built powerful, coherent worlds, traversed by clarity and violence. They produced solidarity, transcendence, fervour and also enduring fractures, including territorial tensions still unresolved. This is not a moral judgement but an observation: symbols are never neutral.

And these frames of reference are profoundly anthropocentric. The animal is rarely recognised there as a subject bearing intrinsic value comparable to that of the human. It is creation, resource, backdrop, sometimes sign, but rarely an ontological partner. This human centrality in tension with the divine profoundly structures ethics: salvation, the law, perfection, submission or the covenant concern above all the human being. This trait is not insignificant, for the modern world inherits this centrality, now secularised in most countries. We continue to organise the world as though the human were the sole bearer of intrinsic value. We speak of ecology, yet we still think in terms of resource management.

What if the ecological crisis were revealing the limit of an imaginary in which the human remains the sole bearer of intrinsic value?

And yet I do not believe that the symbol mechanically determines history.

Judaism transforms itself after the destruction of the Temple. Christianity changes when it becomes imperial. Islam is born in a tribal context that marks its initial dynamic.

A symbolic frame of reference is born of a history. Then, once crystallised, it in turn becomes a historical driver. And this interaction continues without end, particularly through the interpretation of texts, which widens or narrows borders.

If we accept this, then modernity must be interrogated with the same rigour.

Although it represents an exit from grand narratives, it nevertheless absolutises other principles — inclusion, the individual, the fluidity of borders, suspicion of any structuring transcendence.

We believed that a world without a shared matrix would be pacified. Yet we see fragmentation, polarisation, competing narratives, ideological conflicts emerging. Plurality without a centre can become a permanent struggle to impose one’s own vision. The symbolic void does not exist. If there is no longer a shared centre, there is competition to establish one.

And it is here that the dialogue you propose becomes decisive. If symbols shape worlds, then we cannot content ourselves with analysing them. We must ask ourselves what we wish to engender.

Must we rework the interpretations of existing matrices, in the hope that they still carry sufficient transformative power?

Or must we dare to think a new symbolic foundation — not as religion, not as dogma, but as a conscious architecture of the common world?

A matrix that would seek to: transcend narrow anthropocentrism; ground responsibility in the existence of a perfectible spiritual individuality; inscribe evolution within a Law that exceeds our cultural constructions; and propose a concrete path rather than a corpus to be believed.

Not to erase inheritances — which would be in vain — but to respond to an age that can no longer simply reproduce them.

The question is therefore no longer only: what worlds have the ancient symbols produced? But: what world do we wish to render possible now? And are we ready to assume the symbolic responsibility that this implies?

Jérôme Nathanaël:

Dear Alexander, your intervention opens up many perspectives that I shall explore in turn.

You observe that my reading of the three monotheisms renders our approach ‘situated’ and ‘partial’ if it does not integrate the great Eastern traditions. This situated position is, however, deliberate: it is that of the long history which leads to the globalised system that dominates the planet today, with its multiple crises — of which the deepest is the crisis of meaning. In the slow process that leads from the Greco-Roman world to Christendom, then from the Enlightenment to the industrial revolution and contemporary globalisation, the interaction between the Christian, Jewish and Muslim symbolic matrices remains central. Extra-European civilisations acquire significant influence over our representations only from the post-war period onwards, culminating in the vogue of the New Age in the 1970s and the growing place of Buddhism in Western space. But this becomes possible only because the internal inheritances — the Christian substratum transferred into Enlightenment universalism, then into the atheist messianisms that are socialism, communism and even a certain political ecology — had failed to contain the progressive dislocation of our societies under the blows of globalisation and the commodification of the world. Since our question is precisely ‘what are the symbolic universes we inhabit responsible for?’, it seems to me therefore decisive to interrogate first and foremost the frames of reference that ground our common history.

It is worth noting, moreover, that today, even as the East in its diversity maintains its own symbolic frames of reference, the mode of life it adopts or desires to adopt is of Western origin — but that is another debate.

On the question of the ‘dynamics of inclusion and exclusion specific to the monotheisms’ and, more broadly, on the fact that ‘every symbolic universe traces a line’: this line always delineates those who are within the frame of reference and those who are excluded from it. The central question then becomes: what is the nature of the cohabitation between two limited universes — fraternal or competitive?

History answers with clarity. The cohabitation of Pauline Christianity with Judaism is competitive from the outset: Christianity sets itself up as the ‘New Israel’ bearing the ‘New Covenant.’ From the Acts of the Apostles onwards, the dispute between Paul and James over the abolition of the Jewish Law is its inaugural sign — with, it should be noted in passing, a revealing slippage: Torah means teaching, not law. The Jews would subsequently be designated as the murderers of Christ — thereby erasing the fact that crucifixion is a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one, and that it was most likely a faction of Sadducean notables, allied with Rome, who handed Jesus over to the procurator. One had to wait for the Second Vatican Council, then for John Paul II, for this relationship to become fraternal.

The same gaze may be brought to bear on Islam. The notion of Dar al-Islam — the Muslim space — and that of Dar al-Harb — the space to be conquered — imply that a territory that has once been Muslim cannot revert to non-Muslim domination, particularly in its radical Islamist reading. This is, moreover, the unstated foundation of the impossibility, for a large section of the Palestinians — fallen under the influence of a radical Islam stemming from the Muslim Brotherhood — of accepting the existence of Israel.

Thus, if the symbol does not mechanically determine history, it creates conditions: through the representation it imposes of the other — especially of the one who stands beyond the limit — it sets in motion dynamics that become political and structural.

You evoke ‘the interpretation of texts which widens or narrows borders.’ It is particularly instructive to observe how Christian and Muslim hermeneutics have very often served not a free reading, but a justification of political expansionism and a delimitation of the boundaries of the thinkable. The distance between the message of Jesus as one may reconstruct it, liberated from doctrinal accretions, and what the Church has been able to justify and accomplish, is immense. The same work is called for in a renewed reading of the Quran — freed, in particular, from the juridical constructions surrounding the status of dhimmis — Christians and Jews theoretically protected — whose historical implementation was, at best, a regime of inferiority and humiliation.

On the Jewish side, the destruction of the Temple and the Dispersion created radically different conditions that compelled a concentration on study and fostered a remarkable capacity for adaptation. But that is yet another subject — and one may surmise that Judaism, had it survived as a continuous political reality, would not have been free from disparaging those beyond its borders: Jesus himself already denounced contempt for the Samaritans.

One would also need to evoke the ravages of distorting readings within the traditions themselves. Christianity long justified the worst social injustices, relegating to the world to come any reward for a servile obedience to the established order — until liberation theology in the twentieth century. Islam, in a different way, proceeded similarly. And Hinduism with its caste system, Tibetan Buddhism with its feudal order before the Communist invasion, show that the confiscation of the spiritual for the benefit of structural power is not the exclusive preserve of the monotheisms. Examples abound of an initial spiritual impulse transformed into an instituted religion, empowered to define definitively what is good, right and true.

This is why modernity constitutes an exit from grand narratives: these narratives — religious, then philosophical — all failed. The great political narratives — communism, socialism, and even liberalism, itself issuing from Protestantism, let us recall — likewise failed. Hence the profound crisis of meaning and the competition of narratives you describe. Viktor Frankl demonstrated it: human beings have a vital need for meaning — in the camps, those who survived were precisely those who still managed to find a reason to exist. My experience as a therapist bears witness to this, day after day.

When there is no longer a shared collective meaning, society fragments into infinite competitions, reinforced by a consumerism that offers the illusion of an existential purpose — the famous jouir sans entrave, enjoyment without restraint. This impasse feeds frustration, comparison, envy and violence, latent or expressed. I sometimes have the impression that this is, today, the substance of collective life.

I arrive therefore at the central question we share: how do we emerge from the void of meaning, from symbolic simulacra, from these attempts to impose a centre at the expense of others? What do we wish to engender?

You ask whether one must revisit the inheritances, reinterpret the founding texts in the hope that they still carry a dynamic of transformation. I think this is first and foremost a critical necessity. If one admits that these texts have been stripped of their spirit by those who interpreted them for other ends, and that the societies claiming them are not the fruit of the fulfilment of the original impulse but often of something very far removed from it, then it seems evident — first in order to understand the genesis of our world, then in order to nourish ourselves from the initial dynamism — that we must return to the sources and attempt to clear them of accumulated deviations. This is not a proposal for a return to religious and ritual adherence to any given tradition, but an attempt to recognise what, in each of them, has preserved something capable of grounding an ethic of the living and of opening paths towards a better world. This work requires first clearing away everything that traces a border and separates human beings, in favour of the common ground that can bring them closer and constitute a foundation for hope and peace. It then demands setting aside every interpretation that legitimises a politics of domination or hierarchisation — every system that divides societies between those who hold the truth and those who are summoned to abdicate their own powers of reflection. There can be no border between the human being and life. This does not mean the rejection of the wise and the competent, but placing them at the service of all, and refusing to allow knowledge to be converted into a power of domination.

One must equally extirpate every form of superstition — religious, cultural or scientistic. No adherence to a ritual or a practice automatically grants access to salvation, to reward, to the right to exist or to true life. Every form of ‘magical’ thinking — whether it drapes itself in religion, science or politics — must be called into question. Engaging with Krishnamurti’s thought seems to me here indispensable: it is at this price of a profound deculturation and a questioning of our most deeply-rooted certainties that we may hope to perceive once again the spiritual ground of the traditions — the originary ground. Only then can they recover a dynamism which, according to one’s origin or sensibility, resonates with one’s interiority, provides a compass for self-improvement and a clearer understanding of how to advance towards tomorrow.

This enterprise of returning to the sources by no means implies that it must be accomplished in a posture of superiority or contempt for those who live within these traditions. It is not a matter of rejecting human beings whose inheritance is nourished by a long chain of men and women who sought, each in his or her own manner, to advance towards the light. It is, on the contrary, a matter of engaging in dialogue with all those who are ready to assume the demanding responsibility of questioning and of a refoundation that preserves what is most authentic and most life-giving in each tradition — with, towards all, an unalterable gratitude and respect.

Finally, you end your text with a further question: must we dare to think a new symbolic foundation — not as religion, not as dogma, but as a conscious architecture of the common world? You touch there on a vast field of investigation. Personally, I think that two contemporary texts — The Dialogues with the Angel and The Sign or Revelation of Arès — can here bring precious illumination.

The Dialogues with the Angel teach that the relationship to oneself is above all a faithfulness: each being bears a unique form of being — one’s own Task — and the spiritual path consists in recognising it and then fulfilling it completely, without allowing oneself to be dictated to from outside as to what one must be. The relationship to others obeys a law of deep reciprocity: no one can improve and achieve fulfilment alone, and the authentic encounter is neither service nor domination, but a co-transformation where each elevates the other by the simple fact of being truly oneself. Action in the world, finally, is not a frontal struggle against darkness, but a resolute orientation towards what is good, true and new — for the obstacle itself is the Task, and not what prevents it. To build and to raise is therefore to radiate from within: ‘the new world can only be built of beauty.’

This book offers a kind of viaticum that allows a new path to be nourished, a renewed way of being in the world. It is moving to know that it comes to us from a historical moment when the Nazis were destroying entire societies and killing by the million in order to impose an ideology of absolute domination over humanity — an ideology of control that seems very much at work today in a great many political systems.

As for the Revelation of Arès, it reminds us that the spiritual relationship to oneself is an act of re-creation: each being carries within himself or herself a fragment of the Living and a direct link with the infinite, and the spiritual path consists in actively awakening and cultivating the inner Good — love, forgiveness, peace, intelligence of the heart, absolute freedom — in order to activate our sublimity. The relationship to others is directly nourished by this: here again, no one can fulfil himself or herself spiritually alone, for this personal re-creation cannot be dissociated from the transformation of the world, and it is love of one’s neighbour that constitutes the founding act of all collective transformation. Action in the world is therefore both inward and outward — not by way of politics or religion, but through the call addressed to other beings to enter into this dynamic of the Good; for it is the discreet radiation of goodness, accumulated from generation to generation by a small remnant of men and women, that will finally cause evil to recede and transfigure the world.

Kept at a distance from all media presence — so much does it overturn, in a dynamic sense, the very foundations of our current societies — underlining the inhumanity of deviations and calling each person to the responsibility of contributing to change through active goodness, this book seems to me likewise a significant contribution to our shared project of thinking a new symbolic foundation as the conscious architecture of a common world to be refounded, to borrow your expression.

Some will read these two books in an attitude of faith and surrender. As for myself, I think it matters little whether the origin of such works is divine or not: they count for what they bring as insurgence, as nourishment for a free and nomadic spirituality — as I like to call it. The problem is not whether one believes them or not, but whether one stands before them taking on the questions they raise — which are also the questions you pose in your own way, my dear Alexander. Yes: are we ready to assume the symbolic responsibility that this implies? Are we ready to bear and embody the human responsibility to which they call us, and to work collectively towards refounding a possible and happy future for humanity?

Whatever symbolic frame of reference we adopt to read and understand the world, it will always be ours without being everyone’s, and the problem of the limit and the plurality of frames of reference will immediately present itself — a plurality that seems to me inevitable, for it corresponds to what lies at the foundation of the human: diversity. But that this frame of reference no longer imply exclusion, that it allow coexistence and sharing — this will only be possible if human beings come to agree on the basis that renders the perpetuation of life possible: the full recognition that good and happiness reside in collective sharing and in the total respect for the integrity of the other in all his or her dimensions. This is the language of love, in the sense that Jesus understood it in the Sermon on the Mount. It is also the language of action that privileges the importance of what each person does over what he thinks — above all if he does so while thinking of the common good and happiness.

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Alexander Djis:

Thank you for the depth and rigour of your reply. The critical work you evoke — returning to the sources, distinguishing the original impulse from its historical deformations, clearing the inheritances of their accumulated debris — seems to me indeed necessary for understanding the world that shaped us. It illuminates our symbolic genealogy and allows many simplifications to be avoided.

But perhaps we might return for a moment to the question that opened our exchange: ‘What are our universes of meaning responsible for?’

If they are responsible for what they compel us to embody — our gestures, our laws, our forms of coexistence — then their ontological structure becomes decisive. A universe centred exclusively on the human produces certain forms of exploitation or blindness. A universe structured around salvation can engender implicit hierarchies. A nihilistic universe favours fragmentation and the competition of wills.

In other words, the responsibility of a universe of meaning is not merely moral or political: it is structural. It silently shapes what the human being believes himself to be, and therefore what he allows himself to do.

It is here that I venture a slight displacement.

The spiritual impulse to which we refer does not seem to me to belong primarily to the past. It does not seem to me to depend on a return to the ancient matrices, even purified. It seems to me to surge up in the present, as a constitutive tension of human consciousness itself. Every age sees it reappear in new forms, independently of the texts that preceded it. The source may not be only behind us. It is active, here.

This being so, I ask myself: must the contemporary spiritual foundation necessarily immerse itself again in the monotheistic frames of reference in order to re-establish itself? Or do we have the possibility — and perhaps the responsibility — to formulate explicitly a coherent architecture for our time?

An architecture that:

- transcends narrow anthropocentrism;
- grounds responsibility in the existence of a perfectible spiritual individuality;
- inscribes evolution in a Law that exceeds our cultural constructions;
- and proposes a concrete path rather than a corpus to be believed.

The Way of the Wayfarers is, for my part, inscribed in this attempt. Not as a new religion, nor as a reaction against the traditions, but as a methodical proposal: to re-establish contact with one’s own foundation, to experiment with verticality, to attune oneself to the Law, to evolve consciously.

I do not formulate this as a break with the inheritances. Perhaps our approaches are complementary: yours explores and clarifies the sources, mine attempts to formulate a prospective architecture.

But I ask myself whether our age does not call us, beyond the necessary clearing, to assume a conscious foundation for the present.

Do we need more than a Law, a perfectible consciousness and a path by which to attune ourselves to it? I leave the question open.

I should be curious to hear you on this point: do you think a contemporary spiritual foundation can be autonomous, or must it necessarily be explicitly rooted in the great matrices of the past?

Jérôme Nathanaël:

Our universes of meaning are indeed prior to what we embody in our daily lives. They structure our reading of the world in which we live and determine the overall direction of our choices and our responses to the circumstances of existence. But let us not forget that they are often disturbed by our unconscious psychic life, which intervenes with authority in our inclinations and our daily reactions, as well as by the chain of circumstances that eludes us — to the point that many human beings struggle to be genuinely aligned, in their concrete lives, with their own convictions.

Now our frames of reference are first and foremost collective and inherited: we receive them from the society into which we are born, from our generational heritage and our family environment. It is the inner irruption of an additional demand for meaning — sometimes in adolescence, sometimes at the moment of a profound existential crisis — that pushes us to question and become conscious of them, sometimes to the point of radically calling them into question and changing them, often in order to adopt as a new frame of reference another collective frame of reference. This shows how difficult it is, at the individual level, to measure the real hold of a frame of reference on our lives. It therefore seems to me more fruitful to study them in their civilisational dimension: the great collective narratives, their articulation with one another, their trajectory between the original impulse and their current state — the individual always finding himself somewhere between inherited collective frames of reference and that call of meaning which can arise according to each person’s circumstances, for it is indeed, as you say, “a constitutive tension of human consciousness.” This tension reappears with particular force when the great collective narratives lose their capacity to carry people forward, because the civilisation they helped to found is disintegrating and generating new challenges for the human being, confronted with crises capable of calling into question even his very existence. We are there. I share your sense that we must face the necessity of founding a “coherent spiritual foundation for our time,” capable of avoiding the repetition of the errors that led our humanity to the edge of the abyss. One is forced to acknowledge that it is the West that, since the colonisations and then the industrial revolution, has for the most part shaped the great orientations that determined the global destiny of humanity. This is why I asked myself, at a very young age, the crucial question: how did we pass from the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount to the Shoah and Hiroshima — from those impulses of justice and love that infused our history to societies in which the human being is reified, reduced now to a producer-consumer under tutelage, with no future other than the augmented human wedded to the machine for the wealthiest, and a quasi-slavery nourished by Chinese-style social credit for the rest?

In seeking to answer this question, I studied the emergence of the great spiritual traditions that attempt to respond to the question of meaning. And I observed that it is almost invariably an irruption of the Elsewhere — for want of a better term — in very diverse forms of which we have multiple testimonies in all traditions, that brings down the pre-existing universes of meaning, making of the recipients of this irruption the initiators of a new current of thought and life. From Abraham to Moses, from Jesus to Muhammad, but also in the East, from the Vedic rishis to the Buddha, all the spiritual traditions that have left a legacy still living today — in developments sometimes very far removed from the initial impulse — begin with an event that radically breaks with the ordinary and comes to strike the life of whomever they claim as their founder. Even those whose legacy is less discernible today, such as Zarathustra or Akhenaten, first underwent a supernatural experience that founded their approach. Very few traditions escape this schema: one might perhaps cite Taoism and the shamanic traditions, which moreover remained highly localised — though we have too few elements to be certain.

It seems important to me to underline this aspect, for it brings an element of response to your question: “can a contemporary spiritual foundation be autonomous, or must it necessarily be explicitly rooted in the great matrices of the past?” I do not think it must be explicitly rooted in them. But I do believe that the great matrices of the past have authentic spiritual foundations, rooted in messages that exceed the human capacity for invention — and that, as such, if they have been diverted from spirituality towards instituted religion, as I believe, they still have much to tell us, provided one approaches them through a hermeneutics of freedom.

It is in this sense that the contemporary voices I spoke of in my previous contribution — The Dialogues with the Angel and the Revelation of Arès — seem to me particularly precious. They reach us through the same type of transmission as the great founding irruptions of the past, and have the advantage of integrating and illuminating those inheritances, thereby enabling transformation without rupture or violence. They recognise the value of all men and women of good will, whatever their tradition, and their capacity to contribute to the future. But their fruitfulness immediately raises a demanding question: how are they to be read and put into practice without falling back into the deviations that gradually stifled the authentic sources of the past? What do they tell us, concretely, towards refounding a possible future without losing an authentic direction of meaning? I shall have occasion to attempt to answer these fundamental questions later, for it does not lie at the heart of our present inquiry.

And yet I do not think this approach is incompatible with yours. Every human being bearing a message — even a wholly personal one — that grounds, to borrow your words, “responsibility in the existence of a perfectible spiritual individuality, that inscribes evolution in a Law exceeding our cultural constructions and proposes a concrete path rather than a corpus to be believed,” contributes to this same underlying movement that is rising slowly today as a natural response to the inner impulse towards meaning that is traversing an ever-growing number of people. I think there may exist multiple intellectual formulations of the Path leading towards renewal, all of genuine worth, if they are embodied in a genuine betterment of the human being rather than merely in a system to be adhered to. This is moreover why my approach is not centred on faith and the confrontation of certainties with those who hold to closed positions, but on dialogue with all men and women of goodwill and open mind who adopt as a basis the change of self as a starting point for changing the world — independently of the details of their personal convictions. The future will be possible if we manage to allow this diversity of approaches to flourish in mutual respect and complementarity, and if we transcend our divided mental structures and convictions in order to work together for the common good.

But I would nevertheless like to return to your idea of a Law — in the spiritual sense, naturally — that “would exceed our cultural constructions.” It is precisely because I am not persuaded that human beings are genuinely capable of transcending their cultural constructions of their own accord that I believe it is useful to remain attentive to the voices that come to us from the irruption of the Elsewhere, to help us define a bearing that is free of our mental functioning and capable of embracing a diversity of concrete applications open to the multitude of human talents. Even if they express themselves in human words — and you and I know the limits of language — these voices inhabit those words with a tension and an amplitude of meaning that exceed our human possibilities, as those that preceded them once did, before perhaps being obscured by the weight of the theologies that strayed from them. They contain a breadth of horizon concerning human lives, and a depth of resonance and analogy with the messages that preceded them, that reveal themselves only slowly and through sustained acquaintance. Now it is precisely this inexhaustible richness that distinguishes the Words of Life from all other discourse on meaning. Today as yesterday, we can nourish ourselves by meditating on certain passages of the Torah, the Gospels or the Vedas that have still not exhausted their meaning. No human word, however wise, allows for this.

This is why my approach to spiritual refoundation is illuminated by these new voices, which have engaged me in a genuine inner demand for work towards awakening, in order to translate them into inner life and into responsible engagement in the world. And under this illumination, I also explore the ancient sources in order to attempt to draw out their originary coherence and adapt it to the new perspectives we need. These contemporary voices, if they confirm the inheritances and surpass them, leave us a vast field of responsibility and innovative work for inventing the means, the alliances and the perspectives of their concrete realisation. It is, for example, in my work as a therapist that The Dialogues with the Angel prove to be a genuine enrichment in understanding persons going through existential difficulties. Reflecting on the horizons they illuminate in the articulation between our life-mission and the potentials at our disposal allows me to accompany these persons towards a personal realisation inscribed within the scope of this responsibility towards the future, while leaving them full freedom to choose or not the frame of reference of meaning that resonates with their sensibility or their search. The question of meaning then releases a dynamic that allows them, little by little, to reconnect with the deep spiritual essence that inhabits them, so that it may be freed in daily life and radiate beyond themselves.

There, my dear Alexander: this lengthy development which, I hope, will bring some elements of response to the fundamental questions that our dialogue and your concluding questions raise. Your response — of whose richness and openness I have no doubt — will allow us to go still further, and it is precisely this that I await from this exchange with the keenest interest.

Alexander Djis:

Dear Jérôme, I should like to pause for a moment on a point in your argument that seems to me both central and problematic: this notion of the ‘Elsewhere’ as the privileged source of spiritual foundations.

You recall with force that the great traditions are born of an irruption, a surge that exceeds the human. I do not deny the power of these events, nor the density of the texts they engendered. But I believe it is necessary to interrogate the prism through which we interpret them.

For this ‘Elsewhere that speaks’ is not a universal given. It is a situated form, historically and culturally marked. The Abrahamic traditions do indeed rest upon this structure of descending revelation. But other major paths — Buddhism, or Taoism — do not inscribe themselves within it. They do not receive a word. They discover a structure of reality.

A question thus imposes itself: why accord to the irruption of an ‘Elsewhere’ a superior value as the foundation of the true?

For if this Elsewhere is a unified source, then its expressions should converge. Yet that is not what we observe. We see instead a plurality of messages, often incompatible, almost always situated, and largely anthropocentric — always far too much so, to my mind.

Two hypotheses thus present themselves: either there exist several distinct transcendent sources, which would fragment the unity of reality; or these ‘words from the Elsewhere’ are inevitably filtered, interpreted, reconstructed by situated human structures.

In either case, the consequence is the same: these messages, while having nourished powerful impulses, have also contributed to structuring distinct symbolic communities, sometimes irreconcilable. And here, for me, lies a line of tension we cannot dissolve.

For if one continues to ground spiritual legitimacy on a supposedly non-human origin, one risks simultaneously legitimising contradictory systems, each bearing its own claim to the universal.

Conversely, it seems to me that another criterion must emerge: not where the message comes from, but what it renders possible.

In other words, the value of a universe of meaning resides not in its proclaimed origin, but in its capacity to produce a coherent, lucid and shareable transformation. This is where I locate my displacement.

What I call spiritual individuality is not the reception of an external message, but the emergence of an internal perfectible structure that one can explore, test, refine. Not to believe, but to experiment. Not to receive a Law, but to attune oneself to it.

I do not claim that this path invalidates the inheritances you explore. But it does not rest on the same foundation. And it seems to me important not to seek to fuse these two approaches too swiftly.

For they engage two relationships to the true: one founded on revelation, the other on structured experience.

Perhaps they are complementary, and perhaps they are irreducible.

But it is precisely in this tension that our dialogue takes on its full significance.

For if we return to our initial question — what are our universes of meaning responsible for? — then this divergence is not secondary.

A universe founded on a revealed word tends to structure communities of reference. A universe founded on inner experimentation tends to produce individual trajectories attuned to a common Law. And these two dynamics do not produce the same worlds.

This is why it seems essential to me not to seek to reconcile them too quickly, but on the contrary to expose their implications lucidly.

For at bottom, the question remains wholly open: what kind of human being do we wish to see emerge, and what kind of world do these foundations render possible?

Jérôme Nathanaël:

Dear Alexander, in re-reading your last intervention this morning, I became conscious of having left implicit a point that deserves to be stated clearly, for it conditions everything I have said about the irruption of the Elsewhere — and perhaps even the heart of our apparent divergence.

When I evoke this Elsewhere, I am not speaking exclusively of the Abrahamic traditions, nor of what is commonly called revelation — a term whose exact scope we cannot, in truth, measure, since language is structurally incapable of transmitting these lived experiences: it can at best designate their outer edge. I am speaking of something far wider: the irruption of everything that exceeds our mental and cultural constructions, every event or experience that wrests the human being from his ordinary limit in order to confront him with what surpasses the restricted ego. In this sense, the Vedic rishis do not receive a revelation in the Abrahamic sense — but they are seers, beings who have acceded to a direct perception of that subtle and metaphysical reality which overflows the common human condition. Siddhārtha Gautama, born into Vedic India, sets out from this inheritance and travels a path that leads him too beyond the limit — to that Elsewhere precisely signified by the word Buddha: the Awakened One. And it is because he lives the Vedic texts in deep experience, rather than simply believing them, that he contests their social application and opens a path of freedom that breaks free from them. The distinction between belief and experience that you formulate with precision in your argument, and which I had already posed in previous contributions, thus runs through all traditions without exception — including those you opposed to the revealed structure.

This first point established, your second hypothesis — that these messages are inevitably filtered, interpreted and reconstructed by the human structures that receive them — remains, as I said, irrefutable. And one must go still further in this acknowledgement: all these founding irruptions circulated for a long time in the fragility of oral transmission before being fixed in writing. What do we truly know of what Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, the rishis or the Buddha actually transmitted? In the texts that claim to bear their teachings, an authentic portion coexists with a portion — perhaps the greater — of additions, reworkings and adaptations carried out by those who received them, then by those who received those receptions, in a chain of mediations of which we never perceive more than the final link. It is ultimately the followers who progressively construct the symbolic frames of reference — and it would be vain to hope, between the reception of an impulse in a given culture and era and the evolution that its heirs impose upon it, that any tradition whatsoever has preserved an original unity intact.

From this point, we converge towards a shared conclusion, which we formulate from different positions: what takes precedence, beyond texts, traditions and teachings, is what you call structured experience — the capacity to reach directly, in embodied life, what transmissions can only designate from afar. This is the criterion of the true transformers: Francis of Assisi, Rūmī, the Baal Shem Tov did not distinguish themselves by the purity of the channel they claimed, but by the quality of being they embodied and by the living transformation they rendered possible around them — because they lived the experience of their tradition rather than simply adopting its beliefs. And it is this same criterion of transformative fruitfulness that grounds my confidence in the contemporary voices I evoke — independently of any discussion as to their origin, which remains, in the last analysis, unverifiable.

As for the distinction you draw between a universe founded on revelation and a universe founded on inner experimentation, it is a stimulating one — but I maintain that it does not constitute the decisive cleavage you assign to it. As we have seen, the traditions that ground themselves in illumination or inner maturation have also engendered communities of reference, spiritual hierarchies and their own shadow-zones: Hindu castes, the domination of the Tibetan clergy, Buddhist nationalisms. The true line of fracture lies not in the type of original foundation, but in the dynamic of deviation that sets in almost invariably when a living impulse crystallises into an institution — the moment when the maieutic method gives way to the master who commands; when the community as laboratory of shared living becomes an obedient mass; when knowledge is converted into power and the force of life into the force of death. This drift is political in its essence, whatever the tradition that harbours it. And this is why every conscious symbolic architecture — the one you call for — will escape this destiny only if it integrates from the outset safeguards against its own institutionalisation: no longer the master who dictates what must be believed and done, but the companion who accompanies a genuine spiritual evolution.

All of this brings me to what seems to me the natural closing of our long and fertile dialogue. We have explored at length what our universes of meaning are responsible for — which worlds they render possible or impossible, which virtues they compel us to embody, which blind spots they authorise. But in tracing together the path that leads from the original impulse to its institutional deformations, in recognising that symbolic frames of reference are never more than approximate maps of a territory that each being must traverse for himself, we touch on something essential: responsibility does not only ascend from the frames of reference towards us. It descends also from us towards them. For a symbolic frame of reference, however powerful, never relieves the human being of freedom — nor of its inevitable corollary, the demand. No text has ever prevented a Francis of Assisi from living the Sermon on the Mount in its most exacting radicality. And the absence of any shared frame of reference has never prevented human beings from doing violence to one another in the name of ideological voids equally murderous.

This is why I would like to invert the question that opened our exchange, and reformulate it thus: what symbolic frames of reference are we responsible for? No longer only: what do our universes of meaning make of us? But: what do we make of our universes of meaning? What reading of them do we assume? What portion of them do we genuinely embody in our lives — and what portion do we leave to others to define in our place? This is perhaps the common ground I identify beneath the diversity of all traditions: not a shared doctrinal content, but a transversal demand — become what you are capable of being, and place it at the service of the whole. This injunction has no exclusive origin. It arises in the prophet as in the sage, in the one who receives and in the one who discovers. And it is precisely because it exceeds all the frames of reference that bear it that it can constitute, today, the basis of a symbolic responsibility that we are both called to assume — each from his own path, together in the horizon they share.

With all my friendship,
Jérôme Nathanaël

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A closing note

This dialogue does not close upon an agreement. It stops where the questions remain open — and that is perhaps its most useful truth. What Alexander and I sought to do here was not to demonstrate a thesis, but to show that genuine encounter in difference is possible: to contradict one another without confrontation, to advance without merging, to point together — from distinct paths — towards a shared demand of responsibility and rectitude.

It is this demand that I invite each reader to practise, in his own exchanges, in his own questions, in the way he inhabits the universes of meaning that sustain him. If this dialogue has reached you, if you yourself carry questions about what our symbolic frames of reference are responsible for — and about what we, in turn, are responsible for towards them — I should be glad to explore them with you.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

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The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 22 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Stage 6 — Inner stability
Previous article: Humility full of gratitude

The trunk that stands firm

At the close of the first five stages of this journey, something has gradually risen within us like an inner tree that has slowly found each of its dimensions. Love was first recognised as that infinite energy which sustains the universe and can move through us if we consent to open a passage for it — like a living sap that irrigates the most secret fibres of our being. Discipline then gave it form, its bed and its banks, transforming a generous but diffuse impulse into a directed and fruitful force, capable of acting rightly amid the rough circumstances of daily life. From their slow convergence was born radiant Compassion, that living fruit of inner transmutation, that warmth of one who, having traversed one’s own labyrinth, can now hold another’s hand. Constancy, the fourth quality of the soul, rooted all this in duration, refusing to let that fine edifice collapse at the first gust of wind, and Humility full of gratitude came to lay the nurturing soil, that obscure and discreet depth without which no root can sink far enough to hold in the storm.

But to a tree thus consolidated — roots and sap, form and fruit — there is still lacking what makes its visible unity: the trunk, that central axis which gathers everything together, which channels the life of the root towards the crown and which, alone, allows one to say of this tree that it stands upright. This sixth quality of the soul is inner Stability: that living and motionless point at the very centre of oneself, which does not simply add itself to the preceding qualities but gathers them into a living coherence, conferring upon them a common hearth and a centre of gravity.

The shock of lucidity

Sometimes an unexpected event comes to overturn our existence: a separation, a redundancy, an illness that compels us to stop. It may also be, more simply, the chance encounter with a spiritual teaching or with a being more advanced than ourselves on the path of fulfilment. By dismantling our habits and even our identity, such an event becomes the occasion for a decisive awakening: our personality has been built, in large part, by mimicry. We have acquired it under the influence of our upbringing, our social milieu and the ambient culture, and not through lucid and deliberate maturation. A vertiginous question then opens: if everything I believe to be myself has been shaped from without, who am I truly? From this question, if we have the courage not to flee it, may be born the desire to reach a genuine inner freedom — a freedom that restores in us contact with the most authentic part of ourselves, that singular essence with which we came into the world and which has only ever waited to be recognised.

Through patient self-observation, we gradually learn to know ourselves better. We identify how our functioning took shape — first in childhood, then during the years of learning that led us to take one orientation or another in our life. Little by little, we extricate ourselves from the entanglement of our inner movements and the rigidity of our reactive automatisms. A truly awakened presence to ourselves and to the world then begins to develop. The more this presence is strengthened — through the constancy of effort freely given and the humble sincerity that allows us to foil the many traps of self-delusion — the more that most intimate part we seek to reach reveals itself. This is our deep, essential being, the depositary of the spiritual potentials and singular talents that are ours. The multitude of small selves that were stirring in our inner theatre then begins to quieten. They organise themselves around that part of ourselves which wages the spiritual combat towards self-realisation. A space of stability begins to crystallise, and becomes little by little a reliable refuge where silence and peace may at last settle.

The sanctuary at the heart of the tumult

All around us is the cacophony of modernity — its technological din, the roar of vehicles, the ebb and flow of urban agitation that pours into the avenues at certain hours like a tide. Behind every door, the clamour of quips and proclamations that have invaded what the previous generation called “the set”, and which now colonise even those small screens we carry with us everywhere. And yet, despite all this racket in which our consciousness founders as in a bottomless abyss, there is, at our very depths, a sanctuary of joy, peace and stability. To reach it requires a twofold effort: first, to foil the posturing of our inner characters, as fickle as the draughts that inflame them; and then, obstinately, to realign our bearing towards our will to truly be. Only then, somewhere at our most intimate depth, do we reach that place of encounter with the truest part of ourselves, which is waiting to be inhabited…

For we often forget this. We desert ourselves through weakness or hesitation, through a taste for ease and comfort, through surrender to conformism and fear of what others may say. And yet, despite all this, the small secret voice is still there, waiting to teach us. It speaks to us of our sublime destiny, our true nature. It whispers that we are made for goodness and love, for happiness and sharing. He who each day consents, without faltering, to pay the price of nourishing his inner fire — renouncing the factitious and the useless, embracing the cause of the light — he who has traversed all the valleys to launch himself into the ascent of the mountain: such a one at last gains ever readier access to this essential inner refuge. There he discovers a nourishment that is both sweet and strong, which gradually penetrates even into his body and ceaselessly rekindles his hope of seeing the dawn of splendour rise over the world.

From the ‘i’ of the ego to the ‘I’ of the essence

This inner space of stability, like a motionless yet living point, is the place from which we can truly say “I”. There we renew our bond with what, within us, pre-exists all outward influences. This singular essence makes of each person a unique being: a particular compound of spiritual potentials and living forces, endowed with a consciousness irreducible to any other. Each time we succeed in observing ourselves while continuing to act, we draw closer to this place. This presence to ourselves extracts us from the flux of outer events and inner movements which, ordinarily, carry us away like a cork in a mountain torrent. And each time, this “I” awakens a little more and grows stronger.

This is no longer a matter of our greedy and fearful ego — that ego which gathers the most powerful small selves of the personality, those that have imposed themselves over the years because they were the most efficient and the most agile in securing our material survival and our place in human relations. What is at stake now is the “I” of our true spiritual identity. This “I” lays claim to its sovereignty over our life. It wishes to benefit from the able concurrence of the positive aspects of the personality, in order to fulfil itself and realise its singular work upon this earth. It is this “I” which, by becoming conscious and active once more, will clear the path that leads to this inner refuge. With each effort of presence, it gradually draws out of the shadow all the obstacles with which we have encumbered the way — arising from our fears, our lies, our resentments and our selfishness. For to reach this place of peace and to be able to abide there in lasting peace is also to transcend the illusions and self-fixations that our ego produces. Only then does it become possible to open oneself wholly to the reign of love and joy, and to hope to enter the palace of the king of the universe, of which this modest space is still but an antechamber.

No need for a monastery: ordinary life as a workshop

To extricate oneself from the ambient agitation and keep one’s bearing towards what is essential; to calm the inner turbulence in order to preserve serenity; to unmask our self-deceptions that deprive us of access to our real being — none of this is a path reserved for those who can withdraw into the tranquil atmosphere of a monastery and devote their lives to meditation or prayer. The outer conditions of our life-path have their importance, in so far as they present circumstances more or less conducive, in appearance, to genuine inner work. But let us hold no illusion: the human being finds ways to sleep spiritually just as readily in a monastic cell as in the tumult of city life. The reverse is equally true: he who knows how to keep watch, keeps watch in any place whatsoever… The practice of religious observances, whatever the tradition, or the use of techniques of whatever nature, does not, a priori, bring about any substantial spiritual change. Everything depends on the presence within us of a genuine desire for awakening and deep transformation. Traditions and techniques are tools. They can yield good or poor results depending on how each person uses them. And confusing the instrument with what it makes possible is one of the most tenacious illusions of the spiritual life. Shutting oneself in a monastery to meditate ten hours a day, or separating oneself from the world in any other manner, is not a primary condition for advancing.

The true prerequisites lie elsewhere: to awaken within ourselves the one who observes, and to develop a genuine presence to oneself. It is through this work — and through it alone — that we can emerge from illusions and complacency, and attain an authentic self-knowledge. It is by discerning who we are, how we have been formed and how we truly function that we can undertake this patient journey, which alone allows us to find within ourselves the space of stability where our spiritual dimensions gradually awaken. Retreats, readings and teachings can be precious oases along the way. But they do not replace the walking itself, which takes place wherever we are, in the ordinary fabric of our days.

The patient art of working upon oneself as a masterpiece

There remains the need to carry within us a genuine desire to awaken to our deep being, the desire to reach that space of inner calm where our most intimate voice can resonate. If this desire is present, the path that leads there is open to us right now, in our daily life, which is the best place to begin. It is by casting a lucid eye upon our functioning here and now that we shall learn most about ourselves. And the progress made, being independent of facilitating circumstances, will prove enduringly solid when the trial returns.

This work is marvellous: learning to see ourselves as we truly are, in all sincerity — with our luminous aspects and our shadows, our strengths and our weaknesses, our wounds and our splendours. Then patiently deconstructing some rigid aspect in order to replace it with another, truer one, and so on. It is, in a sense, to work upon oneself as the artist works upon his masterpiece. It demands patience and constancy over time. It is this taste that we must cultivate. With time, what at first seemed a burdensome discipline becomes a joy in itself, an almost secret pleasure in seeing oneself advance, in recognising within oneself nuances and subtleties that were not there the day before. It is by keeping this bearing that we shall succeed little by little in letting go of all those influences that push us towards the useless and the futile. And we shall reach what is essential: to hear the small voice which, in the stable refuge of the inner depths, teaches us how to free our spiritual potentials and activate our human talents in the service of the world.

The virtuous circle of equanimity

To succeed in reaching this space of stability within oneself is to find calm and rest that protect us from the ambient agitation as much as from our own inner turbulence. And it is thus that a more equanimous approach to existence gradually develops. The more familiar the access to this inner refuge becomes, the more it helps us to step back from the events of our daily life. We then approach them with a more even temper, whether they be agreeable or difficult, expected or unforeseen, flattering to our ego or disagreeable to it. Several paths can facilitate this quiet interiority: meditation or relaxation, walking in nature or listening to soothing music, prayer or reflection upon spiritual texts. Whatever means is chosen, the more the path that leads there becomes clearer and easier, the more our capacity to remain connected to ourselves is strengthened — without being quickly unsettled by persons or situations.

This is a virtuous circle, whose beauty lies precisely in the fact that it reinforces itself without our needing to think about it. The more readily we reach this motionless point within ourselves, the more we can be present here and now while observing ourselves in order to know ourselves better. And the more we are present to ourselves, the more access to this space of plenitude becomes simple, frequent and lasting. A new energy — more alive and more subtle — begins to spread through all parts of our being, generated by our patient work upon ourselves. Our relationship to the world is progressively calmed thereby, for negative emotions have less and less hold upon us. We then enter the dimension of awakening and the sacred, where each instant can become at once denser and lighter, more present and freer of the ego, if we are able to advance within it in full consciousness.

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One foundation, a thousand faces

In the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, this foundational stability has received different names and faces depending on language and culture, yet its deep reality is everywhere the same: that inner anchor without which no fruitful spiritual life can stand upright over time.

In Judaism, this quality receives the name of Yesod, the Foundation, the sixth emotional sefirah of the Tree of Life according to Kabbalah. Yesod occupies a singular position on the Tree: it stands on the central axis, just above Malkhut the kingdom, and it is that vertical channel through which all the energies of the preceding sefirot — love, rigour, compassion, victory, splendour — converge into unity before they can take concrete form in life. Without Yesod, the qualities elaborated upstream remain dispersed and cannot be faithfully transmitted to the dimension of action and reign. The Hasidic tradition calls the authentic sage Tzaddik Yesod Olam, “the righteous one, foundation of the world”, drawing on a verse from the Book of Proverbs which designates the upright man as the living pillar upon which creation rests. The Hebrew month associated with this quality is Elul, the month of inner preparation before the High Feasts, during which the work consists precisely in gathering the scattered fragments of oneself and bringing them back to the central axis of the heart. The Sefirat HaOmer, that count of forty-nine days leading from the Exodus to the revelation at Sinai, passes through this sixth week as its penultimate stage — the one where all that has been worked upon must converge into a stable foundation before it can blossom into full realisation.

In the Christian tradition, this quality has taken two complementary forms. The stabilitas of the Benedictine Rule — that vow of stability to place and community which monks profess — is not a geographical attachment but a discipline of the heart: to refuse flight when difficulties arise, to remain where one has been called in order to accomplish there the inner work that only this place and these companions will make possible. Saint Benedict saw in the wandering monk, the gyrovague, the very image of the dispersed soul, incapable of allowing itself to be worked upon in depth by anything whatsoever. Further to the East, in the tradition of the Desert Fathers and then in Byzantine hesychasm, this stability takes the name of hesychia, the silent quietude, that calm inhabited by a vivid attention which Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas place at the heart of all authentic prayer. The Gospel itself offers the founding image of the rock: “the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.”

In Islam, this spiritual stability is expressed through several profoundly complementary terms. Sakina, a word sharing its root with the Hebrew Shekhina, designates that soothing and stabilising presence which descends into the heart of the believer to root him in trust despite trials: the Quran evokes it on several occasions as a precious gift that “descends into hearts” at the very moment when fear and distress threaten to carry the soul away. An-nafs al-mutma’inna, the serene soul mentioned in Surah 89, designates that mature stage of inner development where the believer has moved beyond the commanding soul and the blaming soul to attain profound quietude. Tawakkul, the total trust in God taught by the Sufis, is not resigned passivity but that unshakeable reliance of one who acts fully while knowing that the outcome does not depend on him alone: his heart is no longer agitated because it is anchored beyond the fluctuations of the world.

In Hinduism, inner stability is expressed as sthira, the tranquil firmness which Patanjali, in the Yoga Sutras, makes one of the two essential qualifiers of every right posture: sthira-sukham asanam, “the posture is stable and comfortable.” This definition, which seems to concern only the body, is in reality the precise metaphor for what the yogi’s mind must become: firm without rigidity, settled without heaviness, capable of enduring effort without unnecessary tension. The Bhagavad Gita magnificently develops the figure of the sthitaprajna, one whose wisdom has become stable and who, like the ocean “into which all rivers flow without its being disturbed thereby”, receives the events of existence without being carried away by them. Samatva, equanimity in the face of joy and sorrow, honour and dishonour, completes this figure: this is not indifference but that living balance which enables a just response to each situation because one is no longer a prisoner of one’s automatic reactions.

Buddhism, in all its branches, makes inner stability one of the pillars of its practical path. Shamatha, the pacified quietude, is the first of the two wings of Buddhist meditation, the other being vipassana, the penetrating vision: without the prior stabilisation of the mind, no clear vision is possible, for the agitated consciousness projects its own turbulence onto what it observes. Upekkha, equanimity, is the fourth of the “sublime abodes” (brahmavihara), the one that crowns and stabilises the preceding three — loving-kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy. Tibetan Buddhism gives to this stability the striking image of the mountain, immovable and majestic, around which the clouds of thoughts pass without altering it: not a mountain that resists through hardness, but a mountain that is, simply, and whose very being suffices to hold firm.

Taoism addresses this stability through the image of zhong ding, the stable centring, and through the still deeper image of the hub of the wheel. “Thirty spokes converge upon the hub, but it is the empty centre that makes the wheel useful”, says Lao Tzu in chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching. The sage is he who has found within himself that empty and stable hub around which all may turn without carrying him away; and it is from this paradoxical centre — motionless because empty — that right action can arise at the precise moment it is required, in the art of wu wei already evoked at the stage of discipline. Zhuangzi illustrates this quality through the figure of the sage who “sits in forgetting”, zuowang, and whose inner stability is not a fixation of the will but a dissolution of the resistances that were preventing deep nature from expressing itself.

All these traditions converge upon a single deep conviction: inner stability is not the immobility of the dead, but the steadfastness of the living being who has found his axis. It does not oppose movement — it makes movement possible and right, as the hub makes the rotation of the wheel possible, as the root makes the unfolding of the branches possible. Without it, all the other spiritual qualities we have cultivated risk remaining scattered fragments that the first gust of wind will carry away; with it, these fragments gather into a unified work that can at last begin to radiate.

A few markers for the path

These reflections on inner stability are not intended to transform us into rigid and imperturbable figures, indifferent to the world and its calls. They are intended to help us recognise and cultivate that point of anchorage within us from which life can be fully inhabited without carrying us away — where we can at last act from what we truly are, rather than from what circumstances make of us. If the Love of the first stage was the sap, the Discipline of the second the form, the Compassion of the third the fruit, the Constancy of the fourth the root, and the Humility of the fifth the soil, Inner Stability is the trunk: that living axis which gathers all, and without which the tree cannot stand upright in the storm.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Take a moment of calm and interiority. Let each of these questions descend within you without seeking an immediate answer. What rises with a slight resistance is often the most precious thing to hear.

On the reality of my inner anchorage
Is there within me an inner place of peace to which I know how to return, or am I almost always carried away by the flux of events and emotions? When I stop, do I find silence within myself, or only the background noise of my preoccupations? Is there a moment in the day, however brief, when I can say that I truly inhabit the centre of myself?

On the quality of my attachments
Are the bonds I maintain with the beings and commitments that matter in my life rooted in genuine love, or rather in need, in the fear of solitude, or in the search for validation? Am I capable of committing fully to a relationship while preserving both my own dignity and that of the other, or do I efface myself in the other, or absorb him into myself?

On my relationship to vulnerability
Am I capable of letting myself be deeply touched by a person or a cause, or have I learned to no longer allow myself to be reached for fear of being wounded? Have my old wounds closed me to new genuine bonds, or have I known how to let them teach me something without allowing them to become a fortress?

On my faithfulness to deep commitments
When I commit to something that truly matters, how long do I hold before allowing myself to be turned aside? Does my commitment withstand the arid phases when what I have undertaken no longer brings me any immediate return? Do I have long-standing commitments that have profoundly shaped me, or is my life made up of short impulses and repeated withdrawals?

On dignity in the bond
Do my attachments — whether affective, professional or spiritual — make me freer and more fully myself, or do they diminish me, efface me, cause me to renounce what constitutes me? And on my part, do I sometimes crush those to whom I am bound, by taking up too much space or by demanding too much of them? The simple test is this: does this bond make me grow? Does it make the other grow?

2. A few gestures for the week

Establishing a daily fixed point
Choose this week a time and a place, however modest, and commit to returning there each day at the same hour for a few minutes of silence, prayer, spiritual reading or simply conscious presence to yourself. The faithfulness to this appointment — more than its duration — builds within you the trunk of which we have spoken. Observe, at the end of the week, what this simple repeated gesture has deposited in you.

Deepening an existing bond
Choose a person you love — a spouse, a child, a parent, a close friend — and this week devote to them a time of genuine quality, free of screens and pressing concerns, in simple attentive presence. Not a utilitarian time for settling matters, but a free time simply to be together. The stability of a bond is nourished less by grand declarations than by these small regular intervals when we consent to stop together.

Examining an attachment
Identify in your life a relationship, a habit or a commitment where you sense that something is not quite right: perhaps you are too invested, perhaps not enough, perhaps through dependency rather than genuine love. Without seeking to change anything immediately, simply take the time to observe honestly the true nature of this attachment. This benevolent lucidity is itself already a work of stabilisation.

Holding firm in a difficulty
Identify a current situation where it would be easy and tempting to give up — a project that is stalling, a relationship that demands effort, a personal discipline that is faltering. Without needless heroism, choose to remain faithful to it for one day, one week more, simply to observe what this perseverance changes in you. Stability is built in these small silent victories over the temptation of flight.

Honouring the strength of another
Tell someone close to you, in simple and precise words, which quality in them nourishes you and helps you to stand firm. This explicit recognition strengthens the bond and bears witness to the fact that inner stability is never a purely solitary affair: we are also held upright by others, and this deserves to be named.

3. Celebrating this stage

At the end of these seven days — or the time you will have devoted to this stage — take a moment to identify one precise instant when you felt this inner stability making a difference: a moment when, instead of being carried away by an emotion, a provocation or a difficult circumstance, you were able to hold your bearing and respond from your centre rather than from your periphery. Note it in a journal, or say it aloud. For stability that is not recognised becomes confused with inertia, and what we celebrate with due attention we invite to unfold further and more deeply into our life.

Next week we shall arrive at the seventh and final stage of this journey — the one where all the qualities previously worked upon at last fully incarnate in a life that stands upright of itself: spiritual sovereignty, that inner reign where the being who has recovered his axis lives at the height of what he came to be, and can begin to radiate, discreetly, the light whose source he has sought for so long.

A good journey to all.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article: Stage 6 - Spiritual Sovereignty

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The Eternal Present · Words of Life · 22 min
To read the great spiritual words as living sources.

2,800 years ago, in Judea, a smallstock breeder named Amos spoke out against the mighty of his time. This text explores why his words have not aged a single day. The Book of Amos appears in the Hebrew Bible among the Twelve Minor Prophets — read the full text in Hebrew and English.

Hearing or pretending to sleep

Before the text, there is the cry.

Before the word, there is the animal — the lion in the steppe of Teqoa, whose roar crosses the night and silences the crickets. Amos begins there: not in the palaces of thought, not in the corridors of the Temple, but in the body of a man who hears something that others pretend not to hear.

Aryéh sha’ag mi lo yira — “the lion has roared, who would not tremble?” (Amos 3:8). The verb yaré conveys both dread and reverence. To tremble before the lion is to acknowledge a reality that exceeds our will to believe in it or not. The lion does not ask for our consent.

This is the first hermeneutic gesture of the book of Amos: there is a reality that roars, and we must choose between hearing it and pretending to sleep.

Our civilisation is pretending to sleep.

It sleeps on its ivory divans, as in the eighth century before the common era, in Samaria and Jerusalem, whilst the lion circles the camp. It produces alarming reports which it publishes and ignores in the same breath. It holds summits where commitments are made not to exceed thresholds that are then exceeded. It passes laws that legitimise the very exploitation they claim to forbid. It celebrates its democratic, economic, religious, intellectual liturgies with a fervour inversely proportional to their actual efficacy.

This is what Amos teaches us to read. Not as an ancient text with a few contemporary applications, but as a hermeneutic lens, a way of seeing, which deciphers our world with an almost unbearable precision.

Note on transcription: Hebrew terms follow a simplified phonetic transcription, close to that used in prayer books, rather than the academic SBL transliteration.

The man who had not asked to speak

‘The words of Amos, among the nokedim of Teqoa, which he received in vision concerning Israel, in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash king of Israel — two years before the earthquake’ (Amos 1:1).

The opening of the book is already a programme. The word noked, often translated as ‘shepherd’, refers more precisely to a smallstock breeder, perhaps also a dresser of sycamores (7:14: bolés shiqmim), one who incises wild figs to hasten their ripening. A man of manual labour, of dry earth, of the Judaean steppe. Teqoa lies 16 kilometres south of Jerusalem, at the edge of the desert, a frontier between the cultivated world and the void.

And then the stunning formula, unique in the entire prophetic corpus: lo-navi anokhi vélo-ben-navi anokhi — ‘I am not a prophet, and I am not a son of a prophet’ (Amos 7:14). He repudiates the function, the title, the membership of any prophetic school. Amos is not a professional prophet. He is someone whom that Word has seized despite himself.

The verb he uses to describe his vocation is laqakh, ‘to take, to seize’: vayyiqakhéni YHWH mé’akhar hatsso’n — ‘YHWH (the unpronounceable Name of God) took me from behind the flock’ (Amos 7:15). Not a mystical calling in the sanctuary, not a theophany in the Temple. A hand that shoves you from behind, in the midst of the animals, on an ordinary morning. And yet Amos will stand up and speak loud and clear.

But who speaks today about the state of the world? Who dares, in the wake of Amos, to name the collapse for what it truly is?

We live within a paradox that the sociologist Ulrich Beck had called Risikogesellschaft, the risk society, in which dangers are known, measured, published, and yet politically inassimilable. IPCC reports accumulate. Studies on inequality multiply. Demographers, epidemiologists, collapse theorists, humanist thinkers — all the nokedim of our time — cry out in the wilderness. And the wilderness responds: interesting, thank you, let us move on to the next item on the agenda.

For the legitimacy of speech, in our world, belongs to institutional experts, to mandated experts, to experts accredited by the very institutions that are themselves stakeholders in the system it is their task to critique. The man from Teqoa would not have had access to the microphone. He would not have had a doctorate. He would not have had an affiliation. His word would have been disqualified before it could be heard.

And yet, and this is the paradox the book of Amos poses with a quiet rigour, it is precisely the one who does not belong to the system who can see it whole. The noked of Teqoa has no interest to protect. He has no career to manage. He has no partners to avoid offending. His word is freely given because it was given to him despite himself.

This is the first hermeneutic lesson: in a world where every critical word is immediately absorbed, recycled, neutralised by the institution, the prophetic question is that of the provenance of the voice. From where does one speak? For whom? At what risk?

Amaziah, the priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel, says to Amos: lékh bérakha-lékha él-érets Yéhouda vé’ékhol-sham lékhem outsham titnavé — ‘go, flee to the land of Judah, eat your bread there and prophesy there’ (Amos 7:12). The proposal seems reasonable: go and speak elsewhere. But it means in reality: render your word harmless by removing it to a place where it will not trouble those who hold power.

Amos refuses. He stays. He speaks where it hurts, before those who have an interest in not listening. Prophetic speech is always localised. It does not address humanity in general from a view from nowhere. It addresses these people, in this sanctuary, in the name of these specific victims, in such circumstances. It is dangerous precisely because it names reality, conferring upon it a truth that no one can any longer deny.

Law without justice — mishpat and tsedaqah

Véyigal kamayim mishpat outsdaqa kénahal étan — ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).

This verse is probably the most cited in the book. But its force is often flattened in translation. Two Hebrew terms carry here the full weight of a civilisation:

Mishpat — law, the juridical order, the verdict rendered according to established rules. This is what we call today the rule of law, the legal framework — formal legality in all its cold precision.

Tsédaqah — justice, but in the sense of a relational rectitude, a rightness in the bonds between beings. Tsédaqah is not abstract; it is measured in the concrete quality of relations between the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, the landowners and the day labourers.

The image is that of the nahal étan — the ‘perennial stream’, as opposed to the wadis that flow in winter and dry up in summer. What Amos asks for is a justice that is not seasonal, a justice that is embodied each day and for each person.

We live in societies endowed with extensive rights on paper and structural injustices in practice. Our constitutions guarantee equality. Our legal codes protect workers. Our charters proclaim dignity. And meanwhile, tax havens legally shelter fortunes built illegally. Multinationals observe the letter of tax law whilst circumventing its spirit. Trade agreements protect investors and expose populations. The instruments of formal democracy — the vote, the parliament, procedure — are scrupulously observed so as to produce policies that serve the interests of those who finance the parties.

This is the distinction Amos drew three millennia before contemporary jurists: mishpat without tsédaqah — law without justice — is a refined form of barbarism. It is barbarism with good manners. It is violence with a legal signature.

The current triumph of what one might call mishpat without tsédaqah is the true face of the civilisational regression we are living through. It does not resemble barbarism as our imagination represents it — hordes invading cities, flames and destruction. It resembles a properly conducted tribunal, a properly adopted law, a properly signed contract, at the conclusion of which a human being is ground down with all due process.

This barbarism wears a suit. It has judges and lawyers.

What the prophet Amos opposes to this legal barbarism is not a reform of mishpat, but the nahal étan of tsédaqah, that ‘ever-flowing stream’, that force which overflows the channels of formal law because it springs from a deeper source.

Tsédaqah in Hebrew thought is not an abstract value inscribed in a founding text that one contemplates from a respectful distance. It is an embodied practice, oriented towards the la’anayim shé’érit Yosséf — literally ‘the afflicted humble ones, the remnant of Joseph’ (cf. Amos 2:7; 5:15), a permanent attentiveness to the lot of the voiceless. The term shé’érit designates a remnant, what remains after a destructive passage — the grains forgotten after the harvest, the survivors after a catastrophe. Those who matter in the eyes of the prophet are precisely those whom history has left behind: the human debris of the system.

The stream that never runs dry is the attention that never grows weary. Justice is not a state to be attained; it is a practice to be sustained, a current to be kept flowing against the natural tendency of water to stagnate in the fertile valleys.

The ivory divans — an anatomy of indifference

Hoy hashaanannim beTsiyon véhabotkhim béhar Shomron — ‘Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, secure on the mountain of Samaria’ (Amos 6:1). The central word is sha’anan — variously translated as ‘insouciance’, ‘quietude’, ‘tranquillity’. But this Hebrew term carries a darker dimension: it is the security of the replete, the indifference of the satiated, the peace of one whose full stomach prevents him from hearing the cry of his neighbour’s empty one.

The portrait that follows is of clinical precision: they lie on mitot shén — ‘beds of ivory’ — stretched upon their couches, they eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall (agalim mitok marbéq), they improvise on their musical instruments, they drink wine by the bowlful (bemizreqé yayin), they anoint themselves with the finest oils (réshit shemanim yimshakhou).

And the verdict falls like an axe: vélo nekhalou al-shévèr Yosséf — ‘and they are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph’ (Amos 6:6).

It is not wealth that is condemned. It is the anaesthesia and indifference of the privileged towards the shé’érit — the left-behind, those whom the system has rendered invisible.

There is something hallucinatory in the precision with which this text describes our age.

We live in societies where the upper and upper-middle classes of wealthy nations have reached a level of comfort, leisure, aesthetic and gastronomic consumption without precedent in human history — at the very moment when the indicators of the world’s condition (biodiversity, climatic stability, social cohesion, democratic health, international justice, the return of wars) are collapsing collectively.

It is not that these social classes are unaware of it. They know. They read serious newspapers. They watch documentaries. They express outrage on social media with the appropriate hashtags. And then they have their organic meal delivered in plastic packaging by a courier on a zero-hours contract, whilst the algorithm selects for them the next series to watch on their screens costing several thousand pounds.

The contemporary sha’anan, this comfortable indifference, is not ignorance — it is something more subtle and graver: it is the capacity to hold together the knowledge of disaster and the impermeability to that knowledge. To know that the world is burning and to continue booking one’s holidays. To know the figures on extreme poverty and to find it normal that financial markets set new records every day.

The British-born philosopher Timothy Morton coined the concept of hyperobject to designate those realities so massive and so diffuse — world poverty, the biodiversity crisis, all the modern crises — that the human brain can grasp them only fragmentarily, and therefore tends to treat them as if they did not quite exist. This is the neuroscientific version of sha’anan.

But Amos does not allow us this excuse. He says that the problem is not cognitive — it is ethical. It is not that the elites of Samaria fail to see the ruin of Joseph. It is that they prefer not to see it because seeing would cost them something.

Amos’s diatribe against the ivory divans is structured as a gesture of interruption. He enters the bubble of comfort, he names precisely each element of the décor — the beds, the meat, the music, the wine, the oil — and then he turns the gaze towards what is absent: shévèr Yosséf — ‘the ruin of Joseph’.

The shévèr — a term used elsewhere in the Bible for the fracture of a bone or the breaking of a ship — here designates the social rupture, the collapse of the structures that had held a community together. The ruin of Joseph: the small peasants dispossessed of their lands (Amos 2:6–7: sold for a pair of sandals), the exploited day labourers, the widows who have no one to plead their case at the city gate — the list is too long to name them all. Prophecy brings no programmatic solution. It does something more radical: it unites within the same field of vision the ivory divans and the ruin of Joseph. It makes it impossible not to see both together. And this co-presence is unbearable.

This may be the most essential function of a prophetic hermeneutic act today: before proposing any reforms, to force a simultaneous vision — to place side by side what society organises itself to keep separate, and to let that confrontation work upon us in the depths of our being.

Piety as alibi — worship without conversion

Sanéti ma’asti khaguékhem vélo ariah béatsérotékhem — ‘I hate, I despise your feasts, and I cannot bear your solemn assemblies’ (Amos 5:21).

This is one of the most scandalous texts in the entire Hebrew Bible. Sanéti — I hate — is a strong term, unqualified. And it is YHWH himself who speaks, in the first person, concerning his own feasts, his own sacrifices, the music offered in his own honour.

Ki im-yigal kamayim mishpat — ‘but let justice roll down like waters’ (5:24). The adversative conjunction Ki im is here fundamental: it opposes worship without justice to justice without worship, and decides unhesitatingly in favour of the latter.

Amos is not an iconoclast. He does not say that worship is bad in itself. He says that worship detached from the practice of justice becomes its own contrary: a way of purchasing a clear conscience for next to nothing, of settling one’s account before G-d without settling one’s account before one’s neighbour.

Two readings may be made of this passage, one intra-religious and the other secular, and they are superimposed upon one another.

The intra-religious reading is of burning relevance: to what extent do contemporary religious institutions — churches, mosques, synagogues, Buddhist temples — produce moral comfort rather than ethical conversion? To what extent is liturgical fervour inversely proportional to engagement with humanist, social, political, ecological questions? Amos’s diagnosis strikes the religious where they believe themselves most secure: in their very piety.

But the secular reading is equally pertinent. Our age has its own substitute liturgies: international summits, conferences on sustainable development, prize-giving ceremonies for philanthropists, the grand speeches of world leaders on solidarity. These gatherings have the structure of worship — the sacred venue (Davos, the UN General Assembly), the accredited officiants, the ritual formulae, the music (here: applause). And this worship produces exactly what the worship at Bethel, which Amos condemned, produced: the satisfaction of having performed the required gestures, without having changed anything in reality.

Sanéti ma’asti khaguékhem — I hate your forums, your COPs, your G7 summits. Not because the questions are absent from them, but because they serve to neutralise those questions. The problem is not gathering there. The problem is leaving relieved.

What Amos asks for is not the abolition of worship but its verification — the question posed at the entrance to the sanctuary: does my life outside this place correspond to what I am about to celebrate within?

The Hebrew prophet is not a moralist who proposes rules. He is a tester of coherence — one who measures the gap between discourse and practice, between proclamation and reality, between what one claims to be and what one actually brings into being.

The prophetic question posed to our age is this: what is the gap between what we proclaim ourselves to be — democratic, equal, committed to solidarity, mindful of the environment — and what our collective practices actually do to the world?

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The illusory hope that excuses inaction

Hoy hamit’avim ét-yom YHWH lama-zé lakhem yom YHWH hou-khoshékh vélo-or — ‘Woe to those who desire the Day of YHWH! What will this Day of YHWH mean for you? It will be darkness, and not light’ (Amos 5:18).

The Yom YHWH, the Day of G-d, was in the popular imagination of Israel the great moment of national deliverance, the day when YHWH would intervene to save his people and crush their enemies. A triumphalist, eschatological imagination in the sense of a guaranteed happy ending for one’s own.

Amos overturns this expectation. Ka’ashèr yanus ish mipné ha’ari oufga’o hadov — that day will be ‘as if a man fled from a lion and met a bear’ (Amos 5:19). The catastrophe moves but does not disappear. One escapes one predator only to encounter another. On that day, the man who goes into his house and leans his hand against the wall will be bitten by a snake.

Deliverance does not come automatically to those who believe it their due.

Our age is haunted by various forms of this ill-founded expectation of a providential rescue.

There is the technological expectation: geo-engineering will save us, nuclear fusion will save us, artificial intelligence will save us, renewable energy deployed at scale will save us — without requiring any change in the foundations of a way of life that produces the disaster. One flees the lion of climate change by running towards the bear of digital hyperactivism.

There is the political expectation: a great leader, a great election night, a great reform — something from outside that comes to resolve what one lacks the will to resolve from within. This secular messianic expectation is the dominant political pathology of our time, oscillating between hope in a providential saviour and cynical despair when the saviour proves to be made of clay as well — which is always the case.

There is the properly religious expectation: the return of the Messiah, the Parousia, the redemptive Apocalypse — eschatologies which, in their degraded forms, dispense with engagement in present history since everything will in any case be transfigured by divine intervention.

In the face of all these illusions, Amos poses the same question: lama-zé lakhem — ‘what will it mean for you?’ What use is hope that does not pass through conversion, through turning, through what the Hebrew prophetic tradition calls shûv — to return, to change direction, in individual life as in collective life?

For Amos is not a prophet of despair. But he is a prophet of conditional hope — and that hope has nothing to do with an individual salvation deferred in the world to come. It concerns the world, here, now: the real transformation of relations between human beings and with the earth they inhabit. In this sense, it joins all the great hopes, secular as well as religious, that wager on the possibility of a more just world.

But the condition is demanding. It is not meritocratic — Amos does not say that the good shall be saved, nor that human efforts suffice to guarantee anything. He says something more radical and more disturbing: without real turning, without shûv — that turning which engages the body, the will and collective practices — the hope of a better world is merely an empty word, a comfortable expectation that relieves one of the need to act and ends by serving the status quo.

Dirshou oti vikhyou — ‘seek me and you shall live’ (Amos 5:4). The verb darash — to seek, to require, to consult — is not a verb of mystical contemplation. Nor is it a verb of reward. It is the verb of active movement, of investigation, of permanent questioning — an orientation, not a guarantee. Prophetic hope is a hope that rises early in the morning and begins to work towards building another world, without guaranteed results, without certainty of seeing its fruit.

The earth that remembers — an eco-prophetic dimension

In the background of the book, the adamah, the earth — whose intimate bond with the human adam drawn from it Genesis recounts — is a silent but omnipresent character. Amos 4:6–11 describes a cascade of natural catastrophes: famine (niqyon shinayim — ‘cleanness of teeth’, that is, teeth that have nothing to chew), drought (végam anokhi mana’ti mikkhem ét-haguéshem — ‘And I too have withheld the rain from you’), mildew and blight that ravage the harvests, locusts, pestilence, epidemics.

These catastrophes are presented not as arbitrary divine punishments but as responses of the earth to the violence of human relations. It suffers first from what human beings inflict upon one another. There is an ontological solidarity linking social justice among the adam to the health of the adamah.

The formula that recurs like a refrain in the enumeration of catastrophes is vélo-shavtem élay — ‘and you have not returned to Me’ (Amos 4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). Ecological catastrophe is an invitation to shûv, to turning. But the invitation is refused — five times.

The contemporary ecological crisis is irreducible to a technical question. At its foundations, it is an ethical and anthropological question.

What the earth sciences have been telling us for several decades converges, with troubling precision, with what Hebrew prophecy has been saying for three millennia: there is a deep connection between the way human beings treat one another and the way they treat the earth. Societies that reduce human beings to extractable resources treat ecosystems in the same fashion. This is not a coincidence; it is the same logic operating at different levels of reality.

The economist Jason Hickel and others have shown that the ecological crisis is structurally linked to the global economic system, which is itself structurally linked to global inequalities. What is politely called the ‘environmental crisis’ is in reality the shévèr — the fracture — of a relationship: between human beings, and between human beings and their milieu.

And as in Amos 4, the alarm signals multiply — pandemics, droughts, floods, collapses of biodiversity — and the collective response bears a terrible resemblance to vélo-shavtem élay: we have not changed direction.

What is remarkable in Amos’s thought is that the adamah is not merely an object of human solicitude. She is a subject — a reality that reacts, that responds, that bears the memory of the acts accomplished within her.

This intuition, which the indigenous thought of many cultures has maintained and which Western thought has systematically effaced, now stands at the heart of the new ecological ontologies (Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, the new materialism school) and of the theologies and spiritualities of creation (Laudato Si’, Latin American theologies of the Earth).

The hermeneutic question this text poses for today is radical: what happens when one takes seriously the idea that the earth speaks — not metaphorically but as a subject of right, as an entity to which we are answerable? To integrate this perspective would transform the whole of our legal, economic, and political frameworks.

And yet...

We have built remarkable architectures for not trembling. We have psychologists who help us manage our eco-anxiety — that is to say, to live with the anguish of catastrophe without modifying its causes. We have economists who explain to us that green growth is possible — that is to say, that we can go on consuming more whilst destroying less. We have theologians who assure us that G-d will not allow humanity to disappear — that is to say, that we can act as though someone else were going to deal with the problem.

These are our ivory divans. These are our rites of Bethel. These are our yom YHWH from which we hope for salvation without having had to change.

Sanéti ma’asti — says the Voice. I hate your solutions that resolve nothing. I despise your agreements that commit no one. I cannot bear your conferences where you congratulate one another for having pronounced the right words.

This is what I ask of you: véyigal kamayim mishpat — let justice roll down like waters.

Not a trickle of water administered by committees of experts. Not a rivulet channelled through compliance procedures. A nahal étan — a stream that never runs dry — that is to say, a demand for justice that knows no dead season, that does not suspend its course during elections, that does not pause during economic crises, that does not run dry when the lobbies have drunk their fill.

A demand for justice reborn in each individual movement towards greater consideration for the other, in each daily effort at self-betterment, in each group that begins to embody the first fruits of a new world.

For one must hear also what Amos does not say. He does not say that we are condemned.

The book of Amos ends, after all, with a promise — Véshavti ét-shévout ami Yisraél — ‘I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel’ (Amos 9:14). The vine shall be planted, the wine shall be drunk, the gardens shall be made and their fruits eaten. The final image is that of the adamah reconciled with those who dwell within her.

But between the now and that future, there is one word, just one, on which everything hinges: shûv. To return. To change direction. Not a surface reform, not an optimisation of the existing system, but a turning — what all spiritual traditions name in their own fashion: the Greek metanoia, the Hebrew teshuvah, conversion in its most radical sense — that change of life which engages the body, the will, the practices, the concrete choices of every day.

Dirshou oti vikhyou — seek me and you shall live.

Barbarism is not our destiny. It is our default choice when we relinquish the act of choosing otherwise. And prophecy, in its most precise, most faithful, most Hebraic sense, is not the prediction of the inevitable. It is the name of the Voice that says: it is still possible not to go where you are going.

The lion has roared.

To respond is to begin, here and now.

Reading to be transformed

This way of reading — beginning with the Hebrew text, turning towards today, returning to the text enriched, turning back towards the present transformed — is an existential posture as much as a method. It refuses two symmetrical temptations: fundamentalism, which maps the ancient text onto the present without mediation and crushes the complexity of the real; and complacent projection, which seeks in the prophets sympathetic forerunners of our current preoccupations without allowing the text to disturb our certainties and question us in any depth.

This is, ultimately, the wager of all serious hermeneutics: that understanding is not a neutral act, that reading transforms the reader, and that the transformed reader can transform what he reads — that is to say, the world in which he reads.

Aryéh sha’ag. The lion has roared.

The question that now remains is whether we shall prophesy.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

What does this text make audible for you today? Leave a sentence, a resonance, a disagreement, or a glimpse of light in the comments, so that the word may continue to circulate.

And if you wish to share your reading of a spiritual word, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 6 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

I am
of all departures
of all wanderings
everywhere I have known cold
hunger and sorrow
but joy too
immense and full
ember of the infinite I was
beneath the stars

I am the child of trees
and mountains
birdsongs
flutter through my dreams
I know no boundary
I eat the bread of springs
the moon is my inn

I am the Hebrew
radical rupture
the wound of heaven
has bled upon me
its gold and its vertigo
I knock unceasingly
at the door of mysteries
I shall sing tomorrow
Thy Name
in Jerusalem

I am the defiant one
slave they would make me
the thieves of the earth
who beat and kill
since the dawn of time
the number of their iron cage
traced upon my arm
from my very first breath
I burned it mingled
into my ashes
and my blood
never to forget
never to forget

I belong to no law
that tears Life
into tawdry fair-day scraps
for stray dogs
I am woven of Life
the immense Life
that nothing can confine
the bread of free Life
shared in love
Thy Word alone is my viaticum
O Father
Thou who dwellest within me
as within Thine infinities!

I am the poor Sufi
all but delirious
from having turned so long
and I turn and I turn
new axis of the world
my foot in the earth
my hand hooked to heaven
and the Sap flows through me
I am a gilded reliquary
wherein the Eternal dwells

I am the brother of Yechou
I overturn the merchants
of every temple
they nailed him with their dogmas
dragged his cross like a banner
to mark their conquests
but Life is stronger
than death and falsehood

I am the man
of the new world
I glimpse it far away
over there
on the bluish horizon
the tumult and the tears have ceased
human beings are no longer
divided competing
they have laid in common
their talents of light
their possibilities of love
all the sublime of their being

Each one knows his rightful path
none diminishes the other beneath his rule
the entire universe is in jubilation
for the children of Adam speak once more to G‑d
in the cool of the evening

Adochem hou haElokim !°
Adochem hou haElokim !
Adochem hou haElokim !    

Jérôme Nathanaël - 16 mars 2019

° יְהוָה הוּא הָֽאֱלֹהִים - Adochem hou haElokim - “The Eternal is G‑d”, Deut. 4,39

Note: this poem was originally written in French. The translation is my own.

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© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 22 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Stage 5 — Humility full of gratitude
Previous article: The victory of Constancy

The fifth step of the temple

At the end of the first four stages of this journey, something has gradually been built within us. Love was first recognised as the fundamental energy that upholds the universe and can pass through us if we consent to open a way for it. Discipline then gave it its form and its channel, transforming generous but diffuse impulses into a purposeful force, capable of acting amid the sometimes rough circumstances of daily life. From their convergence was born radiant compassion, that living fruit of inner transmutation, the warmth of the one who draws from the labyrinth he has traversed the capacity to hold another’s hand. And constancy, the fourth quality of the soul, rooted all this over time, refusing to let this fine edifice collapse at the first squall.

Yet all these qualities, precious though they are, carry within them a risk that one barely senses, and which grows in silence: that of spiritual pride, that refined form of complacency which steals into the one who is progressing and begins to revel in its own progress. It is precisely this peril that the fifth quality of the soul comes to ward off, the most discreet and perhaps the most decisive of all: humility full of gratitude. It is not one virtue among others; it is, in a sense, the guardian of all the others, that without which love turns into possession, discipline into tyranny, compassion into condescendance and constancy into obstinacy.

Humility is not self-effacement

Before anything else, it is necessary to dispel a misunderstanding deeply rooted in our culture, which confuses humility with self-deprecation, lack of self-worth, or worse still, that servile self-abnegation which inclines one to accept the unacceptable for fear of displeasing. This confusion is not insignificant: it has caused immense damage in the history of spiritual traditions, making humility a suspect virtue in the eyes of all those who, rightly, refuse the effacement of their dignity.

True humility does not demean: it places things rightly. It consists in seeing things as they are, beginning with oneself: neither greater nor smaller than one truly is. The man who knows himself with lucidity, who can face his qualities squarely without taking pride in them and his shortcomings without condemning himself for them, who honestly recognises his gifts while knowing that he did not manufacture them entirely by himself but received and developed them, that man is already practising authentic humility. He has no need to diminish himself before others, for he knows that displayed smallness is often another form of pride, more subtle and more difficult to unmask.

Humility, thus understood, is a strength and not a weakness. The man who is humble can receive criticism without collapsing, receive a compliment without becoming intoxicated by it, acknowledge his errors without losing his dignity, and advance on his path without needing the whole world to confirm at every step that he is moving in the right direction. He is no longer dependent on the gaze of others in order to stand upright: it is in this that humility is one of the most central conditions of inner sovereignty.

The empty cup and the open sky

The traditions of wisdom teach us, through a striking image, that one cannot fill a cup that is already full. So long as we are encumbered by our certainties, our prejudices about ourselves and about the world, our strategies of defence and our ambitions of the ego, there is simply no longer any room for anything new to enter us. Life, in its inexhaustible generosity, continues to knock at the door, but the room is so cluttered that it can no longer even cross the threshold. This is precisely what humility does: it clears the room, not in order to leave it empty, but so that it may be filled with what surpasses our ordinary capacity to receive.

This metaphor goes beyond simple psychological common sense: it touches the very structure of spiritual life. The great mystics of all traditions have described humility as the primary condition of union with the Infinite. One does not join what is greater than oneself by clinging to what one is, but by consenting, with trust and without fear, to be passed through and transformed. This consent, which is nothing other than deep humility, is the keystone of every real transcendence. It is not a question of denying oneself, but of surpassing oneself, not of effacing oneself but of opening so widely that one begins to glimpse the immensity of what encompasses us, and to recognise in it our true dwelling place, knowing that what one may receive from it grows with every act of authentic humility.

Humility and self-knowledge

One is not born humble: one becomes so, at the end of a patient labour upon oneself which first requires a particular quality of gaze, a gaze free from indulgent complacency and condemning severity, upon all that lives within us. The man who observes himself without bias, who accepts seeing not only his brighter qualities but also his shadowed regions, his less honourable motives, his skilful compensations, his flights disguised as commitments, begins to gain access to that inner sobriety which is the natural soil of humility.

This self-knowledge is not a melancholy complacency in one’s defects: on the contrary, it is liberating. For so long as we are ignorant of our real mechanisms, we are their prisoners without knowing it, perpetually manipulated by forces we do not see. The discipline acquired at the second stage of this journey taught us to observe our inner functioning with attentive presence, and that observation is precisely what makes humility possible: one cannot bow before the truth of oneself unless one consents to look at it.

This lucidity concerning oneself opens a second door, just as important: the capacity to see the other as he is, and not as a reflection of our own projections. The man who has not worked at this knowledge of himself constantly tends to read the behaviour of others through the prism of his own wounds and his own expectations, deforming the reality of the other for the benefit of an imaginary character whom he takes for real. Humility, by helping us to step out of ourselves, restores the other to us as he is: infinitely more complex, more surprising, more worthy of consideration than our ego, concerned only with its own survival, had led us to believe.

Humility is active, not passive

One of the most tenacious misunderstandings surrounding humility lies in the image of passivity it sometimes evokes. It is readily imagined as a disposition to efface oneself: to occupy as little space as possible, to keep silent about what one would be right to say, to bend without resisting — a virtue of the shadows, agreeable and without roughness. This is a fundamental error. True humility is one of the most dynamic strengths there is: it includes within itself all the other qualities of the soul, love, discipline, compassion and constancy, not in a latent state, but active and directed.

The man who is humble does not wait for circumstances to summon him in order to act: he initiates, he proposes, he commits himself. But he does so without the agitation of the one who seeks to prove something, without the tension of the one who watches over his own image, without the impatience of the one who wants immediate results. He acts because it is right to act, and this right action, carried by a pure intention, possesses an efficacy that agitated action never attains. Humility has a sensitivity all its own: it perceives what the other needs even before he expresses it, it discerns the right moment to intervene and the moment when silence is more eloquent than any word.

This active humility is also that which does not abdicate before injustice on the pretext that it does not wish to put itself forward. To remain silent and neutral in the face of cruelty or oppression, out of a false humility which in reality conceals the fear of exposing oneself, is not a virtue: it is a desertion. Authentic humility, because it has no pride to protect, can rise up with a freedom and a determination that an ego clenched around its reputation never knows. Let us think of Moses, to whom the Torah attributes precisely the quality of being the humblest man on earth, and who was also the liberator of a people, the one who stood against Pharaoh and the mediator of a Covenant. Humility does not extinguish the sacred fire: it gives it its true measure.

Gratitude: the other face of humility

There is a dimension of humility that is mentioned too rarely and yet is, in certain traditions, inscribed in its very etymology: gratitude. In Hebrew, the word that designates humility in its deepest sense, hoda’ah, issues from the same root as the verb “to thank” and “to acknowledge”. To be humble, in this perspective, is first of all to acknowledge, in the full sense of the term: to acknowledge that the strengths, talents and gifts we bear do not belong to us in our own right, that they have been entrusted to us for a purpose greater than ourselves, and that we are their responsible custodians far more than their absolute owners.

This acknowledgement changes everything in our relation to existence. The man who lives in gratitude takes nothing for granted: neither his health, nor his intelligence, nor his friendships, nor the beauties of the world he has been given to inhabit. He knows that every instant of clarity, every impulse of love, every fruitful encounter is a gift whose source surpasses him, and this fills him with a wonder that does not grow weary. This disposition has nothing naive or sentimental about it: it coexists perfectly with a lucid vision of the sufferings of the world and of one’s own fragilities. But it transforms the gaze, substituting for the bitterness of lack the silent richness of what is there, and for the anxiety of what might be lost, the living fullness of what is present.

Thus gratitude is a protection against one of the most corrosive forms of the ego: jealousy. The man who is truly grateful for what he receives no longer needs to compare what he has with what his neighbour possesses, for he has discovered that comparison is the declared enemy of joy. Gratitude shifts our centre of gravity from scarcity to abundance, from complaint to thanksgiving, from clinging to what is missing to an open welcome to what comes.

Humility and dignity: to walk humbly is to walk tall

We must now return to an apparent paradox, one that sometimes makes those hesitate who sense the value of humility but fear losing something of their being in it. To walk humbly is to walk tall. Dignity is not the enemy of humility: it is its natural expression. The man who has truly integrated this quality bears a quiet nobility which has no need to proclaim or defend itself. He is not on a stage playing a role: he is simply there, whole and present, available and free.

This humble dignity is the exact antithesis of two equally destructive attitudes. On the one hand, arrogance, which believes itself above others and looks down on them from its supposed height, digging chasms where bridges should be built. On the other hand, the false humility of the one who systematically diminishes himself, who refuses every responsibility or guiding role in the name of a displayed modesty, when that modesty is sometimes no more than a disguised fear of assuming the consequences of his own greatness. True humility occupies a just space between these two pitfalls: it accepts being what it is, neither more nor less, and allows that being to manifest itself freely, in the service of something greater than itself.

It is remarkable that the most luminous spiritual figures in human history share this characteristic: a humility that never prevented them from speaking with authority, acting with decision, or radiating with a force that nothing could extinguish. Their humility was precisely what made their radiance authentic and impossible to imitate by mere force of will: it bore witness to a source passing through them, greater than they were and yet intimately mingled with what they were.

The secret strength of humility

Humility has a particular relation with the constancy we explored at the previous stage: it is, if one may put it so, its invisible fuel. For human constancy, left to its own forces alone, sooner or later comes up against its natural limits. It may endure for a long time, but it becomes exhausted if it does not draw from a source deeper than itself. It is humility that makes possible this connection with a vaster source, by recognising that our endurance is not only the fruit of our own will, but is also nourished by a strength that passes through us and that we do not entirely master.

Without humility, constancy runs dry and slowly diminishes, whereas with it, a power greater than itself can nourish it and, far from fatiguing it, regenerate it. This is the experience of all those who have crossed long inner nights and who, instead of bracing themselves upon their will alone, have consented to let go of control over the result while maintaining their fidelity to the effort: they then discover that they endure with a lightness they did not expect, borne by something that does not come from them.

Humility also brings into human relations a fluidity that no other quality produces with the same efficacy. There is no truly deep bond that was not born, at one moment or another, from an admission of fragility, a gesture of mutual recognition, a consent on both sides to step down from their respective pedestals in order to meet on the common ground of their humanity. Humility is not a solitude: on the contrary, it is what makes the strongest bonds possible, because it rests on shared truth rather than on a carefully constructed façade.

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One inclination, a thousand names

In the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, humility receives different names and faces according to languages and cultures, yet its deep reality is everywhere the same: the primary condition of every authentic inner life.

In Christianity, humility is placed at the very heart of the Gospel message. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” says Jesus in the Beatitudes according to Matthew, designating not intellectual poverty but that inner availability of the man who does not cling to his certainties and remains open to what surpasses him. Paul, in the Epistle to the Philippians, speaks of kenosis, voluntary self-emptying, as a paradigm of spiritual life, evoking the way in which Christ “emptied himself” in order to take on the human condition. The monastic tradition, from Benedict of Nursia to John of the Cross, made humility both the first and the last degree of spiritual life, the one without which all the other virtues risk being corrupted by pride, and its great masters traced with precision the successive degrees of this stripping away of the self.

In Islam, humility is expressed by the word tawadu, the act of “lowering oneself”, and constitutes one of the cardinal qualities of the mu’min, the fully realised believer. The Qur’an constantly returns to the necessity of recognising that every good comes from God and that the human being is only the custodian of His gifts: “Do not walk upon the earth insolently; you can neither pierce the earth nor equal the mountains in height” (Sura 17:37). Sufism deepens this notion through the concept of fanâ, the extinction of the ego in divine contemplation, which the masters describe not as the disappearance of the person but as the dissolution of his illusory tensions so that what lies beyond the ego may shine forth. Al-Ghazali, in his Ihyâ’ ‘Ulûm al-Dîn, devotes an entire chapter to humility as the antidote to pride, which he considers the first of the spiritual vices to be fought.

In Judaism, the central notion is anavah, humility, the quality the Torah attributes to Moses in unique terms, and which does not signify weakness of character but an absolute openness to hearing the divine will. The Kabbalah designates this fifth quality of the soul by the name Hod, whose Hebrew etymology refers at once to splendour, magnificence, and acknowledgement in the sense of thanksgiving, hoda’ah. This double meaning is profoundly instructive: the true splendour of being does not manifest itself in the brilliance of the ego, but in the humility of the man who recognises the source of his gifts and becomes their conscious channel. Hod is the fifth of the emotional sefirot of the Tree of Life, corresponding to the left side in the dimension of receptivity, and the kabbalists teach that it gives Netzach, constancy, its right direction, just as fuel gives the engine its real power.

In Hinduism, humility appears under the term vinaya, which designates at once modesty and voluntary self-discipline, or again namrata, the gracious gentleness of the one who does not believe himself superior to others. The Bhagavad Gita cites humility among the divine qualities of the accomplished being, alongside purity and courage, and the tradition of Vedanta makes the surpassing of ahamkâra, the feeling of being a separate ego, the primary condition of realisation of the Self. Ramanuja and Shankaracharya, though diverging on the ultimate nature of the relation between the individual soul and universal Brahman, agree on one essential point: the ego clenched around itself is the primary obstacle to every spiritual breakthrough, and its voluntary abandonment is the gate of liberation.

Buddhism, in its different branches, approaches humility through the central notion of anâttâ, the non-permanence of the self, and through the practice that follows from it: the gradual loosening of attachment to a fixed and defensive identity. Theravada Buddhism sees in humility the necessary condition for entering upon the Noble Eightfold Path — the eight-fold way the Buddha designated as the path towards the cessation of suffering: so long as one believes oneself already awakened or spiritually superior, every real progress is blocked. Mahayana Buddhism enriches this perspective through the figure of the Bodhisattva, who renounces the glory of his own liberation by an act of radical humility in the service of all beings. In Zen Buddhism, the tradition of shoshin, the beginner’s mind, expressed with force by Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, admirably sums up this quality: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.” It is humility that keeps alive the availability to learn and to be transformed.

Taoism approaches humility by way of its most characteristic images: water, the valley, the fertile void. Water, says Lao Tzu in chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, “nourishes all beings without intending to, and is content with the low places others disdain: thus it resembles the Tao”. The valley, in chapter 6, is called “the spirit of the valley” (gushen), that void which is not absence but infinite receptivity, capable of receiving all waters because it claims no height for itself. This Taoist humility is not a moral posture but an alignment with the deep nature of reality: water does not choose to be humble, it is humble because that is how it expresses its own nature. The Taoist sage, likewise, does not practise humility as a painful discipline: he simply lets the ego dissolve into the natural flow of the Tao, discovering that what he thought he had to defend in himself was only an obstacle to his own freedom.

All these traditions converge towards one and the same deep conviction: humility is not the enemy of greatness but its condition. It does not diminish the one who cultivates it: it reveals to him that what he had believed to be his own greatness was only a sketch, and that his true measure is infinitely vaster than anything his ego could imagine.

A few markers for the path

These reflections on humility and gratitude are not meant to transform us into effaced and resigned figures. They are meant to help us recognise and cultivate that form of inner clarity which allows life to pass through us more freely, by lessening the resistances we oppose to it without even knowing it. If the love of the first stage was the sap, the discipline of the second the form, the compassion of the third the fruit, and the constancy of the fourth the root that holds the whole tree, humility is the soil: that dark and nourishing depth without which no root can sink far enough to hold firm in the storm.

As a complement, you may wish to reread the articles in the Abecedary: H for Humility and G for Gratitude, each of which approaches one of these two notions in its own right.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Take a moment of calm and inwardness. Let each of these questions descend within you without seeking any immediate answer. What rises with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On the reality of my humility
Is my humility sincere, or is it another form of ego, a secret pride in being humble? Do I sometimes flatter myself inwardly for my modesty, or do I display it in a way that seeks to be recognised? Does my humility bring me joy and lightness, or does it weigh upon me and make me sad? A joyful humility is living and true; a sad humility deserves to be re-examined.

On humility in my relationships
Does my humility lead me to be more loving and more generous, or does it inhibit me and close me in upon myself? Do I know how to receive a compliment with grace, without evading it through excess of modesty or becoming proud of it? Do I know how to acknowledge my errors towards someone without my request for forgiveness carrying an expectation of recognition? And when I exercise authority or offer counsel, does my manner of doing so leave the other person standing in his dignity?

On humility before adversity
Does my humility withstand trials, or is it carried away by the first disappointment? In the face of criticism, do I know how to discern what it is right to receive, without either defending myself out of pride or collapsing through lack of self-worth? When I encounter an obstacle, is my first reflex to seek what this obstacle has come to teach me, or is my first reaction to look for an external culprit?

On my gratitude
Am I in a state of natural gratitude towards existence, or do I take for granted what I receive from it? Am I aware, in moments of clarity or joy, that these moments are gifts and not dues? In difficult moments, can I still find, without forcing myself, at least one thing for which to give thanks? Is the gratitude I express to others sincere, or is it a formula of politeness that I no longer truly inhabit?

On the source of my strengths
Do I attribute to my will alone and to my merit alone the qualities I manifest and the successes I attain in existence, or do I honestly recognise that they also come from what I have received, from those who have formed me, and from something greater than myself? Does this acknowledgement weaken me or, on the contrary, free me from a burden too heavy to carry alone?

2. A few gestures for the week

Practise generosity before recollection
Before each moment of meditation, prayer or inner silence during this week, perform an act of generosity towards someone, however modest it may be: an attention offered, a service rendered, an encouraging word. Observe how this gesture prepares and deepens your inner state in the moments that follow.

Observe the origin of my hesitations
Choose a situation in your present life in which you feel a resistance, a refusal to commit yourself, or a reluctance to acknowledge something. Take the time to examine its root honestly: does this hesitation come from a real and just discernment, or from a disguised fear, from an unavowed pride? This simple distinction, practised regularly, is one of the most powerful exercises there is.

Express humility in an act of compassion
Identify someone around you who is going through a difficulty. Not in order to place yourself in the position of the one who helps and knows, but in order truly to put yourself in his place, with the awareness that you could, in other circumstances, go through exactly the same trial. Let this silent identification guide your gesture. Observe how it changes the quality of your presence.

Build something lasting with someone
Humility should not be a solitary experience: it finds its full measure in the bonds it strengthens and deepens. Choose this week to create something with someone — a project, a substantial conversation, a shared commitment — while deliberately placing yourself in a position of listening and co-construction rather than direction. Humility that unites is stronger than any solitary eloquence.

Teach the dignity of humility
Find an opportunity, this week, to show by your example, not by your speeches, that humility and dignity are not opposed. This may take the form of receiving criticism without defending yourself, publicly acknowledging an error or a limit, or expressing precise gratitude to someone who has helped you grow. The most powerful lesson is always the one that is seen rather than the one that is heard.

Be humble, simply
On one day this week, choose to practise humility for its own sake, without any expectation of recognition, result, or even spiritual progress. Not in order to prove to yourself that you know how to be humble, but simply in order to do it. This form of humility, freed from all self-regarding purpose, is the rarest and perhaps the closest to what the traditions call purity of intention.

3. Celebration of this stage

At the end of these seven days, or of whatever time you devote to this stage, take a moment to identify one precise thing that your practice of humility or gratitude has made possible during this week: a strengthened bond, a defused tension, an instant of lightness where there had been heaviness, a beauty noticed where your ordinary gaze would not have rested. Write it in a notebook, or say it aloud.

For humility that is not celebrated risks being confused with self-effacement, and gratitude that is not named dissolves into habit. What we welcome and acknowledge with joyful attention, we invite to continue growing and unfolding further in our life.

Next week, we shall discover how this humility full of gratitude, once integrated into our way of being, naturally opens the way to the sixth quality of the soul: inner stability, that deep and living centre from which the spiritual sovereignty we came together to seek on this path may at last begin to rise.

A good journey to all.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article: Stage 6 - Inner Stability

To go further

Have you experienced a moment of true humility, received or given, that transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

Night has almost fallen. The arid, grey plain seems devastated by fire. I do not know how I came to be here. I walk slowly, hesitantly, among the shadows — vague human shapes I sometimes feel brushing past me. Yet no face calls out to me, I who am among the living, in this place foreign to all memory.

Only a muffled murmur fills the space, telling me that I am moving through a multitude. I begin to make out a few words, like whispers around me: “Killed in Gaza,” “killed at Kibbutz Nir Oz,” “at the Nova festival,” and again: “Killed in Jabalia,” “at Kfar Aza!” then further off, slightly louder: “At Kibbutz Be’eri!” “killed in Khan Yunis…” Other voices draw closer and grow more distinct: “Killed in Mariupol,” “Mosul…,” “Aleppo…,” “Srebrenica,” “killed in Kigali.” All at once I understand: these fragments of sentences are addressed to me. This ageless crowd, in order to exist still, is calling out to me! The terrible litany continues to swell all around: “Killed in Vietnam,” “killed in Hiroshima,” “Stalingrad!” “Dresden!” until it has engulfed me entirely. “Killed at Auschwitz,” “Verdun!” “Waterloo!” — each supplication weighs heavier on my step. I stagger, overwhelmed, more and more moved. Suddenly a brief silence, full and heavy, followed by a harrowing cry: “Killed by the madness of the living!”

I wake abruptly, drenched in sweat, seized by tears, shaken to the core. I look at the time: three o’clock. Outside, the darkness is absolute, black as the history of the world. Tomorrow morning, the living will rise to slaughter one another. Some will have the glory of defending their own against murderous hatred. Others will obey resentment or indoctrination. And yet all those who have fallen, like all those who will fall, will be gathered into a single people in that other world I have glimpsed. They will swell those multitudes who weep over their lost lives, their blood mingled with the earth, crying out towards an implacable sky.

Faced with this irreversible misfortune, all certainties — those good or bad reasons to kill or to be killed — appear to me so provisional and so tragic. That terrible cry, “Killed by the madness of the living!”, still echoes in my head and obliges me, like a summons from my dead brothers, to try to reduce the customary violence of this world.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

It is truly time that human beings chose love, as Martin Luther King proclaimed, he who said that “hatred is too great a burden to bear.” We may observe this each day, both in the wars and massacres that punctuate our history and in the countless conflicts of our societies: terrible are the consequences of these hatreds with their many faces, from which none of us is entirely exempt. Some conceal themselves beneath the veil of propriety or diplomacy. Their ferocity is no less for it, as they await only a fitting occasion to set the world alight or to gnaw at the daily lives of our fellow human beings, burdening them with fears or illusions. These hatreds drape themselves in so many tawdry trappings, in arguments of common sense or vengeance; they vary in intensity, erupting explosively or living secret lives — yet all share a common matrix: they are all daughters of Cain, that first murderer in history who, when questioned by G-d about the fate of the brother he had just killed, replied with this founding abdication:

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9)

Many hotbeds of war

When I look at the world today, civil wars and wars between nations are spread across the entire planet, though the media most often highlight only those pitting Ukraine against Russia, or Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

To measure the true extent of this disaster, one must accept looking squarely at figures that well-protected consciences prefer to leave in the abstraction of organisational reports. The ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) estimated in a report of July 2024 that 50 countries are in the grip of violence: one person in seven worldwide is said to have been exposed to its consequences.

The map below, taken from their Conflict Index, shows the scale of it.

The AOAV (Action on Armed Violence) recorded approximately 34,000 civilian deaths worldwide in 2023: an increase of 130 per cent compared with 2022, with victims in Gaza accounting for 39 per cent of that total. On the military side, Media Zona estimated in November 2024 that Russian losses in the war in Ukraine exceeded 77,000.

Thus, a few hours’ flight from Paris, we watch helplessly as barbarism makes its tragic return. Yet this return is hardly surprising: cyclically, the violence of war recurs upon the earth. Is each period of peace merely the provisional rest of a humanity exhausted from having shed too much blood? It sometimes takes only a few months, at best a few decades, before human beings succumb once again to their morbid addiction to carnage and destruction.

The lucrative industry of war

The twentieth century was that of mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Increasingly lethal weapons, from the great guns of Verdun to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, produced human losses at a level never before reached in history: approximately 8.5 to 10 million soldiers killed in the First World War, to which must be added 6 to 7 million civilian victims; then, in the Second World War, 21 to 25 million soldiers and 50 to 55 million civilians, swept away by combat, bombardment, massacres, the Shoah and famines.

And yet the industry of war continues to thrive. It is here that the ledger of reality reveals its most unbearable truth. In 2023, when 200 million children were suffering from malnutrition and UNICEF was devoting 3.63 billion dollars to them, global military expenditure stood at 3,000 billion dollars, nearly 827 times more. This budgetary balance of power is not a misallocation of priorities that better policies might one day correct. It is a civilisational choice, repeated consciously or unconsciously, generation after generation, that reveals the essence of what our societies truly value, far removed from declarations of principle and charters of human rights. In this bleak picture, France accounts for 11 per cent of global arms exports, third behind Russia (16 per cent) and the United States (40 per cent).

Let us pause for a moment on this arithmetic of shame. Three thousand billion to organise death; three point six billion to try to spare children from it. If one wished to summarise in a single figure what our so-called contemporary civilisation truly offers for the future of its children, that figure would suffice.

Are we truly civilised?

Can a globalised world that allows millions of children to die of hunger while others grow rich by the billion from the commerce of death be called civilised? Personally, I do not believe it can.

The dissonance is vertiginous: on one side, surgeons transplant hearts, biologists decode living matter down to its most infinitesimal sequences; on the other, armies pound residential buildings with those same derived technologies, and financial markets flourish on this commerce of destruction. Behind the cultural and technological veneer that makes our societies appear advanced, barbarism holds sway today as it did in the Neolithic, but with a capacity for destruction our forebears could not have imagined.

What Auschwitz revealed with unmistakable clarity — and I return to it here briefly, having treated this question in its full depth on the occasion of Yom haShoah — is that technical rationality, bureaucracy and scientific thought, when severed from all ethical and spiritual compass, can become the most efficient instruments ever devised for the extermination of human beings. That danger is not past. It accompanies every technical advance we make without having simultaneously accomplished the corresponding inner work. We have manifestly still not undertaken, as a collective, to plumb our inner depths in order to eradicate there whatever carries the seed of violence and war.

Cain: an interior anatomy of violence

This tenacious incapacity to plumb our depths, precisely where violence takes root before rising to the surface as wars, hatreds or organised indifferences, has a name, a face and a history. To understand its mechanics, let us return to the oldest account humanity has transmitted on this subject, not as a religious curiosity, but as a mirror of redoubtable precision on human nature. The historical genealogy of this primal murder, from the Neolithic mass graves to the genocides of the twentieth century, I have traced elsewhere. What concerns me here is different: not the map of the massacres Cain has produced across the centuries, but the interior anatomy of Cain himself — the psychological, philosophical and spiritual mechanism that drives him to act, and that continues to act within us.

Genesis, in its fourth chapter, tells the story of Adam and Eve’s two sons in sixteen verses of quite stupefying anthropological density. Cain, the elder, is a tiller of the soil: a man of settled earth, of property, boundary and accumulation. Abel, his younger brother, is a nomadic shepherd: a man of the flock, of movement and shared space. Both make an offering to G-d. He accepts Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s. The Bible, in what constitutes one of its most vertiginous silences, offers no explanation for this preference. No declared fault on Cain’s part precedes the divine refusal, as though the text wished to make us grasp that the injustice Cain then feels is an original condition of human existence, an irreducible given with which every living being must learn to contend.

Cain burns with rage and shame. His face turns away. And G-d addresses him with words of troubling gravity: “If you act well, will you not hold your head high? But if you do not act well, sin is crouching at the door: it desires you, yet you must master it.” This formulation is striking in its psychological modernity: G-d does not condemn Cain a priori; he describes an interior dynamic — something waits, crouching in the shadow of his soul, ready to spring if the guardian relaxes his vigilance. Were Cain to consent to look his anger in the face, he might then learn to transform it; but Cain does not hear. He invites his brother into the fields and kills him.

When G-d then asks, “Where is your brother Abel?”, Cain utters what is perhaps the most revealing response in all of human history: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In a few words, he enunciates the prototype of all moral abdications, all retreats into self-interest, all organised indifferences to the fate of the other. This response traverses the millennia without ageing a single day: one hears it resonate behind every politician who refuses to look at world hunger statistics, behind every investor who signs arms contracts without questioning their destination, behind every citizen who averts his eyes from the misery of his neighbour.

We are Cain’s heirs

This truth deserves to be faced without evasion or mitigation: we do not descend from Abel. Abel died without issue, he was cut off too soon, erased from the chain of generations. It is Cain who fathered the nations, who built the first cities, who developed the arts, crafts and trades. The mark that G-d set upon his brow we all bear, invisible and indelible, inscribed not only in our cultural memories but in the most archaic structures of our psyche.

Freud, in his essay Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), named it the death drive,Thanatos, that inner force impelling us towards the destruction of self and other, in permanent tension with Eros, the drive towards life, union and creation. War, on this reading, is not an aberration external to the human being, an accident of history arising from institutional malfunction: it is the collective expression, organised and amplified by states, of what each individual carries in seed form in the least illuminated regions of himself.

René Girard deepened this intuition decisively with his theory of mimetic desire, which is worth dwelling upon, for it illuminates an aspect that neither Freud nor political scientists are quite able to grasp. Cain does not simply suffer from being refused by G-d: he suffers from seeing that Abel is desired where he is not. It is not the object of the offering that matters, but the preference — that gaze of the other that falls elsewhere than upon him. From that moment, what Cain wants is no longer merely to be accepted; it is to be Abel, to occupy his place in the divine gaze. This desire to occupy the other’s place, to possess his recognition, his status, his territory, is according to Girard the engine of all human rivalries, from marital conflict to wars between nations, by way of economic competition and identity struggles.

The brother becomes a rival precisely because he is close, because resemblance renders the difference in destiny unbearable. Fraternal mimesis then turns inexorably into sacrificial violence whenever no spiritual or symbolic authority intervenes to interrupt its fatal spiral. The scapegoat — Abel — provisionally absorbs collective violence, but does not suppress it: he merely defers it until the next explosion. The universal history of wars, persecutions and genocides is, on this reading, nothing but a long succession of scapegoats who have never sufficed to slake the mimetic thirst of their murderers.

Saint Augustine, fifteen hundred years before René Girard, had intuited something similar in seeing in Cain the figure of the Earthly City — that human organisation founded on self-love pushed to the point of contempt for G-d and for the other — and in Abel the figure of the City of G-d, whose tragic vocation is to be ceaselessly sacrificed by the logics of the world yet never to disappear entirely. These two cities coexist not only in the course of collective history but simultaneously within each human soul. What each individual carries, each society amplifies; and what each society amplifies, history inscribes in letters of fire and blood upon the dark plains I traversed in my dream.

The contemporary faces of Cain

It would be convenient — and profoundly false — to confine Cain to the trenches, the airstrikes or the gas chambers. The Cainite impulse invests all spaces of collective life with equal destructive efficacy, often without a single drop of blood being shed. The managerial violence that methodically grinds individuals down beneath the imperatives of profitability, the organised public humiliation on social networks where anonymous crowds set upon designated victims, the predatory economic competition that impoverishes entire nations to enrich a handful of shareholders, the institutionalised indifference to the slow death of millions of migrants, malnourished children or abandoned elderly people: all of this bears the same signature as the first murder in the fields.

And everywhere, the same response from Cain: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Behind the figure of 3,000 billion devoted to armaments, there is no accounting error: there is the result of thousands of individual decisions taken by educated men and women, often cultivated, often fathers and mothers, often capable of generosity in their private lives. The financial analyst who structures an investment fund in the arms industry, the engineer who optimises the flight path of a combat drone, the lobbyist who secures the release of an export contract to an authoritarian regime: none of them thinks he is performing a murderous act. They have simply, each at his own level, answered as Cain did — their brother is not their concern, their expertise is their concern, their career is their concern, their shareholders are their concern. The growing sophistication of our technologies changes nothing in this fundamental equation: it merely increases the efficiency of destruction and the distance between killer and victim, rendering the act cleaner, more abstract, easier to delegate and therefore easier to bear without undue guilt.

Cain decides, time and again, that his brother’s blood is of no consequence to him, and that his own immediate interest or his own fear outweighs every other consideration.

The only remedy: transformation from within

Faced with this diagnosis, the usual responses very quickly show their limits. Diplomatic solutions, disarmament treaties, Security Council resolutions, economic sanctions: all these responses are necessary given humanity’s present condition, yet none is sufficient, for they operate solely upon symptoms without ever reaching the source. The wound that has been bleeding since Abel is not institutional — it is interior, and it is there that the transformation must occur, at a level that neither politics nor technology can reach.

Three great spiritual traditions, among many others that converge upon the same reality, allow us to take its exact measure and to sketch its concrete paths.

Christian mysticism speaks of metanoia — the complete turning of one’s interior orientation, the passage from self-love to the love of G-d and of one’s neighbour — as a radical rupture accomplished not through the accumulation of knowledge nor through good intention, but through a decision of the whole being, sustained by a daily practice. What the Desert Fathers called nepsis — interior spiritual vigilance — is precisely the antidote to what G-d describes to Cain: something crouching at the door. One cannot afford to leave one’s door unguarded.

Sufism names the jihad al-akbar the great combat of the soul — not the outward war against the enemy, but the inward war against the disordered passions of the soul: jealousy, wounded pride, the resentment that settles in and festers. This combat is called great precisely because it is the most difficult, the most protracted and the most decisive: to win every outward battle without having waged it is to have won nothing at all, as the history of empires that vanquished their enemies before collapsing under the weight of their own inner contradictions bears witness.

Theravāda Buddhism proposes mettā — loving-kindness — not as a feeling, but as a deliberate and progressive practice: one begins by cultivating benevolence towards oneself, then extends it to those one loves, then to those who are indifferent, then to difficult relationships, then to enemies. This progressive, concentric deployment is not an exercise in naivety but a rigorous training of the will, comparable in its discipline to that of an athlete or a musician. Mettā does not suppress the reality of conflict; it transforms the gaze of its practitioner upon the adversary — no longer an enemy to be destroyed, but a suffering being carrying, in his own way, his share of Cain.

Martin Luther King had understood this in exemplary fashion: before taking to the streets, before mounting a platform, before facing the batons of the segregationist South, he worked each day upon his own interior Cain — the fear, the anger, the resentment, the temptation to answer violence with violence. Gandhi through his long campaigns of resistance, Mandela through his years of captivity, Etty Hillesum writing her diary in the Westerbork transit camp before boarding the train to Auschwitz: all bear witness to the same reality. Profound spiritual transformation does not anaesthetise pain nor suppress reality in its brutality; but it prevents brutality from triumphing definitively. It keeps alive, even in the most desperate circumstances, an irreducible space of inner freedom from which love may spring as act rather than as sentiment.

It is this space of love that we must develop within ourselves, then learn collectively to inhabit, to expand and to pass on.

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Learning to love — truly

“Learning to love”: the phrase may seem derisory measured against the scale of the evil described, almost naïve in the face of bulldozers, cruise missiles and armed drones. It is not, provided one understands which love is meant. Not romantic and sentimental love, as fragile as wet paper in the first contrary wind; nor the superficial benevolence that smiles at everyone without ever risking or giving anything. The love of which the mystics speak, the Stoic philosophers, the therapists of reconciliation and the builders of peace, is an active, demanding, disciplined force — a permanent labour upon one’s own structures of fear, competition and closure.

This love begins each morning, long before the bombs have had time to sound: in the way one listens or does not listen to one’s neighbour, in whether one responds or not to the distress of a stranger, in the refusal to take part in the destructive rumour, in the choice to see in the adversary not an enemy to be destroyed but a lost brother bearing, in his turn, the mark of Cain upon his brow — the same mark as our own.

This choice, repeated billions of times by billions of people in their daily lives, is the only revolution that could at last change our human condition: not by suppressing Cain, which is doubtless impossible, but by teaching him to hear the voice that has spoken to him since the dawn of time: “Sin is crouching at the door — but it is for you to master it.”

That night, in my dream, those dead asked nothing impossible of me. They simply reminded me that I am alive, and that the living still have a choice.

For Abel continues to cry out towards the sky. And the sky continues to wait for us to answer.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 20 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Towards spiritual sovereignty | Stage 4 — The victory of Constancy
Previous article: The radiance of Compassion

No fruit without roots

By the end of the first three stages of this journey, something has been gradually consolidating. Love was first recognised as an infinite energy that sustains the universe and can flow through us if we consent to open a passage for it. Discipline then gave it form, a riverbed and a bank, transforming a generous but diffuse impulse into a focused and productive force. And from their slow convergence was born radiant compassion — that living fruit of inner transmutation, that warmth of one who has himself trembled and who, from that trembling, draws the strength to hold another’s hand.

But a single fruit is not enough to nourish an entire life. The tree must hold; its roots must sink deep enough to withstand the long droughts and the squalls of winter. This is precisely what a fourth quality of the soul brings: constancy — that perseverance which makes possible the victory over oneself, not the kind wrested in the blazing moment of a decisive test, but the kind built silently and stubbornly in the patient repetition of ordinary days.

A forgotten strength of our times

The human being, who struggles to see beyond his immediate needs, has little sense of the value of constancy, except as a guarantee of material security. He can barely glimpse its usefulness for his inner development, and still less for his spiritual progress. It takes a measure of maturity already acquired — having been confronted with the difficulty of changing oneself or bringing a demanding project to fruition — to accept that constancy alone will bring victory.

Our mercantile societies, driven by unbridled consumption and the planned obsolescence of products as much as desires, ceaselessly urge us to leap from one novelty to the next in a desperate pursuit of stimulation, as though it could fill our inner void. In this permanent agitation, sustaining a patient effort or remaining faithful to a commitment so often seems disappointing in comparison with the brilliance of the new, which fills us for a moment and wearies us immediately afterwards.

A strength for building and becoming

And yet anyone who undertakes a project that takes him out of the routine of ordinary life will inevitably confront the need to leave his comfort zone. Reaching that objective will demand that he surpass his habitual limits and sustain his effort over a greater or lesser period of time, depending on the nature of the goal. There then arises the difficulty of remaining constant, of continuing to advance whatever obstacles are encountered or whatever adaptations become necessary. For without constancy, the human being can obtain nothing lasting — whether in material achievement, inner development, or spiritual fulfilment. Yet we persist involuntarily in our most limiting habits whilst rarely finding the same perseverance for the efforts that might truly benefit us.

When we do manage to sustain effort over time, it is most often out of constraining necessity — working to ensure our livelihood, or studying to gain a qualification — rather than from a taste for accomplishing something that calls upon our potential for creativity and renewal. But if we come to understand the hold that a society has over us — one which urges us to chase after artificial needs — and if we gradually grow aware of the wealth of our inner resources, we shall find the motivation needed to commit to a patient effort and a solid constancy, so as to fulfil our true nature and unfold our personal path in the world.

Patience, perseverance, courage

Constancy is a subtle compound of three mutually sustaining forces: patience, perseverance and courage. It is patient because it is clear-sighted, knowing that every effort must be inscribed in time to yield the desired result — even for the most gifted of individuals. It is perseverance in the face of obstacles, always attentive to adjusting its pace in order to overcome unforeseen setbacks without exhausting its strength upon them. And it has the courage to rise again after a moment of weakness, drawing from the fall the lessons needed to resume its advance more wisely.

He who practises constancy must have the humility to accept putting himself into question — observing with sincerity his difficulties, and the distance still separating him from his goal — so as to deploy intelligently the talents and resources at his disposal and to compensate for his shortcomings without losing heart. In this way he is continually enriched by his confrontation with the real, seeking to adapt himself subtly to it rather than forcing his way towards his goal through excess of enthusiasm, which would quickly lead him to exhaustion.

A wisdom of rhythm

There is in constancy a wisdom of rhythm that our age has largely lost. An effective constancy must be loving, disciplined, compassionate, humble and dignified all at once. A constancy without love becomes aggressive rigidity that drives away those who accompany us. A constancy without humility becomes stubborn obstinacy that refuses to acknowledge its errors and presses on with decisions that can no longer be revised. A constancy without compassion is a cold mechanism, turned inward upon itself, incapable of taking into account the living world around it. What we seek is not the voluntarist contraction of one who clenches his teeth, but the dynamic openness of one who holds firm because he loves what he does and believes in what he is moving towards. True constancy does not smother the impulse: it extends it, nourishes it and gives it the duration without which it would be no more than a blaze of straw.

Just as the climber takes time to study the safest route and steady his breathing before tackling a difficult section, the spiritual seeker will try to embrace the roughnesses of daily life rather than impose his demands upon them. It is by finding within himself that space of quiet presence, to which he can remain subtly connected even in the heart of agitation, that he will discover the right and confident attitude to adopt before the obstacles that arise on the path, and will know how to recognise with gratitude the unexpected help that fortunate concurrences of circumstance sometimes provide.

Traversing the inner nights

In our spiritual evolution, to develop our qualities and transcend our fears, we must demonstrate a constancy that is at once optimistic and clear-sighted, one that will be strengthened by each small breakthrough towards greater light, and replenished through meditation or the prayer of the heart in moments of fatigue or doubt. It is important to keep our consciousness awake, in a benevolent attitude towards ourselves, so as not to be swept away by disappointment at our slowness or our setbacks, and thus to accept as serenely as possible the impermanence of our inner states, so readily influenced by outward circumstances.

For there inevitably come dark hours — not as signs of failure, but as those passages necessary to every authentic spiritual journey. These inner nights, which John of the Cross described with striking precision, do not mean that the path is false: they mean that something profound is in the process of transforming itself, at a depth our waking consciousness cannot yet grasp. Constancy is precisely this capacity to traverse our regions of shadow without fleeing them or dramatising them, trusting in that larger movement of life which carries us even when we no longer feel it.

Let us never forget that the path is long before we can begin to unify in a single direction of progress the multiplicity of figures that, within us, take turns holding the centre of our inner stage. We are like a theatre director watching his actors constantly steal the best role from one another, without yet having found the means to reconcile them and make them perform the play as he wishes. This is why on one day we feel we are advancing, whilst on another we suddenly feel weighted down and hesitant, without quite understanding why. What matters above all is to keep faith and to place one foot before the other, at our own pace.

The humility of the reed

Just as our body needs nourishment and rest to traverse the years in good health, our inner life needs to replenish itself and to breathe deeply so as not to become exhausted. Our constancy, for all that it must be sincere and determined, must not therefore harden into a proud and blind rigidity that would destroy the very inner strength we need to sustain it.

The task is to find, through a refined attention to our inner states and our real capacities, the right degree of self-demand — one that genuinely marks our will and our commitment, that obtains results little by little, whilst preserving that suppleness which prevents us from breaking. The reed that bends in the squall holds its ground without difficulty, whilst the mighty oaks sometimes end up uprooted. Let us have the humility of the reed: firm in its resolve to hold, yet with that lightness of yielding to the wind and playing with it.

The ardour of our constancy is ultimately but another gift of the Living, making it possible to exercise our human talents in order to evolve and transform the givens of our reality. This is why it is so important that it be directed towards noble aims that honour the best of our human condition. Let our constancy be that of the creator who is conscious of holding in trust that human genius which opens so many possibilities, and who gives thanks for it to the Infinite. May we use the forces and talents that come to us from the overwhelming mystery of Life to nourish an ever greater commitment to awakening our spiritual consciousness and spreading joy throughout the world.

The synergy of heaven and earth

When our constancy is thus placed at the service of a noble and spiritual aim, we gradually discover that it nourishes itself through a synergy between our inner determination and living forces that flow through us and exceed us, arising from that infinite vitality which sustains the universe. It is as though what seek to unite within us are, on the one hand, an openness, a kind of surrender and trust, and on the other, a keen will, the driving force of a measured discipline. Something difficult to define in words, since it is at once a releasing and a holding, which only a watchful alertness, a demanding presence to oneself, can keep in balance.

He who has this experience understands that his inner strength grows in proportion to the degree of his surrender, his emptying of what he believed he must defend in himself and what his habitual egotistic contraction has always protected. This contraction, as it releases, can allow other dimensions of being to awaken. The inner disorder of the acquired personality then gradually reorients itself in a single direction, in order at last to fulfil its role as vessel and mouthpiece of our spiritual essence. And this essence, in awakening, begins to perceive — as the Rig Veda teaches us: O Fire, thou art the son of Heaven through the body of the Earth — that it is at once the subject and the object of this circulation of forces between earth and heaven, between its infinitely small earthly presence, a speck of dust bounded in space and time, and the infinity of the universe.

The fidelity that sustains the living

In our relationship with others, constancy is a testimony of commitment that strengthens bonds, a harbinger of reliability and responsibility that inspires trust. It is always easy to show our neighbour our interest or our compassion in a punctual manner, on the occasion of some significant event. But persevering in support and love for the other over time, whatever the vicissitudes of his existence — whether he be in joy or distress, in abundance or poverty, acclaimed or held in contempt by others — or extending to him our compassion and the benefit of our forgiveness even when he goes astray in ways that harm us: this is a sign of the nobility we can attain when we elevate our spiritual consciousness and look upon our neighbour with the eyes of the heart. It is this unfailing fidelity, composed of patience and understanding, which can sometimes save a friend worn down by life from despair, and help him regain his human dignity by taking back the reins of his destiny.

Deprived of this capacity for attachment to the other that endures beyond every immediate consideration, delivered back to the inconstancy of relationships woven solely from interest, tribal reflex or self-centred love, the human being empties himself of the very substance of life — that infinite circulation of shared and transformed energies of which our life in common should, upon this earth, be the most sublime realisation.

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One perseverance, a thousand faces

In the constellation of the world’s spiritual traditions, this victorious perseverance has received different names in different languages and cultures, but its reality is everywhere the same: the sine qua non condition of all lasting transformation.

The Hebrew Kabbalah names this quality Netzach, victory, the fourth of the emotional sefirot of the Tree of Life. The Hebrew word netzach carries two inseparable meanings: victory and eternity, as though the tradition wished to convey that only constancy can inscribe human effort within a dimension that transcends time. Netzach is the force that refuses to capitulate, the vital energy that renews itself at each dawn after the night, and of which the kabbalists say it is the foundation of all genuine spiritual aspiration. Without it, Chesed, love, and Gevurah, discipline, remain fine intuitions without a tomorrow, and Tiferet, compassion, withers for want of being nourished over time. The Sefirat HaOmer, that counting of forty-nine days from Passover to the Giving of the Torah, is itself a school of constancy: each evening, one day alone is counted, one step alone is taken, and it is this accumulation of small faithful gestures that builds our capacity to receive the Revelation.

In Islam, spiritual constancy is expressed as sabr, patient endurance, and istiqāma, rectitude in the continuity of the path. Sabr is one of the most celebrated virtues of the Quran, mentioned in more than ninety places in various forms: not the resigned patience of one who merely endures, but the active composure of one who chooses to remain upright in the trial, grounded in his trust in G-d. Istiqāma denotes persevering uprightness, that effort to remain on the just path without being led astray by temptations or discouragements. The Prophet, when asked to sum up the whole of religion, is said to have replied: “Say: I have faith in God, then be upright” — thumma astaqim — placing constancy in rectitude at the very heart of the spiritual life. The Sufi masters deepen this notion through the figure of the maqāmāt, the stations of the heart on the path towards G-d: each station is acquired only through long residency, a repeated and patient practice, until it becomes the natural tonality of one’s being.

The Christian tradition has developed two complementary notions to describe this quality. The Greek hypomonē, often rendered as patience or endurance, literally denotes the capacity to hold firm under the weight, to remain standing under the burden without breaking or fleeing. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, traces a striking chain of transmutation: “tribulation produces patience, patience produces experience, experience produces hope”, as though the trial traversed with constancy were the only alembic capable of distilling pure hope. The Latin monastic tradition adds perseverantia, perseverance in the lectio divina and the daily rule, which Benedict of Nursia made the foundation of his Rule: “Ora et labora” — pray and work — each day, at the same hour, not seeking the extraordinary but deepening the ordinary. John of the Cross, finally, whose dark night of the soul is perhaps the most lucid description of what all spiritual seekers traverse in their passage through doubt and aridity, teaches that it is precisely constancy within that darkness which is the touchstone of true love.

In the Hindu tradition, constancy bears the name dhṛiti, resolute firmness, which the Bhagavad Gita places among the divine qualities of the accomplished being, alongside courage and purity. It is distinguished from mere obstinacy by its inner nature: it is not the rigidity of one who clings, but the stability of one who is rooted. The practice of tapas, the voluntary ascesis already evoked in the stage of discipline, yields its fruits only over time: the inner fire purifies the metal only when it is maintained patiently, without sudden force or slackening. The yoga tradition insists on the fact that samskaras, the psychic imprints that condition our behaviour, are transformed only through conscious and prolonged repetition of new attitudes: constancy is not a spiritual luxury, it is the very condition of all inner reprogramming.

Buddhism names this quality adhiṭṭhāna in the Theravāda tradition, unwavering resolve, one of the ten pāramitā or perfections that the Bodhisattva must cultivate on the path to awakening. It is distinguished from stubbornness by its grounding in wisdom (prajñā): one does not persevere out of pride or fear of failure, but because one has clearly discerned the right direction and remains faithful to it with suppleness. Tibetan Buddhism insists upon virya, the joyous and ardent energy of perseverance, that force which advances without wearying, not under compulsion but through love of what it moves towards. Milarepa, the great Tibetan yogi of the eleventh century, became one of the most venerated figures of the tradition precisely because his constancy in practice, despite years of trials and humiliations, illustrates that the door of awakening opens not to the most gifted but to the most persevering.

Taoism approaches constancy by what seems a paradoxical route. Whereas most traditions insist upon voluntary effort, Lao Tzu teaches jiān, perseverance as fidelity to one’s own deep nature rather than the imposition of will upon reality. Water returns often in the Tao Te Ching as the image of this perfect constancy: it never forces, it goes around, it seeps through, it always takes the most humble path, and it is precisely for this reason that it ends by wearing away stone. “Nothing under heaven is as supple and yielding as water, yet nothing is its equal for overcoming that which is hard and rigid”, says Lao Tzu in chapter 78. Taoist constancy is therefore less a taut will than a quality of attention, a fidelity to the natural movement of the Tao within oneself, which allows one to act rightly at the right moment with the minimum of effort, in what the tradition calls wu wei: action without unnecessary resistance, effort attuned to the rhythm of the real.

All these traditions converge upon a single deep conviction: constancy is not the quality of the strong, but that of the wise. It is not measured by the intensity of the effort expended but by the quality of the presence maintained. And everywhere it is recognised as what allows all the other qualities of the soul to bear fruit over time, to inscribe themselves not as fleeting sparks but as a real and irreversible transformation of being.

A few signposts for the path

These reflections on constancy are not intended to turn you into an indefatigable and indestructible walker. They are intended to help you recognise within yourself this capacity to hold firm, supple and determined at once, and to trust it, for it is there, even when you do not always feel it. If the love of the first stage was the sap, the discipline of the second the form, and the compassion of the third the fruit, constancy is the root: invisible, silent, yet alone capable of inscribing all the rest within duration.

To go further, you may wish to re-read the article Abecedary: H for Humility, which explores in depth this quality towards which our constancy naturally leads us.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Sit down in a moment of calm. Allow each of these questions to descend within you without seeking an immediate answer. What rises with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On the reality of my constancy
Am I truly constant in the commitments that matter to me, or do I scatter my energies and abandon things the moment novelty fades? Does my constancy come from deep conviction, or from fear of failure, from habit rather than genuine will? Do I persevere out of love for what I am doing, or merely from inertia? And when I abandon a path, is it a wise decision or a capitulation before difficulty?

On the quality of my constancy
Is my constancy loving and supple, or so hard and demanding as to become crushing — for myself as much as for those around me? Do I know how to distinguish healthy tenacity from sterile obstinacy — that obstinacy which refuses to acknowledge its errors and invests itself in decisions that can no longer be revised? When I face an obstacle, do I try to force my way through or to find, like water, the most fitting path?

On my constancy in relationships
Am I reliable and present for those who matter to me — not only in happy moments but in times of trial or tedium? Is there someone in my life to whom I have promised a presence I have not sustained? What form of constancy in relationships do I wish to cultivate more?

On the source of my constancy
Do I attribute my capacity to hold firm solely to my own will, or do I recognise that it is also nourished by something that exceeds me? Am I capable of relinquishing control of the outcome whilst maintaining fidelity to the effort? Have I ever had the experience of that synergy between my own determination and vaster forces that were carrying me?

2. A few gestures for the week

Sustain a commitment for seven days
Choose a simple and concrete commitment — a brief daily practice, a few minutes of silence, a page of writing, a moment of attention to someone close to you — and keep to it each day for the full duration of this stage, without exception. Not to prove anything to yourself, but to feel from within what repeated fidelity to an intention builds.

Break a limiting habit
Identify a habit that holds you back or scatters you: a reflex of avoidance, a recurring distraction, a negative automatic thought. Choose just one. Observe it this week each time it arises, without judging it, but without yielding to it either. Constancy begins with this simple refusal, peaceful and decided.

Be patient with someone who tests you
Choose a person whose pace or manner of being usually makes you impatient. This week, offer them an entire and tranquil listening, without seeking to accelerate, to conclude or to correct. Constancy in relationship begins first with this quality of presence that does not grow discouraged by another’s slowness.

Enact a resolution immediately
If you make a decision to change in the course of this week, do not leave it sleeping in your mind: translate it into a concrete gesture as soon as possible, however modest. A resolution not immediately anchored in a real act risks evaporating before it has had time to take root.

Act for a cause that transcends you
Devote a moment this week to an action that does not directly serve your immediate interests: an act of support for someone, a contribution to a just cause, a gesture for something you believe the world needs. The highest constancy is that which takes root in something greater than oneself.

3. Celebrating this stage

At the close of these seven days, or however long you devote to this stage, take a moment to identify one small victory of constancy you have won over yourself. Not an exploit, but a faithful gesture repeated, a commitment held despite fatigue, a moment in which you chose to hold firm where you might have given up. Note it in a journal, or speak it aloud, with the quiet sobriety of one who knows that the great transformations are built of exactly these bricks, one by one, day after day.

For unacknowledged constancy discourages itself. What we receive with gratitude, we invite to grow. And it is upon these small, silent, accumulated victories that this spiritual sovereignty, solid and luminous, will gradually rise — the sovereignty we have come to seek together on this path.

Next week we shall discover how this constancy, once established, naturally opens the way to a fifth quality of the soul: humility full of gratitude, which does not weaken him who cultivates it but frees him from his last enclosures.

Good travelling to all.

© 2026 — Dialogues du Nouveau Monde — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article: Stage 5 - Humility full of gratitude

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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Notebooks of life · Poems · 3 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Today I knew jubilation, and I danced in the infinity of praise!
O You, the Eternal, spread out over the universe,
You who are Life and Love and Presence poured forth in abundance,
I who am but an infinitesimal speck of dust in Your world below,
once more I entered this vessel of stone, a beggar in Your house,
built in Your Name by those men of faith to seek You and sing You,

I the wandering Jew, brother to all men,
the hassid° inhabited by all memories, all tongues, all signs invented by those who seek You from generation to generation,
I inhabited by Your Fire, companion to all those who desire You here below, descended from Heaven, invited by us to inaugurate the great Feast of joy,
a little Franciscan, a little Sufi, a little Buddhist, a little anarchist — but anarchist of love and peace,

and I sang, I sang, I sang…

“Hoïdou l’Adoïnoï ki toïv, ki le’oïlom ‘hasdoï! ( Give thanks to the Eternal, for He is good, for His Love endures for ever! )
Give thanks to the G-d of the heavenly powers, for His Love endures for ever!
Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for His Love endures for ever!
He alone has wrought great wonders, for His Love endures for ever! ...”

I sang this psalm of praise of King David, drunk with that Hebrew which is the language of my soul,
the tongue that healed me like a purifying unguent, the one that alone can open me to the most intimate part of myself…

"Hoïdou l'Adoïnoï ki toïv", and my voice carries my body to one side, as though swept by the exhalation of the song…
"ki le'oïlom 'hasdoï", the voice answers me like an echo and there I am leaning the other way,
the frail skiff of my body ebbs and flows upon the wave,
and the movement amplifies little by little with the phrases
that turn without end and resound through the nave…

I am weightless, perhaps as angels are, all heaviness dissolved,
I am a pure smoke rising in praise,
a dust of infinity within His Infinite Love…

“Halleluya, halleluya, halleluya!”

° hassid: a pious Jew, in reference to Hasidic Judaism, a mystical movement founded in eighteenth-century Poland by the Baal Shem Tov. Centred on the direct and fervent relationship of the individual with the divine, it stood in opposition to the rigid tradition of rabbinic Judaism and constituted a spiritual response to the misery of the persecuted Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. The Hasidim express their communion with G-d above all through song and dance.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

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In echo

If this text brings forth in you an image, a memory, a silence, a piece of music, or a few lines, you may set them down in the comments so as to enrich our shared imagination or reflection.

And if you wish to go further, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The Eternal Present · Spiritual awakening · 16 min
To explore the concrete paths of inner transformation.

Series: Toward spiritual sovereignty | Step 3 – The radiance of Compassion
Previous article: The effort of Discipline

The fruit of effort

At the end of the first two steps of this journey, something has begun to be transformed. Love, first recognised as an infinite energy that sustains the universe and can pass through us, has gradually found within us a more attuned form thanks to that ardent discipline which has given it its riverbed and its banks. Whoever has truly worked on these first two qualities of the soul, abundant love and rigorous discipline, now discovers that he begins to see them converge towards a third reality, higher and more luminous: active and radiant compassion.

For compassion is not simply a mixture of love and discipline, it is the fruit of a deeper inner transmutation. It is by sincerely trying to embody love, by coming up against his own limitations, by supplying the effort that discipline requires in order to come closer to it, that the spiritual seeker naturally develops this widened empathy for the difficulties of others. He has groped his way through his own inner labyrinth, he has measured the weight of his heaviness, and this experience makes him open to the path of every human being.

Knowing oneself in order truly to see

It is by moving beyond our ego and its visceral fear of lack, born of our mortality, as well as our representations and behaviours acquired under the influence of education, imitation and culture, that we can gain access to a right vision of ourselves and of others. This lucidity allows us to discern more clearly our real personal needs as well as the expectations of those around us, and to find a just balance between the two, so that we behave in a way that is attuned and conscious rather than impulsive and reactive.

So long as we remain conditioned by the distortions of our acquired personality, which dominates our essential being, we are deprived of that spiritual gaze which would assess situations and people truthfully. Our compassion remains at best random and subject to our moods of the moment, now overflowing, now absent, depending on the emotional state in which we find ourselves rather than on the reality of the other. As we gradually gain a clear vision of our own functioning, through self‑observation and that sincerity which allows us to look at everything without flattering or condemning ourselves, we shall in the end decipher the deep springs of our attitudes and feelings, and we shall begin to be able to find lasting harmony between our inner demands and our capacity to love.

True compassion or illusion?

The more we learn to know ourselves and to understand the driving forces behind our motivations and our behaviours, the more capable we become of discerning whether our impulse of compassion is borne by a truly disinterested intention of dedication towards another, and whether we are really ready to put ourselves in his place in order to understand his point of view or his needs and to welcome these as they are. This distinction is essential, because compassion can very easily become one of the subtlest guises of the ego.

Is our compassion nothing more than a passing emotional reaction that soothes our conscience without our being in any way ready to embody it in concrete terms? Is it a ruse of the ego turned back upon itself, content to tell itself that it is sensitive and empathetic, without wishing to leave its habits in order to take the risk of truly caring for the one who is in distress? Or is it perhaps the result of a sense of guilt created by the imbalance between two human conditions, a selective compassion that we would not feel with the same intensity, for example, towards a wealthy person struck by great misfortune? These questions deserve to be asked honestly, for they reveal to what extent true compassion is a demanding fruit.

True compassion, which springs from a real opening of the heart to love, is that capacity to feel and to sense by empathy the sorrows and difficulties of every human being we meet, even if he is a stranger, and to be ready to support and accompany him without any form of judgement or condescension. It does not judge, does not compare, does not rank sufferings. It simply stands there, available, with the quiet nobility of one who has learnt to stand upright through his own trials.

The maternal face of compassion

To picture this quality of soul that is compassion in all its depth, let us think of a mother’s love, attentive to the needs of her children, ready to comfort them when they face difficulties, naturally finding extenuating circumstances if they have acted badly. She watches to ensure that they may grow up surrounded by affection and safety, and she passes on everything she can to awaken them to life. This maternal love expects nothing in return, does not keep count, is not discouraged by setbacks: it holds fast.

Thus compassion bears this feminine aspect of tenderness and attentiveness to the other, and whoever develops it in himself gradually softens his character: he expects less from others for himself, and becomes towards them more generous and serene. Little by little he acquires a benevolent attitude towards everyone, which prompts him to lay aside any kind of prejudice as to another’s origin, social status or culture. He distrusts rumours and hasty judgements, and should he happen to hear some damaging information about someone, he suspends his opinion and takes the time to enquire from other sources. By practising active and concrete compassion, he becomes close to everyone and seeks to bring human beings closer to one another rather than to cultivate what separates them. Indeed, he feels intensely that common humanity which we share, that universal confrontation with the vicissitudes of an existence in which suffering and death constantly rub shoulders with the joys of everyday life.

All brothers and sisters in fragility

Thus compassion always goes to what is essential: recognising the other as my fellow man, my brother in humanity, without lingering over clothing, reputation, origin or social condition. For compassion, every being deserves consideration and love. Indeed, all alike, the poor vagrant as much as the illustrious figure, the cleaning lady as much as the head of state, share the same ontological reality, our human destiny, and the same metaphysical vocation: to bring their spiritual potentials to fulfilment, that is, to realise wisdom and love in concrete form and thus ennoble the world.

Compassion is therefore welcoming towards the stranger who comes to meet it, ready to share with him the best that is possible, disposed to learn from all in humility. It is concerned to lessen the suffering of humanity, not by becoming drunk on with fine ideas, but with the courage to act as far as possible in this direction, being first of all demanding with itself. In the midst of a world of injustice and violence, compassion resolutely traces the path of peace and reconciliation, and replaces condemnation and revenge with understanding and forgiveness. Since the one who develops active compassion has himself confronted the harmful tendencies that dwell in all human beings, he knows the real effort it takes to transmute our negative energies into forces of light and love.

Opening one’s inner frontiers

Establishing active compassion within oneself is the fruit of an effort to go beyond our limitations, by gradually escaping our atavistic reflexes of withdrawal and self‑protection. It is a matter of discovering that it is possible to love oneself differently and therefore to love the other in a totally new way, not by cultivating our fears and our guarded reserve, barricaded within our very limited field of life experience, but by giving ourselves the chance of an opening to the world that allows us to be enriched by every situation in existence and by every human encounter.

As we thus emerge from our inner confinement and open ourselves to the possibility of a bond of love with all living things, we also become more sensitive to the consubstantiality of all human beings. We enter a space in which reality, which we formerly perceived as fragmented and sometimes hostile, now appears to us as integrated and unified: an uninterrupted flow of energy and consciousness, of which every human being is a unique instance of freedom and individuality, not separated, however, from this shared abundance. The very idea of individuality becomes thinkable in a different way, since true compassion makes us feel that there is in us something of the other, just as there is in him something of ourselves. We then understand why both the Talmud and the Qur’an affirm that whoever saves a human being saves all humanity, and that whoever loves another with this true active compassion already loves all humankind.

Radiant compassion

My compassion becomes beautiful and radiant when it is spontaneous, humble and sincere. It is that gentle and tranquil energy which warms or consoles, that small delicate intention which underlines the happiness one hopes for the other, that attitude of non‑judgement and peace which allows the other to escape the disguise of falsehood or the urgency of flight. It is the friend who walks with you through dangers as through joys and helps you to journey in complete freedom.

It regards the other in his essential reality, beyond the contingencies of his condition, and welcomes him with all the respect due to his human dignity. It has the constancy of one who keeps his awareness and presence to himself awake, in order to stand with full nobility upon this passing earth, where the greatest riches are those of the heart. It is enduring in its love, because it knows how hard a man must toil in his inner labyrinth, cluttered with traps and distorting mirrors, before finding the exit and emerging again into daylight. This towpath, compassion has worn it away with its own laborious, obstinate steps, and how many times it has had to turn back in order to find again, back there at the last crossroads, the barely visible footpath. How could it do otherwise than blaze up in love for its unhappy human brothers and sisters, when it has needed, for itself, so much clemency, effort and patience in order to approach, slowly, the shores of freedom and light?

It is precisely this path travelled, this intimate experience of human fragility and of the grace that enables one to rise again, that gives compassion its particular beauty: it is lit from within. It is not the condescending pity of someone who watches suffering from some safe height, but the warmth of one who has himself trembled and who, from that trembling, has drawn the strength to hold another’s hand.

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One heart, a thousand faces

Within the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, active compassion has been given different names according to languages and cultures. Yet its face is everywhere the same: the living junction between goodness and truth, between expansive love and the rigour that gives it form.

Hebrew Kabbalah situates this quality at the very heart of the Tree of Life, in the sefirah Tiferet, whose name means beauty and splendour. Tiferet is the central sefirah, the one that harmonises and transcends the two opposing pillars of Chesed, the expansive love of the first step, and Gevurah, the ardent discipline of the second. It introduces between them a third dimension, the truth of being, which is neither one nor the other and can therefore integrate them, giving them a shared and radiant countenance. The Zohar designates it as Rachamim, compassion, derived from the root rechem, the womb, underlining that compassion is not a feeling but an original warmth, a love that engenders and protects.

In the Christian tradition, the Gospels use, to describe the feeling of Jesus in the face of suffering, the Greek verb splanknizomai, to be moved in one’s very entrails, a physical and visceral compassion impossible to feign, which we find in the parable of the Prodigal Son to describe the father who runs towards his child as soon as he sees him in the distance. Meister Eckhart, in the Rhenish mystical tradition, speaks of Mitleid, co‑suffering, as the most immediate spiritual quality, that by which the divine itself is present in human suffering.

In Islam, the first two names of God that open each sura are Al Rahmân and Al Rahîm, the All‑Merciful and the Most‑Merciful, both derived from the same Arabic root rahma which, like rechem in Hebrew, evokes the womb. This convergence between the two Semitic traditions around a shared image is profoundly eloquent. Sufism prolongs this intuition with the notion of ithar, the preference granted to the other over oneself, which the masters regard as the highest degree of spiritual love.

In Hinduism, compassion is called Karunâ, a cardinal quality that the Bhagavad Gîtâ sees as an indispensable condition of Dharma, the realisation of the sacred duty of the incarnate being. It finds concrete expression in the principle of Ahimsâ, active non‑violence, not a mere abstention from harming but a vigilant attention to causing no avoidable suffering to any living being.

Buddhism makes Karunâ the second of the four Brahmavihâras, the sublime abodes of the awakened being, complementing Metta, loving‑kindness already evoked in the first step, but distinct from it through its specific orientation towards suffering. The figure of the Bodhisattva embodies this compassion at its highest degree: he renounces definitive nirvana in order to remain present to the world so long as a single being still suffers. In the Tibetan tradition, Avalokiteçvara, known as Chenrezig, is the Bodhisattva of universal compassion, whose mantra Om mani padme hum is regarded as the very vibration of this quality diffused throughout the cosmos.

Taoism places compassion among the three fundamental treasures of the sage. In chapter 67 of the Tao Te King, Laozi declares: “I have three treasures which I hold and cherish: the first is tenderness (ci)…”. Ci, tenderness‑compassion, is therefore the first of the founding virtues of the Taoist sage, the one that makes all the others possible. It is not an effort of will, but the natural course of the Tao in human existence, the gentleness of water which flows around obstacles without ever losing either its direction or its power.

All these traditions converge on a single conviction: compassion is not a feeling that one happens to experience or not according to circumstances, it is a quality of being that one develops, a dimension of consciousness one cultivates until it becomes the permanent tonality of our presence in the world. And everywhere it springs from the same source: the inner experience of one’s own fragility, traversed with honesty and sustained with dignity.

A few markers for the path

These reflections on compassion are not meant to turn you into some heroic figure with an infallible heart, but to help you recognise within yourself the seed of this quality and give it a little more space and light. If the love of the first step was the sap, and the discipline of the second the form that allows it to rise straight, compassion is the fruit: living, fleshy, offered.

As a complement, you may wish to reread the two previous steps of this journey, “The abundance of love” and “The effort of discipline”.

1. A few questions to let resonate

Sit down for a moment of quiet. Let each of these questions sink gently, without seeking an immediate answer. What rises up with a slight resistance is often the most precious.

On the nature of my compassion
Is my compassion tender and warm, or does it, without my noticing, take the form of pity, with all that pity can contain of condescension? Even if my intention is sincere, do those whom I help perceive it as an act from equal to equal, or as the gesture of one who bends down from above to below? Do I assess the real needs of the one whom I help, or do I give what relieves me of the pain of seeing him suffer?

On the truth of my compassion
Am I capable of truly placing myself in the other’s situation, of suspending my prejudices and projections in order to see him as he is? Does my compassion come from a guilt I am trying to dissolve, or from an authentic empathy? Am I more easily compassionate towards strangers than towards those close to me, because distance makes compassion less costly? Conversely, does my compassion for those close to me blind me to the needs of others?

On the constancy and humility of my compassion
Is my compassion reliable and enduring, or does it vanish as soon as I am caught up in my own concerns? Does my capacity to be compassionate give me, however slightly, a feeling of superiority over the one who receives? Am I aware that this ability to give of myself is itself a gift received, and not a distinction that places me above others?

On the dignity created by my compassion
Does my compassion strengthen the dignity of the one who receives it, or does it risk installing him in a dependence that ends by diminishing him? Do I help the other to stand up again and to find his own resources, or do I keep him in the position of one who receives? The highest compassion is that which renders itself unnecessary, by helping the other to reach the point of no longer needing it.

2. A few gestures for the week

Listening to the very end
Choose someone around you who is currently going through a difficulty. Offer him a moment of wholehearted listening, without interrupting, without trying to advise him, without bringing the conversation back to yourself. Simply listen with your whole being. Notice what is happening within him, and within you.

Helping according to real needs
Before you offer your help to someone, take a moment to ask yourself what he truly needs, not what you think would be useful to him. If you do not know, ask him. Then align your gesture with his answer, even if it takes you out of your usual ways of doing things.

An anonymous act
Perform, this week, an act of compassion which no one will know about, and from which you expect no recognition. Compassion that does not need to be seen is the purest of all.

Helping to rise, not to depend
Identify someone to whom you are in the habit of directly giving what he needs. Ask yourself whether you might help him differently: by strengthening his own resources, by showing him how to do something rather than doing it in his place, by encouraging him towards autonomy. The highest compassion is that which makes the one who receives it grow.

3. A celebration of this step

At the end of these seven days, or of whatever time you devote to this step, take a moment to identify a real act of compassion that you have carried out, however modest it may be. Not a fine intention left in your heart, but a concrete gesture that has touched someone else, strengthened his dignity, or created a truer bond between you. Note it down in a notebook, or say it out loud, with gratitude.

For compassion that is not acknowledged risks closing in on itself like a flower that finds no light. What we welcome with gratitude, we invite to grow. Through these accumulated acts of compassion, small and patient, the beauty of our being in the world is gradually built.

Next week, we shall explore how this radiant compassion, consolidated over time, becomes the constancy that holds, the silent victory of the one who does not let go.

A good journey to each and every one of you.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

Next article : Stage 4 - The victory of Constancy

To go further

Have you encountered a practice, a discipline, an exercise, or an obstacle that has truly transformed you? Share your testimony in the comments — it will enrich every reader.

And if you wish to express yourself on a subject of spiritual awakening, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
Notebooks of life · Poems · 4 min
To write as close as possible to what is surfacing, without always seeking to conclude.

14 April 2026

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day on which the Jewish people remembers, once again, the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Europe between 1933 and 1945, and of the six million of their brothers and sisters who perished in the Nazi extermination camps. Without forgetting the millions more mown down by the Einsatzgruppen, as the historians revealed in the decades that followed, and, more than anyone, through the tireless, courageous, and meticulous work of Father Patrick Desbois — blessed be he.

As every year, my heart weeps first for the Jewish dead, then for the incalculable number of victims of the massacres and genocides perpetrated since the dawn of humanity. The bloods of Abel have not ceased to cry out from the earth, and humanity has still not learned: destruction and killing continue their cruel work a few hours by air from the desk at which I write these lines.

And so I remembered this poem, written during a silent retreat some years ago. It seemed to me that, alongside the more discursive text published today on this same subject, “The bloods of Abel cry out from the ground“, it might bear witness in another way — more intimate, more inward — to what passes through me on this day; and so I share it with you below.

May we each contribute, with our talents and our means, to the day when this seemingly endless chain of hatred is transformed into a thread of blazing light opening onto the Day — the Day of the Return to Eden.

Jérôme Nathanaël

Excerpt from The Silence of the Hours, a journal of a spiritual retreat, August 2021.

Kaddish

I heard rushing towards me,
like enormous tireless waves,
— how long still?
the rumour of battles in Africa or elsewhere,
for an acre of land and an illusory power,
so much blood spilt,
the weeping of the poor who have nowhere left to go
while others, poorer still,
pay dearly for their instant
of spinning through the sky.

I saw the vacant, stricken eyes of those
swollen with drugs,
with bad medicine or with alcohol,
who stagger like angry shadows,
somnambulists upon a land
they no longer recognise.

O my Father, make of me a consoler,
that I might take this world in my arms and cherish it,
as Your Second Son did in the land of Palestine!

Kaddish° for Your World in flames!
eviscerated by the voracity and madness of men!
Kaddish for the hungry children, kaddish for the beaten children,
kaddish for the enslaved children, violated, murdered!
Kaddish! kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for the mothers who weep,
kaddish for the mothers who cry out, for the mothers in mourning!
Kaddish!
Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

Kaddish for Your daughters and Your sons who have lost hope,
kaddish for those who no longer see Your path — may they return to You!
Kaddish! Yéhé sheméh rabbo mevorakh! May Your Great Name be blessed!

August 2021

° kaddish, in Hebrew קדיש qaddish, sanctification, is one of the central pieces of Jewish liturgy whose theme is the glorification and sanctification of the Divine Name, with reference to one of the eschatological visions of Ezekiel. Several versions exist, the best known being that of the mourners, though the kaddish contains no allusion to the dead or to their resurrection.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

In echo

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