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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

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

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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

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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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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

Does this exchange move you, challenge you, or resist you? The dialogue does not end here — share in the comments the reaction, the nuance or the question it awakens in you.

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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

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
The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

The siren that fractures time

Every year, at the same hour, a siren crosses Israel from one end to the other. Cars stop in the middle of the roads. Pedestrians freeze on the pavements. Conversations die away. For two minutes, the entire country stands, not in a silence that is the absence of sound, but in its exact opposite: an absolute presence, a listening stretched towards what can no longer speak. I experience this from within a particular inheritance, which I do not need to name in full for it to be heard. Yet the singularity of such a transmitted wound finds its full meaning, I deeply believe, only when it becomes a beacon raised above the other darknesses of the world. That is why this ritual does not seem to me to belong to the Jewish people alone. It concerns humanity as a whole — or rather, it should concern it, if it finally consented to hear what the siren says to each of us, wherever we live and whatever memory we have inherited.

Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and of Heroism, commemorates the extermination of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945. This reality is irreducible, named, quantified, documented with a bureaucratic precision that the executioners themselves supplied, doubtless without realising that they were compiling their own indictment file for eternity. Yet this day carries, beyond its national and religious dimension, an appeal addressed to every human conscience: why does man kill man because he is the Other? And how far can he go in that direction? The Shoah has inscribed the answer to these two questions in concrete and ash, to such an extent that the whole history of collective violence, both before and after it, must now be read in its terrifying light.

Auschwitz, or modernity turned against itself

It would be convenient, and profoundly false, to classify the Shoah among eruptions of primitive barbarity, as though the SS had been cavemen armed with clubs. The truth is exactly the reverse, and it is precisely this truth that makes the Shoah unbearable to contemplate in its full dimension: it is the most sophisticated product of modern Western civilisation. The trains that carried the deportees to the camps ran according to timetables optimised by engineers; the gas chambers were designed by qualified architects; the lists of names were kept by scrupulous civil servants; the racial ideology that legitimised the extermination was formulated by doctors of philosophy and university professors. What the Shoah revealed with inescapable clarity is that technical rationality, the bureaucracy of the modern State and scientific thought can, when severed from any ethical and spiritual compass, become the most effective instruments ever produced for the extermination of human beings.

Auschwitz is therefore not a regression to the animal. It is a perversion of the human by itself, at the most advanced stage of its organisational capacities. This distinction is not academic. It means that the danger does not come from a humanity that is insufficiently developed, but on the contrary from a highly developed humanity that has dissociated intelligence from conscience. And every age carries within itself the seeds of this dissociation, including our own, with its targeting algorithms, its real-time rhetorics of dehumanisation on social networks, and its States increasingly tempted, in their governance, by fear of the foreigner and surveillance of the average citizen.

From Cain to Auschwitz: a genealogy of massacre

Yet the story does not begin in 1933. It begins in the very first days, where the Torah itself placed the first act of violence: in a field, between two brothers, under the gaze of a God who asks Cain, the murderer of Abel: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground.” (Genesis 4, 10). The Hebrew text is striking in its precision: dəmê, the bloods, in the plural – as though Abel’s body contained not a single blood, but all the future bloods of all the victims that Cain and his descendants would spill over the centuries. Rashi, one of the greatest commentators on the Torah, notes that the text indeed says “the bloods” in order to teach that whoever kills a single human being is as though he had destroyed an entire world, and conversely, that every life saved is worth an entire world. In this sense, Abel is not one victim among others. He is the name borne, in sacred memory, by every victim of collective violence from prehistory to the present day.

The list of these bloods is long. Cain is older than all our civilisations, and the question that the Torah raises is not a pious metaphor, it is an anthropology. We must find the courage to go through a brief enumeration without turning away our eyes. From the Neolithic period, the mass graves of Talheim, Asparn-Schletz or Schöneck-Kilianstädten, dated between 5000 and 7000 years before our era, bear witness that the collective and methodical massacre of an entire community is not a modern invention. The Assyrians exterminated the populations of Mesopotamia with an implacable method that already stunned their contemporaries. The Mongol conquests annihilated entire civilisations from Central Asia to Persia. The colonisation of the Americas was accompanied by a demographic collapse that some historians estimate at eighty per cent of the indigenous Amerindian populations, a proportion that exceeds anything the twentieth century produced. The transatlantic slave trade deported twelve million human beings, torn from their African lands, from their names, from their languages, from their humanity.

In the twentieth century, the Shoah was itself preceded by two tragedies. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia were exterminated by the German colonial army with a method and an ideology that made it the first laboratory of modern genocide and a direct foreshadowing of what was to come. Then, in 1915, during the genocide of the Armenians, Turkey pushed this logic of extermination a step further, with a troubling administrative precision: the designation of a population, dispossession, deportation, extermination — a protocol that the Nazis then had only to industrialise. After 1945, the list continued, as though humanity had stubbornly refused to learn anything. Let us name the Cambodian people massacred by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, the Bengalis of East Pakistan in 1971, the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand dead in a hundred days, under the indifferent gaze of a world that the survivors have never been able to forgive, then the Yezidis in 2014… The list is not closed and it is still lengthening today.

Each of these massacres has followed the same fundamental architecture: someone first decided that the Other was not fully human. That his life was worth less, that his blood flowed for a reason, that his disappearance was necessary or at least tolerable. And once this decision had been taken inwardly, in the heart of an individual, in the ideology of a group, in the law of a State, the mechanism set itself in motion, with the terrifying docility that mechanisms always display. The Shoah is the moment when that mechanism reached its maximum speed and power, when the process of dehumanisation encountered industrial machinery and total political will. It is the climax, not because the other massacres matter less, but because it is the one that rendered the question absolutely impossible to evade: how far can humanity go in the destruction of its own flesh?

We are all Cain in potential

This is the disturbing claim, the one that neither moral comfort nor clear conscience can easily accept, and it is precisely for that reason that it must be voiced without trembling: there is no race, no nation, no religion, no civilisation that has demonstrated a definitive immunity against collective violence. Nazi Germany is not a monstrous exception that appeared from nowhere in the concert of nations. It is the result of an accumulation of political choices, complicit silences, stoked resentments, instrumentalised fears, and the designation of a scapegoat deemed responsible for every ill, a process that any society can undergo if it lets its spiritual and ethical guard drop sufficiently. Hannah Arendt, with her now famous phrase about the “banality of evil”, was saying nothing else: ordinary executioners are not monsters different from us in nature; they are ordinary men who consented, step by step, to monstrous acts because social, ideological and institutional pressure had rendered those acts normal.

This does not mean that we are all guilty of the Shoah, nor that all moral positions are equivalent. It means something far more demanding. We all carry, somewhere in our psychic structures and in our collective inheritances, the seeds of what Cain accomplished in the first field in history. The jealousy of what belongs to the Other. The resentment before difference. The fear of the foreigner erected into a principle of government. The contempt for the weak, dressed up in discourse about natural selection or meritocratic competition. Indifference to the suffering of a group we have not chosen to recognise as our neighbour. It is these seeds that Yom HaShoah invites us to look at directly, not in order to lash ourselves in vain, but to accomplish the work that the Jewish tradition calls teshuvah — the return, the conversion, the turning back of oneself towards what one knows to be right.

Cutting the inner roots before the violence ripens

Teshuvah does not mean regret. Regret, on its own, is a comfortable emotion that can be experienced without changing anything. Teshuvah means to return, to return to what one is at the deepest level, before the layers of fear, ideology and tribal conditioning that have covered over the original conscience. In Jewish thought, human beings are capable of teshuvah at any moment, because the divine image within them, the tselem Elokim, can never be utterly destroyed, only obscured. Yet authentic teshuvah demands an honest inventory. What have I done with the Other in my own life? Which Other have I dehumanised, even in the silence of my thoughts? To which rhetoric of rejection have I applauded because it seemed legitimate to me, because it targeted those I did not like, because it protected what I wanted to protect?

This question is not abstract. In our contemporary societies, crossed by migratory crises, surges of identitarian nationalisms, and algorithms that confine each group within its own reality facing its own enemy, it is burning in its relevance. To remember the Shoah without carrying out this inner inventory is to honour the dead with our lips while reconstituting in our hearts the conditions of their murder. It is spiritual complacency in its most dangerous form: the form that wraps itself in the cloak of commemoration in order to avoid transformation.

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Reciting names: a liturgy for all the Abels

That is why, on this day, I would like to suggest a symbolic gesture that goes beyond the sole framework of Yom HaShoah, without in any way denying it. Imagine a silent liturgy in which, after the six torches lit for the six million murdered Jews, other flames would be kindled: one for the one and a half million Armenians of 1915, one for the eight hundred thousand Tutsis of 1994, one for the two million Cambodians under Pol Pot, one for the millions of enslaved people drowned in the Atlantic whose names are engraved on no memorial, one for the indigenous peoples of the Americas whose civilisations have been reduced to legends in their own lands, one for the Yezidis, for the Uyghurs, for all those whose collective suffering has not yet found an official name in the calendar of world memory.

This gesture is not a dilution. It is an amplification, the recognition that the bloods of Abel cry out from all lands, in all languages, that God hears all these cries with the same shattering attention, and that our responsibility as living human beings is to become the bearers of these names that no one else can any longer pronounce. To recite the names in full awareness is the most radical act of resistance against forgetfulness, which is itself the second death of the victims. And it is at the same time an act of collective teshuvah: in naming our victims, those of our nation, our civilisation, our group, we acknowledge the share of Cain that produced them, we choose to remain silent no longer and truly to change.

What all these martyrs of inhumanity still demand of us

In a few moments, the siren will fall silent. The cars will start up again. Conversations will resume. And if nothing has been transformed within us during those two minutes, if we have simply endured the ritual as one endures a shower before coming back into the dry, then we will have betrayed both the dead and the living. For the dead of the Shoah, like all the Abels of history, are not asking us for tears. They ask something more difficult and more costly: they ask us to become men and women who refuse, in their daily lives and in their collective choices, to allow the roots of rejection, contempt and dehumanisation to germinate within and around them, whose outcome, carried through to its extreme conclusion, always bears, in the end, the same name: Auschwitz.

Zakhor — remember. But remember in order to change.

— On the occasion of Yom HaShoah 5786 / 2026.

© 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 · The age under strain · 9 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

On February 14, 2026, while many were exchanging Valentine’s Day declarations of love, a 23-year-old man was lynched and died in Lyon. His name was Quentin Deranque. He was a mathematics student and a philosophy enthusiast who sang in his parish choir.

Two days earlier, on February 12, he was near Sciences Po Lyon, the city’s prestigious political science institute, where the Némésis collective held a counter-demonstration against a conference by Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament for the far-left La France Insoumise party. Quentin held nationalist convictions and moved in Lyon’s Catholic traditionalist circles. Némésis presented him as a member of its security detail. However, his family and their lawyer formally contested this characterization. They stated that Quentin was “neither a security agent nor a member of any protection service,” had no criminal record, and defended his convictions in a nonviolent manner.

What is certain is what followed: the confrontation between the two groups of militants turned into a bloody battle. Pursued by a group of several dozen far-left activists for more than two kilometers, he was knocked to the ground and struck repeatedly on the head. He was found unconscious by the banks of the Rhône. He never recovered. The autopsy revealed a fatal brain injury. He was beaten to death for what he represented.

This is not an ordinary criminal case. It is a symptom, and it calls not for a partisan reaction but for courageous clarity.

Two commitments, two logics, two levels of responsibility

Much of the international press has simply described Quentin as a “far-right activist.” While not inaccurate, this description is incomplete. Honest analysis requires us to draw finer distinctions than those that fit a headline.

Founded in 2019, the Némésis collective presents itself as an identitarian feminist movement. It denounces sexual violence against women in public spaces and insists on its connection to migration. The collective positions itself as a defender of what it calls “European civilization.” The collective’s origin touches on a genuine concern. After the mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in 2016 in Cologne, a significant segment of the feminist left remained silent about the perpetrators’ origins for fear of fueling racism. This left a rhetorical and political vacuum that identitarian movements were quick to fill.

The vacuum was real, but the way Némésis chose to fill it is far more questionable. The collective’s discourse racializes sexual violence, designates Muslim immigrant men as a structural threat to women, reduces wearing the veil to “political Islam activism,” and promotes a conservative, exclusionary vision of femininity. Némésis is neither a neo-Nazi organization nor a simple women’s rights movement. It is a radical right-wing identitarian collective whose rhetoric stigmatizes an entire ethno-religious category of the population. This is both ideologically problematic and socially dangerous, even when no physical violence is incited.

This is precisely the fundamental difference with La Jeune Garde Antifasciste, the group from which Quentin’s assailants appear to have come, according to judicial sources. Founded in 2018 by Raphaël Arnault, who was subsequently elected to the French parliament under the La France Insoumise banner, this far-left collective was structured around combat training and planned physical confrontations with far-right groups, according to French authorities. This is precisely why the government dissolved it in June 2025. The difference is not one of degree, but of nature. Professing radical ideas is one thing, however objectionable. Organizing groups of masked men to chase and beat political adversaries in the street is another matter entirely, and it is this second logic that killed Quentin Deranque.

I want to be clear: I do not share Némésis’s positions or their vision of a “European civilization” reduced to an identitarian fortress closed in on itself. I believe in a new civilization that is open and founded on dialogue between human beings. It is a civilization that acknowledges the complexity of the world and seeks common solutions in a spirit of mutual goodwill. However, rejecting their ideas does not authorize me to equate them with killers or to claim that legal identitarian discourse is equivalent to deadly lynchings. Ethical clarity requires these distinctions.

The political atmosphere that makes this possible

However, it would be insufficient to look only at these two fringe groups, ignoring the rest of the political landscape. Quentin’s death occurs against a broader backdrop in which elected political representatives have progressively abandoned debate in favor of designating opponents as enemies.

La France Insoumise, comparable in spirit and method to the most radical wing of left populism found in several Western democracies, has popularized a conflictual grammar in which opponents are entities to be delegitimized rather than interlocutors. The persistent accusations of antisemitism against several of its elected officials — accusations that they contest but that their handling of the October 7, 2023, massacres has substantially fueled — betray a structural difficulty in clearly naming hatred when it presents itself in a politically convenient guise. Refusing to label the massacre of 1,200 people based on their Jewish identity as an antisemitic crime in favor of a geopolitical framework of “resistance” is not a trivial semantic debate. It authorizes a narrative in which the dehumanization of certain people becomes understandable, if not justified.

Rima Hassan, the central figure in this polarizing debate, embodies these contradictions. She is genuinely committed to the Palestinian cause but multiplies militant appearances and statements that, according to her critics, blur the line between humanitarian advocacy and legitimizing hate speech. Multiple proceedings for “apology of terrorism” have been opened against her in France, none of which have resulted in convictions thus far; all are still under judicial review. However, these cases outline a political space where ambiguity is systematically cultivated, with consequences for the social climate that cannot be ignored.

From words to blood: the mechanics of dehumanisation

There is a slippery slope between words and actions. This slope is not inevitable; millions of people hold radical opinions without ever raising a hand against anyone. However, it becomes dangerous when language ceases to acknowledge the full humanity of others.

It becomes dangerous when a radical-right activist is seen as a “fascist” to be neutralized, when a pro-Palestinian citizen is seen as a “potential terrorist” to be crushed, and when a university conference is seen as “an act of war” and a counter-demonstration as “a nest of Nazis.” In this context, physical violence is merely the natural extension of the discourse. All that’s needed is an opportunity and the impunity of numbers. The slogans have done their work; they have stripped the opponent of his humanity.

The lynching of Quentin teaches us precisely this: a group of individuals pursued, surrounded, and beat a man already on the ground—some of them masked, that is, knowingly—because they had absorbed into their militant imagination that this man deserved to live less than others. This is not uncontrollable madness; it is ideological coherence carried to its most bestial conclusion.

It is the return of militia logic: organized groups hunting and beating their political opponents in the streets. History has seen its darkest forms, and we believed we had learned from them. Every form of thought that claims allegiance to humanity must unambiguously condemn this, regardless of political affiliation.

The shattered mirror of a society that has lost its common reference points

This tragedy forces us to face something we generally prefer to avoid: modern societies have entered a phase of profound dislocation of their shared ethical reference points. This is not because people are fundamentally worse than before, but because the symbolic structures that once contained conflict—respect for the law, a culture of debate, recognition of shared dignity, and the spiritual foundation of “thou shalt not kill”—have eroded faster than our collective capacity to register it.

Social media has created echo chambers where each group reinforces its worst fears and darkest judgments about others. Political spectacle has replaced deliberation with conflict. In this ethical and spiritual void, violence fills the void left by words. Rather than arguing and seeking compromises from which each interlocutor might benefit, violence imposes itself, provokes fear, and forces the other to yield.

Quentin’s death is a tragedy, but we must not allow it to blind us to an even more troubling tragedy: young people on both sides are so deprived of inner resources, a shared language, and spaces for genuine encounters that they can no longer see their political adversaries as anything other than threats to eliminate. This is the true poverty of our age—not only material poverty, but also the poverty of the soul that makes it impossible to look the other person in the eye and recognize that, despite all that divides us, he is made of the same clay and has the same essential humanity.

The urgency of recovering our common humanity

I want to speak in my own name and clearly dissociate myself from all forms of radicalism — whether political, discursive, or physical — that reduce the world’s complexity to slogans and reduce people to symbols to be destroyed.

The crises we are experiencing—the migration crisis, the identity crisis, the geopolitical crisis, the ecological crisis, and the crisis of meaning—are real and profound. They deserve better than tribal responses. These crises call for slow, humble thinking capable of holding together seemingly contradictory realities: migrants can be both victims of unjust systems and perpetrators of violence; defending Israel and standing in solidarity with Palestinians are not mutually exclusive; and love for European civilization and openness to other cultures can coexist. Holding these paradoxes alive without hastily resolving them is the most courageous act of thought available to us today.

This requires a type of work that political discourse will never perform for us: work on ourselves, our own hatred, our own absolutist certainties, and our tendency to reduce others to caricatures in order to maintain our identities. This work is spiritual in the deepest sense—not religious in the narrow sense, but interior, patient, and demanding. It involves forgiveness—not naive forgetting, but the sovereign decision not to allow hatred of the other to define who we are. It passes through dialogue—not strategic negotiation, but the authentic willingness to be changed by what the other has to say. It passes through humility—the recognition that my interpretation of the world, however legitimate, is incomplete in the face of the infinite complexity of reality.

The absurd brutality of Quentin Deranque’s death can be an invitation. Not to vengeance or political escalation—his parents themselves called for calm with remarkable dignity. Rather, it should prompt us to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in a world where people die for what they believe in, or do we want to live in a world where we learn, even painfully, to talk to one another?

Quentin was twenty-three years old. He loved mathematics and sacred music. He died because someone decided that belonging to an idea stripped him of his right to life. May his death teach us what we had not learned any other way: that the humanity of others cannot depend on their opinions. It is precisely this fragile and demanding principle that defines a civilization worthy of that name.

© 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
The World We Cross · New World · 21 min
To open up perspectives, test out possibilities, seek forms of life more fit to be inhabited.

The diagnosis of an era seeking meaning

Our era is characterized by a dizzying contradiction: never has humanity possessed so many technical means to transform the world, and yet never has it felt so powerless in the face of the existential threats weighing upon it — climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, resurgence of totalitarianisms, dissolution of communal bonds, collective spiritual exhaustion. Instrumental reason, which was supposed to emancipate us, seems to have generated new forms of enslavement: contemporary individuals find themselves reduced to an algorithmic profile, an economic function, a standardized consumer.

This crisis is not merely material or political; it is profoundly spiritual and existential. It reveals the failure of the great modern narratives — indefinite progress, perpetual economic growth, blind faith in technology — to give authentic meaning to human existence. In this context of disenchantment and disorientation, spiritual existentialism emerges not as a systematic doctrine to be passively adopted, but as an existential posture capable of answering the most urgent questions of our time: how do we authentically inhabit our finitude? How do we preserve the irreducible dignity of the person in the face of forces of massification? How do we articulate inner freedom and collective responsibility? How do we recover a living relationship with transcendence without sacrificing critical thinking?

The timeless foundations of a philosophy of embodied existence

Spiritual existentialism has its roots in a philosophical and theological tradition spanning the centuries, from Job crying out his revolt against divine injustice to Kierkegaard asserting that “subjectivity is truth,” through Dostoevsky exploring the abysses of human freedom and Orthodox mystics celebrating cosmic transfiguration. This current immediately rejects any reduction of human existence to abstract categories, biological or sociological determinisms, philosophical systems claiming to exhaustively explain the mystery of being.

At the heart of this thought lies a fundamental conviction: existence precedes essence. This formula, far from being a mere intellectual provocation, means that human beings are not first and foremost a predetermined nature, an assigned social function, a destiny written in advance. They are a perpetual project, freedom in action, infinite responsibility that discovers itself progressively through choices and commitments. Unlike a manufactured object whose essence precedes existence — the knife exists first as the idea of “cutting” before being fabricated — humans exist first in the world, then progressively define themselves through their acts.

This existential freedom is not a comfortable blessing but an overwhelming condemnation, as Sartre affirms: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Anguish arises precisely from this consciousness of our radical freedom: faced with the infinity of possibilities, no determinism can excuse me, no given nature can justify me. But this anguish, so well explored by Kierkegaard, far from being a pathology to cure, constitutes the very signal of our access to authenticity, the proof that we are capable of transforming ourselves, of rectifying our trajectory, of becoming otherwise.

Spiritual existentialism, however, distinguishes itself radically from atheistic existentialism by affirming that this freedom does not float in the void of an absurd and indifferent universe. It is rooted in a living relationship with transcendence — whether it be named G-d, the Absolute, the Mystery of the Living, or simply recognized as that dimension of depth that infinitely exceeds our rational categories. Kierkegaard expresses this magnificently with his concept of the “leap of faith“: a total existential commitment to what transcends reason, not through blind irrationality, but through lucid recognition that ultimate truth cannot be grasped by conceptual intelligence alone.

What spiritual existentialism teaches us

The absolute primacy of the person over systems

Spiritual existentialism tirelessly proclaims the irreducible dignity of each concrete person against all abstractions claiming to subsume them — whether in the name of eternal Truth, historical Progress, the Nation, the Market, or any collective Cause whatsoever. This conviction is born from a profound existential experience: singular suffering, ineluctable death, personal anguish cannot be “explained” or “justified” by any rational system. As Ivan Karamazov cries out in Dostoevsky: “If the sufferings of children have served to complete the sum of sufferings necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm in advance that this truth is not worth such a price.”

Nicolas Berdyaev develops this intuition by radically distinguishing the person (lichnost) from the individual. The individual is a biological and sociological category: the atomic unit, the specimen of a species, the number in a series. The person, on the contrary, is a unique spiritual reality, irreplaceable, bearer of a singular creative vocation that places them in direct relation with the absolute. Modern civilization — whether capitalist or totalitarian — tends to reduce humans to individuals, that is to say, to a function, a cog in the economic or political machine. This objectification constitutes the fundamental form of contemporary slavery.

For spiritual existentialism, no external authority — State, Church, Party, Corporation — can substitute itself for personal conscience in its relationship to the absolute. Leon Chestov writes forcefully: “No one but oneself can hold one’s own keys. And use them. In this matter, heads of Churches and States often prove to be sad and bad counterfeiters.” This affirmation possesses prophetic resonance in our era when algorithms claim to know our desires better than we ourselves do, when political and religious institutions arrogate to themselves the monopoly of truth, when technocratic experts decide what is good for the masses.

The struggle against objectification and massification

Berdyaev introduces a crucial distinction between spirit (dukh) and objectification (obiektivatsiia). Spirit designates living, creative, free personal reality that relates directly to the absolute. Objectification designates the process by which this spiritual reality becomes fixed, crystallizes into objects, institutions, dead concepts. Every human creation — intellectual, artistic, social, religious — undergoes this tendency toward objectification: living spiritual intuitions transform into rigid dogmas, impulses of creative freedom fossilize into oppressive institutions, persons become interchangeable social functions.

This objectification represents a form of permanent “fall,” a process of alienation constantly at work in our societies. The task of the spiritual person consists precisely in struggling against this petrification, in keeping alive the flame of spirit against forces of uniformization and standardization. It is an endless combat, for objectification is constantly reborn, but it is precisely in this combat that existential authenticity is forged.

Kierkegaard had already diagnosed this phenomenon when he wrote: “The crowd is untruth.” The institutional Church of his era had transformed authentic Christianity — risky personal commitment, direct relationship with Christ, faith lived in trembling — into a comfortable mass religion where everyone is automatically Christian by the simple fact of being a citizen. This critique applies mutatis mutandis to all contemporary forms of massification: social networks that transform singularities into standardized profiles, political ideologies that reduce human complexity to binary slogans, intellectual fashions that impose the conformism of groupthink.

Subjectivity as existential truth

One of the major contributions of spiritual existentialism lies in its rehabilitation of subjectivity against the pretension of rational objectivity to hold a monopoly on truth. Kierkegaard’s formula “truth is subjectivity“ has often been caricatured as nihilistic relativism. But it is something altogether different: Kierkegaard does not deny the existence of objective truths in the scientific domain (laws of physics, mathematical theorems), but he affirms that in existential domains — the meaning of life, ethical commitment, religious faith — a truth has value only if it is passionately appropriated by an individual, if it becomes the foundation of their way of being in the world.

A luminous example: a pagan who prays to his idol with all the passion of his soul, with total commitment of his being, is closer to truth than an orthodox Christian who mechanically recites prayers out of institutional habit. The difference does not reside in doctrinal content but in the degree of existential appropriation, of lived incarnation. This perspective revolutionizes our relationship to knowledge: it is not enough to accumulate information about G-d, about goodness, about justice; one must become what one claims to know.

This existential subjectivity is not volatile sentimentalism or complacent narcissism. It is passion — in the Kierkegaardian sense of infinite interest in one’s own existence, total commitment that puts at stake the integrity of the person. It is the difference between knowing the map of a territory and exploring it oneself, step by step, in the flesh of lived experience.

Creative freedom against the dictatorship of evidences

Russian existentialism, particularly in Leon Chestov, develops a radical critique of what he names “the dictatorship of reason.” For Chestov, the original Fall does not consist in the disobedience of Adam and Eve but in the fact that they chose the tree of knowledge of good and evil to the detriment of the tree of life. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge means accepting to submit existence to the eternal principles of reason, to laws of necessity, to the logical order of constraining evidences.

Since this Fall, humanity has lived under the reign of “one must,” of “it is necessary,” of “it is impossible.” We have internalized this servitude to the point of no longer even recognizing it as servitude: we call “wisdom” this submission to rational order. Chestov opposes to this tyranny of reason creative freedom: an ontological power that can radically transform the very nature of the real, undo the past, resurrect the dead, render non-occurred what has occurred.

This conception seems delirious from the rational point of view — and it fully assumes this. But for Chestov, asking the question “how could one undo the past?” already means submitting oneself to reason. Authentic faith does not ask “how,” it affirms: “With G-d, all things are possible.” Benjamin Fondane, disciple of Chestov, writes magnificently: “Well, yes, Chestov glories in being absurd — that goes without saying; and what if the absurd were the only way to find?“

This critique of reason possesses burning actuality in our era when techno-scientific rationality claims to reduce the real to what is measurable, calculable, controllable. It reminds us that there exist dimensions of human existence — suffering, love, death, hope, artistic creation, mystical experience — that irreducibly escape rationalization.

These philosophical teachings, far from being pure speculative abstractions, find their true scope in the responses they allow us to elaborate in the face of the concrete crises of our era.

Existential responses to contemporary crises

Facing the ecological crisis: an embodied spirituality of transfiguration

The contemporary ecological crisis reveals the failure of an instrumental conception of nature that reduces the living world to a reservoir of exploitable resources. Spiritual existentialism, particularly in its sophiological dimension inherited from Vladimir Solovyov, proposes a radical alternative. Solovyov’s vision of Sophia — divine Wisdom as the soul of the world, living link between creator and creation — affirms that the entire cosmos is called to theosis, to divinization, to transfiguration.

This perspective implies that matter itself is not inert, dead, separated from the divine, but that it participates in the spiritual mystery. An embodied existential spirituality does not consist in fleeing the world to take refuge in a pure disembodied spirit, but in recognizing that transcendence expresses itself through creation, that each element of the living carries within it a divine spark. As the Hasidic tradition often evoked in this publication affirms: “There is not an atom of reality that does not contain the divine presence.”

This vision sacralizes the world without however sacralizing its exploitation. On the contrary, it calls for radical ethical responsibility: if the world is a bearer of the divine, then its destruction constitutes a profanation. The creative freedom of which Chestov speaks does not signify technocratic domination of nature but conscious participation in the work of cosmic transfiguration.

Facing the dissolution of bonds: communitarian personalism

Modern liberal individualism has atomized human communities, reducing interpersonal relations to contracts of mutual interest or superficial digital interactions. Simultaneously, collectivist movements — whether nationalist or neo-totalitarian — dissolve the person in the mass, sacrificing singularities on the altar of a fantasized collective identity.

Spiritual existentialism proposes a third way: a communitarian personalism that articulates the affirmation of the irreducible dignity of each person with the recognition of our constitutive interdependence. Paul Ricœur develops this perspective by affirming that our shared fragility, our common mortality, founds a radical equality and a responsibility toward the other that cannot be dissociated from responsibility toward oneself.

Berdyaev insists on the fact that the person cannot flourish in solipsistic isolation but only in communion with other persons, in an authentic spiritual community that respects the singularity of each. This communion is not undifferentiated fusion but mutual recognition of creative freedoms. It requires what Martin Buber names the “I-Thou” relationship — not the instrumental use of the other as means (I-It), but the dialogical encounter where each person recognizes in the other an irreducible presence.

In the era of social networks that transform human relations into quantifiable social capital, this personalist vision recalls that the authenticity of bonds is measured neither in number of “followers” nor in frequency of interactions, but in the depth of mutual presence, in the capacity to see and honor the irreducible singularity of the other.

Facing contemporary nihilism: an eschatology of hope

Contemporary nihilism does not always manifest itself as a conscious and proclaimed despair but more insidiously as a generalized loss of meaning, a diffuse sentiment that nothing is really worthwhile, that all values are equivalent or arbitrary. This passive nihilism feeds on the collapse of the great modern narratives and the revelation of their intrinsic violence: Progress engendered Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Reason legitimized colonization and exploitation, emancipatory ideologies produced the gulags.

Spiritual existentialism refuses both nihilism and attempts to authoritatively restore fixed values. It proposes an existential way: meaning is not given to us from the outside — neither by a providential Nature, nor by a teleological History, nor by an imposed Revelation — but it emerges from our free and responsible engagement in the world. As Sartre affirms, “man is the being through whom meaning comes into the world.”

But contrary to Camus’s nihilism which affirms that we must “imagine Sisyphus happy” by accepting the definitive absurdity of existence, spiritual existentialism maintains an eschatological dimension, a hope that human history is not an eternal recommencement devoid of finality but a drama tending toward transfiguration. This hope is not an easy consolation that would deny present suffering but an affirmation that the last word belongs neither to evil, nor to death, nor to the absurd.

Facing the technologization of existence: the affirmation of the unobjectifiable

Contemporary techno-digital civilization progressively submits all dimensions of human existence to the logic of optimization, measurement, control. The body becomes a set of biological parameters to monitor and improve. Emotions are quantified and monitored by “wellness” applications. Social relations are mediated by algorithms that determine what we will see, whom we will meet, what we will think. The human itself becomes a set of exploitable data.

Spiritual existentialism opposes to this totalizing objectification the affirmation of the unobjectifiable: there exists a dimension of the human person that irreducibly escapes all attempts at reduction, measurement, control. This dimension — which Berdyaev names spirit, which Kierkegaard names passionate subjectivity, which Chestov names creative freedom — constitutes precisely what makes us persons and not things.

Recognizing this unobjectifiability implies refusing the transhumanist fantasy of an “augmented” human who would be improved by fusion with technology. Not that all technology is bad in itself, but because the essence of the human does not reside in measurable functional capacities (physical strength, calculation speed, memory) but in the capacity to freely relate to meaning, to create, to love, to suffer, to hope — dimensions that escape technocratic logic.

Toward an existential spirituality for the 21st century

A spirituality of choice and commitment

Spiritual existentialism calls for a spirituality that is neither passive inheritance of an imposed tradition nor conformist adherence to an intellectual fashion, but free and risky personal appropriation. In an era when religious identities are increasingly chosen rather than inherited, this perspective takes on particular actuality: it is no longer a matter of being Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist by simple family or cultural belonging, but of existentially committing oneself to a spiritual path because it resonates with our deepest experience, because it helps us become more authentically ourselves.

This existential spirituality implies what Kierkegaard names “becoming Christian” (or spiritual becoming, to broaden beyond Christianity): a never-completed process where the person progressively appropriates spiritual truths, transforms them into effective modes of being. One is never “Christian” in the sense of a fixed identity that one could exhibit; one is always in the process of becoming so, in a permanent tension between what one is and what one is called to be.

A spirituality of creative uprooting

Paradoxically, spiritual existentialism affirms that uprooting — tearing away from comfortable certainties, inherited evidences, firm lands of rational knowledge — can become the very condition of a deeper rooting. Chestov writes: “Authentic philosophy begins precisely with uprooting, with the voluntary suspension of all belief in the established order.”

This uprooting is not a nihilistic wandering without compass but an active availability to revelation, an openness to what exceeds our pre-established conceptual frameworks. In a world in accelerated mutation where old certainties collapse — whether traditional religious certainties or secular certainties of modernity — this capacity to “hold in uprooting” without sinking into despair becomes an essential spiritual competence.

My journey of spiritual nomadism actually embodies this spirituality of creative uprooting: I have traveled through multiple traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Sufi Islam, Buddhism, etc.), never enclosing myself in any fixed confessional identity, but drawing from these diverse sources to construct my own path as a spiritual seeker. This approach is not superficial syncretism but recognition that spiritual truth always exceeds the particular formulations given by historical traditions.

A spirituality of presence and action

Spiritual existentialism refuses the dichotomy between contemplation and action, between inner life and engagement in the world. It calls for an embodied spirituality where transcendence is not sought in flight from the world but in the very heart of ordinary existence, transformed by intention, love, attention.

The Hasidic tradition, which I frequently claim, expresses this vision magnificently: sanctifying the everyday (kadosh), recognizing the divine presence in each gesture, each relationship, each ordinary moment. Eating, working, loving, creating — all these acts can become manifestations of spiritual life if we accomplish them with consciousness, with total presence, with the intention of participating in the transfiguration of the world.

This spirituality also implies ethical and political engagement. One cannot call oneself spiritual while remaining indifferent to social injustice, ecological destruction, oppression of the most vulnerable. Paul Ricœur affirms that ethics precedes morality: before asking “what are my duties?” one must ask “what life do I aim for? toward what good do I orient myself?” And this ethical aim necessarily implies responsibility toward others, particularly toward the most fragile.

A spirituality of tragic joy

Spiritual existentialism does not promise easy happiness nor beatific serenity. It fully recognizes the tragic dimension of existence: suffering, death, injustice, the absurd are insurmountable realities. But it affirms that in the very heart of this tragic condition can be born a form of profound joy — not despite tragedy, but through it.

This joy does not result from ignorance or denial of suffering but from lucid acceptance of our finite condition associated with the affirmation that this life, despite everything, is worth living, celebrating, offering. Nietzsche spoke of amor fati (love of fate), but spiritual existentialism goes further: it affirms that authentic faith can transform fate itself, that nothing is definitively lost as long as G-d remains possible.

When I propose, in the presentation of these Dialogues of the New World: “Together, let us build a more habitable and joyful future,” I express precisely this fecund tension between lucid realism (the current world is not “habitable” for many) and active hope (we can transform this situation). The joy of which I speak is not escapism but spiritual resistance, affirmation of life against all forces of death.

Conclusion: embodied hope as an act of resistance

Spiritual existentialism proposes to the 21st century not a closed philosophical system to be dogmatically accepted but an existential posture, an art of living that articulates lucidity and hope, radical critique and creative affirmation. In an era when old certainties collapse and when new idols (the Market, Technology, the Security State) claim to occupy the void left by the withdrawal of the divine, this philosophy reminds us of fundamental truths.

First, no human person can be sacrificed on the altar of an abstraction, whatever it may be. Each singular existence possesses absolute dignity that transcends all utilitarian calculations, all ideological rationalizations. In a world that reduces humans to statistics — migrants drowned in the Mediterranean, civilian victims of bombardments, precarious workers — this affirmation possesses prophetic force.

Second, authentic freedom requires the courage of uncertainty. Faced with authoritarian temptations that promise security and simplicity in exchange for submission, spiritual existentialism affirms that it is better to live in the anguish of freedom than in the comfort of slavery. This freedom does not mean doing anything whatsoever but fully assuming responsibility for our choices, recognizing that we are co-creators of the world we inhabit.

Third, transcendence does not distance us from the world but engages us more deeply in it. An authentic spirituality does not flee the urgencies of the present to take refuge in a consoling beyond but finds in its relationship to the absolute the strength to transform the here and now. As I have already written: it is a matter of “contributing to the respiritualization of the world and to the elevation of the ethical level of populations.”

Finally, hope is not naive optimism but existential decision. Faced with announced catastrophes — ecological, social, spiritual — it would be “rational” to despair. But authentic hope is not a calculation of probabilities; it is an act of faith that affirms that the impossible remains possible, that the last word does not belong to forces of destruction, that life can reflourish where death reigned.

Spiritual existentialism thus invites us to become authentic persons: neither atomized individuals subjected to the determinisms of market and technology, nor undifferentiated masses manipulated by ideologies, but free and responsible subjects who dare to think for themselves, love with all their being, create the new, resist forces of oppression, hope against all hope.

In a century that promises to be difficult and decisive for the future of humanity, this philosophy of embodied existence, far from being an intellectual luxury reserved for a few privileged, perhaps constitutes the most precious spiritual resource we possess to avoid sinking into resignation or despair, but to continue building, “together, a more habitable and joyful world.”

To go further:

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Danish philosopher and theologian, father of existentialism, who placed passionate subjectivity and “becoming Christian” at the heart of his reflection against the Hegelian system and the institutional Christianity of his era.

Major Works:

• Fear and Trembling (1843)

• The Concept of Anxiety (1844)

• Either/Or (1843)

• Philosophical Fragments (1844)

• Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Russian novelist whose works constitute veritable philosophical laboratories exploring radical freedom, the problem of evil, innocent suffering, and the encounter with the living Christ.

Major Works:

• Crime and Punishment (1866)

• The Idiot (1869)

• Demons (also The Possessed, 1872)

• The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

• Notes from Underground (1864)

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)

Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet, founder of sophiology and theandrism, who developed a mystical vision of divine Wisdom (Sophia) as the living link between God and His creation.

Major Works:

• Russia and the Universal Church (1889)

• The Spiritual Foundations of Life (1882-1884)

• The Justification of the Good (1897)

• Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of World History (1900)

Lev Shestov (1866-1938)

Russian existentialist philosopher in exile in Paris, prophet of the struggle against “the dictatorship of reason” and defender of absolute creative freedom against the constraining evidences of logic.

Major Works:

• The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905)

• Athens and Jerusalem (1938)

• Potestas Clavium (The Power of the Keys, 1923)

• Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (1936)

• In Job’s Balances (1929)

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Russian Orthodox philosopher exiled in Paris, thinker of the person and freedom, who developed an existential personalism radically opposing creative spirit to forces of objectification and massification.

Major Works:

• Slavery and Freedom (1939)

• The Beginning and the End (1947)

• Spirit and Reality (1927-1928)

• The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916)

• Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (1949)

Martin Buber (1878-1965)

Austro-Israeli Jewish philosopher and theologian, thinker of authentic dialogue, who developed the distinction between the “I-Thou” relationship (dialogical encounter where the other is recognized as presence) and the “I-It” relationship (instrumental use of the other as object).

Major Works:

• I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923)

• The Way of Man (1948)

• The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908)

• Tales of the Hasidim (1906-1928)

• Eclipse of God (1952)

• For the Sake of Heaven (originally Gog and Magog, 1941)

Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944)

Romanian poet and philosopher of Jewish origin, established in Paris, disciple of Chestov, who developed a tragic existential philosophy refusing all rational consolation. Murdered at Auschwitz in October 1944.

Major Works:

• Unhappy Consciousness (La Conscience malheureuse, 1936)

• Existential Monday and the Sunday of History (posthumous, 1945)

• Baudelaire and the Experience of the Abyss (posthumous, 1947)

• Ulysses (poem, 1933)

• Exodus (poem, posthumous)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

French philosopher and writer, major figure of atheistic existentialism, who affirmed that “existence precedes essence” and that man is “condemned to be free,” radically responsible for his choices.

Major Works:

• Being and Nothingness (1943)

• Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)

• No Exit (theater, 1944)

• Nausea (novel, 1938)

• Dirty Hands (theater, 1948)

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

French writer and philosopher of the absurd, who explored the human condition confronted with the absence of meaning while refusing suicide and affirming lucid revolt and solidarity.

Major Works:

• The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

• The Stranger (novel, 1942)

• The Plague (novel, 1947)

• The Rebel (1951)

• Nuptials (1939)

Paul Ricœur (1913-2005)

French philosopher of hermeneutics and personalism, who developed a thought of the person articulating narrative identity, ethical responsibility, and recognition of the other in their constitutive fragility.

Major Works:

• Oneself as Another (1990)

• Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950-1960)

• Time and Narrative (3 volumes, 1983-1985)

• The Course of Recognition (2004)

• The Just (1995)

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

What form of life, of organisation, or of relation seems to you today the most fruitful for preparing the world of tomorrow? A concrete intuition is often worth more than a grand programme: set it down in the comments — it will nourish the reflection of us all.

And if you wish to express yourself on the subject of the New World, 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 · New World · 13 min
To open up perspectives, test out possibilities, seek forms of life more fit to be inhabited.

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The World We Cross · New World · 5 min
To open up perspectives, test out possibilities, seek forms of life more fit to be inhabited.

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