Silence makes us accomplices. Complicit in a repugnant double standard, of boundless injustice that, under the cloak of good intentions, only masks the true face of inexhaustible hatred. I am referring to anti-Zionism, that “justified anti-Semitism, finally within everyone’s reach. […] it is the license to be democratically anti-Semitic”, in the words of the great French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch.
Although I no longer hold any position, since I left Barcelona City Council in the summer of 2021, I cannot remain silent when it comes to the future of Europe and our values. And there is a subject on which I will never remain silent, because it is the fight of my life. That of the fight against that leprosy that comes to us from the depths of time, always a harbinger of great misfortunes: anti-Semitism.
It worries me because it has been a hot topic for a long time in France and the weather is deteriorating, causing fear among my French Jewish compatriots. Although the situation in France and Spain is different in many aspects, I am alarmed by an increasingly hostile discourse towards Jews and Israel, to the detriment of civil peace.
In Spain, the Jews were expelled in 1492, erasing an entire memory and culture, dispersing them throughout the rest of Europe or around the Mediterranean basin. The country where I was born did not participate in the Second World War, but the Francoist discourse on the Jews was nourished by traditional and popular Catholic anti-Judaism, deeply rooted in the mentality.
This propaganda built an ideological and political discourse in which Judaism appeared, along with Freemasonry and Communism, as one of the pillars of the same internal and external enemy. However, it is true that there was no real collaboration with the Nazis on this issue, other than a form of passivity. Spain was even a place of passage, a transitory refuge for the Jews who crossed the Pyrenees.
Since 1992, the Spanish State has recognized Judaism as one of the three major minority faiths with known roots, along with Islam and Protestantism. On November 30, 2015, receiving the representatives of the Jews of Spain, King Felipe VI delivered a vibrant speech before concluding: “How we have missed you!”
This moving appeal was confirmed by a law that allowed the descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled by the Catholic kings to gain Spanish nationality. A memory is being reconstituted. But it is estimated that the Jewish population in Spain is around 30,000, while on the other side of the Pyrenees it is estimated at around 500,000.
France was the land of the emancipation of the Jews two hundred years ago, of the notorious Dreyfus affair and of the famous “J’accuse” by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, but it was also one of the lands of their martyrdom: 76,000 deported and killed. in concentration camps during the period of collaboration with the Nazis.
Anti-Semitism has assumed worrying proportions in the last twenty-five years. How many of us have warned of the dangers of this deadly old passion, and yet in deafening silence?
The institutional left was too weak, too incoherent in the early 2000s because it did not want to see anything at the time of the upsurge in acts against Jews in France during the second Intifada in the Middle East. She was confused because this anti-Semitism came from the Arab-Muslim world, from the children of immigrants, and from the “proletariat” in the suburbs. In other words, it did not come from the traditional extreme right, but from the “victims of the earth.” The left refused to “stigmatize” these populations. What blindness! How can you accept that citizens are harassed or murdered for the sole fact of being Jews?
As a result, there was a double exodus, external, of French Jews to Israel, and internal, from the suburbs to Paris. I was one of those who made the correct diagnosis. That of a historical anti-Semitism that feeds on the new conspiracy theories (we have verified it again during the pandemic) or of radical Islamism, and whose new face draws its strength from the hatred of the State of Israel.
The reincarnation of Jew-hatred in anti-Zionism is its most dangerous camouflage. The unexpected pretext of having the right, and even the duty, to hate Israel. Over the years and the unfolding of events in the Middle East, Israel’s superior strength and firepower have been seen as irrefutable proof of its “moral culpability.”
From the Durban conference, as early as 2001, to the desperate slanderers who describe Israel’s policies as apartheid, attempts have been made to present the Jewish state as a new dominating and colonialist power. This has given many arguments to a part of the left – Podemos and Comuns in Spain, La France insoumise de Mélenchon, Corbyn in Great Britain – to get on the horse of anti-Zionism. The novelist Rosa Montero already suspected in a column in El País in 2006 “that anti-Israel phobia is becoming a new hallmark of a certain pseudo-left.”
Anti-Zionism, which has swept Europe since the beginning of this century, is the crossroads of the far right, the far left, Islamists and other radical groups united in their hatred of Jews and Israel. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. France and Spain are advancing on this sad path.
The State of Israel is based on eleven fundamental laws that make this country a democratic and egalitarian State of law, guarantor of human dignity and the freedoms of all its citizens. Tel Aviv is the example of a democratic, open and progressive city that shares many similarities with its Catalan sister. And not to reveal any secret, the country is an exception in the region.
Everyone in Europe is free to criticize the policies of the Israeli governments, to be indignant at the fate of the Palestinians, but it is in Israel itself where criticism or concern is heard most strongly. This democracy does not exist in the territories managed by the Palestinian Authority or in Gaza, which is under the yoke of Hamas. There, LGBTI people are persecuted and forced to seek support and protection…in Tel Aviv.
“[…] It does not weigh the commitments in terms of human rights and respect for human dignity as inexcusable principles in promoting international relations that promote global justice,” declared the mayoress of the Catalan capital. She is taking the exact opposite path.
Viewing Israel solely through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a serious mistake. Barcelona and Tel Aviv are open and welcoming societies, leading cities that have enjoyed a long and fruitful association over many years. The accusations of “apartheid crimes” made by the initiators of the proposal to break the twinning are unbearable and have no other reason than to discredit the only democratic State in the Middle East, capable of building the Abraham agreements with numerous Arab countries.
I ask Barcelona City Council to reject this unworthy proposal. I remember that the BDS movement has been condemned dozens of times in Spain for discrimination at the initiative of ACOM (Action and Communication for the Middle East). Such a major city cannot be part of such a despicable boycott movement that would legitimize anti-Zionist and hate speech through institutional means.
Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism concern us all, beyond any religious or national considerations. Perhaps one day we will understand that we must fight all forms of anti-Semitism, no more and no less than ourselves.
A society that is lost in hatred is none other than a society that implacably distances itself from the defense of common values ??to the detriment of truth and peace. I have said it over and over again in the soil of my heart, and I am sorry to have to do the same in the soil of my flesh.
