Gérard Bensussan Interview | Alex Gilbert #265

An Endless Tragedy

In his poignant column in Le Monde dated October 5, my colleague and longtime friend Jacob Rogozinski speaks of his “shame of being Jewish” after October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza. He also believes that a “pardon” should be implored by Israel and, by extension, by all Jews for the suffering inflicted on the Palestinian population by Israel’s response.

Neither the shame felt nor the request for forgiveness seems to me to be a necessary response to such a painful and politically inextricable situation.

From a strictly philosophical standpoint, forgiveness, whether in classical antiquity or in Spinoza’s thinking, is not the most appropriate framework for considering what justice truly demands. Kant believed that the impossibility of universalizing its maxim rendered forgiveness incompatible with a just legal order founded on reason. Levinas saw it as a kind of arbitrary clemency exercised by the wronged party. And Derrida, while emphasizing that forgiveness can only be for the absolutely unforgivable—something regrettably omitted in my colleague’s column, which conspicuously forgets October 7, 2023—often clarified that what he called the “scene” of forgiveness could only be examined from the perspective of justice.

But the discussion is not primarily philosophical. This highly instructive dimension of thought is insufficient to grasp the interminable war—lasting a hundred years and more—between Israelis and Palestinians.

At its core, the question is political. Indeed, the demand for forgiveness could, inevitably, be reversed and applied to the pogrom of October 7, 2023. Emotions—shame, the plea or demand for forgiveness, the feeling of having been “held hostage” (!) by the Israeli right and far right—are far from insignificant but are merely derivative expressions of a condition that anthropologist Charles Stepanoff aptly described as that of the “empathetic predator.” We are all empathetic predators, thrust into the violence of hunting, war, and spilled blood, and compelled, through empathy with those we put to death, to engage in rituals and symbolic inventions meant to exorcise emotional dilemmas and moral tensions. The war in Gaza unquestionably falls within this framework of mutual predation.

However, neither philosophical clarification nor anthropological description exhausts the issue. What is the political reality?

It is imperative, against the significant risk of a form of Jewish “denialism,” to unreservedly acknowledge the vastness of Palestinian suffering, which is too immense to be ignored or evaded. Yet, from this outcry of suffering rising from Gaza, it is not easy to determine what could politically translate it into a negotiated resolution. There is no avoiding the contemplation of the suffering inflicted—it is an immediate ethical requirement. However, as Levinas put it, there must also be an “after,” in which the political articulation of this duty challenges us. And once this legitimate demand is acknowledged, it excludes the purely compassionate register. Politics in the “complicated East” does not operate through unilateral denunciation, made from a distance, far from war and its trials, in reference to a problematic notion of a “people at fault.” At fault for what? Recognizing Palestinian suffering does not absolve us from continuously situating the “Israeli-Palestinian question” within its historical reality and the uncertain search for coexistence between two peoples fighting over a single land—two aspirations equally legitimate despite their violent clash.

One fundamental, uninterrupted dimension emerges: tragedy. This war is tragic. Relentlessly so. Two protagonists stand against each other, locked in struggle, in a proximity and intimacy that is also an infinite, cruel distance. Two voices rise and cry out into the void. For each, what is at stake is a “right to live” and a possible death. “What makes a tragedy,” wrote Camus, “is that each opposing force is equally legitimate, each has the right to live.”

I am merely describing a setting—the stage of a tragedy. Its dramaturgy undoubtedly includes fault and forgiveness. Hatred and the desire to kill also play their part. In saying this, I do not claim that political and diplomatic responsibilities are equally shared. Personally, I believe that the successive leaderships of the Palestinian national movement bear a heavy responsibility for today’s disastrous situation due to their condemnable irredentism. This perspective can be debated, but the tragedy itself cannot be denied.

In the current context, where some contemplate the forced displacement of entire populations without even consulting them, one must never become blind to the suffering of the enemy. In the Talmud, a highly esteemed Sage, Akiva, interpreted the commandment to love one’s neighbor in a negative formulation: as an absolute prohibition against despising those who have despised me, against seeking revenge on those who have humiliated me, and against asserting my suffering over that of another, whether near or far. Akiva taught never to proclaim that “my blood is redder than yours.”

Gérard Bensussan is a philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg. He will publish Des Sadiques au cœur pur. Sur l’antisionisme contemporain (Hermann) in March, referencing Sartre: “The antisemite is a sadist with a pure heart”.