The Democratic License: Jankélévitch, Anti-Zionism, and the European Left after October 7

“Anti-Zionism is justified antisemitism, finally within everyone’s reach. It is the permission to be democratically antisemitic.”

Vladimir Jankelevitch, Pardonner ?, 1971

October 7, 2023 made verifiable what Vladimir Jankelevitch had put on record fifty years before: that anti-Zionism is the historically specific form through which the European left settled its account with antisemitism. Not by overcoming it. By reinventing it in a language compatible with its own declared values. This argument is uncomfortable, most of all for someone writing from inside that tradition. Which is exactly why it needs to be made.

The Mechanism
Rereading Jankelevitch today produces a particular kind of unease. His words are almost cruelly clear. And that cruelty sharpens when you register that they were written more than fifty years ago — that they describe, with something close to surgical exactness, what played out across an entire continent in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. A diagnosis made when the patient still looked well, found in a drawer while the patient is on life support.

What Jankelevitch had identified was a mechanism. The way an ideology sustains itself by changing its name — keeping the deep structure intact while the surface acquires a new respectability. “Anti-Zionism” does more than swap a label. It transfigures. It moves the discourse from biology to politics, from racial hatred to the critique of states, from the obscene to the acceptable. Further still, as Jankelevitch saw: to the obligatory. A duty, now, in democracy’s name.

The slippage is culpable. Its structure is what one might call, with some precision, a second-order false consciousness — a representation that has pre-absorbed and neutralized the available critique, something beyond simple distortion. Oppose anti-Zionism and you are instantly assigned to the camp of reaction, of complicit silence, of apology for the strong. The mechanism is autoimmune. It produces antibodies against anyone who tries to take it apart.

The Test of Reality
October 7 worked as a reagent. What it revealed — at the speed and with the brutality that crises alone can produce — was how far the mechanism Jankelevitch described had prospered. Ramified. Become institutional. In European universities, in the marches through capital cities, in the public statements of significant portions of the Western intelligentsia, something structurally legible occurred: a suspension, in this case and this case alone, of the moral criteria applied without hesitation everywhere else.

A distinction worth making explicit: criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate political thought. What calls for analysis is something different. The speed with which, after the massacre of October 7, a substantial part of European public discourse moved its attention from victims to contexts, from people to states, from the fact of horror to its causes. The effect was an interpretive framework in which the suffering of certain bodies became immediately explicable — and therefore, beneath the surface, justifiable.

Jankelevitch had seen this coming too. The full passage ends: “And what if the Jews were themselves Nazis? That would be wonderful. It would no longer be necessary to pity them; they would have deserved their fate.” The inversion of victim and perpetrator is the function of the discourse, prior to any accidental distortion. It is the endpoint the mechanism reaches when pressed to its logic. After October 7, that inversion found its way into academic departments, cultural institutions, and political formations whose members consider themselves, sincerely, progressives.

The Left Side of the Mirror
The hardest question is also the most necessary. It concerns the European left directly. Jankelevitch was unambiguous: anti-Zionism offers the left what biological antisemitism had always withheld from it — a form of hostility that is democratically presentable, congruent with the vocabulary of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. What follows here is immanent critique. It works from inside a tradition, against one of its blind spots. That is not the same thing as an external attack.

The blind spot has a long history. It runs from the nineteenth-century socialist tradition’s ambivalence toward the Jewish question, through Stalinism’s particular repressions, to the Third Worldism of the decade in which Jankelevitch was writing. A structural tension, this — embedded in the way a certain left mapped the world into oppressors and oppressed, using categories that turn out, in specific cases, to be sealed against historical complexity. A recent aberration would be easier to repair.

After October 7, the tension broke the surface with a visibility it had not had in decades. Across the European radical left — with real variation country by country, but with a common underlying logic — there was a conspicuous difficulty: naming the massacre plainly, separating the judgment of Israeli military conduct in Gaza from the judgment owed to the Israeli victims of October 7, holding the elementary line between political critique and ontological delegitimization. That difficulty is diagnostic. It points to an analytical category that has worn through, one that can no longer bear the weight of the universal principles it claims.

Silence as Evidence
How many European intellectuals cited Jankelevitch after October 7? The question is empirical before it is rhetorical. It registers something about the condition of moral thought on the continent. Jankelevitch held the chair of moral philosophy at the Sorbonne. He wrote foundational work on ethics, on time, on death, on forgiveness. He was a central figure, his texts in print, his arguments available. His account of antisemitism and its postwar disguises was there, waiting.

The silence around that account carries responsibility. An intellectual tradition that holds the tools for understanding a phenomenon — and leaves them in the drawer, systematically, while the phenomenon runs its course — can claim, at most, repression. And repression, as that same intelligentsia’s psychoanalytic formation should clarify, is never absence. It is presence in a mask.

The tools are there. The deficit is in the willingness to use them without exception. When universal principles get applied selectively — when anti-colonialism applies to every people but one, when solidarity with victims pauses before a particular set of victims — the result is ideology dressed as political analysis. The form belongs to argument. The substance belongs to prejudice.

A Question That Remains
Go back to Jankelevitch’s sentence. Written in the seventies, it has outlasted a great deal: the Cold War’s end, the proclaimed death of ideologies, European integration, the liberal confidence of the nineties, the security state of the two-thousands. It is here, still. Legible. Current. That durability is a philosophical problem before it is a footnote.

What does it mean that a diagnosis from fifty years ago fits the present this well? It means the phenomenon it describes never stopped. It changed shape, register, political address. It means the deep structure of hostility toward Jews has shown an adaptive range that purely conjunctural or sociological readings cannot account for. And it means that the categories of moral philosophy — responsibility, consistency, the universality of principles — are load-bearing, not decorative. Without them, critical thought turns into its opposite.

Jankelevitch’s demand was harder than political critique. He asked that principles be applied with rigor — no exceptions, no sheltered zones. That consciences prove equal to what they profess. The European left, after October 7, demonstrated that it had not managed this. That is the diagnosis. Whether it will become the occasion for something else remains, for now, an open question.