Tribune. A column recently published in The world proposes to clarify the use of the term “apartheid” for “Qualify Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians”. This employment is denounced on the pretext that it would constitute a simplistic, dishonest, even dangerous point of view of reality. The signatories thus condemn what would be a “Crusade” against Israel led by organizations (including the United Nations!) and within academia. Their main argument is simple: the situation in Israel / Palestine would be “Extraordinarily complex” and the subject, “Complicated and fundamentally very little known”, which would suffice to immediately disqualify any debate or public positioning on the matter. Serious accusations are brought against those who, by resorting to this term, would satisfy their “Primary passions” and participate, “Under the guise of good feelings”, To give back “Acceptable and even imperative hatred of Jews”.
This process is as fallacious as it is worrying. Rather than opening the debate and inviting a reflection that already exists and is required elsewhere in the world concerning the present and the future of this region, the signatories of this forum still hope to prevent it in France, by feeding confusion and practicing intimidation. They demonstrate in passing the little regard they have for international law, reclassifying the occupied territories as “Disputed territories” and Palestinian refugees in “Exiles” whose return “Would sign the end of Israel”. Rejecting the common base of an international order based on law is not an insignificant opinion and testifies to a hawkish vision of the world that should be named as such.
This charge is not an epiphenomenon. Tribunes are regularly published which intend to muzzle the debate, university or association events are deprogrammed and awareness campaigns prohibited. These liberticidal offensives have no other aim than to silence any analysis of the situation in Israel / Palestine that does not comply with a government communication. We are not, however, resolved to accept this reduction of the debate to invective. We hope that the questioning of Israeli apartheid is no longer marginal in universities or in the French media and political space, not out of Manichaeism, but precisely to get out of it.
Universal scope
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