Two very important books are coming out these days: one from La Découverte, written by the anthropologist Didier Fassin (1), the other from Lux, by the historian Enzo Traverso (2).
A Strange Defeat. On Consent to the Crushing of GazaDidier Fassin, La Découverte, 198 pages, 17 euros.
Gaza before historyEnzo Traverso, Lux, 136 pages, 14 euros. Let us specify that La Découverte and Lux are also my publishers, and pay me – very kindly – several hundred thousand dollars into a numbered account in Neuilly (Hauts-de-Seine) each time I cite them here, so that after this column, I should (finally) be able to settle down in the Seychelles, not far from a deckchair.
These two works have in common that their authors deal with the ongoing genocide in Gaza without nothing to concede – to say the least – to the doxa of the time and that they will, consequently, and in all probability, be squalidly vilified by the dominant commentariat.
In fact, it has already started: because the title of his book – A strange defeat – obviously refers to the famous one that Marc Bloch devoted to the debacle of 1940, Didier Fassin is already accused, on social networks, of “Nazify Israel”. This somewhat outrageous assertion is false – and all the more extravagant since, in reality, it is Israeli leaders and their supporters who regularly Nazify Palestinians and their supporters.
But it has this interesting thing that it completely validates the denunciation by the anthropologist of “democratic paradox according to which criticizing a government” Israeli “composed of far-right ministers, promoter of religious supremacism, author of discriminatory laws, rejecting international law and committing massacres of civilian populations, exposes oneself to being accused of iniquity.”
On the same subject: Netanyahu’s Fascist Drift
Enzo Traverso, whose book will be published on October 4, recalls, from its first pages, that “The war in Gaza is not World War II, that is obvious”. However, he adds, “Historical analogies – which are never homologies – can guide us, even if they involve very different actors and events that are not on the same scale”: the historian recalls, for example, that in the 1990s there was talk of “‘tropical Nazism’ during the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda and that the word ‘genocide’ reappeared in Europe during the war in the former Yugoslavia.”
Then, in the last pages of his very remarkable work, he repeats that “Netanyahu is not Hitler and his government is not a Nazi regime, that’s obvious”. Before adding this warningfor the attention of those who actually use – and very thoughtlessly – certain analogies to justify the horrible fate of the Palestinians: “After decades of obsessively comparing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – and now Hamas – to the Nazis, this juxtaposition risks backfiring on Israel.”
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