In Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel, Submission (2015), which takes place in an imaginary France in 2022, when the Muslim Brotherhood has won elections and rules the country in alliance with the Socialists, the non-Jewish protagonist, a professor at the Sorbonne, tells his Jewish student, who is escaping to Israel with her family, that there can be “no Israel for me.” This is one of the most poignant observations in the book.
Another is the protagonist’s reflection that the increasing violence, even the gunshots in the streets of Paris as a civil war threatens to explode during the run-up to the elections, has become the new normal: something that everyone is resigned to as an inevitable fact, barely reported in the media and treated as unremarkable by his fellow lecturers. Even after the Muslim Brotherhood wins the elections, and the Sorbonne is turned into an Islamic university, with all that this entails, his colleagues treat this development as nothing out of the ordinary. Houllebecq’s indictment against the silence and complicity of his fellow intellectuals in the face of the Islamist encroachments on French society is scathing. As a matter of course, in the new France, where freedom of speech comes at a prohibitive price, Houllebecq now has to live under 24-hour police protection. Submission, by the way, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.
The resignation and the precarious pretense that everything is normal in the face of rapidly deteriorating circumstances, is a predictable human reaction, testimony to the sometimes practical but lamentable human capacity for adaptation to most circumstances, whatever they may be. Historically, Jews have excelled in this discipline, simply because they had no choice. Just like Houllebecq’s protagonist, they had nowhere else to go. However, whereas there “can be no Israel” for the lost professor, today, unlike the last time Jews were threatened on a large scale in Europe, there is an Israel for the Jews. Uniquely among all the peoples of Europe, the Jews have a welcoming place to go. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Western European Jews choose to stay put in Europe.