Bernard-Henri Lévy: Things We Need to Stop Hearing About the ‘Stabbing Intifada’
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Things We Need to Stop Hearing About the ‘Stabbing Intifada’
It is painful to hear the phrase “lone wolves” applied to the handful
— and perhaps tomorrow the dozens and then the hundreds — of killers
of Jews “liked” by thousands of “friends,” followed by tens of
thousands of “Tweeters,” and connected to a constellation of sites
(such as the Al-Aqsa Media Center and its page dedicated to “the third
Jerusalem intifada”) that are orchestrating, at least in part, this
bloody ballet.
It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about “Palestinian
youth no longer subject to any control,” after seeing the series of
sermons published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in
which preachers from Gaza, facing the camera, dagger in hand, call
upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they
can, to inflict as much pain as possible and to spill the maximum
amount of blood; doubly painful to hear that refrain from Mahmoud
Abbas himself, at the outset of this tragic chain of events a few
weeks back, describing as “heroic” the murder of the Henkins in the
presence of their children, and then expressing indignation at seeing
the “dirty feet” of Jews “defiling” the Al-Aqsa Mosque and declaring
“each drop of blood” shed by “each martyr” who dies for Jerusalem
“pure.”
Not only painful and intolerable, but also inapplicable, is the canned
phrase about “political and social desperation” that is used to
explain — or excuse — criminal acts. Everything we know about the new
terrorists, their motives and the pride their relatives take in
converting, post-mortem, crime into martyrdom and infamy into
sacrifice, is, alas, much closer to the portrait of the robotic
jihadist who yesterday would take off for Kashmir and today turns up
in Syria or Iraq.
It is highly doubtful that “intifada” is the right term to apply to
acts that bear more resemblance to the latest installment of a
worldwide jihad of which Israel is just one of the stages.
It is doubtful that erudite disquisitions on occupation, colonization
and Netanyahu-esque intransigence explain much about a wave of
violence that counts among its favored targets Jews with sidelocks —
that is, those Jews who are the most conspicuously Jewish, those whom
their killers must consider the very image of the Jew, and who, by the
way, are often at odds with the Jewish state when not in open
secession from it.
It is doubtful that the very question of the state, the question of
the two states and thus the question of a negotiated partition of the
land — which is, for moderates on both sides, the only question worth
posing — has anything to do with a conflagration in which politics has
given way to fanaticism and to theories of vast conspiracy, one in
which some decide to stab random others as they pass by because of a
vague rumor reporting a secret plot to deny Muslims access to Islam’s
third holiest site.
It is doubtful, in other words, that the Palestinian cause is being
helped in any way by the extremist turn. On the other hand, it is
absolutely certain that the cause has everything to lose by it, that
the reasonable heads within the movement will be the ones who wind up
flattened by the wave, and that the last proponents of compromise,
along with what remains of the peace camp in Israel, will pay dearly
for the reckless condemnations of the imams of Rafah and Khan Younis.
Intolerable and inapplicable, too, is the cliché of the “cycle” or
“spiral” of violence, which, by putting the kamikaze killers and their
victims on the same footing, sows confusion and amounts to an
incitement to further action.
Intolerable, for the same reason, are the rhetorical appeals “for
restraint” and disingenuous pleas “not to inflame the street,” which,
as with the “spiral of violence,” reverse the order of causality by
implying that a soldier, police officer or civilian acting in
self-defense has committed a wrong equal to that of someone who
chooses to die after spreading as much terror as he possibly can.
Strange indeed, how tepid are the condemnations of the stabbings of
innocent passers-by and rammings of bus stops — condemnations that I
have to think would be less half-hearted if the acts had occurred on
the streets of Washington, Paris or London.
More than strange — disturbing — is the difference in tone between the
equivocal reaction to the recent killings and the unanimous and
unambiguous international outpouring of emotion and solidarity
elicited by the fatal hatchet attack on a soldier on a London street
on May 22, 2013, a scenario that was not very different from those
unfolding today in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Intolerable, again, that most of the major media have paid the
grieving Israeli families only a fraction of the attention they have
paid the families of the perpetrators.
Intolerable, finally, the minor mythology growing up around this story
of daggers: The weapon of the poor? Really? The weapon one uses
because it is within reach and one has no other? When I see those
blades, I think of the one used to execute Daniel Pearl; I think of
the beheadings of Hervé Gourdel, James Foley and David Haines; I think
that the Islamic State’s videos have clearly gained a following, and
that we stand on the threshold of a form of barbarity that must be
unconditionally denounced if we do not want to see its methods
exported everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is one of France’s most famed philosophers, a
journalist, and a bestselling writer. He is considered a founder of
the New Philosophy movement and is a leading thinker on religious
issues, genocide, and international affairs. His 2013 book, Les
Aventures de la vérité—Peinture et philosophie: un récit, explores the
historical interplay of philosophy and art. His new play, “Hotel
Europe,” which premiered in Sarajevo on June 27, 2014, and in Paris
on September 9, is a cry of alarm about the crisis facing the European
project and the dream behind it.
This article was translated from the French by Steven B. Kennedy.
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