Read an Excerpt
Introduction
I finished writing this book in Jerusalem in 2019. It feels like a very distant and impalpable time. I remember fondly this solitary and halting exercise, done around my work as a correspondent covering Israel and the Palestinian territories for the newspaper Le Monde, starting in 2014. I wrote in my free time and against my own instincts, which had always kept me from becoming the subject of my work.
This melancholy book is a voyage from Minsk to Paris, from Jerusalem to Gaza. It weaves together the paths taken by my grandfather Hersh, by my father Aleksander, and by me. We are traitors, each of us in our own way. Acknowledged traitors, in the sense that we didn’t put Judaism at the center of our lives, preferring some other cause instead. For my grandfather, it was Communism. For my father, his beloved Poland. For me, journalism and its demands.
Bad Jew combines my family history with History writ large, that of the Second World War, Communist Poland, and the modern Israeli state. Since it was written, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in December 2022. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the Gaza war, have again made the conflict the focus of world attention. Jewish diasporas, in all their nuances and diversity, have been brought back together around the fate of the Jewish state, because of a shared fear and pain. This does not mean, though, that they support the troubling path taken by Israel. On the contrary.
In this account, my aim was to capture a decisive moment in Israel’s history as I saw it unfolding. There once was a wall between classic conservative forces and the far right. That wall started to crack during my stay. The idea of enemies within was taking hold in Israel, as it is in other countries with threatened democratic foundations. Many Israelis were experiencing the deeply painful feeling of being strangers in their own country. Today, this political and ethical wall seems torn down. There is no more circle of reason or decency. A single position dominates, though it’s still a minority one: a Zionism of conquest, an intolerant and reactionary Judaism that considers itself the exclusive holder of divine truth and stifles the idea of conversation and questioning at the very heart of Jewish identity.
Can an identity be captured, the way you catch a butterfly? Can you reduce an ascendancy or origins to an irrefutable equation? One of contemporary society’s greatest perversions is the obsession with purity, the idea that a religious, ethnic, national, or political identity can’t endure mixture, compromise, or reformulation without risking debasement. Purity is often dirty. So many lies and crimes have occurred in its name.
I have always avoided any summons to appear before my own to submit to a loyalty test. Being Jewish doesn’t fit a unique definition. You can approach that identity through genetics, genealogy, the memory of the dead and the voice of the living, faith, education, cultural practices . . . Each of us has the right to his or her intimate alchemy. There are no dunces here, and nobody is head of the class.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel exploded some widely held certainties. Its cruelty, not to mention its sadism, abruptly gutted the classic rhetoric about Palestinian “resistance.” The widespread killing and hostage-taking—including babies and the aged—turned Israel’s stomach. An entire country was made sleepless, plunged into mourning without end. Israel found itself vulnerable and traumatized, though united in its will to punish the perpetrators. Confidence in the nation’s security, in particular its massive technological and military superiority vis-à-vis the armed Palestinian factions, was shattered.
I was in Washington a week after the attack, when the general mobilization of reservists was in full force. I wrote a piece for Le Monde, whose title practically imposed itself on me: “Israel and the intoxication of revenge.” This is what I noted, in anticipation of Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip: “Because of its premeditation, the attack invites a blind, disproportionate response, at the expense of Gaza’s 2.3 million civilians. The price that the Jewish state could pay for such a large-scale operation will far exceed the human toll. It will also affect its alliances, its regional security, and its very soul.”
Its soul.
I am writing these lines a few months later, in early 2024, as the number of people killed in Gaza has passed 30,000. When you can’t articulate the outline of a hoped-for victory, you inevitably risk disillusionment. “Destroy Hamas” is a slogan that is easy to understand but impossible to put into practice. That’s because Hamas is all of these things: a terrorist organization, a political movement, a social fabric, an idea, a rage, an impasse, and a collective condemnation to endless martyrdom in the absence of any alternative.
It is true that the Israeli army has destroyed a large part of Hamas’s capacity to do harm, in particular its underground tunnel network, but at an incredible cost: indiscriminately bombing civilians, and turning the Palestinian territory into a field of ruins and bones, a sea of blood and tears. These are all conditions that will combine to produce a new generation of Palestinians driven by hatred of Jews.
A crime has been answered by a crime. This isn’t the place to measure, compare, or confuse them. Each side has its exegetists and proponents, shouting in a general brouhaha and mutual dehumanization that augurs the worst for what is to come. A historic wave of antisemitism is already sweeping through our societies. The tally of recent acts of violence is just its most visible aspect. War validates idiotic prejudices. In the United States, many demonstrators share a sincere empathy toward Palestinian civilians, especially among the youth. But for them, the conflict is both a cause and an abstraction. Can they even tell the West Bank from Gaza? Do they understand the historic freight of the rallying cry “From the river to the sea”? Can they name the river? The sea? On many campuses, a kind of internationale of the oppressed is sweeping Black Americans, the LGBTQ, and the Palestinians into the same parade. A confusion of minds. In the view of these activists, Israelis are all Jews, Jews are all white, whites are the oppressors, the privileged, the colonialists. It is very difficult to also picture them as victims when the dominant narrative is decolonization. Reality is so much more complicated, just as Hamas does not reflect the state of mind and the will of all Palestinians, far from it. Though it seems very much out of reach at the moment, we know that the only just and reasonable answer to the conflict would be a two-state solution. But it is unrealistic to pretend that this would imply dismantling all the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where more than 460,000 Jews live. Unfortunately, after October 7, it has become so difficult to look beyond slogans and dark clouds of hatred.
The sadness I have felt since October 7 is due to the fact that I’m not indifferent to any of the parties, and that I refuse hemiplegia. I have family and friends in Israel. Some of our conversations have been temporarily interrupted, for lack of a common language. The emotions are too raw. My text messages with people I know in Gaza have been reduced to the bare essentials. Sign of life? Something to drink, or eat? Where to hide?
I refuse to watch the videos, any of the videos, of the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7 and the carnage caused by the Israeli army. I have lived through intense experiences in Gaza, a place like no other. The tragedy suffered by its people for the last eighteen years in no way justifies or relativizes the October 7 attack. But it would be equally absurd and irresponsible to not take it into account. In the same way, it would be a mistake to ignore Israel’s strategic tragedy since October 7. Was there a viable alternative to a land operation, if the objective was to stop such a trauma from happening again? Could that operation have unfolded in another way?
The terms of the Roman saying Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) can also be inverted. If you want war, prepare for the peace to follow. The Israeli government’s inability—unwillingness, I should say—to think about the day after, the management of Gaza after the military offensive, is troubling. It supposes a new denial of reality.
After Mauvais Juif was published in France in 2020, meeting with my readers was a terrific experience, as my family story echoed those of many people who had followed a similar path. In particular I remember a reading at the Mémorial de Caen, in Normandy—a museum devoted to the history of the twentieth century—after which I signed copies of the book. A woman of about forty came up to me, a little embarrassed, but determined. She handed me her copy to sign, then leaned over to say confidentially, “You know, I’m a bad Jew too.” Her voice held a mix of pleasure and relief that confirmed my intuition that European diasporas are caught in a vise. On the one hand, a surge of antisemitism. On the other, the quasi-military discipline demanded by headquarters Israel, and in particular by the ruling nationalistic right.
In Europe, and especially in France, it has long been impossible to talk about Israel’s rightward drift outside of the usual circle of discredited haters. Any reservation, however subtle and well-founded, was impugned as evidence of antisemitism, whose flames unfortunately are leaping up all around. French Jews could not criticize the original homeland for fear of being charged with treason. You were either for or against Israel: those were the only alternatives. Some people practiced self-censorship, while others saw a misbegotten link between the Israel-Palestine conflict and separatist tensions in France. Tribal membership ruled, instead of basic humanist values.
The contrast with the situation in the United States was striking. In 2022, when Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power by forming a coalition with Jewish supremacists and the ultra-Orthodox, it sent an electric shock through the American diaspora. An unprecedented mobilization began in Israel that joined the traditional left with citizens unaccustomed to demonstrating to denounce the coalition’s attempted sabotage of the Supreme Court. Week after week, hundreds of thousands of people defended democracy and the idea of checks and balances, eventually forcing the new government to back down.
In America meanwhile, a new awareness was growing in both conservative and liberal circles. Rabbis who normally eschewed political engagement were signing petitions. Newspapers published dramatic editorials warning of the possible destruction of democracy in Israel. Sounding a warlike note, Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times in March 2023 with an evocative title, “American Jews, You Have to Choose Sides on Israel.” The phrase “choosing sides” suggests an uncompromising confrontation, but also a rift within the Jewish world itself.
Obviously, some groups followed their own logic and beliefs. The first are the disciplined American ultra-Orthodox, more concerned with their duty to God than anyone else’s equal rights. Then the diaspora’s extreme right wing. In November 2022, shortly before the turmoil, I went to Las Vegas to observe the annual convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), which hopes to convert American Jews to the GOP. Netanyahu appeared by video from Jerusalem and got a rock star’s welcome. “We’re with you one hundred percent!” cried an excited RJC official.
The vitality of this debate in the United States is heartening. But it leaves a bitter aftertaste, because the Palestinians are once again being deleted from the equation. Whether in America or Israel, the demonstrators supporting the Supreme Court saw Netanyahu’s desire for immunity from the judiciary investigating him for corruption and abuse of power as his sole motivation.
But the coalition has a wider aim, of a more revolutionary nature. The messianic right wants to drop the ambiguity of West Bank occupation in favor of outright annexation. It wants to impose civilian authority over the Palestinians, not just military. It wants to open Palestinian land and resources to unrestrained pillage. From this perspective, Israel’s Supreme Court is an obstacle, since it is the ultimate guarantee of the rule of law. Fortunately, in early January 2024, the high court overturned the controversial law aimed at curbing it, by the slimmest of margins: eight judges to seven.
Healthy antibodies still exist.
The right-wing project took on unprecedented intensity after the October 7 attack. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a depraved supporter of Jewish supremacy, sees the attack and its consequences as an “opportunity” for ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He wants its Palestinian inhabitants to leave for Egypt or some other Arab country. Another minister, Amihai Eliyahu, claims there are “no noncombatants” in Gaza. The son of an extremist rabbi, he considers dropping an atomic bomb on the Gaza Strip as “an option.” None of these positions taken in the months after October 7 should come as a surprise. They occur in a particular psychological context, in which Israeli television networks ignore Palestinian suffering.
A collective condemnation of another people is being expressed by members of a Jewish government. At the end of January 2024, thousands of people, including government ministers and Knesset members, gathered at a convention center in Jerusalem. They danced, they sang, and they rejoiced, as a great opportunity lay before them: the resettlement of Gaza. What about the local population? “Transfer” was the shared hope that evening. A second Nakba. Erase the problem rather than solve it.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was among the guest stars that day. He is one of the most noxious actors in this campaign. Seven months before October 7, he was roundly criticized for suggesting “razing” the village of Huwara south of Nablus in the West Bank. Think about that for a moment. A major political figure, a minister of a state celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary as the refuge of European families shattered by the Holocaust, casually suggests erasing from the map a Palestinian village inhabited by people whose very existence and humanity he denies. With infinite sadness, this must be called Jewish fascism. His is a minority view, but gaining in influence. And it is shortsighted to see the term “razing” only as an anomaly or an outrage, while ignoring the overall plan behind it.
On March 12, 2023, I was at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington as hundreds of people protested Smotrich’s visit to the United States. No American official had agreed to meet the messianic nationalist. As I listened to the speakers at the microphone, I remembered talking with Smotrich at the Knesset in 2017, when he was a freshman deputy but already very active. In a mock-scholarly tone, he explained to me that the Palestinian people did not exist.
I had asked him a simple question: What would he do if one of his children someday announced that they wanted to marry an Arab? “That could never happen,” he said. “They’ve been very well brought up. Anyone who wants to preserve Jewish identity must be very careful about the risk of assimilation; it’s the biggest danger we face. And I’m not saying this just about Arabs, but about all non-Jews. I’m against mixed marriages.”
The obsession with purity.
This restrictive and exclusive religious view of Jewish identity merges faith and politics, God and human government. That’s the very principle of a theocracy, and far from the promises of equality contained in Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence. But the demographic and religious reality is that Israeli society as a whole is moving away from what it once was, losing homogeneity while gaining diversity, for better and sometimes for worse.
The exponential growth of settler colonies, the rise of religious figures and the retreat of secular ones are concomitant phenomena that are changing the country’s face and its political culture. The diaspora often overlooks this evolution and talks about an Israel that is mythicized or lost to time. No other country in the world generates as many fantasies and prejudices as Israel, whether from hatred, love, or ignorance.
