Blog : Philosémitisme

Le journaliste britannique Dominic Lawson, dont le père est Nigel Lawson, qui fut  chancelier de l'Echiquier de Mme Thatcher, a signé sa dernière tribune dans le Independent dans laquelle il évoque, entre autres, Roger Waters, l'ex Pink Floyd (également critiqué par le Vatican) qui dans ses spectacles exhibe un cochon frappé d'une étoile de David, initiative qui enchante l'agence de presse iranienne, et Laurent Fabius  qui a déclaré que ?le conflit israélo-palestinien est le père de toutes les batailles' à la suite d'une réunion avec Mahmoud Abbas. Mais pour être juste envers Fabius il convient de rappeler que c'est le genre de phrases que les dignitaires ont l'habitude de débiter à Ramallah. Mais, ajoute M. Lawson, en pleine déflagration en Egypte et en Syrie, cette phrase rappelle immédiatement celle de l'ambassadeur français à Londres, Daniel Bernard, qui avait avait confié en 2001 qu'Israël, petit pays de merde, était à la source de tous les problèmes dans le monde... ("All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people'")[1] Visiblement M. Fabius a retenu la leçon. Il faut saluer le geste de Dominic Lawson. Il est rare qu'un membre de l'establishment européen - notamment juif - prenne publiquement de telles positions très concrètes envers les critiques obsessionnels d'Israël.  En général on préfère les ignorer, ou les dénoncer en privé, ou quand on les dénonce en public on le fait dans les termes les plus vagues possibles pour ne déranger personne.

"So who still thinks Israel is the root of Middle East problems' When regimes in the Middle East feel threatened by their own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection on Israel or ?the Jews'

[...] Given the longstanding iconography of anti-Semitism within the Middle East, it is perhaps not surprising that when regimes in the region feel threatened by their own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection on Israel or ?the Jews'. When the wave of popular uprisings sometimes known as ?the Arab Spring' reached Syria, Damascus's envoy in London went on BBC's Newsnight to tell a clearly startled Jeremy Paxman that ?the Israelis could be behind it'they could be behind any bad thing in the world.?

Actually, the Israeli government was most discomfited by the uprisings in the region, rather preferring the dictators it knew to the possibility of Islamist regimes in their place. It is Israeli citizens who are now stampeding for gas masks, not those of the US, in preparation for what might follow if President Obama does unleash part of America's vast arsenal in the direction of sites believed to hold Assad's chemical weapons.


It is true that Israel in 2007 sent eight fighter jets laden with 17 tons of high explosives to demolish the Dair Alzour site in Syria, which the International Atomic Energy Authority has since concluded was the base of a ?gas cooled graphite moderated nuclear reactor not configured to produce electricity'built with the assistance of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.? So Israel is indeed ferociously single-minded in pursuing its self-defence within the region.

Yet the idea that Israel is the proximate cause of any tension within that part of the world ? and therefore of the sea of blood sweeping through Egypt and Syria ? is paranoiac when not deliberately mendacious. In many cases, the origins of the problems go back to the death of the prophet Mohamed, and the split between the followers who believed his successor should be appointed under Arab tribal tradition ? later known as the Sunni ? and those who insisted his successor should be from his family, and nominated Mohamed's cousin and son-in-law Ali ? the group which became known as Shia muslims.

In certain Arab countries, power had been held for generations by the Sunni, even while a majority of the population might have been Shia. This was the case in Iraq, where a sectarian civil war was precipitated by the disastrously misconceived US invasion. The opposite is true of Syria, a majority Sunni country, yet ruled by Alawites, a branch of the Shia. Not surprisingly, the rebels there are overwhelmingly Sunni, backed by the Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar; and Bashar's main backer is the Shia regime of Iran.

This tribal and sectarian dispute, which has the potential to become the Muslim equivalent of the Thirty Years War, has about as much to do with Israel as did the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. And the peoples involved care very little, if at all, about the fate of the Palestinians ? certainly much less than do Nigel Kennedy and Roger Waters.

Yet some western governments still fall for the bizarre idea that if the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians were to be sorted, then this would help to solve all the other conflicts in the region. Thus the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared last week, following a meeting with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: ?The Israeli-Palestinian issue is ?perhaps the central issue of the region.?  To be fair to Fabius, that is the sort of thing visiting dignitaries are expected to say when in Ramallah. But, in the midst of the conflagrations in Egypt and Syria, it does bring to mind the remark of the late French ambassador in London, Daniel Bernard, who in 2001 delivered himself of the view that ?all the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.?

Hyperbole has surrounded that little nation ever since it was created in 1948 and the secretary of the Arab League pronounced, as five Arab countries launched a joint attack on the one-day-old state: ?This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.? Now the exterminations and massacres are Arab on Arab; but somehow it will still be said to be all to do with Israel. [...]"

[1] La citation se trouve dans la page sur l'ambassadeur Daniel Bernard sur Wikipédia en anglais (et en polonais-, il n'y a pas de page en français.  Intéressant!  Un contributeur de Wikipédia s'étonne: "I find it strange that there is no article on him on French Wikipedia. Is he not popularly known at all in his home country' This affair was a huge scandal in the English-speaking world."