Palestine: Human conscience demands action

BY Bruno GUIGUE

 

disgusted, the world witnesses the daily massacre of civilian populations by a state descending into murderous madness, combining mass crime with the abjection of stigmatising its victims.

In a world where media rehashing serves as irrefutable proof, certain words are portmanteaus, whose pre-codified usage is conducive to all sorts of manipulation. With perpetual shifts in meaning allowing for the insidious transition from one term to another, nothing stands in the way of the malignant inversion by which the executioner becomes the victim, the victim becomes the executioner, and anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism.

Anti-Zionism may well be defined as opposition to a colonial enterprise, but to accept it as such would still be to compromise with the unacceptable. Imbued with diabolical causality, anti-Zionism is morally disqualified, sidelined by virtue of the anathema that afflicts it. It's no use pointing out that Palestine is not the property of an ethnic group or a faith, that Palestinian resistance has no racial connotations, that the rejection of Zionism is based on the right of peoples to self-determination, but these rational arguments are swept aside by the prevailing doctrine.

For seventy-five years, everything has happened as if the invisible remorse for the Holocaust guaranteed absolute impunity for the Zionist enterprise. With the creation of the Jewish state, Europe miraculously freed itself from its age-old demons. It granted itself an outlet for the feelings of guilt that gnawed at it for its anti-Semitic turpitudes. Bearing the responsibility for the massacre of the Jews on its shoulders, it sought a way to rid itself of this burden at all costs.

The completion of the Zionist project offered it this opportunity. By applauding the creation of the Jewish state, Europe absolved itself of its sins. Simultaneously, it offered Zionism the opportunity to complete the conquest of Palestine. Israel participated in this proxy redemption of European conscience in two ways. First, it directed its vengeful violence at a people innocent of its suffering, then it offered the West the benefits of an alliance for which it was repaid in return.

Both thus bound their destinies in a neocolonial pact. The triumph of the Jewish state soothed the European conscience, while providing it with the narcissistic spectacle of a victory over the barbarians. United for better or for worse, they mutually granted absolution at the expense of the Arab world by transferring the burden of anti-Semitic persecution to it. By virtue of a tacit agreement, Israel forgave Europe for its passivity in the face of the genocide, and Europe gave it a free hand in Palestine.

 

Israel owes its exorbitant status under common law to this debt transfer by which the West shifted its responsibilities onto a third party. Because it was the antidote to absolute evil, because its roots were rooted in the hell of Nazi crimes, Israel could only be the embodiment of good. Even better than a biblical sacredness with dubious references, it is this historical sacredness that justifies Israel's immunity in the European conscience.

By adhering to it, the Western powers inscribed it within the international order. Endorsed by the dominant powers, the Zionist profession of faith became a global iron law. By demonising its opposite, the invocation of the sacred—this sacredness of Israel—aims to strip all legitimacy from the opposition it arouses. Always suspect, the disapproval of Israel borders on desecration. Challenging the Zionist enterprise is blasphemy par excellence, for it is an attack on what is inviolable to the European conscience.

This is why the denial of moral legitimacy opposed to anti-Zionism rests on a simple premise whose effectiveness does not diminish with use: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Fighting Israel would, in essence, mean hating Jews, being driven by the desire to reenact the Shoah, and dreaming with open eyes of repeating the Holocaust.

 

This fraudulent conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is a weapon of mass intimidation. Drastically limiting freedom of expression, it paralyses all non-conformist thought by inhibiting it at its source. It generates self-censorship which, against a backdrop of unconscious guilt, imposes through intimidation, or prudently suggests, a well-intentioned silence on Israeli atrocities. Simultaneously, this false conflation aims to morally discredit political opposition to the Zionist occupation.

The chain of abusive conflations ultimately leads to the hackneyed argument that constitutes the ultimate source of the doxa: the "reductio ad hitlerum," moral defilement through symbolic Nazification, the final level of a slander of which something always remains. Terrorist because it is anti-Zionist, anti-Zionist because it is anti-Semitic, resistance to colonial terror thus accumulates infamy.

The only force that does not yield to the demands of the occupier, the resistance, as a reward for its courage, then suffers the crossfire of Western accusations and Zionist brutality. And as if the occupier's military superiority were not enough, it must also boast of a moral superiority, the futility of which its colonial crimes, however, attest.

What the Gaza genocide demonstrates is the brutality of the occupier, its colonial arrogance, its contempt for the lives of others, its self-confidence in murder, its cowardice when it murders civilians. But it's also this abysmal bad faith, this hypocrisy of the aggressor who plays the victim, this lie that comes from his mouth when he claims to be defending himself, when he condemns terrorism, when he dares to invoke self-defense, when he speaks of anti-Semitism.

Palestinian fighters are resistance fighters fighting for the land of their ancestors, to live in peace, one day, in this Palestine whose invader wants to despoil them, for this Palestine whose settler-state believes itself to be the custodian, when in fact it is the illegitimate occupier. Israel's self-defense? Let's be serious: the only legitimate self-defense worth anything is that of the Palestinian people, not that of the colonial soldiery; that of the occupied who resist, not that of the occupier who oppresses.

We are told that the current confrontation is due to the intransigence of extremists on both sides. But this equating of the occupier with the occupied is a deception. Since when has resistance been extremist? It is the occupation that is extremist, with its constant violence, this unbearable weight of silence weighing down a wounded people, whose bursts of revolt, fortunately, show that they are not defeated.

This war is the fruit of occupation and colonization, and the Palestinians are not responsible for the injustice inflicted on them. It did not begin on October 7, 2023: it was born with the Zionist project and the dispossession of the Palestinian people. And this war is not an ordinary war; it is the struggle between an occupying power and an armed resistance, and calling for a cessation of fighting is not enough to end it.

What is both odious and ridiculous in the declamations of Western and Arab diplomacy is this call for the disarmament of the Palestinians, which now returns like a refrain. Incapable of intervening against the genocidal policy of the butcher of Tel Aviv, these cowards ask them to give up, to resign themselves, to accept the yoke, while pretending to ignore the reasons why the Palestinians will not do so, neither today nor tomorrow.

Is it so difficult to understand that the war between the occupying power and the armed resistance will last as long as the occupation lasts? It was not the Palestinian side that buried the "peace agreements," but successive Israeli governments. 

We remember the lyrical flights about the "miracle of peace" achieved in 1995 in front of the White House by charismatic leaders crowned with Nobel Prizes. Despite this showy reconciliation, the confrontation has never ceased. And for good reason: resulting from secret negotiations conducted in Oslo, the agreements initialed in 1993-1995 never aimed to establish a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.

Presented as a "historic compromise" based on mutual concessions, these agreements were a sham. Yasser Arafat recognised the legitimacy of the State of Israel. He approved UN Resolutions 242 and 338, even though they did not even mention Palestinian rights. He solemnly renounced armed struggle. But Yitzhak Rabin only recognised the legitimacy of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, nothing more.

Before the Knesset in October 1995, the Israeli Prime Minister clarified his thinking: "We want a permanent solution with a State of Israel that will include most of the land of Israel from the British Mandate era and, alongside it, a Palestinian entity that will be a home for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza. We want this entity to be less than a state." A Palestinian state? Three months before his assassination, Rabin made it clear that he wanted none of it.

The agreements provided for the establishment of an "interim self-government authority," not the exercise of Palestinian national self-determination. This interim authority had none of the attributes of sovereignty. It depended on international funding, granted according to its cooperation with Israel. It had neither armed force, nor independent diplomacy, nor a territorial base, as the fragmentation of the West Bank prevented control of a homogeneous territory. 

In an incredibly perverse manner, the process reversed the burden of proof to the detriment of the Palestinians. Pending the final settlement, the PLO leadership was required to provide proof of its good faith. Now responsible for public order in the West Bank and Gaza, it had a duty to suppress the slightest resistance to the occupation.

The interim authority was therefore a sort of indigenous police force to whom the occupier delegated the task of maintaining order. The establishment of true Palestinian sovereignty, however, was in no way provided for in the agreements. The adopted text provided only for a "permanent arrangement" which, after a five-year interim period, would be based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338.

The long-term outlook remained all the more unclear since, throughout the negotiations, the Israeli position boiled down to a fourfold "no": refusal to acknowledge Zionist responsibility for the refugee tragedy of 1948 and 1967; refusal to fully return annexed East Jerusalem; refusal to dismantle the main Jewish settlements established in the West Bank; and refusal to demarcate the borders between Israel and Palestine along the 1967 "Green Line."

Based on UN resolutions, these demands constituted for the Palestinians the legitimate compensation for their renunciation of 78% of Mandatory Palestine. But for Israel, this 78% belonged to it by right. As for the remaining 22%, it divided it into two parts. The first, non-negotiable, was destined to remain under Israeli sovereignty (East Jerusalem and the main settlements). The second (Gaza and half of the West Bank) would be entrusted to an authority responsible for administering areas with a high indigenous population density.

Immediately touted by Western propaganda, the "Israeli generosity" during the Camp David II negotiations in September 2000 consisted of conceding to the PLO the tiny Gaza Strip and the leopard-like skin of a West Bank riddled with settlements, a tenth of Mandatory Palestine. Moreover, the question of Jerusalem was the subject of a disgraceful proposal in which Israel retained usurped sovereignty over the future Palestinian capital.

The sovereignty of the Palestinian people over their historic land was no longer a non-negotiable demand, but an uncertain horizon, subject to the hypothetical success of a shaky process. In the absence of immediate negotiations for a substantive settlement, the Oslo Accords (1993) and the Camp David II negotiations (2000) thus postponed the establishment of Palestinian sovereignty indefinitely.

For Israel, the benefits of these unequal agreements were colossal. In accordance with the "Allon Plan" presented in the aftermath of the 1967 victory, the occupier withdrew from areas with a high Arab population density, then surrounded them with a vast network of settlements connected by bypass roads. Gradually erasing the "1967 borders," colonization intensified, relentlessly corrupting the Palestinian territories: the policy of fait accompli would flourish like never before, sheltered by the "peace process."

Benefiting from a favourable balance of power, Israel, from 1993 to 2000, negotiated with one hand and colonised with the other. It used the slightest resistance as an excuse to renege on its commitments and increase its hold over the whole of Palestine. In the name of its sacrosanct security, it struck relentlessly. By undermining the territorial foundations of the future Palestinian state, colonization destroyed the very purpose of a negotiation that had become a mere alibi. Soon, the name Oslo evoked nothing more than a crude fool's bargain, and the PLO leadership appeared to have sold peace for nothing.

By attacking Israel with unprecedented audacity on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian national movement reached a historic milestone. Faced with the absence of a political solution and the violence of Israeli repression, Palestinian fighters launched an offensive into enemy territory. The merciless war now being waged against them by the occupier ushered in a new phase of the national liberation struggle, marked by the unleashing of genocidal policies and the prospect of mass expulsion, but also by the incredible resistance and fierce determination of the Palestinian national movement.

These atrocities demonstrate a headlong rush by the occupying power, incapable of militarily defeating a resistance that refuses to bend the knee, despite the sacrifices of its activists and the horrors inflicted on the martyred women and children of Palestine. For two years, the world has been disgusted and has witnessed the daily massacre of civilian populations by a state descending into murderous madness, combining mass crime with the abjection of stigmatising those it murders en masse.

Accented by the grotesque invocation of apocalyptic prophecies, this violence enjoys a de facto impunity that, beyond near-unanimous condemnation, profoundly challenges the human conscience. For there are situations in which moral imprecations are no longer sufficient: we must take concrete responsibility and act resolutely through all available channels, not just settle for inconsequential disapproval or ineffective indignation.

Thus, the nagging reminder of the "two-state solution," this mantra of diplomatic representations, seems doubly derisory: due to its immediate impotence to stop the massacre, and due to its impossibility of becoming a reality for thirty years due to an obstruction inherent in the very nature of the Zionist project. The intention may be laudable, but in history, colonialism has never been ended with intentions. To invoke this solution as if it were viable is to feed an illusion that was already maintained in the past, and which left a bitter taste by quickly dissipating.

 

Bruno Guigue

 

https://www.legrandsoir.info/palestine-la-conscience-humaine-demande-des-actes.html

 

TRANSLATION BY JULES LETAMBOUR.

 

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

SEE ALSO:

 

Spirituality mutilated in the face of Palestinian genocide 

by Azzedine Kaamil

Author's Note

This text is not a political pamphlet, nor a simple theological critique. It is born of an intimate pain, a cry of conscience in the face of complicit silence. I write it not as a scholar, nor as a judge, but as a brother among believers, a witness to an era in which comfort has sometimes stifled the truth. May this text serve as a call to lucidity, not to division; to fidelity, not to hatred. May it awaken, in each of us, the sacred fire of justice and spiritual loyalty.

Introduction

When Mecca becomes a tourist stopover and not a place of awakening in the face of injustice. While more than a million Muslims performed the Hajj rituals in June 2025, the world watched with folded arms as the Palestinian people were massacred. The indifference of the faithful, combined with the complicity of the Gulf monarchies, casts a moral shadow over one of the five pillars of Islam. At the heart of the contradiction: a pilgrimage emptied of its substance, becoming a rite without spiritual resonance, in contempt of justice, truth, and the bloodshed in Gaza.