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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Jacqueline Rose: the story of Dreyfus « Previous | |Next »
June 6, 2010

Jacqueline Rose ‘J’accuse’: Dreyfus in Our Times in the London Review of Books says:

The story, because of Dreyfus, so Israel, is not without some truth: what happened in France at the turn of the century was in many ways a forerunner of Vichy. But it is not the only story, and those who tell it risk blinding themselves to what Israel as the nation for the Jewish people did to the Palestinians in order to become a nation, and no less to what Israel has become. If the only lesson we learn from anti-semitism is more and more anti-semitism – of necessity, eternally, and as the core and limit of Jewish life – then we have learned nothing. A different version of the story would instead take from the Dreyfus affair a warning against an over fervent nationalism, against infallible armies raised to the level of theocratic principle, against an ethnic exclusivity that blinds a people to the other peoples of the world, and against governments that try to cover up their crimes.

She adds that that the story of Dreyfus, the fight for justice, leads rather to universal human rights and the need to abide by international law. To my mind, the Goldstone Report instead affords Israel a unique possibility, I would say an obligation, to take responsibility for its own actions and to recognise the injustice of those actions, not just during Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008-9, but on a daily basis against the Palestinian people. There will always be a better way to serve a country ‘than to wrap oneself in blind faith’.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:45 PM |