No Historic Duty toward Other Men Should Prevent Jews from Attending to Their Own Difficulties

A brilliant novelist and political thinker, Albert Memmi was one of the most influential theorists of anticolonialism, as well as a proud Jew and a defender of Israel who painted vivid portraits of North African Jewish life in both his fiction and nonfiction. Memmi, who was born in Tunisia in 1920, died in Paris last month. In 1962, when some 120,000 Jews left Algeria following its independence, he wrote an essay in Commentary about the Jewish future in the newly independent states of North Africa, which begins with a provocative question:

Am I a traitor? It is a question I could not have avoided facing indefinitely, one which has been asked by my former North African compatriots—Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans. It had to be asked. Here I am, living in France, the country of the colonizers of North Africa. I, a Tunisian Jew, have gone away, left behind those young, newly independent nations, whose independence I had so fervently desired.

Memmi never refutes this accusation, but his reflections lead him to more profound, and very relevant, conclusions:

If anyone has given a false picture of what the Jews of North Africa think and feel, it is the Jewish intellectuals, particularly of the left, who have done nothing but imitate the kind of thinking characteristic of the French left in general.

Such blindness, conscious or unconscious, is not, alas, new in the history of Jewish communities. It would certainly be easier, for thought and for action, if the lot of Jews could coincide exactly with that of their neighbors. It would be pleasant if history were always rational and manageable. How fine to be able to work for the good of all men at once, including Jews! I really believe this to be the great dream of every Jewish intellectual: to fight for all humanity, and in so doing to save his own people, without suspicion of self-interest, Alas, history abounds in contradictions. Not that the history of the Jews is independent of that of the Others; on the contrary, everything that happens to the Others also affects the life of the Jews, but in a special way.

In any case, the destiny of the Jew too often carries with it a hard nucleus that cannot be minimized. No historic duty toward other men should prevent our paying particular attention to our special difficulties. It is not wrong for the Jewish elite to take positions in advance of the majority of their people, but at the same time they must never forget to listen to the voices of their people. Jewish leaders have not performed their historic mission simply by fighting for the coming of a universal morality. For, beyond the solidarity with all men, there exists a more humble and often less comfortable duty: to come to grips directly with their special destiny as Jews, without worrying too much about being called a traitor by anyone.

A few months after the article was published, Algeria passed a law denying citizenship to non-Muslim citizens. Within a decade, barely anything was left of this nearly two-millennia-old Jewish community.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Albert Memmi, Algeria, Mizrahi Jewry, Postcolonialism, Tunisia

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF