By Pr Dr Yves ROUCAUTE
Article published on Atlanlico news webside, November 2, 2023
Peace? Yes. The solution could be easy: Hamas should surrender and release the hostages. But this is obviously not the case. So is the road to peace impossible? I don’t think so. It can and it will. But it cannot be achieved without first making the right diagnosis: this war is neither a war between civilizations, nor a war of conquest between two states, but a war of civilization against the abject. A war that should bring together all civilized beings, whatever their culture, from Paris to Moscow, from Ryad to Berlin, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Shinto, atheists… all the colors of civilization.
Step 1: Diagnosis
Yes, abjection is here, and it is the enemy to be destroyed. Babies with their heads cut off, dismembered human bodies, Jews tied up and burned alive, pregnant women stale alive with their fetuses ripped out before their very eyes, children chased into their bedrooms to be shot, loving couples slaughtered in their beds, corpses of old men beaten, young girls raped and then killed… Tormentors exulting with their hands soaked in human blood, and their families congratulating them on the phone, live – the magic of live – on exterminating Jewish humans, drunk with the death drive, drunk with hatred, drunk with evil… And to win peace, we must begin by showing the images of horror, as we showed those of Mauthausen, Auschwitz and Dachau to the Germans and Austrians yesterday, as General Patton did on April 15, 1945, when he demanded that the mayor of Weimar show the inhabitants of his town around Buchenwald. As did Eisenhower, who demanded that every unit not at the front visit a camp. « We’re told that the American soldier doesn’t know what he’s fighting for. Now, at least, he’ll know what he’s fighting against. This is what we’re fighting against. This is the message that the souls of the dead send, so that we don’t confuse justice with vengeance, and bury the horror in a modesty that censors images, or in an unseasonable pride that believes it can conceal Israel’s fragility or the incompetence of an incapable Israeli government.
Yes, peace begins with facts. And the fact that Hamas is not a Palestinian resistance group, but a savage horde that propels abjection, organizing a ruthless totalitarianism against the Palestinians of Gaza. So much for the fantasies of Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive Abjection Party and the despicable Agence France-Presse who refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Hamas is a totalitarian organization that forbids women access to schools and enforces the full veil, that prohibits freedom of the press and the right to demonstrate, that tortures and murders opponents, just as it murdered all the members of the PLO, that plunges its civilian population into misery, seizing international aid for its own benefit, and that engages them in the desolation of war. No, they do not represent the Arab world, nor the 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza, out of 9.3 million. Supported by only around 29% of Gaza’s population, these butchers are a minority.
And Hamas are not « the » Muslims. There’s nothing Muslim about them. Show me the suras in the Koran that say babies’ heads should be cut off and women raped, rather than « Peace be upon Noah in all the universe », « Peace be upon Abraham », « Peace be upon Moses and Aaron », « Peace be upon Elijah and his followers », peace be upon Christians too? Where would this God of hatred be, rather than this « merciful and loving » God? Of course, it’s always possible to detach the suras from their context, especially the statements attributed to Mohammed when he was at war. Certainly, as a Christian, I find that certain suras are sometimes difficult to reconcile with my vision of God, women and secularism, but none of them justifies the pleasure of killing. From Cairo to Riyadh, everyone in their soul feels that the Hamas militant is not a « barbarian », which meant only « foreigner » to the Greeks, but a savage beast that has lost all humanity, a beast to be eradicated.
Step 2. Just war
The second stage of peace follows on from this. After this observation: the war against abjection is imperative. And since it is a war of civilization, the objective is not the victory of a state but that of civilization, not to win the war but to win the peace, what I have elsewhere called the « peace of humanity ».
Don’t you want to eradicate Hamas the way we eradicated National Socialism in Germany? Then you’ll have war tomorrow, and an even more ruthless war at that. Because what the members of this organization and the Iran that arms them want, they’ll want again tomorrow. Even more deadly, because the means made available to these despicable forces will be even more destructive. Stop pretending to believe in the « evil peace » once denounced by Thomas Aquinas, a peace that lasts only as long as the balance of power. Yes, you can sign the Munich Treaties galore, and send aid in the belief that you’re buying peace: you’re only buying yourself a good soul at a bad price. You don’t make peace with crime, you fight it; you don’t compromise with terrorism, you terrorize it; you don’t negotiate with abjection, you eradicate it. When abjection has invaded the mind to the point of extinguishing all light, to the point of enjoying the act of death, the only solution is to put to death the savage body that carries this desire for death. With sadness, but with determination.
Are you afraid the world will go up in flames if you continue to intervene? First of all, fear your own destruction if, in the face of such infamy, mankind were to show an insignificant weakness, worthy of those illnesses from which decadent nations suffer and which no longer even find in themselves the virtue to defend themselves. If Israel stopped fighting, imagine the cries of victory from the world’s partisans of abjection, imagine the lawless districts of France and Belgium, imagine the insecurity of our liberal democracies, imagine the hope in Yemen of putting an end to Ryad and the Pakistani Islamists of putting an end to the American alliance.
Should we create two states now? Who are we kidding? Would France allow a state to be built on its doorstep, with the aim of exterminating its citizens? Should we also help it, as we did yesterday by allowing the Hamas regime to buy and manufacture weapons, to spread hatred all the way to elementary school, where textbooks present the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of the West as a divine demand, and let it play, for the undistracted part, the protector of the population, with its social aid networks?
You want a truce because you fear for the lives of thousands of civilians in Gaza? I understand your compassion. That’s why, by the way, playing on your honorable sensibilities, Hamas is replaying the propaganda trick of the German Nazis, Japanese fascists and Petainists who showed images of the dead during the bombings of Saint Nazaire, Hamburg and Tokyo. These bastards turn those who made the horror and those who suffered it into opposites, just as yesterday they turned those who put Europe in irons, made the extermination camps, organized the Nanking massacres and those who tried to liberate humanity from ignominy into opposites. But fear the worst if you follow France, which has just voted in favor of the UN motion put forward by Jordan, which killed 10,000 Palestinians in 1971. A motion which even refuses to associate this truce with a condemnation of Hamas. Would France accept that, after 10 Bataclan, murderers reigning on its borders are swooning with ease, ready to reconstitute their forces in the truce, ready to start the massacre again tomorrow, sending their missiles day and night over Paris and Marseille? Like yesterday, when French deputies, having lost all dignity, all sense of honor, all duty to uphold France’s universal values, voted for full powers for Pétain and accepted a truce with abjection? For a few votes, the road to shame. And Germany abstained? Wonderful too: supported by those obscurantist reds and greens who idolize nature and want to save the planet with decrees, rather than save humanity, they reproduce without shame the ideology which holds that a Jew is worth less than an acre of their sacred forest. Yes, I can only see Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Croatia on the road to honor, and I fear this Europe of cowards ready to let go of the morbid impulses that threaten to destroy it.
You want a humanitarian corridor? Good for you. But let’s cut the bullshit: a corridor under control. Under the strict control of the Red Crescent or the Red Cross, because no one is fooled by Hamas’s claim: it’s for its troops that it wants this aid, not for the population it has been plundering and terrorizing for ages. A humanitarian corridor, yes, not a dehumanization corridor.
Finally, do you fear for the lives of the hostages? I do too. These despicable people know the humanity in us. They enjoy our suffering and intend to take advantage of it to drive the camp for the liberation of Gaza from the reign of morbid impulses, to give in. This will allow them to continue tomorrow with other massacres, other kidnappings, other blackmail that will lead them to a new pleasure and us to eternal impotence. The truth is, they didn’t take 239 Israelis hostage, they took humanity with Israel. Only weak nations can give in. Strong nations are forced to set themselves the goal of destroying the savage horde, with as few innocent deaths as possible, and, on the way, to do everything in their power to free the hostages. And those who bet on the weakness of true humanists should remember the likes of Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, who demonstrated that the strength of arms lies in the strength of the soul, and prayed for a loving God to forgive their mistakes and the unwitting destruction of innocent lives.
Step 3: Human peace and reconstruction: the Arab key
After war, peace. And what kind of peace? Because wars can never be won, only peace. And whoever wins without worrying about the aftermath, as the Allies did in 1918 with the iniquitous Treaty of Versailles, humiliating the vanquished without being forgiven for the death they gave, or forgetting the necessary self-recognition that every nation desires, is preparing for the next war. In this way, the pride of victory gives hatred the pretext it needs to feed itself again and again, as we saw in Germany in 1933, where the National Socialists used this pretext to justify their abjection, where the cowards found the excuse for their alliance. And so it is today, too, with this tartuffery that transforms « pretext » into « cause », as if the Treaty of Versailles were the cause of the concentration camp abjection and justified it, as if the misfortune of many Palestinians in Gaza were the « cause » of the horror and justified it.
Yes, two states, that’s the horizon. But this is only possible if the Palestinian state is itself a pacified, demilitarized state, rediscovering in its schools the distinction between the abject and the civilized, preferring cooperation to death. And, in exchange, reconstruction aid will be possible, as it was for post-war Germany. Rebirth instead of humiliation, recognition of Palestinian identity instead of denial. This is what I was hoping for back in January 1993, in Tunis, with the Crises magazine group I had founded, when we took part in meetings between Yasser Arafat and Yael Dayan, who revealed to us – alas! that we were wrong, that the PLO didn’t really want peace, preferring to receive aid subsidies for confrontation.
But this possible state cannot be achieved without the help of our Muslim brothers in humanity. In this war of civilization against abjection, they are the key, hence the importance of sharing the diagnosis with them. I see no other solution. I don’t know what the regime of this Palestinian state would be, because it’s up to the Palestinians to choose, but logic says the objective and its means. Instead of offering hatred, ignorance of the other and submission, the aim is to bring reconstruction, recognition of the Palestinians and freedom.
Yet such a state is only possible, in the first phase, if it is controlled, sponsored, under protectorate – I dare use that word – by countries that also want peace with Israel, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, whose dreams of cooperation have been sabotaged by Iran, and other countries that would be donors to the reconstruction, perhaps the pluralist Indonesian republic, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, or the constitutional monarchy of Morocco. Do we believe that the mass of Gaza’s population aspires to anything other than a good life for itself and its children? Do we think that they would still hate Israel if it became the building force of a cooperative state, proud of its culture and respectful of its own diversity? Yes, a sort of international Marshall Plan for the rebirth of Palestinian civilization against abjection. A declared objective of Israel’s moral army, setting the “peace of humanity” as the ultimate goal of this war. A clear signal to the world’s death drives that they can never prevail. Humanity, yes, humanity, first and foremost through a lasting peace, a “peace of humanity”.
Pr. Dr Yves Roucaute, Philosopher, University Professor, PhD in Political Science, PhD in Philosophy, “agrégé” of Philosophy and “agrégé” of Political Science, author of numerous books, including « L’Obscurantisme vert, la véritable histoire de la condition humaine » (« Green Obscurantism, the true story of the human condition »), éditions du Cerf.