The piercingly acute playwright Eugène Ionesco, born in Romania, spent his adult life in France, where leftist intellectuals supported the Arabs against the besieged Jewish state. I just happened upon his remarks on Israel, the Arabs, and antisemitism, dating from after the Six-Day War, and found them of sufficient interest to post them at Jihad Watch. You can find more of his remarks here.
In June 1967, Eugène Ionesco wrote: “When I think about how frantically antisemitism is revived under the mask of anti-Zionism or under the mask of progressive doctrines, and that all this is directed against the Jews of Russia, already scattered throughout the country, I cannot refrain from thinking about what would happen if there were no Jews on earth: there would have been no Christianity or Hasidism at all, there would never have been Freud or Bergson or Husserl or Einstein or Schoenberg. Not even Trotsky, not even Marx. The most antisemitic were the Soviet antisemites, who consider themselves Marxists.”
In 1968 Ionesco’s autobiographical book “PRÉSENT PASSÉ, PASSÉ PRÉSENT” was published. In July 1967, the author wrote: “At this moment there is no more war in Israel […] The world has prepared […] to deplore the massacre of 2,600,000 (Israel’s population at that time. – A. G.). But the victims did not agree to this and did not surrender. Those who wanted to kill them laid down their arms. Because of the defeat of the Arabs, there has been a change in public opinion in their favor by those who call themselves intellectuals. In particular, it is becoming increasingly clear to what extent antisemitic Russia supports the Arabs. […] Sartre condemns the Israelis for having attacked first. He argues that they are the aggressors. […] In fact, ideologically and strategically, the Egyptians attacked first. […] For months they have been preparing (for war. – A.G.) ideologically, strategically and propagandistically. Moreover, their army approached the borders of Israel. […] In an excellent article in Le Figaro Littérair, Klosterman explains well that the Egyptians, not the Jews, were the aggressors in the war against Israel (the Six Day War. – AG).” The Israelis were the victors, and therefore immediately lost the sympathy of the “progressive forces.” The historically established image of the weak and oppressed Jews has changed dramatically.
In contrast to the position of many French leftist intellectuals, Ionesco argued that Arab aggression against the Jews had taken place in the Six-Day War: “French Jewish intellectuals, poisoned by leftism, argue in letters to newspapers that the very presence of Jews in the country of Israel is an aggression against Arabs. They traitorously borrow this worldview from the Arabs. […] If Jewish life in Israel is aggression, then everything is aggression: the French are aggressors in Corsica, in Brittany and Languedoc. The Algerians are aggressors in Algeria, for they came there from another place. The entire continent of Europe is overrun by ‘aggressors’ who came from Iran and Asia.”
One of the pillars of modern European art, one of the 40 “immortal” academicians, the world-famous playwright Eugène Ionesco sided with little Israel against his colleagues. Three times the writer traveled to Israel to stage three of his plays and to participate in protests against the repression of Soviet Jews who wanted to repatriate to Israel.
In his memoirs, Ionesco wrote: “I know that the Jews have fertilized their (Arab. – A. G.) lands, a thing of envy to their neighbors, who themselves are unable to do so. I know that the “advanced” Arab regimes are not advanced at all, and that military circles and fascists rule over them. […] I am for the Jews. I chose this people. […] When everyone thought that there was no hope for Israel (during the Six Day War. – A.G.), I turned to an Israeli diplomat in desperation and asked what I could do to help. “I can do nothing but write an article in the paper,” I said. “It’s a lot,” he told me, “do it, everything is important. I wrote the article, printed it in the paper. Wrote another article. And I felt like I had done something. It was an effective action, not a particularly big one, but I did it from my heart.”
Read more here.
cornelius says
Good stuff Hugh. The ‘oppressor-oppressed’ narrative fused with the outcome of the 6 Day War to forever after imbue Israel with the stigma of oppressor in the mind’s eye of the modern left.
As for who was the aggressor in the war, Ionesco was exactly right. Among all his other provocations, Nasser’s closing of the Straight of Tirana was – according to international law – an act of war.
sporticus says
So his father was a policeman?
I know what the cop would say about his son’s literary and theatrical works:
-Absurd rubbish, Eugene. Your name is “Eugene”, isn’t it? And you say you’re my son?
-Apparently I am, papa, although you may have an alibi.
Some years ago, someone handed me a newspaper which had an interview with Ionesco. Ionesco made a remark which made me shiver then and still does:
“The World was made by devils and God doesn’t know that the World exists.”
Of course that would imply a “finite” god and that we are all damned.
Kepha says
Good for Eugene Ionesco.
The poor, poor Palestinians! Their plight is the perennial excuse the Arab street uses to periodically trash a US diplomatic mission; but the USA has given passport-holding, voting rights, property rights, public office eligible, and no-questions-asked about the children’s status to more victims of an-Nakhba and their descendants than any seven Arabic-speaking nations put together, with Hashemite Jordan and Israel excluded. Down to the fifth generation, the Palestinian refugees remain stateless, even in the Gulf countries, where they do a lot of the real work.
As for the oppressor-oppressed and colonialist-colonized memes, the great-grandfathers of the people now claiming an unsullied “indigenous” right to the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean used to proudly show off genealogies going back to some colonist/land stealer/conqueror from the Hijaz. Pushc the settler-indigenous meme too far, and we’ll end up asking the Nahua-speaking peoples to move back to Aridamerica and leave central Mexico to the Otomi and other “Chichimeca”, and call on the Apache and Navajo to move back to the Yukon cradle of the Na-Dine peoples so the descendants of the Anasazi may reclaim their patrimony.
I’ll go on record saying the Zionist idea was born in misconception–the pipe dream of Ignaz Goldziher and some others that the “fellow unitarian” and Semitic Arabs would welcome back the Jews with open arms. But we can’t simply uproot seven million people; and modern Israel has made a go of a very unpromising start. I will also go on record as seeing the bulk of the current “anti-Zionist” agitation as a very filmy screen for old-fashioned and utterly reprehensible anti-Semitism.
Maybe another initiative the USA should take is persuading the Arab states to naturalize the descendants of the 1948 refugees living among them. It’s high time that happened. Israel made no-questions-asked Israelis out of the Mizrahim, many of whom came with only their clothes and luggage, and got not a penny of UN money. The far bigger refugee problem in post-partition South Asia, in which the refugees going both directions numbered between 12 and 20 millions reached the point where Lahore-born Manmohan Singh and Delhi-born Parvez Musharaf could sit down together and discuss how to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan. The Palestine Arab refugee issue also ought to be settled with resettlement and naturalization.