Deux réponses à l'Holocauste: Israël et l'Union européenne (Yoram Hazony)

Yoram Hazony, intellectuel israélo-américain, auteur d’un ouvrage remarqué sur La Vertu du nationalisme, a été interviewé le 19/09/2019 par Laure Mandeville pour Figaro Vox - ICI.

Giles Fraser sur l'ouvrage de Yoram Hazony, La Vertu du nationalisme:

A word of warning: if you are a liberal with high blood pressure, you may want to give The Virtue of Nationalism, the new book by Yoram Hazony, a miss. I have rarely read anything so explosive. But it is absolutely fascinating.

According to Hazony, an Israeli political scientist, most Europeans have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion from the Second World War. They have too readily assumed that what went wrong with Nazism was an extreme form of nationalism, and that nationalism was, therefore, the thing that needed to be solved. Guided by this assumption, nationalism became a byword for racism and bigotry.

But despite the fact that the Nazi party was called “National Socialist”, Hazony argues it was actually neither of those things. Hitler was an imperialist. He sought to establish a “third Reich”, modelled on the “first Reich”, which was the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, Hitler wanted an empire to rule over others. And the political wickedness of Nazism was much more to do with its desire for empire than for its celebration of the nation state. For Hazony, it was empire that led to the Holocaust not nationalism. And had Europeans drawn this conclusion, the debate over the European Union would look very different. […]

The crucial section of the book is when Hazony writes about two completely different lessons that can be drawn from Auschwitz – one in which nationalism is seen as the problem and, therefore, internationalism is seen as the answer; and another in which internationalism is seen as the problem and, therefore, nationalism is seen as the answer. Those who set up the state of Israel, for instance, took the second position, believing that a nation state i.e. Israel was to be the best way of protecting the Jewish people. But …

“Jews are not the only ones for whom Auschwitz has become an important political symbol. Many Europeans, too, see Auschwitz as being at the heart of the lesson of the Second World War. But the conclusions they draw are precisely the opposite of those drawn by Jews. Following Kant, they see Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of that barbarism, that brutal debasement of humanity, which is national particularism … According to this view it is not Israel that is the answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union.”

There are, therefore, he argues, two irreconcilable responses to the horror of the death camps. If you see nationalism as the cause of the Holocaust then – basically – you will see the dismantling of nation states as the right and proper response. Thus the European Union. But if you see empire and internationalism as the problem, then the answer is stronger nation states, especially for the vulnerable. Thus the state of Israel.

In other words, the two basic but opposite assumptions about what created the Holocaust inevitably lead to two completely opposite answers as to what should be the right response to it. For one position, nationalism is the solution. For another, nationalism is precisely the problem. For such as these, as Hazony puts it: “Israel is Auschwitz”. If you analyse nationalism as the problem, then more nationalism cannot be the answer. That is, if you believe nationalism is the problem, then “Israel is, is some important sense, a variant of Nazism”!

It is no coincidence, Hazony maintains, that Israel is constantly compared to Nazism by some liberal Europeans. Thus, he concludes, opposition to the existence of Israel is deep in the European marrow, it represents a “universal will [that] cannot abide a single, obstinately dissenting people, no matter how small”.

Lire l'article complet @ Unherd