At first, I wanted to write you a letter, Anasse.

So it began with, “My dear Anasse…” Obviously, that wasn’t right. So I started again: “My poor Anasse…” Because, you see, you’re a rebeu¹Rebeu is a French slang term, often considered pejorative, that refers to a French- or European-born person whose parents or grandparents came from the Maghreb, or, West or North Africa., you’re a communist, you support the Palestinian people, you’re anti-Zionist. Congratulations, you’ve methodically ticked all the boxes of the moment, you’ve chosen your side perfectly, you’re a real heavyweight. 

That’s where I was when I realized that this was what I needed to explore: a big shot, but of what? A big shot with pedigree. You see, you’ve got the whole pedigree — to be prey for the police and the courts. So my first idea is that you’re a champion of synthesis; you’re a walking political synthesis. In fact, you’re like the personification of a situation that is itself an extraordinary condensation.

Because that’s what strikes me about Gaza: its incredible power of condensation. People often ask the hypocritical question, “But why are you only interested in Gaza, and not the Uyghurs, or Sudan, etc.?” It’s precisely because Gaza is a condenser without equal. Everything comes rushing in, everything melts together, on all scales, temporal and spatial.

Gaza, for example, is the shipwreck of the West’s pretensions of civilization, and the reality of its predatory and murderous history.

In Gaza, there is the monstrous European disruption of the Holocaust, which has never been resolved. It is impossible not to quote Césaire here: 

What the very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century…cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

In Gaza, as Sonya Faymann, Béatrice Orès, and Michèle Sibony have shown, there is also the transfiguration of European antisemitism into philosemitism, which, as usual, is far too ostentatious to be honest, and which Shlomo Sand, speaking as a Jew, summed up in perhaps the most succinct way: “The Europeans have vomited us onto the Arabs.”

In Gaza, we see this confusion taken to its extreme when the representative state of a people who have suffered genocide commits genocide itself, when the leaders of a people whose martyrdom gave rise to the category of “crime against humanity” are themselves being prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

Finally, in Gaza, there is one last element that enters into the melting pot — and it is by no means the least important. Surprising as it may seem, Gaza is potentially exacerbating national class situations in a very particular context of the organic crisis of capitalism. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the violence against supporters of the Palestinian cause and the criminalization of their actions if we look only at Gaza and do not bear in mind this landscape of class and class struggle; if we fail to see that this limited criminalization offers an unprecedented opportunity for widespread criminalization — namely, that of any challenge to the bourgeois order. 

For the bourgeoisie understands very well what is at stake for it in Gaza: nothing less than the preservation of its hegemony. We therefore cannot understand the paroxysmal intensity surrounding Gaza if we do not include the fundamental issues at stake for the bourgeoisie. Yet there is a connector linking all the heterogeneous data of this situation, which has become indistinguishable through international and national coalescence, and that connector is the signifier “Arab.”

The “Arab,” whom the genocidal variant of Zionism has made an object to be crushed, inevitably resonates with the “Arab” of national Islamophobia. In both cases, “Arab” is identically the bad object to be expelled and destroyed in order to restore the peace of the dominant class. The paradox of the signifier “Arab” in the national context is that it is almost never pronounced as such, even though it has become centrally active, symbolically and politically. But we know from psychoanalysis that unspoken words, absent words, are sometimes the most present and the most charged with organizing power.

Through a mechanism that is in fact very classic, the contradictions of capital accumulation that bourgeois political institutions are no longer able to regulate are offloaded onto a social group chosen as a receptacle for these unresolved tensions. These tensions are then transformed into violent racial tensions. All this is perfectly well known, although here we should say a word about the very characteristic auxiliary mechanism that leads to visceral adherence to ideas initially espoused in an opportunistic manner because of their functional properties in a given political situation. Hence, anti-Arab racism, initially an instrumental political solution for the bourgeoisie, has become its most authentic passion and even its moral cement. The most salient feature of a moral portrait of today’s political and media bourgeoisie is its racism.

And then came the Gaza event. Suddenly everything connected — even at a distance, even elements that at first glance seemed unrelated. The historical enormity of the crime committed by Israel would normally call for universal condemnation. This would mean taking the side of the Arab populations massacred in Gaza without reservation. But this would risk jeopardizing the domestic, anti-Arab political solution. For the bourgeoisie, this is completely impossible, since the preservation of its hegemonic interests takes precedence over everything else.

Everything then falls into place: the bourgeoisie’s fake philosemitism, supposedly an expiatory form, but in fact simply an inversion of its criminal antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s, dictates its support for Israel, and this with all the more fanaticism because this support preserves and even consolidates the most precious thing of all: the domestic anti-Arab solution; and this while facilitating the general repression of left-wing forces, which can be attacked on entirely fallacious grounds (antisemitism or apology for terrorism) to cover up the real motives: these are forces committed to challenging the bourgeois order in a situation of a contested bourgeois order.

This gives rise to an absolutely fascinating global political phenomenon, in which different eras and spaces enter into communication and seem to merge into one another. And from this melting pot, we see the three sides of today’s bourgeois order emerge, revealed, therefore, by Gaza: 1) the power of capital to maintain itself and the radicalized class war in a situation of crisis; 2) the opportunistic philosemitism of the bourgeoisie; 3) its anti-Arab racism as a political solution for restabilization. Three sides of a triangle in the middle of which we find nothing but moral decay and political violence, complicity in genocide by default, and the policing of non-conformist opinions.

Let us remember that “catastrophe” etymologically means “upheaval”; in this respect, we can safely say that the situation is catastrophic: indeed, everything has been turned upside down. The (far-right) National Rally, the radioactive core of inveterate antisemitism, passes for a friend of the Jews; anti-Zionism becomes the sole face of antisemitism, when in fact it is the only bulwark against antisemitism — since it offers the only means of decoupling Jews from their genocidal state and of not making them bear indiscriminately the crime of Gaza — support for the victims of crime becomes the crime; and fascism is to oppose fascism.

And you, Anasse? You stand on your own two feet in a world that stands on its head. 

And since everything is upside down, people say, of course, that you are the one who is upside down, when in fact you are the anti-catastrophe par excellence at the heart of the catastrophe. It takes strength of character to stand upright in an upside-down world. The fact is that the hegemony standing on its head is determined to make those who dare to remain standing pay dearly. So, with an extra dose of hostility, which is perhaps the mark of a confused guilty conscience, they come down on those who dare, in all sectors: from politics to academia, trade unions and even the entertainment industry.

The list of those who are paying for having been right too early, and whom history will prove right, is endless. For there is no doubt that shame and disgrace will change sides. All the propaganda in the world will be powerless against the irresistible truth of what has been done in Gaza. Nor can it stand against the genocidal rhetoric of all those connected to Israel whenever they attempt to deny, minimize, or even demand that Israel go even further and, as one twice-miserable figure put it, “finish the job” — twice miserable for the statement itself and for the position from which it was made. These people will end up buried under a historical shame.

But our task is not to wait for the future verdict of history to adequately describe the despicable acts of this bourgeoisie, but to do so as soon as they are committed. Our task is to fight for this truth to be universally recognized today. However painful the ordeal may be, this is also what your trial may allow. I believe that the people who are persecuting you are even more stupid than they are evil (which is saying a lot). They are so stupid that, as certified agents of overthrow, they will end up, through their excesses, overthrowing their own overthrow. So that, from their truth standing on its head, the truth may finally emerge standing on its feet. And it will join you, who has never stopped standing.

Originally published on May 17, 2025 in Révolution Permanente