The explosion of the massacres of October 7, 2023 and the carnage in Gaza which followed, still ongoing at this moment, brought from oblivion, or rather disinterest, a conflict whose litany of deaths is regularly included in our daily. The double tragedy has revived the confusion from which he continues to suffer: the crossed accusations of hemiplegic memory and selective emotion, or else a campism for which it only serves to designate the adversary, even the enemy. It is in this particularly heavy context that the latest book by the historian and Arabist Jean-Pierre Filiu appears, the culmination of a clarification project launched well before October 7.
This work does not only stand out for its ability to pick up in its title, How Palestine was lost and why Israel did not win(Seuil, 432 pages, 24 euros) the two propositions that its author intends to defend, also a chronicler of Middle Eastern disorders for The world.
This conflict, which extends over three centuries, has nourished a very rich historiographical material composed of the best academic sums (we are thinking here of the monumental Question of Palestine, by Henry Laurens, Fayard, five volumes), but also numerous accounts from witnesses, whether they were political leaders, diplomats or journalists. Jean-Pierre Filiu’s approach is to mirror two dynamics, those of the winner and the vanquished at this point in the conflict, each time identifying three factors considered determining in their respective fates.
Power of Christian Zionism
This bet is held with virtuosity, in particular because it frees itself from the usual limits and borders of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Among the three Israeli assets distinguished by Jean-Pierre Filiu, the first is undoubtedly the least known. It is about the power of Christian Zionism carried by the British kingdom as much as by the young American republic. Founded on an eschatology – study of the final ends of man, history and the world – which preceded the great work of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), this Christian Zionism is at the origin of the misleading formula of “country without a nation for a nation without a country” denying the Palestinian reality which precipitated a century of clashes.
That this Christian Zionism carried in its wake a solid anti-Semitism embodied by the controversial pastor Robert Jeffress, chosen by the administration of Donald Trump to bless the opening of the United States embassy in Jerusalem in 2018, is only ‘seemingly a paradox. His “dispensationalist” eschatology sets as a prerequisite for the return of Christ the decimation of the Jews after the restoration of the kingdom of Israel over the whole of Palestine, then the conversion of the survivors to Christianity.
You have 50% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.