“For the cause of Zion I will not stand idly by, for the cause of Jerusalem I will not stand still, until there comes forth, like a brightness, his righteousness, and his salvation, like a burning torch” , says the prophet Isaiah (62, 1) at the sight of Israel departing from justice.
I am Jewish. Not only because my mother was, or because persecuted as such, but because, in the Jewish tradition, justice is not just another concept. It is the very foundation of his identity. “Justice, justice you will pursue,” says the psalmist. And that appeals to me.
It is this dream that a Semitic tribe, one among many, went to seek more than 4,000 years ago, with Abraham, in Jerusalem, “Salem”, where they were welcomed and blessed – strange coincidence! – by a king named Melchizedek, “king of righteousness.”
As for the State of Israel, it was never for me, a child of the Warsaw ghetto, a compensation for the 6 million of my brothers killed during the Holocaust, or the result, as some claim, of some miracle. He is the accomplishment of justice. A requirement that the Jews never abandoned. The great French writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, was able to see this more than two centuries ago, during his trip to Jerusalem.
It is a fact. Despite the forced dispersal and successive occupations, the Jewish community that remained in Israel never ceased, through the preservation of its heritage, the work of the land to which it was attached and the armed struggle, to demand justice. This justice it obtained in the form of independence in the historic United Nations vote on May 14, 1948.
“Remember,” David Ben-Gurion reminded me, “most modern dictators have risen to the top of states democratically. This was, according to him, the raison d’être of the Supreme Court of Justice. An institution that does not depend on any government and whose action is to prevent any attack on freedom, minority rights and justice, a natural temptation of all powers, whatever they may be.
Now, Benyamin Netanyahu’s coalition, for the first time since the rebirth of Israel, is questioning the existence and independence of this unique institution, essential to the survival of Israeli democracy. A reform that will allow a few power-hungry men to issue unfair laws as they please.
It is so as not to become citizens of a theocratic state, such as the mullahs’ Iran, that millions of Israelis have been demonstrating for weeks across the country. They want to preserve democracy, the dream of their fathers, the rights of women and the independence of justice.
I should have been by their side. For justice, negotiated by Abraham with the Eternal, does not belong only to the Israelis. It is the bond that unites all Jews throughout the world. Limée, hijacked by his government, it weakens all the communities of the diaspora.
Israel must remain a model state, a just state, both for its citizens and for the minorities who live there. “Democracy is not the law of the majority, wrote Albert Camus (Carnets III, March 1951-December 1959), but the protection of the minority. To all the Jews of the world: the Israelis are waiting for your reaction and the nations are watching you!
