There are times in history when the obvious is no longer shared, and knowing how to state it is the first duty of a politician, the prerequisite for any debate and any action. So let's start by saying what some on the French left are unable to express: We are devastated by the fate of these Israeli children massacred, these women raped and these families burned alive; Hamas is a terrorist organization and its fanatical ideology, its frenzied anti-Semitism, its cult of violence and death logically led to the crimes against humanity committed on October 7; and nothing – neither the legitimate struggle against colonization nor the necessary fight for recognition of a Palestinian state – can or will ever justify the horrors of Kfar Aza or Re'im.

Let's state that decapitating a human being or kidnapping children will never be an act of resistance, and neither the French resistance nor today's Ukrainian resistance have ever done anything similar or anything approaching it. Instead, there is a chasm, one that separates resistance to oppression from terrorism aimed at the annihilation of the other. The resistance fighter may have to kill, but he does so reluctantly, whereas the terrorist enjoys his crime, like the Hamas assassin who called out to his father in the midst of a massacre: "You'd be proud of me, I've killed ten Jews! Ten!"

Let's also state that the Molotov cocktails thrown at a synagogue in Berlin and the slogans heard in Sydney ("Gas the Jews!") have nothing to do with solidarity with the Palestinian people, but everything to do with an ancient hatred of Jews. This hatred, which presided over the worst page in European history, must be fought by everyone. Without exception or hesitation.

To say simple, basic things like this, clearly and without "buts," is neither to ignore the historical and political context in which these atrocities took place, nor to conceal the immense role of the Netanyahu government, nor to overlook the colonization of the West Bank or minimize the crimes committed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers. To say this is to demonstrate the incompressible minimum of humanity without which no truly political debate is possible.

To say this – if we are guided by the quest for justice that should be in us at such tragic moments, when we feel the rising anger that threatens to make us forget that others, their rights and their suffering exist – must also lead us to affirm that any collective punishment of Palestinian civilians is unacceptable, to express our empathy with the thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza, many of them children, to refuse indiscriminate bombardment and the placing of a people under siege, and to recognize, with gravity, that no world can be born from the burning down of schools or mosques and the lack of political perspective maintained by Israel for years.

You have 68.41% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.