Georges Didi-Huberman: 'Neither persecuted, nor refugees, nor prisoners, we are nonetheless the psychological hostages of the intolerable situation in Gaza'

LeMonde

04-06-2025

Gaza or the intolerable. For months now, each day more than the last, seemingly. The situation is two, three, a thousand times intolerable. First, on a human level, of course, for what the civilian population has endured, crushed beneath the bombs of an army that, following the American model, believes it can "eradicate" (that is, uproot entirely) by indiscriminately destroying everything on the surface (houses, hospitals, women and children, journalists, ambulance workers, humanitarian personnel…).
The situation is also politically intolerable, as the countless voices raised against it have proven desperately powerless, so long as American bombs continue to be delivered and used. [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu has long since stopped listening to the world around him – a deeply cynical and tactical deafness, but also suicidal at its core, apocalyptic, eliminating any possibility of a political solution to this conflict.
All of this is well known, even if it must be repeated. Yet, there is a third aspect to this intolerable situation: a psychological one, I would say, particularly affecting Jews in the diaspora. Those who have never dreamed of empire, only of a civic life in whatever country they have chosen to live in. Those who do not place their Jewish existence in the crucible of a state. They do, it is true, carry the heavy burden of history, stacked in piles or half-arranged along the winding corridors of their memory.
Henry Meige, a student of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, in 1893 published a medical thesis on what he called the "wandering Jew syndrome": It often concerned destitute migrants who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe and lost their minds after enduring such immense suffering. They could be recognized in the streets of Paris by the enormous bundles they carried on their backs, filled with pitiful, disparate, useless yet sentimental objects.
Four decades later, after Hitler came to power, those who had not fallen victim to Nazi persecution became migrants again who endured miserable living conditions and the loss of rights, among them many great intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, who analyzed this condition with rigor in a now-famous essay, We Refugees (1943).