Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Historische Diktaturforschung

PhD project: When Israel Became a Colonial Question

Anticolonial Thought and the Left-Wing Intellectual Interpretation
of Israel/Palestine in France, 1956 – 1975

In the left-wing and anticolonial interpretation of the conflict in Israel/Palestine, the Six-Day War in 1967 is often referred to as the turning point. However, this project argues that the positions which rose to widespread recognition in 1967 were developed earlier. It strives to understand how left-wing intellectuals interpreted the conflict in Israel/Palestine in the “long 1960s”. As the main hub of innovative radical thought at the time, the project focuses on France (and Paris in particular), where the intense struggles around decolonisation intertwined with the experiences of German occupation and the Holocaust. As the war in Algeria became the focal point of the political debate in France, an anticolonial consensus developed on the left. This project analyses the different ways in which this consensus was applied to Israel/Palestine.

By analysing these debates, the project will show that the increasingly anti-Israeli orientation of anti-(and later post-)colonial thought was not the only possible or theoretically compelling one, but rather a result of different historical experiences and their intellectual interpretation. The field’s initial heterogeneity was short-lived as the range of acceptable positions increasingly narrowed. The project follows the hypothesis that this narrowing was caused by dynamics within the left-wing intellectual field in France, whereas the events in Israel/Palestine functioned more as a backdrop than as a direct influence.

Beginning with the “triple crisis” of 1956, where de-Stalinisation (including the Soviet invasion of Hungary), the escalating war in Algeria, and the Suez war intersected to shake up the French left, I will analyse the debate until the middle of the 1970s. By then, the New Left’s radical anti-colonialism was replaced by a stronger focus on human rights and NGOs. The intellectual field changed, too, with the existentialist paradigm of Sartre’s hegemonic era (late 1940s to early 1950s) giving way to deconstructionist and postmodern approaches. Many of these tendencies culminated in the debates around the double moment of Six-Day War 1967 and the uprising in May 1968, which I will contextualise historically.

To this end, I will analyse publications in journals and publishing houses commonly referred to as left-wing at the time. This includes Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, Arguments, and Éditions Maspero, among others. Although I will focus on several prominent figures, the project will provide a wider historical context than a narrow interpretation of towering figures like Sartre could give. In addition to the many publications by the relevant intellectuals, I will analyse their articles in newspapers (like Le Monde), letters, diaries, memoirs, and their personal archives.

The project is supported by a PhD scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).