This text is a reflection in the heat of unfolding events, nourished by history, philosophy, and the memory of human tragedies. It is not about siding with one group against another, but about upholding an ethical imperative: never to justify the unjustifiable, especially—not despite—having been a victim. Humanity does not divide into tribes; it is shared, or it is lost.On May 6, 2025, the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, with strong support from two of his far-right ministers—Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—launched a military offensive with the appearance of eradication: destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, mass expulsions, a total humanitarian siege. What remains of the Gaza Strip, already devastated, now resembles an open-air graveyard. The analogy is self-evident: Gaza is a ghetto. This word, so tragically tied to Jewish history, cannot be used l…
The Warsaw Ghetto—walled in by the Nazis to confine Polish Jews before their extermination—was more than a place: it was a mechanism of dehumanization. What is denied there is not only freedom, but the very belonging to humanity. That a people who endured such negation could in turn impose it on others cannot be explained by geopolitics alone. This is a historical paradox, an ethical collapse—and above all, a warning.
Memory alone is not enough to prevent repetition. As the Italian philosopher Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, once wrote:
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
History teaches us that persecuted peoples can, if they lose their critical conscience, become the new persecutors. The State of Israel, born from the ashes of the Holocaust, was founded on a promise: « never again. » But that promise only holds meaning if it applies to everyone. To deny others the dignity one demands for oneself is to betray its very spirit.
I am an atheist, a scientist, a humanist. And what I see revolts me. Religious fundamentalism—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or Hindu—appears to me as one of the greatest perversions of the human mind. Not faith, but certainty. The kind that kills, excludes, and enslaves in the name of a God whose chosen status each claims for themselves.
Pogroms, crusades, jihads, inquisitions, genocides—so many crimes have been committed in the name of the sacred. Montaigne wrote:
“There is nothing more extreme than each person’s judgment of their own faith.”
It is this fanaticism of “us versus them” that eternally haunts history.
Those who seek salvation or legitimacy today in ethnic, religious, or national identity lead us back to the darkest ideologies. Identity obsession, a fetish of the far right and a trap for societies in crisis, rests on an illusion: that there is an essence superior to our shared humanity. But there is only one true and inalienable identity: to be human.
Hannah Arendt, herself stateless, a refugee, and survivor of Nazi exile, once wrote:
“The right to have rights is above all the right to belong to humanity.”
The horror in Gaza—like that in Aleppo yesterday or elsewhere tomorrow—is not just a war. It is a moral failure. An inversion of memory. A corruption of justice. Those who invoke the suffering of their ancestors while inflicting the same suffering on others, lose—through this contradiction—their own humanity.
I do not believe in transcendence, but I believe in dignity. I do not believe in revealed truth, but in shared reason. And I reject the idea that the dead can be ranked by religion, nation, or side.
There are no good dead. There are only murdered human beings.
Lettres d’humeurs et d’opinions. 