Accusations of Impotent Chattering Notwithstanding…

Howard A. Doughty

“Not by speeches and resolutions of majorities are the great questions of the time decided… but by blood and iron.” — Otto von Bismarck, 1862

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was widely revered as the moral voice or his (and my) generation. Few still read him today. During the Algerian “war of independence,” he fatefully said, “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” He considered himself an ally of the Arabs, but they rejected him as a hypocritical colonial apologist. He venerated the ideals and accomplishments of the Europeans, but his empathy for its victims branded him as a traitor to the French. 

At the centenary of his birth, I argued that Camus remained relevant to the so-called “clash of civilizations.” In Gaza and environs today, however, the hazards may be even greater and the horrors worse than in previous colonial struggles. Today, Camus’ sentiments might be contemptuously dismissed, not as hypocrisy or even naivety, but as complicity or cowardice. That is shameful. Whether resurrecting Camus’ concerns would have practical benefits is uncertain. Ignoring his legacy is folly.

Camus was a touchstone for many of us growing into passable maturity in the 1950s. He was born in Mondovi, a coastal town 550 km east of Algiers, in 1913. His father, Lucien, was killed in action at the Battle of the Marne in 1914. He was of French and Spanish ancestry. He was raised by his widowed mother — an illiterate, half-deaf “cleaning lady.” A gifted student, he excelled at football (soccer) and philosophy. His teachers recognized his talents and helped him both intellectually and materially by guiding him to scholarships for advan`ced education. A diarist, journalist, playwright, novelist, and essayist, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

During World War II, Camus pursued his literary career while also secretly risking his life in the French resistance (unlike some of his Marxist critics) as editor of the clandestine newspaper Combat. A self-described man of the political left, he was influenced more by Hellenistic philosophy and Nietzsche than by Heidegger and Marx. His seminal political work, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, cost him his close friendship with philisopher Jean-Paul Sartre. 

Dismissed as a mere bourgeois moralist by orthodox Marxists, Camus championed a form of humanism as rational, pacifist, and staunchly opposed to capital punishment. His political reputation was sealed when he returned to Algeria in 1956. He passionately argued against both colonialism and terrorism. 

A posthumous coup de grâce came in 2013, when a new audience revisited The Stranger — the work that originally made Camus’ name and fame. In it, the anti-hero, an otherwise unremarkable man named Meursault, kills an Arab at the beach. He does it, he says, “because of the sun.” Leaving aside the “existential” issues of morality, truth, and the meaning of life, it elicited a belated rejoinder by Kamel Daoud who presents Camus’ story from the perspective of the Arab community, which, in Camus’ original, has no voice, no genuine presence, no acknowledged existence.

The Algerian war lasted eight years. Camus did not live to see its end. He did feel the agony of a participant-observer who was torn between the two sides, but he was aghast at how they were destroying each other. He said:

The inexcusable massacres of French civilians will lead to other equally stupid attacks on Arabs and Arab property. It is as if madmen inflamed by rage found themselves locked in a forced marriage from which no exit was possible and therefore decided on mutual suicide. Forced to live together but incapable of uniting their lives, they chose joint death as the lesser evil.

No one knows how long the current violence in Gaza will last, or whether it is just one more episode in an escalating narrative of hatred and death. Perhaps, as some Christian fundamentalists hope, it is the beginning of the Armageddon mentioned in the Book of Revelations. But everyone knows that the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel was carefully planned and coldly executed.

Hamas wanted to provoke an overreaction. It succeeded. The Netanyahu government’s response sought to ruin negotiations for a two-state solution. It worked.

This has happened before. In 1982, Israel spoke of “extirpating the terrorist seed” in Lebanon. It won a temporary victory, followed by the rise of Hezbollah. Then, Henry Kissinger, the foremost “crackpot realist” of my time, “announced after the onslaught that he could see ‘a fresh beginning’ emerging from under the rubble. True in a way. What sprouted from under the rubble was Hezbollah. Only crackpot realists think they can suppress that inevitable cycle.”

Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Lady Robert Cecil dated 12 November 1922, wrote: “I read the Book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes through well out of it.” When our progeny read accounts of these times (if literacy remains an option), it is uncertain that humanity will come out well.

In a recent article on the return of “cold war liberalism,” Patrick Iber explains that Camus “advocated for an ethical position that combined responsibility to work against injustice with limits on the pursuit of that goal. ‘Actions that will probably be ineffective’ were preferable to ‘those that will certainly be criminal.’ You could not, he thought, build a radiant future on a totalitarian foundation.” 

But what is “injustice”? Passionate advocates for both sides are convinced of their respective and mutually exclusive righteousness claims. Pro-Israel and pro-Palestine advocates exchange reciprocal narratives of oppression and counter-accusations of genocide. They demand that others take a stand. Each embodies traumatic experiences of suffering and adopts suffering as essential to its self-identity, thus justifying a craving for justice that can be slaked by drinking from the cup of bitterness and revenge.

It might be presumptuous, but not ill-advised, to remind us all of an exchange of letters between Emir Feisal (1885-1933, future King of Iraq) and Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice) in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, which set the stage for today’s events. 

On behalf of the Arabs, Feisal wrote:

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by happy coincidence have been able to take the first step toward the attainment of their national ideals together. The Arabs… look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference… We will do our best… to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home… We are working together for a reformed and revised Near East, and our two movements complement each other. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other.

To which Frankfurter replied:

Allow me on behalf of the Zionist Organization, to acknowledge your recent letter with deep appreciation… We knew that the aspirations of the Arab and the Jewish peoples were parallel, that each aspired to re-establish its nationality in its own homeland, each making its own distinctive contribution to civilization, each seeking a peaceful mode of life. The Zionist leaders and the Jewish people for whom they speak have watched with satisfaction the spiritual vigour of the Arab movement. Themselves seeking justice, they are anxious that the just national aims of the Arab people be confirmed and safeguarded… We know that… the national aim of the Jewish people had your support… and that we have in you a staunch supporter in their realization. For both the Arab and the Jewish peoples there are difficulties ahead [that] we shall work out as friends, friends who are animated by similar purposes, seeking a free and full development for the two neighboring peoples. The Arabs and the Jews are neighbors in territory; we cannot but live side by side as friends.

The catastrophic recent loss of lives testifies to the futility of an ongoing danse macabre. Performative displays of vengeance or despair aren’t anything but insulting to the Israeli and Palestinian dead and dying. It seems no one can claim to refute Bismarck’s insult to human dignity.