Marco Koskas (b. 1951, Tunisia) is a French-Israeli novelist first discovered by Erik Orsenna, who signed him at Grasset after reading his early manuscript pages. Celebrated from his 1979 debut Balace Bounel onward and a Villa Médicis resident (1980–1982), he spent 1998–2006 working as a private detective alongside his writing, before emigrating to Israel in 2012 and earning a surprise Prix Renaudot nomination in 2018 for Bande de Français.

October 7 was not only the date of an infamous pogrom. It also gave rise to an anthropological revolution that transformed the victims of this massacre into executioners, in the eyes of what is called “public opinion.” The Euro-American democratic world, still marked by the Shoah, suddenly invented the accusatory reversal, calling the State of Israel’s survival response to the aggression it suffered a “genocide.” And not a day goes by without attacks occurring here or there — in Spain or Croatia, in London as in New York — inspired by the new status of Jews as a “genocidal people.”

Cultural circles have not escaped the rule. Obeying the Palestinist doxa, they too began accusing Israel of genocide, most of the time while knowing nothing of the conflict, its history, or even its geography. Freshly Botoxed Hollywood celebrities could thus be heard placing Gaza to the east or north of Israel…

Israeli filmmakers dropped from this or that festival, Jewish intellectuals barred from speaking at this or that university — examples of this new McCarthyism abound, with the burlesque and pitiful low point being the misadventure of Nadav Lapid, an Israeli far-left director. Here is an anti-Zionist artist nevertheless asked to withdraw from the Marseille Festival for the very fact of being Israeli. Lapid, “lapidé” (stoned) like a common kibbutznik from Nahal Oz by Hamas’s terrorists, kicked out of the great far-left family despite his voluntary exile in France; despite his virulent criticism of Israel and his hollow dreams so hostile to his own people — Nadav Lapid has become the symptom and the scapegoat symbol of the new antisemitic conformism of cultural circles.

In Europe, Jewish creators and authors absorb the blows without truly grasping the existential stakes that all this hostility implies. They suffer, of course; and they try to defend themselves, even while declaring themselves hostile body and soul to Netanyahu. They give every possible token of political correctness, but nothing helps. Non-Jewish colleagues also denounce this new totalitarianism. The city hall of Marseille and CRIF, LICRA and all........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)