If it is true that old age is a shipwreck, in the case of the Palestinian raïs Mahmoud Abbas (84 years old), it is more like a long and lamentable drowning that drags in its wake Palestine and its just cause. Physically worn out, isolated and politically challenged, Abbas has been multiplying blunders and aberrations for many years. Ultimate slippage, speaking on August 24 before the “revolutionary council” of his party, Fatah, he uttered extremely serious anti-Semitic remarks: “Hitler did not kill the Jews because Jews […] but only because of their social status as usurers,” he asserted.
The Palestinian raïs took up here a hazy theory that he had already developed during a “History lesson” delivered before the Palestinian National Council, in Ramallah, on April 30, 2018, according to which “the reason for the Holocaust is not the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but the “social behavior” of the Jews”! But in his lucubrations of last August 24, he enriched this infamous theory with a new argument tinged with conspiracy: in a delirious attempt to prove that the ‘‘Nazis were not anti-Semites’’, he advanced the strange argument according to which ‘‘Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites”, because “they are the descendants of the Khazars [ancient Turkish people] who have nothing to do with Semitism”. Which, of course, has no historical basis!
Many films dedicated to Nazi horror and the Holocaust have been welcomed, celebrated and rewarded by the Cannes Film Festival. There was, in particular, the tragicomic ‘‘Life is Beautiful’’ by Roberto Benigni (Grand Prix – 1997), the moving and masterful ‘‘The Pianist’’ by Roman Polanski (Palme d’Or – 2002 ), the dark and poignant ‘‘White Ribbon’’ by Michael Haneke (Palme d’Or – 2009) and the atypical and dazzling ‘‘The son of Saul’’ by Laszlo Nemes (Grand Prix – 2015).
When I discovered, in early summer 2019, the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors collected by my friend Jean-Marie Montali, for the purposes of his book Nous sommes la voix des morts (« We are the voice of the dead », Le Cherche-midi, October 2020), I was reading an unpublished text by Hannah Arendt, which had just been published in the excellent collection About & Around, published by Allia editions.
Highlights of the heartbreaking book of our colleague Jean-Marie Montali ‘We are the voices of the dead, the last deportees testify’, which has just been published by Le Cherche Midi. 75 years after the liberation of the camps, these testimonies from survivors, which resound like voices from beyond the grave, describe the unspeakable and name with singular sobriety the absolute horror of the Holocaust.
