Introduction

On 4 June 1967, a 991-page special issue of Les Temps Modernes hit newsstands and bookshops. The volume, dedicated to the Arab–Israeli conflict, consisted of essays written by Palestinian, Arab and Israeli writers that were addressed primarily to the French and European left. Aware of growing tensions between Arabs and Israelis (but unaware that war was about to break out) the journal's editor, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, promised in his introduction that he would treat the topic with ‘neutrality’. Essays were divided into an ‘Arab’ camp and an ‘Israeli’ camp; they were written by leading political figures and intellectuals of their time and were clearly intended to sway European leftists to their respective framing of the conflict.

As the historian Yoav Di-Capua has recently shown, the Arabs were at a clear disadvantage. Only a few days before the special issue appeared, Sartre, along with sixty-seven other prominent French intellectuals, signed a public statement in support of the Jewish state. For a variety of structural and cultural reasons, the European left (with a few exceptions) leaned heavily towards the Israeli perspective, especially regarding Israel's legitimacy. Most thinkers on the European left saw Israel's establishment as redeeming the horrors of the Holocaust, a trauma that was still fresh in their minds. For them, the necessity of having a state for the Jewish people outweighed whatever wrongs the Palestinians suffered as a result of Israel's establishment. As a result, the Arab–Israeli conflict needed to be solved in a way that would retain the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

For Palestinian and other Arab intellectuals, Israel was an illegitimate settlercolonial entity that was established against the wishes of the indigenous population. They believed that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948 and the ongoing colonisation of their land should be opposed by the European left in the same manner that it opposed other settler-colonial regimes throughout the world. To them, the European left's refusal to do so smacked of hypocrisy and ignorance. Moreover, while they saw how anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust, they did not believe that establishing an ethno-national Jewish state was the proper solution.