Raymond Aron warned in 1967 that anti-Semitism was taking a new, more insidious form. His insights still hold true today.
Writing in December 1967, French public intellectual and sociologist Raymond Aron argued that the West was entering the “age of suspicion.” He was referring to a new strain of anti-Semitism ushered in by none other than Gen. Charles de Gaulle, hero of the Free French Forces during World War II and then president of France.
Some context is helpful. June 1967 marked the Six Day War, the third major conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours—primarily Egypt and Syria, united under the short-lived United Arab Republic, with Jordan and Iraq also involved. As in the 1948 War of Independence and the 1956 Suez Crisis, Israel achieved a decisive military victory. This time, however, Israel emerged as an occupying power—an “embarrassment of riches,” as one Israeli official put it—controlling the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai.
During the lead-up to the war, through its course, and in the aftermath, Aron wrote a series of articles for Le Figaro. These essays—later collected in “De Gaulle, Israel and the Jews”—offered a masterclass in political and geopolitical analysis. They examined the Middle East conflict, the involvement of global powers like the United States and the Soviet Union, and the influence of mid-level states including Yugoslavia, India, the UK, France, and Canada. Aron was well-positioned to comment, being the author of “Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations,” a foundational work in the field.
The second contextual point is de Gaulle’s now-infamous press conference on Nov. 27, 1967. Under his leadership, France had extricated itself from Algeria after a brutal war that contributed much to the modern concept of decolonization. During that conflict, France was a strong ally of Israel, supplying advanced fighter aircraft and viewing the Jewish state—and other ethnic and religious minorities in the Muslim world—as a bulwark against pan-Arabism, which sought to revive the Islamic caliphate dismantled by Mustafa Kemal in 1924.
But after the Algerian War ended in 1962, France abruptly changed course. Spurred also by U.S. involvement in Vietnam, de Gaulle distanced France from its colonial past and from the “imperialist” United States—and, increasingly, from Israel. He moved to cultivate closer ties with the Soviet Union and Arab states.
So, by 1967, France—once allied with Israel in the Suez Crisis—condemned Israel for initiating the Six Day War. That Egypt’s President Nasser had provoked Israel by blockading the Gulf of Aqaba and requesting the withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers from the Sinai made no difference. De Gaulle placed the blame squarely on Israel.
For Aron, however, the most troubling aspect of de Gaulle’s press conference was not the political pivot but his comments about Jews—both Israeli and diaspora. De Gaulle stated:
“Some even feared that the Jews, scattered hitherto but who had remained what they had always been, that is an elite people, self-assured and domineering, might, once they were reunited, turn the very moving hopes they had formed over nineteen centuries: ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, into a burning ambition of conquest.”
By Collin May
