In April 2010, we founded JCall, a shift in opinion determined to rise above partisan divisions, the ambition of which was “to gather European Jewish citizens and Israel’s friends aspiring to a peace in the Middle East based on an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, according to the principle of two peoples two States”.
In its founding text entitled “Call to Reason“, we wrote that the occupation and the continuous building of new settlements in the West Bank and in Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem endangered the sustainability of the Zionist project—and that the Jewish and democratic State created by the founding fathers, which had resisted all the vicissitudes of History, would not survive the grim alternative of a civil war and of apartheid. Thousands of goodwill people signed that Appeal, and thirteen personalities contributed to a leaflet we used as a manifest for the movement.
Fourteen years later, we must note that nothing has changed, if not worse. Barely formed in the last days of 2022, the sixth Netanyahu government—the most extremist in the history of the Jewish State—attempted a judiciary coup in order to liquidate Israeli liberal democracy in favor of an elective autocracy regime. This reform put the country on the brink of civil war and seriously affected its defence capabilities. While on the Palestinian side, the coalition agreements affirm the exclusive right of the Jewish people to self-determination over the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To this end, responsibility for the occupied territories was removed from the army, a power recognized by international law, and transferred to the civil authorities, under the domination of the representatives of the settlers in the government. The double fiction of a «temporary» occupation and the «peace process» thus eliminated, the divine decree openly replaced the supposed absence of a partner for peace.
The barbaric assault of October 7 came against this backdrop. This unprecedented pogrom, the war against Hamas, the devastation of civilians and the devastation of the Gaza Strip that followed justify the worst fears that the Call to Reason intended to ward off. It is more evident than ever that Israel’s salvation depends on a reasonable settlement of the Palestinian question, namely the Two-State Solution. As is often the case in history, the boldest solutions are born from the most appalling tragedies.
Thus we relaunch our “Call to Reason”. It is addressed to all those, Jews and non-Jews, who have at heart the salvation of the two peoples who share this piece of land of the Eastern Mediterranean, to all those who contemplate with horror the political and moral degradation in which the coalition in power leads Israel, the perils that beset it at the borders, the international reproach against it; to all those who have not lost faith in a better future, nor in the exercise of reason necessary in order to .achieve that goal.
Elie Barnavi (historian, former ambassador of Israel in France), David Chemla (JCall European Secretary General), Dany Cohn-Bendit (former European deputy), David Meyer (rabbin), Pierre Nora (member of the Académie française), Henry Rousso (Directeur de recherche émérite au CNRS, président de la mission de préfiguration au musée mémorial du terrorisme (MMT), Anne Sinclair (journalist), Dominique Schnapper ( sociologist, former member of the Conseil Constiitutionnel), Alain Rozenkier (président de la Paix Maintenant), Meïr Waintrater (president of JCall France).
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