June 4: Will Israel Hit Hezbollah?

Biden issues border order; Sue and settle; Modi wins third term

---

---

The Big Story

Footage emerging from northern Israel late Monday showed the sort of postapocalyptic scene we’ve come to expect from wildfires in the western United States. The following compilation of X videos, published Tuesday in The Times of Israel, gives you an idea:

The fires engulfed more than 2,700 acres in northern Israel on Monday afternoon and evening before firefighters got them under control. Their source was a series of Sunday rocket and drone attacks by Hezbollah, which has kept up a near-constant barrage of fire into Israel over the past eight months, forcing the evacuation of at least 60,000 Israelis from northern border communities. Under U.S. pressure, the Israeli leadership has grudgingly tolerated this status quo, but the fires have prompted fresh calls for decisive military action. Center-left opposition leader Yair Lapid tweeted, “The north goes up in flames and Israeli deterrence burns with it,” while the nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Monday that it’s “time for all of Lebanon to burn.”

While Ben-Gvir represents the hawkish end of Israeli opinion, the country’s establishment certainly seems to be fed up. On Tuesday, the Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar reported that the British had passed warnings to the Lebanese government that the Israelis were preparing for a major offensive in Lebanon to begin in mid-June. The report also cited “Arab parties connected to the ongoing negotiations”—presumably Egypt or Qatar—who said that there are “many demands from the [Israeli] army and the political leadership for … carrying out major deterrent action against Hezbollah.” It’s unclear whether the rumored invasion plans are real or merely part of some elaborate Levantine haggling gambit, but there’s no doubt that the IDF’s patience is running out. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi announced Tuesday that “we are nearing a decision point” in the north.  

Such an operation, however, would require the Israelis to openly defy the United States, which has extended a de facto protective umbrella to Hezbollah since Oct. 7. The Wall Street Journal reported in December, for instance, that on Oct. 11, President Biden and other U.S. officials convinced the Israelis to abandon their plans for a preemptive strike against Hezbollah under the guise of preventing “regional escalation”—a dynamic that Tony Badran accurately described in Tablet on Oct. 12, months before reporting on the contents of the Oct. 11 call was made public. Instead, the Americans, through Biden Lebanon envoy Amos Hochstein, are attempting to cajole the Israelis into a U.S.-mediated border demarcation agreement with Lebanon, which would pour money into the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government and Lebanese Armed Forces, force Israel into land concessions (following the model of the 2022 maritime agreement), and “fully implement” U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701—code for ending Israeli overflights into Lebanese territory, with the backing of the United Nations and, implicitly, the United States. 

The end state of the U.S. plan, as Badran has argued, is an imperial arrangement in which the United States and Iran negotiate directly with one another to decide the fate of their provinces in the region—an arrangement that requires the downgrading of Israel from a sovereign nation to a U.S. province and the upgrading of Lebanon from a failed state to an Iranian province whose security is guaranteed by Washington. (After all, the United States cannot negotiate with Tehran on behalf of one another’s “equities” if those equities insist on pursuing an independent foreign policy.)

But given the inevitable U.S. opposition to an Israeli operation in the north, what are Israel’s options? We reached out to Lee Smith, who wrote in an email that the situation in the north should be read alongside a Tuesday article in The Jerusalem Post, which reported that the United States had submitted a resolution to the U.N. Security Council endorsing a three-stage hostages-for-cease-fire deal tied to a two-state solution. “Israel,” Lee wrote, “might see the very bad situation in the north as an opportunity to illustrate how it intends to deal with a future Palestinian state by dealing with Lebanon—not just Hezbollah but the Beirut government that insulates it.”

How so? Lee explains:

For Israel, the problem with a Palestinian state is that it lends the terror enclave international legitimacy. Sadly that horse left the barn with Oslo, when Jerusalem negotiated terms with a terror enclave. Probably time for Israel to see the upside to Palestinian statehood. Like Lebanon, a Palestinian state will never have genuine state institutions, like a legitimate parliamentary body, etc., but it does have important assets, like an electricity grid, an airport, sea ports, etc. It has infrastructure. If Israel fights the same war against Hezbollah that it’s been fighting against Hamas for eight months, it will encounter the same issues, as the U.S.-led international community will come to demand that Israeli forces go to extraordinary lengths to target only Hezbollah and not the innocents the terror group hides behind. And even then the White House will permit Israel to fight Hezbollah only up to a certain point and no further. So maybe it’s time for Israel to fight a different war and zero in on the infrastructure of the state that sustains Iran’s Lebanese asset. 

Would the Israelis risk incurring the Biden administration’s wrath by effectively shutting the lights off in Lebanon? “If they don’t,” Lee writes, “Israelis may soon come to know what it’s like to be Lebanon”—i.e., a non-sovereign entity whose fate is decided by fickle imperial masters. 

Tablet’s geopolitical analyst echoed Lee’s emphasis on the critical importance of preserving Israeli sovereignty but was bullish on Israel’s ability to act in the face of U.S. pressure. If Israel invades, they wrote: 

Israel will face a hail of missiles followed by substantial global isolation and a raft of U.N. resolutions and kangaroo court judgments that will make Gaza look like a picnic. But relying on a second-term Biden administration to meaningfully impede these things even in the absence of a Lebanon invasion is a fool’s bet. My guess is that Israel has much more leverage vis-à-vis the Biden administration in the summer before the November U.S. elections than it is likely to have for a long while afterward.

Publicly defying the U.S. and occupying Lebanon up to the Litani is a relatively moderate, defensive move in the face of an Iran that has achieved a highly advantageous strategic position on Israel’s borders while also being on the verge of going nuclear, all with U.S. backing. Lebanon, not Gaza, has always been the minimal, unavoidable war that needs to be fought for Israel’s survival in order to keep a nuclear Iran at a minimal distance. 

The analyst also suggested that Israel might have been planning for such an operation for a long time:

My interpretation of Israel’s endless painful stops and starts and agreements to various U.S. hostage trade schemes in Gaza has long been that it’s a question of physics: Israel needs to amass the required tonnage for whatever operational plans it has in Lebanon, which has reportedly been Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s focus from the start. If Netanyahu and Gallant have indeed been doing their jobs and can keep it together until sometime this summer, they should have a battle-tested army equipped with enough bullets, shells, and bombs to reestablish the security zone that Prime Minister Ehud Barak unwisely abandoned 25 years ago to please the U.S., with incredibly costly results.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen interviews French scholar of Islamism Gilles Kepel on the attempt to replace the Holocaust with the Israeli “genocide” in Gaza

---

The Rest

→Asked in a Tuesday interview with Time magazine whether Netanyahu was “prolonging the war for his own political self-preservation,” President Biden expressed his appreciation for Bibi’s cooperation by saying he’s “not going to comment on that”—before saying “there is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.” We’ll let Omri Ceren take this one in our Tweet of the Day:

→Also on Tuesday, President Biden signed an executive order restricting the ability of illegal immigrants to claim asylum in the United States. The order will temporarily “shut down” the southern border when the seven-day average of crossings exceeds 2,500 per day—half the benchmark number considered in the Senate border legislation this February. In theory, the “shutdown” will allow border authorities to rapidly remove migrants apprehended while illegally crossing the southern border, albeit with several loopholes—e.g. for unaccompanied minors and migrants with a fear of persecution and torture—that, if the past is any guide, will be systematically exploited in much the same way that the asylum system is currently exploited by economic migrants. Fox’s Bill Melugin notes on X, moreover, that the executive order does nothing to stem the flow of “the 1,500 migrants per day released into the U.S. via CBP One app at ports of entry,” nor of the 30,000 migrants per month being flown directly into the country via the administration’s humanitarian parole program. 

Politico reports that a border shutdown is expected to go into effect at midnight.

→But the loopholes may do less to undermine the shutdown than the inside-outside lawfare practiced by immigrants’ rights NGOs and the Biden Department of Justice. In a Monday blog post for the Center for Immigration Studies, Art Arthur explains how rights groups and the DOJ have previously used a “sue-and-settle” scheme to quietly undermine the administration’s border enforcement actions—without the administration having to politically “own” the lax enforcement. The legal details are complicated, but in essence, they center around an ongoing case, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Biden, in which several immigrants’ rights NGOs (the same ones that sued the Trump administration over its asylum restrictions) have sued the Biden administration over a proposed DHS rule to restrict asylum applications from illegal immigrants. The “scheme” is that the Biden DOJ, after spending months defending the proposed rule change in district and circuit courts, suddenly reversed course in February and stopped defending the rule; instead, it approached the Ninth Circuit panel with a joint motion to hold the government’s appeal in abeyance pending the negotiation of a settlement with the NGOs. The panel voted 2-1 to grant the motion, but Judge Lawrence VanDyke wrote in his dissent (emphasis Arthur’s):

The administration’s abrupt about-face makes no sense as a legal matter. Either it previously lied to this court by exaggerating the threat posed by vacating the rule, or it is now hiding the real reason it wants to hold this case in abeyance. ... At the very least it looks like the administration and its frenemies on the other side of this case are colluding to avoid playing their politically fraught game during an election year. 

Read the rest of Arthur’s post here. 

→Narendra Modi won a third consecutive term as prime minister of India, albeit with a smaller majority that may require his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form a coalition. India’s general election began in mid-April and ran until this past Saturday. Modi officially declared victory today, but while the counting of ballots is still ongoing, the BJP looks set to win only about 240 seats—well below the 303 it won in 2019 and short of the 272 needed to form a government, meaning the party will have to form a coalition with its partners in the National Democratic Alliance. Analysts quoted in The Wall Street Journal pointed to economic issues—including unemployment, inflation, and a dearth of government jobs—as the primary reasons for Modi’s worse-than-expected performance, despite India notching 8.2% GDP growth in the fiscal year ending in March 2024, making it the fastest-growing major economy in the world. 

→Quote of the Day:

We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.

That was Washington Post CEO publisher Will Lewis in a Monday meeting with the paper’s staff to discuss the departure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, who was let go on Sunday. Buzbee, a veteran of the Associated Press who has helmed the Post since 2021, will be replaced on an interim basis by Matt Murray, who led The Wall Street Journal from 2018 to 2023, and eventually by Robert Winnett, previously a deputy editor at The Daily Telegraph. According to a report of the Monday meeting in Vanity Fair, Washington Post staff were less concerned with the dire situation at the paper than with the race and sex of the new leadership. “We now have four white men running three newsrooms,” complained one reporter. Another pressed Lewis as to whether he’d “seriously considered” any “women or people of color” for the top jobs. A third staffer relayed that people “don’t feel good about the fact that the first female executive editor … [is] being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”

→While we’re on the media beat, reporter Dan Boguslaw has resigned from The Intercept, explaining his reasons in a Substack post that includes a shot at D.C. “bureau chief” (scare quotes in the original) and Scroll regular Ryan Grim for expecting young reporters to “hit Capitol Hill to regurgitate the latest progressive talking points.” Boguslaw is the second high-profile reporter to resign from The Intercept in as many months; investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein resigned at the end of April after the publication fired veteran national security editor Bill Arkin. Both have attacked what they characterize as a newsroom culture dominated by bureaucrats and business types fearful of “pissing off powerful donors,” in Boguslaw’s words.

In an April Substack post explaining his departure, Klippenstein revealed that The Intercept’s general counsel, David Bralow, and CEO Annie Chabel—whose background is in nonprofit fundraising, not journalism—had attempted to kill a story on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ combined $100 million charity donations to retired Adm. William McRaven and celebrity Eva Longoria. According to Klippenstein, Chabel “had concerns about how the story might come off to The Intercept’s donors.” More generally, Klippenstein derided the publication as a “billionaire-anchored nonprofit” more interested in soliciting donations and avoiding lawsuits than pursuing journalism. 

The Intercept was supported for years by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, but in January 2023, it spun off into an independent nonprofit that relies on multiple large and small donors (the managing director of the Omidyar Group, Pat Christen, remains on The Intercept’s board). In February, the publication laid off 30% of its editorial staff, and according to an April report in Semafor, it is on track to run out of cash entirely by May 2025. 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics, by Blake Smith

Julia Kristeva on Céline

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

An Optimist Who Won’t Be Fooled

Gilles Kepel, France’s greatest expert on Islamist politics, sees French scholarly values and savoir-faire as a bulwark against the mediocrity of Judith Butler and the antisemitic replacement theology of the Global South

by Armin Rosen

Gilles Kepel’s distinguished career as France’s leading scholar of Islamism is “quasi-finished,” he warns me, due to the recent success of his academic enemies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, an institution that he warns is in severe decline. Located a half-dozen marble-lined blocks away from the Pantheon’s awesome neoclassical portico, France’s most prestigious grand ecole is built to resemble a medieval cloister. Luminaries from the harder and softer sciences face off across a lush garden courtyard, perched atop the kind of pedestals that the saints had occupied in less enlightened times. Kepel, one of the most controversial of France’s serious public intellectuals, is not beyond imagining himself among them. The Pantheon, the soon-to-be 69-year-old professor quipped, is “where I will be buried—depending on your article in Tablet magazine.”

Kepel has a round face, calm eyes, and stately waves of gray hair. He wore a sharp navy blazer with no tie. Across 50 years of field work in the Middle East, Kepel has met jihadists and presidents, thugs and thwarted dreamers. I imagine he’s faced a half-century of these intense characters in a similar state of dapper tie-lessness as during our meeting, and with the same mood of sly analytic detachment, livened with a characteristically French interplay of absurdity and mortal seriousness. He had of course tangled with potential antagonists far more daunting than myself, and he knew that I have no ability to ensure or deny him an eternity alongside Rousseau and Voltaire. He is also the kind of thinker whose self-aggrandizing yet self-deprecating appeals to eternity glance toward things that lie beyond mere ego.

“If you're a little bit romantic in life, it’s very difficult to hate Gilles,” was the assessment of one Parisian observer. “And he has balls.”

Kepel has no equivalent in the United States. He wrote two agenda-setting books exploring the historic and religious undercurrents of the gradually more violent sense of alienation among French Muslims, Les Banlieues de l’Islam in 1987 and Terror in France in 2017, as well as the 2002 book Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam, which made the counterintuitive argument that the 9/11 attacks were an extreme symptom of the failure of Islamist movements across the Middle East and Europe in the 1990s. He is respected enough as a media commentator, and harsh enough on his opponents, that successive French presidential administrations have found it necessary to develop their own policies toward him, which usually involve keeping Kepel as simultaneously close and as far away as possible. During the 2017 presidential election, political watchers perceived Kepel as being Emmanuel Macron’s top adviser on terrorism, to the point that he became the target of frequent rhetorical attacks from the eventual president’s rivals in Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally. But Kepel did not end up working in government, and he is not a hardcore Macroniste.

The romantic grandeur of Kepel’s feuds, including the darker ones, is also particularly French. When Kepel, lecturing about Islam at a Parisian prison, proved to have better knowledge of classical Arabic than a French Moroccan jihadist in the audience, the humiliated convict used a contraband phone to call an ISIS contact in Raqqa and requested a hit on the professor. ISIS’ French foot soldiers were aware of the caliphate's subsequent death sentence against Kepel. In 2017, the ISIS-inspired Larossi Aballa stabbed a French police officer and his wife to death, then broadcast his final stand against the cops on Facebook Live. In his final moments, the killer took care to mention that Kepel’s name was at the top of his hit list.

“‘Well, my brothers, I'm going to be killed by the police. I'm going to die as a martyr. You have to die as martyrs: Kill all journalists!” Kepel recalled of the terrorist’s last instructions to the world, adding, “I would like to be martyred as an academic, not as a journalist.” That’s fair, I replied. “And then he said, ‘Well first and foremost here’s who has to go: Gilles Kepel.’ So the guy was killed, and then I was under police protection for 17 months.”

Kepel has carried on a long, public, and often bitter debate with Olivier Roy, a prominent scholar and sometimes government adviser who argues that there is no real Islamic content to jihadist radicalism—in contrast to Kepel, a deeper scholar and also, like Roy, a sometime government adviser, who argues that the religious and ideological content of jihadism is in fact vital to understanding the phenomenon. As part of French President Emmanuel Macron’s official delegation to Algeria in 2022, a senior intelligence officer of the National Liberation Front-led regime made the now-familiar accusation that Kepel is a Jew. To which the professor replied: "I'm not going to convert to Judaism to please the Islamists." In reality, Kepel told me, “I'm from more or less a Catholic and communist upbringing—which, I'm neither anymore.”

Kepel’s current situation at the ecole lacks the glamor and excitement of past showdowns with terror groups, rival thinkers, and spies. The ecole, Kepel explained, has a mandatory retirement age that Kepel was either approaching or had already exceeded. Professors who wish to continue teaching usually receive a pro forma institutional waiver. Kepel charged that the philosopher Frederic Worms, director of the ecole, made sure he didn’t get one. Worms co-wrote a book with Judith Butler, “a 90-page pamphlet, which is the apex of his contribution to mankind,” alleged Kepel. “Was it on care or something? The concept of care— about caring for care.” (For the nonspecialist, it is unclear based on the publisher’s blurb, exactly what “The Livable and Unlivable” is actually about). Worms is “the commander in chief of the Butler division here,” Kepel told me, “the Butler ideological army.”

When reached for comment, Worms said Kepel was retiring voluntarily, and sent me a French-language press release from this past April claiming Kepel had already received multiple past retirement waivers and was in general being treated no differently than any other publicly employed French professor. Worms noted that he and Judith Butler are in very different philosophical camps, meaning that he is not the leader of the French Butlerites. He said their shared book is a transcript of a public dialogue in which they largely disagreed on the very nature of reality. "I have a philosophical controversy on life with her," Worms explained. "I’m not a constructivist—I do think that things are vital and not socially constructed."

Whatever the strict truth of Kepel's claims, the Butlerite encroachment into the French intellectual space is a documentable phenomenon that clearly bothers him. A scholar of Kepel's sensibilities is liable to see her rising stature as a potent though unfortunate expression of American culture revenge. The Berkeley obscurantist achieved academic stardom through a feminist-flavored rehash of French critical theory, crammed through the interpretive sieve of American campus liberalism and its decidedly un-French belief in the transcendent sanctity of identity and the moral superiority of the oppressed. Butler, Kepel said, has “penetrated the system” in France, as evidenced through a March 3 lecture in Paris, prelude to a then-scuttled residency at the Pompidou Center, in which she declared that the Oct. 7 attack had not been an antisemitic act of terror but justified “resistance.”

“She speaks in English, of course … she’s incapable of uttering a word in French,” Kepel noted of Butler’s Paris appearance. “Because now, all those movements speak English—I mean, even at Sciences Po,” the Paris institution where Kepel taught until 2010, when he left amid a fractious debate over the future of its Middle East program that closely resembles Kepel's current situation at the ecole. When the anti-Israel tent campers at Sciences Po, sedulously imitating the example of their age cohort across the Atlantic, won a hearing from university administrators, the French media referred to the resulting event as a “Town Hall”—in English, naturally. The Ecole Superiore is lately obsessed with the study of the suds globale, or “global souths,” Kepel claimed, the study of which is yet another concept “imported from America.”

Kepel’s soon-to-be vacated office has a frilly marble fireplace, a map of the Roman Empire that once hung in a French middle school, and a framed front page from La Depeche, a newspaper from the southeast of France, announcing the 1905 passage of the Law on the Separation of Churches and the State. This law is the legal bedrock of laïcité, the French system of official secularism and shared civic identity. The best explanation of laïcité that I’ve ever heard came from a leading Paris Chabad rabbi: As far as local Jewish self-conception goes, “It is not Juif France,” the idea of being Jewish French that prevails, but “L’France Juif,” the sense of belonging to the Jews of France, explained Haim Nissenbaum. France is, in its idealized view of itself, a society of the unhyphenated. Speaking of Chabad, a shelf in Kepel’s office displays a framed dollar given to him by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the final Lubavitcher Rebbe—who, Kepel noted, once lived on the nearby Rue Boulard, and who in “heavily accented shtetl French” proceeded “to bless all your works and your field of expertise” when Kepel met him.

This being Europe, the professor’s emptied-out quarters also have an instant espresso machine. Toward the middle of the interview, Kepel insisted I consume a second cup, given the likely fate of his office and its more ephemeral contents. “Whatever you don’t drink, it will be drunk by a pro-woke,” he said. “Or a deconstructionist.”

***

In the course of inspiring scorn and ambivalence among Islamists, politicians, and his fellow scholars, Kepel has become a microcosm of battles that are much larger than himself.

In the 1980s, Kepel presciently identified the biggest issue France would face in the coming decades—his book Les Banlieues de l’Islam was one of the first ground-level diagnoses of the country’s failures to integrate its Muslim immigrants. He came to believe that laïcité was actually one of the factors that prevented the problem from getting even worse. Without it, he argued, politics would be conducted on a community-by-community basis rather than a national one, extremists would gain an official status and meaningful vectors into the political system, and society would rapidly balkanize. In the early 2000s, Kepel served on the government commission that recommended a ban on religious headwear in French public schools.

France’s leading scholar of Islamism now represents the French awareness, accepted across the political mainstream, that there are serious overlapping threats to the country’s existing republican order that must be fought. He also tends toward the ever-fraying idea that the answer exists within that order itself, and not through leftist, rightist, Islamist, Catholic, multiculturalist, or American-inflected alternatives.

Indeed, the post-Oct. 7 period has offered at least some limited vindication for defenders of the French system. Ever since the Hamas assault, France’s rigid official secularism and state-promoted insistence on a national monoculture has delivered better results than looser, softer, less Bonapartist visions of liberal order. In the post-Oct. 7 period, there have been no riots in France—Islamist and radical leftist groups generally have not shut down college campuses or highways, as they have in the U.S., or led mass protests in support of Hamas, like in the U.K. In May, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin warned that France was in a “race against time” with “Islamist separatism” and the Muslim Brotherhood—a statement that would be unthinkable in America, where invocations of religious authority are common across most of the spectrum of political discourse, and Islamist control over key communal institutions isn’t really discussed, debated, or even widely acknowledged.

In former times, Kepel told me, “whenever I set foot on the other side of the Channel, I was systematically lambasted as the representative of a secularist country which was anathema to both Jews and Muslims, meaning that the country was fiercely antisemitic and passionately Islamophobe.” A recent visit to the U.K. “was the first time in my career when people asked me: What is it about laïcité which makes it that Jews feel much safer in France than they feel in Britain?”

For a casual American Jewish visitor, the differences really are impossible to miss. Paris has a remarkable absence of kaffiyehs and Palestinian flags, statements of social disdain that are far more common in New York and London. This is in part because the jihadist slaughter at the Nova festival on Oct. 7 reminds many French people of the mass murder of concertgoers at the Bataclan in 2015, an association that Americans and Brits wouldn’t necessarily draw.

The absence of reflexive Jew-hatred among French elites and ordinary people alike might also reflect that the same people who want to kill Jews also want to kill them. Last summer France experienced its worst riots in over a decade, with the enraged children of immigrants setting fire to major downtowns and marching on schools, police stations, and other symbols of the French state, in what was putatively a demonstration of their anger at alleged police brutality. A system that treats religious coercion and social separatism as its chief enemies has produced a generation of Muslims who are more religious and more separatist than their parents were—along with leading political parties, like the far left La France Insoumise and the far-right Rassemblement National, whose attachment to mainline republicanism is strained at best. Many believe laïcité is directly responsible for France's problems, and there is at least widespread uncertainty over whether the current order has the vision or the moral authority to confront the country's sources of social discord.

Kepel sees the past few months as decisive to larger battles over France’s future, even as Paris remains calmer than other Western capitals. “What is very worrying for some, including myself, is this sort of clash, the global south versus north clash, which is being imported into the French social fabric,” he said.

***

The connection between Oct. 7 and the ultimate direction of the Western societies is a major theme of Kepel’s new book, Holocausts: Israel, Gaza, and the War Against the West, a short polemic he published in March. Critics have accused Kepel of drawing an equivalency between the jihadist attack and Israel’s military response to the assault, though Kepel insisted to me he has been misinterpreted. Of course, Kepel is likely the type of thinker who craves the controversy that misinterpretation usually produces, along with the accompanying frisson of intellectual difficulty. In actuality, the title refers to the ambition of the “global south” to swap out the Nazi Holocaust for an alleged Israeli-perpetrated holocaust against Palestinians as a basis for the international system.

In Kepel’s view, Oct. 7 was a chance for the emerging forces of revision to press their case against an incumbent order that was already under strain. In Western countries, a fight that appears to be over Israel and Palestine is in fact about matters much closer to home: “Antagonisms are developing between those who aspire to the integration of populations from southern and eastern immigration through adherence to the civic values of the host countries, and those who—in the name of a principle of breaking with the abhorred North—advocate separatism in fact and in forms, and the carving up of territories into enclaves as a prelude to subversive ethnic identification,” Kepel writes, words that seem to specifically refer to France. “This inverted ‘clash of civilizations’ involves the substitution of ideology for knowledge.”

As Kepel told me in Paris, Oct. 7 and its aftermath “was a means to replace the moral foundations of the world order of 1945, which were based on the ‘never again’ of the Shoah, and which were sanctioned by both the Soviets and the American. ... Today, when South Africa goes to the International Court of Justice, they say, ‘Hey, this is old hat. It took place, what, a hundred years ago? Last century? It's something between whites and Europeans, which are a tiny, shrinking part of the world now. What is the real evil in the modern history of mankind? It's not this thing. It is the slave trade. It is colonialism. And in order to make colonial crime the supreme crime, you have to push aside the Shoah, and have a new Holocaust over the old Holocaust.”

Oct. 7 is therefore more significant than 9/11, “because 9/11 did not fracture the West,” Kepel said, whereas the Hamas atrocities have “introduced a sort of a wedge inside Western societies, pitching one against the other, the exponents of the global south against the people who pay attention to the suffering of the Jews on Oct. 7th.”

For Kepel, the post-Oct. 7 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in France is a proxy for the battle between proponents of sectarian politics and believers in the survival of the republican system. Kepel does not think this clash is likely to have a happy outcome, even if the forces of revision eventually lose. Oct. 7 will lead to a more polarized continent and a more divided world, he predicts: “We might end with a European Union which is far more to the right and which feels far more entrenched in the battle against the so-called global south.”

***

Like seemingly everyone else in France who has a living memory of the ’60s and ’70s, Kepel was a communist at some now-distant-seeming point in life, in an era when this was the hip, romantic thing to be. In 1974, after failing the admissions exam for the Ecole Superiore, Kepel and a friend “boarded a Soviet cruise ship that was bringing French and Italian communists to Crimea,” beginning the cross-Mediterranean adventure that convinced him to become a scholar of the Middle East. During the voyage Kepel ate at the table of the Soviet consul general in Milan, “who came to dinner wearing a cowboy suit.”

The left in France, and the rest of the world, is a much different beast these days, with none of the prior hopefulness or fashion sense. Today, La France Insoumise, France’s party of the left, led by Jean-Luc Melanchon, is broadly viewed as an identitarian entity rather than a strictly republican one. Melanchon, Kepel noted, “belonged to a different Trotskyite sect to the one I belonged to when I was a teenager, which hated the other. Had one of the sects won, they would have hanged all the others the very night of the revolution before we could make a deal with the bourgeoisie.”

In the mid-2010s, jihadists who were born and educated in France pulled off a series of spectacular attacks, including the coordinated assault on the Batalcan rock venue, cafes in central Paris, and the Stade de France in November of 2015. Many of the participants in the mid–2010s French jihad were young men who were “helped by the stupid Francois Hollande,” Kepel alleged, who believed France could solve two problems at once by encouraging its own extremists to fight the Assad regime in Syria. If al-Qaida led a Leninist jihad, a hierarchical network that could be activated on command, ISIS, Kepel said, waged a “Deleuzian revolution,” a decentralized revolt from below among jihadists who had received guidance and training in the Middle East but who could activate themselves back in Europe. In fact, Kepel added, “one of the ideologues for ISIS was a Francophone Syrian called Abu Musab al-Suri, who studied in Paris at one of the leftist universities, Jussieu, at the time when Gilles Deleuze was its star professor, in the late 1980s.”

After enduring the Leninist and Deleuzian jihads, France now is experiencing “the negation of the negation”—what Kepel has termed jihad d’atmosphere, in which individual extremists, like the Chechen refugee who beheaded the school teacher Samuel Paty in 2021, pull off consequential acts of telegenic violence with no connection to any terrorist network whatsoever.

French society, politics, foreign policy, and intellectual life have created the conditions for a slow-rolling decadeslong native religious war, punctuated with the occasional large riot. But the next riot hasn’t happened yet, and there is at least still a place for figures like Kepel, public voices who take meaningful risks and work through the occasional death threat. Kepel can also make the French model seem fragile: ISIS may have failed to kill him, but in his own telling, the alleged Butlerites have now gained the temporary upper hand, careerwise.

Kepel has a post-ecole plan. He explained that the original Gilles was a saint who came to Marseille from Greece in the seventh century. Saint Gilles was canonized after the reconquista—Muslim Spain actually extended into modern-day France, ending in the Rhone Valley near Nimes. Kepel plans to walk a pilgrimage trail from Compostela in Spain to Saint-Gilles in France, along the medieval border of Christendom and Islam, to better understand his namesake, his country, and the nearly millennium-old French relationship with the Muslim world. The resulting book should be finished in two years, Kepel said. It could appear in a France whose post-Oct. 7 calm looks like either a history-shifting accomplishment, or else a brief prelude to greater chaos.

When I asked Kepel if he remained optimistic about the future of France, he replied: “Always—but I'm an optimist who won't be fooled.”