In Defense of Israel’s Legitimacy

On many subjects, Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre Manent do not think alike. The first is a Jewish atheist who supports the recognition of Palestine; the second is a believing Christian who has lost faith in a two-state solution. This does not prevent Manent from expressing his admiration for the non-conformist member of the Académie Française. 

Finkielkraut and Manent share a deep and abiding hostility to totalitarianism and the politically correct subversion of political liberty and the life of the mind. Both engage the “theological-political problem” with rare intelligence and seriousness; both defend the Jewish state and the solidarity between Christians and Jews against those who aim to make Israel an outcast among the nations of the world. Manent is also a regular guest on Finkielkraut’s indispensable weekly radio program on France Culture (“Répliques”), a forum where ideas and books are discussed with rare penetration and insight. Despite his centrality to contemporary French intellectual life, very few of Finkielkraut’s recent books have been translated into English, no doubt because his ideas challenge politically correct platitudes and cannot be readily reduced to existing ideological categories. Manent’s reflection on Alain Finkielkraut’s luminosity of soul and his admirable contribution to contemporary intellectual life appeared in the February 2026 issue of the French conservative-liberal monthly Causeur. It is published in translation with that journal’s permission.  

Alain Finkielkraut is, without a doubt, one of our most important intellectual figures. His name evokes feelings and judgments that are often very strong, whether favorable or unfavorable. A few years ago, on the occasion of the publication of his À la première Personne (In the First Person), I observed that it was a sinister indication of public opinion in our country that he had become a preferred object of hatred. I would hesitate today to use the same expression, not because of a correction in public opinion, but simply because bad people also get tired. In any case, Alain Finkielkraut has made it through his years of trial without giving in or folding under the pressure. Despite his title – With A Heavy Heart – the conversation with Vincent Trémolet de Villers that he has just published exhibits the same intellectual excitement and joy in grappling with the world that make up the charm and value of his writings and his spoken words.  

If I had to sum up in a word the shape of Alain Finkielkraut’s mind and soul, I might say: here we have a man who is not afraid to go out on a limb. It is not that he exhibits himself or shows off, but that he allows us to see the “bites of the present” of which Charles Péguy spoke, without which we have no contact with reality, since this reality does not really affect us. Everything moves him, everything shakes him; in no way does he seek to hide or to be reassured. He is never defensive. Such is his courage, a courage not only rare but unique.  

We see this frankness in Finkielkraut’s consideration of the subject of today’s most heated conflict, one on which he has always expressed himself with clarity and precision, but also with a heart fully engaged. We know that, along with France, Israel is the name of his torment, not only the state of Israel but the Jewish people as history and as memory, as a bond and a heritage. Today, however, it is first of all the state of Israel that is at stake and on trial. An opinion suddenly spread or was exacerbated, and a passion caught fire in places such as universities that one would have thought to be especially resistant to it, as if it were the most meaningful truth of the present world. Its thesis was: the state of Israel is essentially illegitimate because it is “colonial” and “the Jews” represent the last or the main obstacle to the blessed unification of humanity, which the spontaneous movement of the peoples of the world is otherwise bringing about. How can we stand up to this wave of untruths driven by a murderous passion?  

While he is rightly repulsed by the violence of colonists in the West Bank and by the odious encouragement that they receive from certain ministers of the coalition in power, Alain Finkielkraut is careful to remind us why the characterization of Israel as “colonial” is as false as it is unjust. Israel is a new country, but was not born from an act of arbitrary power coming from some distant part of the world; it is the country of return for Jews who have been dispersed, humiliated and oppressed, in Christian as well as Muslim countries, the country that has long been the object of their hopes and prayers, until at last the time came, after the destruction of the Jews of Europe, when the United Nations decided its creation. The Promised Land was never, for that matter, « without Jews,” although those who had never left it survived only with the help of Jews of the diaspora, who themselves most often lived under precarious conditions. The history of the Jews is unlike that of any other people, and Israel is a state unlike any other state. This does not excuse it from the obligations of justice that weigh on all states, but the “universal” notions we resort to and brandish are hardly fair to it.” 

This is why, moreover, if I may say in passing, I am surprised that Alain Finkielkraut approves so resolutely of Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize the state of Palestine. “On this point,” he writes, “I agree with him.”  This decision, as the President knew, could not have any effect. Or if by an extraordinary turn of fortune it did have an effect, then the new state would be governed by Hamas or by the Palestinian authority. No other option today is available to give political substance to this state; no other possibility is emerging or seems to be under serious consideration.  The French President’s decision has had no other effect than to contribute to the delegitimizing of Israel. France in its impotence can still do that much 

No one knows how to solve the Israel-Palestine problem. It is easy to say: we need a two-state solution! I say the same thing, but with this qualification: if that is possible. Is it possible? The Middle East is not an area favorable to nation-states. For millennia, it has been the object of rivalry among empires. The cohesive nations found there are the remains, to be sure impressive, of ancient empires: Turkey, Iran, Egypt. These are Muslim empires, that is, empires nurtured by a religion of imperial form, one that expanded by means of imperial conquests. Of course, I could also mention the role of the mandate of the British empire. The state of Israel was founded in this disputed zone by a decision of the United Nations, and it established itself by force against the attacks of its neighbors. In the most recent period, encircled and attacked by the allies or auxiliaries of Iran, it has been involved in a war on all fronts; this war has been largely victorious, but as a result, Israel has also taken on the habits of an empire. Where might we place the Palestinian state amid this chaos, in which it has never been possible for peaceful habits to take hold?  If the state of Palestine had existed, the state of Israel could never have been founded. Now that Israel has been founded and has developed in the way we know that it has, how might we find a place for a Palestinian state, apart from subjecting the two states to unbearable constraints and forcing them to take unacceptable risks? How then can we redress as much as possible the injustice that the Palestinian population is enduring? Or how can we at least put an end to the constant monitoring, humiliating for both protagonists, that Israel exercises over the Palestinians?  

Alain Finkielkraut’s way of gathering, commenting, and evaluating events in the Middle East demonstrates a constant concern for humanity and justice. But I fear that he extends excessively the domain of the possible. In any case, the solution embraced by “all reasonable people” seems to me entirely beyond our reach today and for the foreseeable future. Perhaps only the fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran, followed by the establishment of a free government that had abandoned the aim of the destruction of Israel, would change the situation in the region sufficiently that Israel could begin to consider taking the risks that it cannot take today. In the meantime, what shall we do? I have no answer to this question. In any case, what must be avoided by Jews and Christians, and by all those who grasp the extent and the virulence of the hatred of Jews in all parts of the world today, is any action or word that in the least damages the legitimacy of the state of Israel, upon whose existence and strength depend the security and thus the very life of the Jewish people.  

I have referred to Jews and Christians. Much is at stake in this “and.”  I have long been struck and touched by the friendship that informs the way Alain Finkielkraut speaks of Christianity. As we know, God does not enter into his equation: “The non-existence of God appears to me as a given.”  This is how he summarizes his “genealogical” Judaism: “One honors not only his father and his mother, but his ancestors, and through them the people into which one is born.” As for Christianity, it is what is specific to this religion, that is, the incarnation, that, far from provoking his scandalized rejection, elicits his emotion and his reflection. Alain Finkielkraut is not a prisoner of the 2000-year contention between these two religions.  

Two religions? This is a convenient but inaccurate and indeed harmful way of speaking. The spiritual bond between Jews and Christians is so tight that Pascal was able to write that “true Jews and true Christians are of the same religion.” The basis of Christian prayer can be found in the Jewish prayer of the Psalms, which is the prayer of Jesus Christ, sent into the world “for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As Alain Finkielkraut reminds us, it was the excommunicated heretic, Marcion, who claimed to radically separate the two testaments. As he also mentions, this Marcionite temptation has been present and active throughout the history of the Church. Still not long ago, it was in the name of a “theology of substitution” according to which the Church, after Israel’s refusal to recognize the divinity of Jesus, was supposed to have become the true Israel, the exclusive mediator of the alliance between God and human beings. Today the Church recognizes that the Jewish people continues to play an active and positive role in God’s plan for humanity.  

Judaism and Christianity are two expressions, successive and mysteriously contemporaneous, of God’s Covenant with human beings. It is wrong to oppose Jewish “particularism” to Christian “universalism.” The “election” of the Jewish people has nothing to do with the “national egoism” denounced by Simone Weil. God binds himself by his law to his people, whom he destines “to be the light of the nations, so that [his] salvation might reach the ends of the earth.” Symmetrically, Christian revelation is not addressed to the human being in general. When Jesus commands his disciples to teach the nations, he commands them to baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit in order to make them also his disciples. The Christian God also binds himself to humanity through a particular people that is called the Church. Today, the religion of humanity in general, that is of humanity with neither form nor vocation, is the universal heresy that subverts everything, but that especially takes aim at Israel and the Church. When we say, “Jews and Christians,” we touch on a mystery, and we form an intention, perhaps a prayer. Alain Finkielkraut will not hold it against me that these are the thoughts that occupied me as I turned the last page of his book.  

Alain Finkielkraut, Le Cœur lourd, Conversation avec Vincent Trémolet de Villers, Gallimard 2026. 

Translated by Ralph C. Hancock (with Daniel J. Mahoney) 

Pierre Manent is a French political scientist, professor, and founder of the journal 'Commentaire'.