Sylvain Cypel

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Sylvain Cypel (born 1948)[1] is a French journalist and pro-Palestinian activist.

Life and career

Cypel was raised in

Palestinian people, Israel would find itself in a colonial occupation that would prove fatal to Zionism.[8]

From an early age, Cypel was a member of a French Labour Zionist youth group and, after graduating from high school, left France for Israel in 1969.[7] He became a paratrooper in the IDF,[7] joined the Trotskyite-oriented Workers Alliance – Avantgarde[citation needed] and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He was particularly struck by similarities he observed between Israeli Jewish attitudes to

Arabs.[1] Overall, he spent 12 years in Israel, an experience which turned him into an Anti-Zionist.[a] He dates his own sense that Zionism had betrayed itself with apartheid to an interview he held with the Israeli Attorney-General Michael Ben-Yair in the early 2000s.[9]

Both he and his wife were ostracized and lost jobs as a result of their views.[1] In 1998 he left the Courrier International magazine where he had worked for five years as editor-in-chief, and joined Le Monde as deputy head of the international section. He was then Le Monde's New York correspondent until 2013.[10][11] He is also a corresponding member of Alain Gresh's online magazine Orient XXI.

Views

Cypel has published two books on the question of the

ideological influence Israel has managed to exercise over world opinion.[12] In the book he argues that Israel practices apartheid, and is highly critical of the silence that he claims has fallen over the question of Palestinian human rights, namely Israel's "ability to deny basic rights to an entire people."[1]
While he allows that many other countries have resorted to similar practices, he finds Zionism's version distinctive for three reasons:

It's true that the occupation has never reached the levels of terror inflicted upon

Yemen, but three factors make it particularly oppressive: its initial basis (expelling people from their land by force); its long duration (seventy-plus years since that expulsion, fifty years of military occupation over most of those people); and finally, its modalities (the slow, but steady confiscation of land, the seizure of resources, the occupying authorities' deliberate policy of making Palestinians daily lives unbearable in hopes of making them eventually leave).[4]

He attributes the silence to the ideological success with which Israel has, by "blindfolding" Western support for what Cypel considers to be an

anti-Semitism
.

Never has Israel's ideological influence appeared so evident: from its impact on the "war on terrorism", which is of paramount importance and which

new definition of anti-Semitism, in which criticism of Zionism and Israel are included.[b]

Cypel speaks of the growing disenchantment of American Jews with developments in Israel,[13] instancing as an example the Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin's remark in 2006, once thought to border on blasphemy:

Most piercing to me is the pain of watching a tradition, my Judaism, to which I have dedicated my life, disintegrating before my eyes. It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz,

Sobibor. I fear-God forbid – that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Dheisheh, Betein' or Khalil.[10]

Notes

  1. ^ "I had always thought that when Israel was founded as a refuge for the persecuted Jews of the world, justice had been on the Israeli side…. But I was gradually discovering that the expulsion of the Palestinians and the seizing of their land had been deliberately brutal." (Shulman 2022)
  2. ^ "Jamais l'influence idéologique d'Israël n'est apparue aussie manifeste: de son impact sur la <<guerre au terrorisme>>, d'une importance primordiale et que Jean-Pierre Filiu a fort bien éclairé dans un récent ouvrage, jusqu'à cette capacité à faire taire toute critique par la menace de se voir aussitôt taxé d'antisémite, cette influence diplomatique se manifeste symboliquement par la capacité israélienne à fair adopter dans d'importants cénacles internationaux une nouvelle définition de l'antisémitisme qui y inclut la critique du sionisme et d'Israël." (Cypel 2020)

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d e f Herbst 2022.
  2. ^ Cypel 2020, p. 9.
  3. ^ Cypel 2020.
  4. ^ a b Gold 2022.
  5. ^ Cypel 2020, p. 10.
  6. ^ Cypel 2020, p. 11,n.1.
  7. ^ a b c Shulman 2022.
  8. ^ Cypel 2020, p. 11.
  9. ^ Kaiser 2021.
  10. ^ a b Cypel 2021.
  11. ^ Cypel Le Monde n.d.
  12. ^ Cypel 2020, pp. 12–15.
  13. ^ a b Weiss 2022.

Sources

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