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0:01:43 A few months ago, I received a long, handwritten letter from a very thoughtful listener.
0:01:52 His name was Eric.
0:01:54 Near the end of it, he asked me why I haven’t dealt with the war in Gaza on the show.
0:02:00 It wasn’t really a criticism, but there was a hint of disappointment in the question.
0:02:09 He knew that I’m not a foreign policy expert, but he wondered why a show that’s so steeped
0:02:15 in philosophy and history and ethics didn’t have something to say about the situation.
0:02:24 To be honest with you, I read Eric’s letter, I responded to it, and then I moved on.
0:02:33 But it stuck with me, and it’s been hovering in the back of my mind ever since.
0:02:41 The main reason I didn’t engage with this topic on the show is that the discourse is
0:02:45 so toxic and there’s so much bad faith that I just couldn’t see any possible value in
0:02:51 lunging into this conversation without a clear contribution to make.
0:02:57 But despite all of that, the truth is that I haven’t felt totally at peace with my silence.
0:03:04 What I do feel is what I suspect a lot of you feel, which is a combination of anger
0:03:09 and sadness and a desperate desire to understand, or at least to process.
0:03:16 So what should a show like this offer in a time like this?
0:03:22 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:37 Today’s guest is Robert Zarecki.
0:03:39 He’s a philosopher and historian at the University of Houston.
0:03:44 You might recognize Robert as a previous guest on this show.
0:03:47 It was an episode called Resisting Despair, back in March of 2022, about the writer Albert
0:03:53 Camus.
0:03:58 Camus was raised as a French citizen in Algeria, which means he lived in a colonized state,
0:04:03 and that experience shaped his philosophy and politics.
0:04:08 He was attached to his French identity, but he also revolted against the treatment of
0:04:13 the native Arabs and Berbers who had lived in Algeria for centuries before the French
0:04:17 arrived.
0:04:20 The push for Algerian independence began in the early 20th century, but when it became
0:04:25 clear that France wasn’t going to cede power, the National Liberation Front, known as the
0:04:31 FLN, launched a guerrilla war against France, and part of that campaign included brutal
0:04:37 attacks on civilian targets.
0:04:39 France throws the bulk of its military manpower into the Algerian rebellion, which daily
0:04:44 assumes the proportions of total war.
0:04:47 Flying columns fan out through the country, which on all sides has become a target for
0:04:51 hidden run attacks by native guerrillas.
0:04:57 Camus was criticized for his insistence that neither side had a monopoly on truth and justice.
0:05:04 He was called a “fence-sitter” and a “moralist” who didn’t understand the realities
0:05:08 on the ground.
0:05:11 But ultimately, I think Camus did understand the situation.
0:05:15 He wasn’t naive or blind.
0:05:18 He simply believed that there were moral lines that couldn’t be crossed.
0:05:23 That killing innocent people as a means to some greater end wasn’t justifiable.
0:05:38 Algeria in the 1950s is not exactly like Palestine today, but there are parallels.
0:05:45 So I invited Robert back on the show to talk about how Camus wrestled with the morality
0:05:49 of the French-Algerian conflict, and what he might have to teach us as we wrestle with
0:05:55 some of the difficult moral challenges in this moment.
0:06:06 Robert Zuretsky, welcome to the show.
0:06:09 Thanks, Sean.
0:06:10 It’s good to be back.
0:06:11 You know, I don’t really have a conventional opening question here.
0:06:16 I think I’m just going to start by asking you how you’re processing this ongoing war
0:06:23 and Gaza and why you wanted to talk about it.
0:06:39 I suspect that I’m not unlike many other people that when I confront a crisis, I turn to writers
0:06:52 that have confronted crises in their lives.
0:06:59 And for many years, the person that I’ve turned to at moments like these is Albert Camus,
0:07:08 and following the massacre of October 7th, and then the response of the Israeli government
0:07:16 in military, and that the horror of that massacre, the unspeakable horror of that massacre was,
0:07:26 to my mind, compounded by the unspeakable horror of what was happening to Palestinian
0:07:35 men, women, and children, civilians in Gaza.
0:07:40 I couldn’t help but think of what Camus towards the end of his life was facing in his native
0:07:48 French Algeria.
0:07:49 Well, I tell you what, let me stop you there because I’m going to ask you almost that very
0:07:56 question in just a bit.
0:07:58 Okay.
0:07:59 I’m sorry, I was rambling a bit.
0:08:01 No, no, no, no, don’t you ever apologize for that, I love it.
0:08:08 What I would like to do first is, I think it’s important, Camus, as you know, is someone
0:08:15 I’ve studied a lot.
0:08:17 He’s not a systematic thinker.
0:08:19 He’s not a political scientist.
0:08:23 He was a philosopher artist, really.
0:08:26 But he was someone who witnessed the worst horrors of the 20th century, and he thought
0:08:32 very hard about why they happened and what it would take to prevent them in the future.
0:08:39 And that’s why he’ll always matter, especially in moments like this one.
0:08:44 But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit here.
0:08:48 Before we go any further into Camus and his ideas, maybe you can say a bit more about who
0:08:55 Camus was and what he was about.
0:08:58 Yes, of course.
0:08:59 Albert Camus was a remarkable individual.
0:09:04 He was born in 1913 in a rural village in French Algeria.
0:09:12 The following year, his father, who had been drafted into the army, died at the Battle
0:09:16 of the Marne, and his mother took both Camus and his brother to Algiers, where they moved
0:09:23 in with Camus’ grandmother.
0:09:27 And he was raised in a household where the grandmother and the mother were both illiterate,
0:09:35 and where the mother was not just illiterate, but she was also death and largely mute.
0:09:42 This is the context, the atmosphere in which the young Camus grew up, gets a job, where
0:09:49 he becomes an investigative journalist.
0:09:52 He spent those years uncovering a series of awful acts being committed by the French
0:10:02 authorities in respect to the native population of Arabs and Berbers.
0:10:11 His reporting was so explosive that the French government shut the newspaper down.
0:10:18 He was very much on the left after a brief flirtation with the Algerian Communist Party
0:10:24 in the mid-1930s.
0:10:26 He was kicked out because he refused to tow the line of the party.
0:10:31 From that point on, he became one of the harshest critics on the left in France of communism.
0:10:38 Camus from the very get-go was acutely aware of the miserable situation that was imposed
0:10:49 on Algeria’s indigenous population.
0:10:53 French Algeria was not a colony of France.
0:10:58 It was invaded in 1830, and by the mid-19th century was incorporated into metropolitan
0:11:07 France, unlike France’s colonies that were acquired later in the 19th century.
0:11:16 Algeria was part and parcel of France itself.
0:11:21 Now the problem with this is that, while the Pied noir, the name given to those French
0:11:30 colonists who arrived mostly in the second half of the 19th century to settle large swathes
0:11:40 of the land, the Pied noir population by Camus’ time was about a million, but the indigenous
0:11:48 population of Arabs and Berbers was about seven million, whereas the Pied noir, the colonists
0:11:57 enjoyed full civic and political rights.
0:12:01 They were French.
0:12:03 The Arabs and Berbers enjoyed neither one nor the other.
0:12:08 And so it was, though not in name, in practice, it was a French colony.
0:12:16 The parallels here are interesting and revealing.
0:12:19 Camus is a mutual hero of both of ours, and the politics of that situation and the politics
0:12:25 of the situation today, for me, feels pretty hopeless.
0:12:31 And I think over the years, my view of the political world, and this is, I think, in
0:12:36 part because of Camus’ influence on me, has become increasingly tragic.
0:12:44 That’s a strange word, but what I mean by that is that I think the political world is
0:12:50 not only not perfectable, I think it often presents impossible choices and irresolvable
0:12:59 moral dilemmas.
0:13:01 And while I can imagine lots of ways this conflict today could have ended before we
0:13:09 reached this moment, now that we’re here, now that there are so many victims and victimizers
0:13:16 on both sides, it is very hard to see an end in sight.
0:13:24 And I could be wrong about that, I’m just being honest about my own despair here.
0:13:28 Now, Camus, as you’re saying, was deeply engaged with Algeria’s fight for independence from
0:13:34 France.
0:13:35 That’s a conflict for people that don’t know, that stretched from 1954 until 1962, when
0:13:42 Algeria finally gained independence, and Camus, as you were saying, was a French citizen
0:13:47 who grew up in Algeria and felt pretty connected to the land and the culture.
0:13:51 How would you sum up his position on that conflict, and does it feel like a useful historical
0:13:59 analog to what’s happening today in Palestine?
0:14:03 As far as serving as an analog to what’s taking place in Israel and Palestine, there
0:14:11 are striking similarities.
0:14:13 But there are also striking dissimilarities.
0:14:16 The similarities are that we have a situation which in many respects resembles that of apartheid
0:14:27 South Africa, where the lives of those who had lived on the land for centuries is now
0:14:36 dictated often in unforgivable ways by another people who have succeeded in creating a state
0:14:47 on that same territory and have a monopoly on the tools of violence.
0:14:54 And so there are similarities, there are parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel,
0:15:02 the ways in which Palestinians, both inside the borders of Israel as well as in the Gaza
0:15:09 Strip and the West Banks, are both legally and extralegally treated by the Israeli state.
0:15:21 I know that the term apartheid raises the hackles of many Israeli Jews as well as Jews
0:15:28 of the diaspora, but I think the label sticks.
0:15:35 There are important differences though, whereas the French Piednois, the colonists in Algeria
0:15:44 can trace their presence in Algeria no further back than the early 19th century, Jews can
0:15:55 trace their presence in Palestine back several millennia, an unbroken presence.
0:16:03 Another difference is that whereas the legitimacy of a French Algeria in the eyes of the world
0:16:15 had never been, in a way, validated by that same world.
0:16:21 This wasn’t the case with Israel.
0:16:23 I mean, Israel was created under the auspices of the United Nations.
0:16:31 On that creation, it was immediately contested by several Arab states and that was the first
0:16:41 of too many wars over the course of the last three quarters of a century that have occurred
0:16:50 in Israel and in Palestine, whereas the Piednois did have a place to go in 1962, though the
0:17:00 manner in which they went was extraordinarily cruel and that place was France.
0:17:08 Israeli Jews don’t have anywhere else to go.
0:17:14 There are so many reasons why Camus resonates with me.
0:17:20 He’s a beautiful writer, obviously, but I think what I admire most about him is his
0:17:30 absolute refusal to hide behind dogmas and abstractions.
0:17:36 And the result of this, however, was that Camus would often appear to stand in the middle,
0:17:45 denouncing the excesses on both sides.
0:17:49 And for this, he was dismissed and mocked by many of his contemporaries as a kind of
0:17:56 feckless moderate.
0:17:58 Do you think that was a fair criticism of Camus?
0:18:01 No, of course I don’t think it was a fair criticism.
0:18:06 It’s telling, to my mind, to compare Camus’ response to the spiral of violence in French
0:18:15 Algeria in the 1950s to say the response of Jean-Paul Sartre and to so much of the French
0:18:23 left, that while Sartre was applauding the violence exercised by the principal independence
0:18:39 and nationalist movement in Algeria, the FLN, the National Liberation Front, and he gives
0:18:48 his voice, his excitement, his approval of what they are doing in his, to my mind, infamous
0:18:56 preface to François Nones, The Wretched of the Earth, where he celebrates the fact that
0:19:05 it’s by taking the life of a colonist that the colonized fully comes into a sense of
0:19:12 self.
0:19:13 Camus, on the other hand, had, you can call it, skin in the game, but actually he had
0:19:20 lives in the game.
0:19:22 There’s one famous exchange that took place in 1957 after he had become silent on the
0:19:30 subject of the bloodbath in his native French Algeria.
0:19:35 He had gone to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he met with a group
0:19:43 of students, where one of the students who was Algerian confronted him.
0:19:51 Why is he not speaking on the horrors that were taking place in Algeria?
0:19:59 Can he not see the justice in what it is that the Algerian nationalists are fighting for?
0:20:07 Camus’ answer was that, at this very moment, terrorists are placing bombs on tramways in
0:20:20 Algeria.
0:20:21 My mother might be on one of those trams.
0:20:27 If that is what justice is, I prefer my mother.
0:20:33 What’s fascinating about this exchange, at least in part, is that the next day it was
0:20:39 reported by Francis Flagship newspaper on the left, Le Monde, that what he said was,
0:20:48 in fact, I prefer my mother to justice.
0:20:55 There is a world of difference between what he told that student, the Algerian student,
0:21:01 and what was reported the next day in Le Monde, namely that he’s making, as you noted, he
0:21:08 abhorred abstraction, and he’s trying to explain what is truly existentially at stake, lives,
0:21:19 the lives of individuals in Algeria, and that when we lose sight of those individual lives
0:21:31 because of abstractions like justice, we’ve lost sight of what it is that makes us fully
0:21:41 human.
0:21:43 And in the retelling of his response in Le Monde, it becomes sloppy sentimentalism, something
0:21:52 that the left, like Sartre, had always mocked him for.
0:21:56 This is why I don’t think he was feckless or weak or wanted to keep his hands pure,
0:22:04 all of which were accusations leveled at him by the French left.
0:22:08 Instead, I think that the sort of moderation that Camus embodied, that he practiced, was
0:22:18 truly heroic.
0:22:20 So, he supported the Arab struggle for political rights.
0:22:26 He did.
0:22:27 He also never quite fully embraced the idea of an independent Algeria.
0:22:31 Is this just a contradiction that he just never quite squared?
0:22:35 Yeah.
0:22:36 Absolutely.
0:22:37 Camus was an extremely harsh critic of French policies in Algeria, what we can call its
0:22:44 colonial policies in Algeria.
0:22:47 The basis for that criticism was that France wasn’t living up to its own republican values
0:22:52 in the way that it was treating the indigenous peoples of Algeria.
0:22:57 From the 1950s, he was horrified and he wrote about his horror in the treatment of both
0:23:08 suspected Algerian terrorists, as well as Algerian citizens at the hands of the French
0:23:15 military.
0:23:17 But he never embraced the idea of an independent Algeria.
0:23:25 The furthest he went was to propose a federal model in which Arabs, Jews, because there
0:23:35 was an important Jewish population in Algeria, an indigenous population that was granted
0:23:43 citizenship, French citizenship, by the French government, unlike their Muslim neighbors.
0:23:53 So he foresaw a federal framework in which the various ethnic and religious communities
0:24:00 could coexist peacefully.
0:24:03 That might have worked in the 1930s, but by the 1950s, it was far too little and was far
0:24:10 too late.
0:24:11 And when, after his failed effort to introduce the idea of a civilian truce, an effort in
0:24:21 which he risked his life, he flew to Algiers from Paris and he gave a speech in which he
0:24:29 made the case for a civilian truce.
0:24:33 He never came to terms with an independent Algeria.
0:24:40 That’s true.
0:24:41 But what’s fascinating is that after his return to France and his silence over Algeria, this
0:24:51 is when he begins his last novel, Sean, the first man, one that was fated to remain unfinished.
0:24:59 Now along with the text itself, there’s a collection of notes at the end, and in one
0:25:08 of the notes, he writes, and I can’t quote it verbatim, I don’t have the book in front
0:25:14 of me, give the land back, give all of it back to the poor, mostly Arab and a few French.
0:25:28 And so it seems that he has taken the measure of the tragedy.
0:25:43 When we get back from the break, we talk about Camus’ complicated relationship with pacifism.
0:25:49 Stay with us.
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0:30:00 The other part of this, and this is something critics like Sartre were quick to point out,
0:30:07 and I think this challenge applies to the present as much as it did to this historical
0:30:14 moment, is that extremism is often what happens when moderation fails.
0:30:24 And in the real world, when you’re dealing with vast asymmetries in force and power,
0:30:34 it’s hard to hold both sides to the same standards, because that leaves the powerless perpetually
0:30:41 at the mercy of the powerful, and maybe that’s just attention we have to live with.
0:30:49 But at the same time, I think Camus was right that the ends justifies the means logic.
0:30:59 If followed long enough, ends in terror and mass death, and there are certain crimes like
0:31:07 bombing thousands of civilians in their homes, or slaughtering innocent men, women, and children,
0:31:15 that simply cannot be justified under any circumstances.
0:31:19 I don’t care who does it, but, and I think you’d agree with this, that principle has
0:31:25 to coexist with the reality that violence is sometimes necessary, and once conversation
0:31:31 gives way to violence, you can’t really control it.
0:31:37 I think Camus would agree with that.
0:31:39 In fact, I know he agrees with that, because in a famous exchange with another former member
0:31:46 of the resistance who criticized him for this effort to straddle both these worlds, Camus
0:31:57 replied that violence is simultaneously unavoidable and unjustifiable.
0:32:07 That’s right.
0:32:08 I think that it’s applicable in the situation of Algeria.
0:32:13 This was the argument of the leaders of the FLN, that it was profoundly asymmetrical,
0:32:23 and they had no recourse but to use the weapons of the weak.
0:32:30 But Camus would take issue with that.
0:32:34 He tried to resolve it, for example, in his play The Just Assassins, based on an actual
0:32:40 event in 1905 when a group of young Russian revolutionaries, in taking the life of one
0:32:49 of the members of the Romanov family, they justified the taking of a life by offering
0:32:56 their life in return, in other words, that they allow themselves to be arrested and hanged
0:33:03 up following the commission of this crime, this assassination.
0:33:08 But it becomes much muddier when you think about suicide bombings in our own age.
0:33:13 It’s no longer so surgical or so limited.
0:33:18 But for Camus, at the end of the day, it’s not so much that the end justifies the means,
0:33:27 but instead that the means can only justify the end, recalling what happens when you lose
0:33:37 sight of the humanity of those who are, in fact, either directly or indirectly oppressing
0:33:48 you.
0:33:50 And when he came to New York in 1946, he had already completed the manuscript to his second
0:33:56 novel, The Plague, which is precisely about the nature of resistance or revolt.
0:34:06 Now in the rebellion, and then a few years later in the philosophical essay called The
0:34:11 Rebel, he makes this terribly important distinction between what we can call the ethics of conviction
0:34:21 and the ethics of responsibility, and by these two contrasting ethics, Camus attempted to
0:34:30 explain what was taking place in France during the occupation, namely that there were those
0:34:38 driven by conviction by an idea, and that idea was the end that justified all means available.
0:34:51 And so those driven by the ethic of conviction were not only willing to sacrifice their own
0:34:58 lives, but all too willing to sacrifice the lives of countless others in achieving that
0:35:03 ideal.
0:35:04 Right, and the problem with that is that ultimately it undermines the conditions that make life
0:35:09 possible in the first place.
0:35:10 Exactly.
0:35:11 To stick with that moment.
0:35:12 Do I think the Nazis had to be defeated?
0:35:14 Yeah, of course.
0:35:16 Do I think that was possible without killing a tremendous number of innocent civilians?
0:35:21 Probably not.
0:35:22 How do I square that moral logic?
0:35:24 I don’t know.
0:35:26 Maybe it’s not really squareable, and I appreciate that Camus wasn’t a pacifist.
0:35:30 He actually was a pacifist, Sean.
0:35:32 Really?
0:35:33 During the 1930s, he was a pacifist.
0:35:37 He was an outspoken pacifist on the left in Algeria.
0:35:42 He only put aside his pacifism come the invasion in 1940.
0:35:50 But you mentioned earlier that how do we square the death of innocents in times of war?
0:35:58 Well, one of the ways in which we do try to square it is through rules of law.
0:36:05 And this is being addressed right now in the case of both Hamas and the current government
0:36:11 in Israel.
0:36:13 There are unavoidably civilian deaths at such times.
0:36:19 We saw it on World War II.
0:36:20 We saw it with the carpet bombing of Dresden, for example, which had no military usefulness
0:36:30 at all.
0:36:31 We saw it with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
0:36:38 An act that Camus wrote about and said that in some ways this signals the beginning of
0:36:46 the end for humankind.
0:36:49 That not only was this weapon invented, but it was then employed.
0:36:56 He recognizes the inevitability of civilian deaths.
0:37:01 He said more or less to his audience, French Piedmont and Algerian nationalists, “Listen,
0:37:11 if you want to carry out this war, so be it, but don’t take the lives of innocents.
0:37:21 Don’t take the lives of civilians on either side of this battle.”
0:37:28 It might be unrealistic after a certain point in a conflict, but it’s not unimportant.
0:37:37 That’s perfectly put.
0:37:40 If he was a non-pacifist, he was certainly one very, very reluctantly.
0:37:47 In that essay of his, the rebel, one of the reasons his instincts are against violence
0:37:53 is because it produces this endless dialectic of violence and retaliation, which once it
0:38:02 gets going is almost impossible to stop.
0:38:07 Once it gets going, eventually the victims become the victimizers.
0:38:11 I have to say, there is something deeply depressing about the historical arc here today, that
0:38:21 after the Holocaust, a Jewish state emerged that ultimately came to wield life and death
0:38:29 power over a population of refugees, and that the memory of the Holocaust is part of the
0:38:35 justification for that power.
0:38:37 I understand how this came to pass, and I understand the legitimate fears Israelis have
0:38:43 about Hamas, a group that says they want to wipe Israel off the map.
0:38:48 I understand why so many Jewish people feel they need a state of their own.
0:38:52 I get all of that, and I clearly don’t have any grand theories about any of it.
0:38:57 The whole thing just feels untenable that Israel has put itself in a position, and I
0:39:03 think Kimu would agree with this.
0:39:05 I’m curious if you think that’s true, that this position cannot be morally sustained.
0:39:13 Christopher Hitchens might have said this almost verbatim, so I don’t want to pawn it
0:39:17 off as an original insight, but it doesn’t matter why you’re doing it or what your ultimate
0:39:22 objective is, you simply cannot occupy people against their will without eventually visiting
0:39:28 cruelties upon them.
0:39:30 There is no humane occupation, and it feels like that’s where we are now.
0:39:35 I couldn’t agree with you more.
0:39:37 It was an inhumane occupation prior to October 7th, not that Israel’s actions prior to October
0:39:45 7th in any way justified what Hamas did on October 7th.
0:39:51 No, it doesn’t.
0:39:52 But one of the things that terrified Kimu, we think about what this widening spiral of
0:40:00 violence does to all participants that it turns victims, eventually into victimizers, is that
0:40:07 he saw this taking place with resistance movements in Algeria by the mid-1950s.
0:40:17 The only nationalist movement was the FLN.
0:40:22 The character of the FLN was truly terrifying.
0:40:28 Camus’ fears about the FLN weren’t only about what they might do to his mother or to the
0:40:39 million or so other Piedronas living in Algeria, but what they would do to their own people
0:40:47 – and he was mocked for this concern by the French Left, which saw the FLN as this
0:40:57 idealistic and authentic expression of Algerian nationalism.
0:41:04 Well, it turns out that Camus was remarkably prescient when it came to the character of
0:41:10 the FLN.
0:41:12 It was a one-party state following its independence in 1962 when it tried to become more democratic
0:41:25 in the late 1980s and early 1990s that led to the horrors of the Civil War that took
0:41:31 place between the Algerian military and the Islamic Salvation Front.
0:41:39 And still do not live under democracy.
0:41:42 Now, it casts a very dark light on what has happened in Israel, to my mind.
0:41:49 You have this growing sort of violence on the Israeli right, and now Israel has a government
0:41:59 that in many ways is as undemocratic, is as violent as the FLN was in the 1950s.
0:42:12 You have a government under Benjamin Netanyahu that has some of its members, including ministers
0:42:21 who now sit in this government, who have called for the recolonization by Israelis of Gaza,
0:42:30 who have called for the eradication of the Palestinian presence in the West Bank, who
0:42:40 have allowed and at times orchestrated the increasing number of attacks on Palestinians
0:42:49 by illegal settlers on the West Bank, and that this is moreover a government that divided
0:42:58 Israel, polarized Israel in its effort to undertake what it called judicial reform.
0:43:06 In other words, to kneecap the powers of the Israeli judiciary so that it could have open
0:43:15 season on carrying out whatever policies it wished to carry out.
0:43:23 And so the parallels while they’re not perfect are more than perplexing.
0:43:31 They’re simply disturbing.
0:43:33 Speaking of parallels, as we’re recording this, Israel is launching raids on Rafah
0:43:43 and southern Gaza, where something like half of Gazans had previously taken refuge.
0:43:50 The carnage is horrific, obviously.
0:43:54 First and foremost, there’s the humanitarian tragedy and all the suffering.
0:44:01 And then for Israel, I don’t understand how any of this is going to make them safer or
0:44:10 freer.
0:44:11 My colleague at Vox, Zach Beecham, wrote a piece on this recently, and he called this
0:44:17 a form of murder suicide in which Israel slaughters Palestinians while raising the chances of
0:44:24 its own long term destruction.
0:44:28 When you look at this, what Israel is doing right now in Rafah, do you see echoes of the
0:44:35 mistakes France made in Algeria?
0:44:38 That’s an excellent question.
0:44:42 We can point to similar, though not identical acts of horrendous violence by the colonized
0:44:51 that lead to even more horrendous acts of repression by the colonizer and both one in the other
0:44:58 case.
0:44:59 So Netanyahu and the fanatics in his government insist that total victory can be achieved
0:45:08 in Gaza of Hamas.
0:45:11 Now this was the disastrous conceit of governments in both the fourth and fifth republics of
0:45:19 France concerning Algerian nationalist movements.
0:45:23 In both cases, in France in the 1950s, in Israel in the 2020s and in fact stretching decades
0:45:33 and decades before, the dominant power refuses to accept that the war can end only when the
0:45:43 dominant powers end their fantasies of controlling the territories they occupy.
0:45:50 The French won the battle of Algiers in 1957, but that victory lost them the war by turning
0:46:02 the indigenous population against them because of the tactics they employed, tactics that
0:46:09 included torture, torture at nearly an industrial level.
0:46:16 And I think this is going to be the case with Rafa, that the Israeli military may well raise
0:46:25 Rafa, but rather than creating peace, they will have created two paraphrased Tacitus
0:46:35 about the Roman legions in Germany, they will have created nothing more than a desert.
0:46:45 The consequences to my mind are horrifying.
0:46:59 After one more short break, what would Camus say today about the war in Gaza and the protest
0:47:04 movement it’s inspired?
0:47:06 Stay with us.
0:47:22 Support for this episode of The Gray Area comes from listening.
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0:50:59 Obviously, Columbia University has been in the news lately because it’s the epicenter
0:51:22 of the protest movement.
0:51:24 If Camus showed up to Columbia today to give a speech, as he did famously in 1946, what
0:51:33 do you think he’d say about this conflict?
0:51:36 I want to believe that the Camus that I think I know, Sean, would say more or less what
0:51:43 he said at Columbia in 1946.
0:51:47 So let me just read one passage from that 1946 address.
0:51:54 He asked them, “How is it,” and I quote now, “that we’ve allowed this atrocious accumulation
0:52:02 of crimes to disfigure contemporary Europe in such a world stripped of values?
0:52:09 What in fact could revolt itself even mean?”
0:52:14 And then he attempts to answer this question and I quote again, “We said no to the world.
0:52:22 We said no to its essential absurdity, to the abstractions that threatened us, to the civilization
0:52:30 of death that was being prepared for us.
0:52:33 By saying no, we declared that things had lasted long enough and that there was a line
0:52:43 that must never be crossed.
0:52:45 At the same time, we affirmed everything that fell short of that line.
0:52:53 We affirmed that there was something within all of us that rejected the scandal of human
0:53:00 suffering and could not, should not, be humiliated for too long.”
0:53:08 Now that’s the end of the quotation, but let me simply add, and I can never be anywhere
0:53:16 near as eloquent as Camus, that this is where the very heart of rebellion beats.
0:53:23 And I use the word “rebellion” because Camus does, but Camus would remind the students
0:53:29 at Columbia that the rebel seeks to impose a limit not just on those who oppress him,
0:53:37 but he also seeks to impose a limit on himself, that true revolt or rebellion is an act of
0:53:47 defense and not offense.
0:53:50 For Camus, and I think he would say this at Columbia, it is a never-ending watchfulness
0:53:57 over the humanity of others as well as oneself, resisting the power exercised by oppressors
0:54:07 all the while insisting on even their humanity.
0:54:13 How did that conflict eventually end, and what was Camus’ reaction to that?
0:54:19 The war itself only comes to an end after Camus’ death in 1960, so Camus died before
0:54:29 Algeria or his idea or ideal of Algeria died, he died two years before that.
0:54:36 The fallout from 1962 on politics not just in Algeria about the commanding position assumed
0:54:48 by the FLN and post-war politics, but also politics in France to this very day.
0:54:54 One of the enduring bases of support for the extreme right in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
0:55:04 Afron National, which has since been re-baptized by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, as the ressemblement
0:55:10 model, one of their enduring bases of support is with the expatriated Pierre-Demois, who
0:55:19 now live mostly along the southern rim of France, and so it’s had all sorts of consequences
0:55:29 to this very day.
0:55:30 The last thing I’d say about Camus.
0:55:32 Oh, there’s never a last thing to say about Camus, there’s always more.
0:55:37 You’re right about that.
0:55:40 He will always be worth revisiting in these moments because his work fundamentally was
0:55:49 a response to human brutality and a plea to pay attention to the language and the logic
0:56:01 that justifies it.
0:56:03 And I think, in the end, Robert, I have never really believed that the arc of the moral
0:56:10 universe is long and that it bends towards justice, though that’s a pretty thought.
0:56:17 I think history is directionless and the wider you zoom out, the clearer that is, and ultimately
0:56:23 history is just human beings acting in the world, and to the extent that decency and
0:56:29 justice prevail, it’s not because of some cosmic plan.
0:56:33 It’s because people defended those ideals in a way that preserved them.
0:56:39 And Camus wasn’t perfect, but he did that as best he could in a time when many people
0:56:46 with microphones and platforms didn’t, and I’ll always love and respect him for that.
0:56:53 I couldn’t agree with you more, Sean, as Paul said, I can’t better that.
0:56:59 You mentioned that he wasn’t perfect by any means, and I think that really does need to
0:57:06 be emphasized.
0:57:10 He was a great believer in our imperfection, and this is what this philosophy of Camus
0:57:20 is all about, that it always aspires to the relative.
0:57:25 It’s a philosophy which recognizes not just our knack for fallibility, but it also reminds
0:57:33 us of our need for humility, and I think that both, well, nearly all of us seem to have
0:57:42 lost sight of both of these qualities over the past several months.
0:57:48 Well, Robert, you know how much I adore you and I appreciate the wisdom you bring to these
0:57:54 conversations, so thanks for having another one with me.
0:57:58 Well, thank you, Sean, for inviting me, and I just can’t tell you how much these conversations
0:58:03 have meant to me over the years.
0:58:11 After Robert and I wrapped our recording, I went back and read a speech that Camus gave
0:58:15 in Algeria while the war was still raging.
0:58:20 It captures where Camus was coming from quite well, and it feels like a natural coda to
0:58:26 the conversation we just had, because it applies just as well to almost any conflict at almost
0:58:33 any time and almost any place once it’s crossed a certain line.
0:58:38 Anyway, I’ll leave you with this passage.
0:58:43 The struggle has taken on an implacable character that arouses on both sides irrepressible rage
0:58:50 and passions that can be slacked only by escalation.
0:58:54 No further discussion is possible.
0:58:59 This is the attitude that kills any chance of a future and makes life impossible.
0:59:05 What follows is blind struggle, in which the French decide to ignore the Arabs, even if
0:59:11 they know deep down that the Arab demand for dignity is justified.
0:59:16 When the Arabs decide to ignore the French, even though they know deep down that the French
0:59:21 of Algeria also have a right to security and dignity on the land we all share.
0:59:28 Steeped in bitterness and hatred, each side finds it impossible to listen to the other.
0:59:34 Every proposal, no matter what its nature, is greeted with suspicion and immediately
0:59:40 twisted into a form that renders it useless.
0:59:44 Little by little, we’ve become caught in a web of old and new accusations, acts of vengeance,
0:59:51 and endless bitterness.
0:59:53 As in an ancient family quarrel in which grievances accumulate generation after generation, to
0:59:59 the point where not even the most upright and humane judge can sort it out.
1:00:04 It becomes difficult to imagine how such an affair can end.
1:00:12 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
1:00:19 fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
1:00:24 New episodes of the Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
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0:01:43 A few months ago, I received a long, handwritten letter from a very thoughtful listener.
0:01:52 His name was Eric.
0:01:54 Near the end of it, he asked me why I haven’t dealt with the war in Gaza on the show.
0:02:00 It wasn’t really a criticism, but there was a hint of disappointment in the question.
0:02:09 He knew that I’m not a foreign policy expert, but he wondered why a show that’s so steeped
0:02:15 in philosophy and history and ethics didn’t have something to say about the situation.
0:02:24 To be honest with you, I read Eric’s letter, I responded to it, and then I moved on.
0:02:33 But it stuck with me, and it’s been hovering in the back of my mind ever since.
0:02:41 The main reason I didn’t engage with this topic on the show is that the discourse is
0:02:45 so toxic and there’s so much bad faith that I just couldn’t see any possible value in
0:02:51 lunging into this conversation without a clear contribution to make.
0:02:57 But despite all of that, the truth is that I haven’t felt totally at peace with my silence.
0:03:04 What I do feel is what I suspect a lot of you feel, which is a combination of anger
0:03:09 and sadness and a desperate desire to understand, or at least to process.
0:03:16 So what should a show like this offer in a time like this?
0:03:22 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:37 Today’s guest is Robert Zarecki.
0:03:39 He’s a philosopher and historian at the University of Houston.
0:03:44 You might recognize Robert as a previous guest on this show.
0:03:47 It was an episode called Resisting Despair, back in March of 2022, about the writer Albert
0:03:53 Camus.
0:03:58 Camus was raised as a French citizen in Algeria, which means he lived in a colonized state,
0:04:03 and that experience shaped his philosophy and politics.
0:04:08 He was attached to his French identity, but he also revolted against the treatment of
0:04:13 the native Arabs and Berbers who had lived in Algeria for centuries before the French
0:04:17 arrived.
0:04:20 The push for Algerian independence began in the early 20th century, but when it became
0:04:25 clear that France wasn’t going to cede power, the National Liberation Front, known as the
0:04:31 FLN, launched a guerrilla war against France, and part of that campaign included brutal
0:04:37 attacks on civilian targets.
0:04:39 France throws the bulk of its military manpower into the Algerian rebellion, which daily
0:04:44 assumes the proportions of total war.
0:04:47 Flying columns fan out through the country, which on all sides has become a target for
0:04:51 hidden run attacks by native guerrillas.
0:04:57 Camus was criticized for his insistence that neither side had a monopoly on truth and justice.
0:05:04 He was called a “fence-sitter” and a “moralist” who didn’t understand the realities
0:05:08 on the ground.
0:05:11 But ultimately, I think Camus did understand the situation.
0:05:15 He wasn’t naive or blind.
0:05:18 He simply believed that there were moral lines that couldn’t be crossed.
0:05:23 That killing innocent people as a means to some greater end wasn’t justifiable.
0:05:38 Algeria in the 1950s is not exactly like Palestine today, but there are parallels.
0:05:45 So I invited Robert back on the show to talk about how Camus wrestled with the morality
0:05:49 of the French-Algerian conflict, and what he might have to teach us as we wrestle with
0:05:55 some of the difficult moral challenges in this moment.
0:06:06 Robert Zuretsky, welcome to the show.
0:06:09 Thanks, Sean.
0:06:10 It’s good to be back.
0:06:11 You know, I don’t really have a conventional opening question here.
0:06:16 I think I’m just going to start by asking you how you’re processing this ongoing war
0:06:23 and Gaza and why you wanted to talk about it.
0:06:39 I suspect that I’m not unlike many other people that when I confront a crisis, I turn to writers
0:06:52 that have confronted crises in their lives.
0:06:59 And for many years, the person that I’ve turned to at moments like these is Albert Camus,
0:07:08 and following the massacre of October 7th, and then the response of the Israeli government
0:07:16 in military, and that the horror of that massacre, the unspeakable horror of that massacre was,
0:07:26 to my mind, compounded by the unspeakable horror of what was happening to Palestinian
0:07:35 men, women, and children, civilians in Gaza.
0:07:40 I couldn’t help but think of what Camus towards the end of his life was facing in his native
0:07:48 French Algeria.
0:07:49 Well, I tell you what, let me stop you there because I’m going to ask you almost that very
0:07:56 question in just a bit.
0:07:58 Okay.
0:07:59 I’m sorry, I was rambling a bit.
0:08:01 No, no, no, no, don’t you ever apologize for that, I love it.
0:08:08 What I would like to do first is, I think it’s important, Camus, as you know, is someone
0:08:15 I’ve studied a lot.
0:08:17 He’s not a systematic thinker.
0:08:19 He’s not a political scientist.
0:08:23 He was a philosopher artist, really.
0:08:26 But he was someone who witnessed the worst horrors of the 20th century, and he thought
0:08:32 very hard about why they happened and what it would take to prevent them in the future.
0:08:39 And that’s why he’ll always matter, especially in moments like this one.
0:08:44 But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit here.
0:08:48 Before we go any further into Camus and his ideas, maybe you can say a bit more about who
0:08:55 Camus was and what he was about.
0:08:58 Yes, of course.
0:08:59 Albert Camus was a remarkable individual.
0:09:04 He was born in 1913 in a rural village in French Algeria.
0:09:12 The following year, his father, who had been drafted into the army, died at the Battle
0:09:16 of the Marne, and his mother took both Camus and his brother to Algiers, where they moved
0:09:23 in with Camus’ grandmother.
0:09:27 And he was raised in a household where the grandmother and the mother were both illiterate,
0:09:35 and where the mother was not just illiterate, but she was also death and largely mute.
0:09:42 This is the context, the atmosphere in which the young Camus grew up, gets a job, where
0:09:49 he becomes an investigative journalist.
0:09:52 He spent those years uncovering a series of awful acts being committed by the French
0:10:02 authorities in respect to the native population of Arabs and Berbers.
0:10:11 His reporting was so explosive that the French government shut the newspaper down.
0:10:18 He was very much on the left after a brief flirtation with the Algerian Communist Party
0:10:24 in the mid-1930s.
0:10:26 He was kicked out because he refused to tow the line of the party.
0:10:31 From that point on, he became one of the harshest critics on the left in France of communism.
0:10:38 Camus from the very get-go was acutely aware of the miserable situation that was imposed
0:10:49 on Algeria’s indigenous population.
0:10:53 French Algeria was not a colony of France.
0:10:58 It was invaded in 1830, and by the mid-19th century was incorporated into metropolitan
0:11:07 France, unlike France’s colonies that were acquired later in the 19th century.
0:11:16 Algeria was part and parcel of France itself.
0:11:21 Now the problem with this is that, while the Pied noir, the name given to those French
0:11:30 colonists who arrived mostly in the second half of the 19th century to settle large swathes
0:11:40 of the land, the Pied noir population by Camus’ time was about a million, but the indigenous
0:11:48 population of Arabs and Berbers was about seven million, whereas the Pied noir, the colonists
0:11:57 enjoyed full civic and political rights.
0:12:01 They were French.
0:12:03 The Arabs and Berbers enjoyed neither one nor the other.
0:12:08 And so it was, though not in name, in practice, it was a French colony.
0:12:16 The parallels here are interesting and revealing.
0:12:19 Camus is a mutual hero of both of ours, and the politics of that situation and the politics
0:12:25 of the situation today, for me, feels pretty hopeless.
0:12:31 And I think over the years, my view of the political world, and this is, I think, in
0:12:36 part because of Camus’ influence on me, has become increasingly tragic.
0:12:44 That’s a strange word, but what I mean by that is that I think the political world is
0:12:50 not only not perfectable, I think it often presents impossible choices and irresolvable
0:12:59 moral dilemmas.
0:13:01 And while I can imagine lots of ways this conflict today could have ended before we
0:13:09 reached this moment, now that we’re here, now that there are so many victims and victimizers
0:13:16 on both sides, it is very hard to see an end in sight.
0:13:24 And I could be wrong about that, I’m just being honest about my own despair here.
0:13:28 Now, Camus, as you’re saying, was deeply engaged with Algeria’s fight for independence from
0:13:34 France.
0:13:35 That’s a conflict for people that don’t know, that stretched from 1954 until 1962, when
0:13:42 Algeria finally gained independence, and Camus, as you were saying, was a French citizen
0:13:47 who grew up in Algeria and felt pretty connected to the land and the culture.
0:13:51 How would you sum up his position on that conflict, and does it feel like a useful historical
0:13:59 analog to what’s happening today in Palestine?
0:14:03 As far as serving as an analog to what’s taking place in Israel and Palestine, there
0:14:11 are striking similarities.
0:14:13 But there are also striking dissimilarities.
0:14:16 The similarities are that we have a situation which in many respects resembles that of apartheid
0:14:27 South Africa, where the lives of those who had lived on the land for centuries is now
0:14:36 dictated often in unforgivable ways by another people who have succeeded in creating a state
0:14:47 on that same territory and have a monopoly on the tools of violence.
0:14:54 And so there are similarities, there are parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel,
0:15:02 the ways in which Palestinians, both inside the borders of Israel as well as in the Gaza
0:15:09 Strip and the West Banks, are both legally and extralegally treated by the Israeli state.
0:15:21 I know that the term apartheid raises the hackles of many Israeli Jews as well as Jews
0:15:28 of the diaspora, but I think the label sticks.
0:15:35 There are important differences though, whereas the French Piednois, the colonists in Algeria
0:15:44 can trace their presence in Algeria no further back than the early 19th century, Jews can
0:15:55 trace their presence in Palestine back several millennia, an unbroken presence.
0:16:03 Another difference is that whereas the legitimacy of a French Algeria in the eyes of the world
0:16:15 had never been, in a way, validated by that same world.
0:16:21 This wasn’t the case with Israel.
0:16:23 I mean, Israel was created under the auspices of the United Nations.
0:16:31 On that creation, it was immediately contested by several Arab states and that was the first
0:16:41 of too many wars over the course of the last three quarters of a century that have occurred
0:16:50 in Israel and in Palestine, whereas the Piednois did have a place to go in 1962, though the
0:17:00 manner in which they went was extraordinarily cruel and that place was France.
0:17:08 Israeli Jews don’t have anywhere else to go.
0:17:14 There are so many reasons why Camus resonates with me.
0:17:20 He’s a beautiful writer, obviously, but I think what I admire most about him is his
0:17:30 absolute refusal to hide behind dogmas and abstractions.
0:17:36 And the result of this, however, was that Camus would often appear to stand in the middle,
0:17:45 denouncing the excesses on both sides.
0:17:49 And for this, he was dismissed and mocked by many of his contemporaries as a kind of
0:17:56 feckless moderate.
0:17:58 Do you think that was a fair criticism of Camus?
0:18:01 No, of course I don’t think it was a fair criticism.
0:18:06 It’s telling, to my mind, to compare Camus’ response to the spiral of violence in French
0:18:15 Algeria in the 1950s to say the response of Jean-Paul Sartre and to so much of the French
0:18:23 left, that while Sartre was applauding the violence exercised by the principal independence
0:18:39 and nationalist movement in Algeria, the FLN, the National Liberation Front, and he gives
0:18:48 his voice, his excitement, his approval of what they are doing in his, to my mind, infamous
0:18:56 preface to François Nones, The Wretched of the Earth, where he celebrates the fact that
0:19:05 it’s by taking the life of a colonist that the colonized fully comes into a sense of
0:19:12 self.
0:19:13 Camus, on the other hand, had, you can call it, skin in the game, but actually he had
0:19:20 lives in the game.
0:19:22 There’s one famous exchange that took place in 1957 after he had become silent on the
0:19:30 subject of the bloodbath in his native French Algeria.
0:19:35 He had gone to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he met with a group
0:19:43 of students, where one of the students who was Algerian confronted him.
0:19:51 Why is he not speaking on the horrors that were taking place in Algeria?
0:19:59 Can he not see the justice in what it is that the Algerian nationalists are fighting for?
0:20:07 Camus’ answer was that, at this very moment, terrorists are placing bombs on tramways in
0:20:20 Algeria.
0:20:21 My mother might be on one of those trams.
0:20:27 If that is what justice is, I prefer my mother.
0:20:33 What’s fascinating about this exchange, at least in part, is that the next day it was
0:20:39 reported by Francis Flagship newspaper on the left, Le Monde, that what he said was,
0:20:48 in fact, I prefer my mother to justice.
0:20:55 There is a world of difference between what he told that student, the Algerian student,
0:21:01 and what was reported the next day in Le Monde, namely that he’s making, as you noted, he
0:21:08 abhorred abstraction, and he’s trying to explain what is truly existentially at stake, lives,
0:21:19 the lives of individuals in Algeria, and that when we lose sight of those individual lives
0:21:31 because of abstractions like justice, we’ve lost sight of what it is that makes us fully
0:21:41 human.
0:21:43 And in the retelling of his response in Le Monde, it becomes sloppy sentimentalism, something
0:21:52 that the left, like Sartre, had always mocked him for.
0:21:56 This is why I don’t think he was feckless or weak or wanted to keep his hands pure,
0:22:04 all of which were accusations leveled at him by the French left.
0:22:08 Instead, I think that the sort of moderation that Camus embodied, that he practiced, was
0:22:18 truly heroic.
0:22:20 So, he supported the Arab struggle for political rights.
0:22:26 He did.
0:22:27 He also never quite fully embraced the idea of an independent Algeria.
0:22:31 Is this just a contradiction that he just never quite squared?
0:22:35 Yeah.
0:22:36 Absolutely.
0:22:37 Camus was an extremely harsh critic of French policies in Algeria, what we can call its
0:22:44 colonial policies in Algeria.
0:22:47 The basis for that criticism was that France wasn’t living up to its own republican values
0:22:52 in the way that it was treating the indigenous peoples of Algeria.
0:22:57 From the 1950s, he was horrified and he wrote about his horror in the treatment of both
0:23:08 suspected Algerian terrorists, as well as Algerian citizens at the hands of the French
0:23:15 military.
0:23:17 But he never embraced the idea of an independent Algeria.
0:23:25 The furthest he went was to propose a federal model in which Arabs, Jews, because there
0:23:35 was an important Jewish population in Algeria, an indigenous population that was granted
0:23:43 citizenship, French citizenship, by the French government, unlike their Muslim neighbors.
0:23:53 So he foresaw a federal framework in which the various ethnic and religious communities
0:24:00 could coexist peacefully.
0:24:03 That might have worked in the 1930s, but by the 1950s, it was far too little and was far
0:24:10 too late.
0:24:11 And when, after his failed effort to introduce the idea of a civilian truce, an effort in
0:24:21 which he risked his life, he flew to Algiers from Paris and he gave a speech in which he
0:24:29 made the case for a civilian truce.
0:24:33 He never came to terms with an independent Algeria.
0:24:40 That’s true.
0:24:41 But what’s fascinating is that after his return to France and his silence over Algeria, this
0:24:51 is when he begins his last novel, Sean, the first man, one that was fated to remain unfinished.
0:24:59 Now along with the text itself, there’s a collection of notes at the end, and in one
0:25:08 of the notes, he writes, and I can’t quote it verbatim, I don’t have the book in front
0:25:14 of me, give the land back, give all of it back to the poor, mostly Arab and a few French.
0:25:28 And so it seems that he has taken the measure of the tragedy.
0:25:43 When we get back from the break, we talk about Camus’ complicated relationship with pacifism.
0:25:49 Stay with us.
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0:30:00 The other part of this, and this is something critics like Sartre were quick to point out,
0:30:07 and I think this challenge applies to the present as much as it did to this historical
0:30:14 moment, is that extremism is often what happens when moderation fails.
0:30:24 And in the real world, when you’re dealing with vast asymmetries in force and power,
0:30:34 it’s hard to hold both sides to the same standards, because that leaves the powerless perpetually
0:30:41 at the mercy of the powerful, and maybe that’s just attention we have to live with.
0:30:49 But at the same time, I think Camus was right that the ends justifies the means logic.
0:30:59 If followed long enough, ends in terror and mass death, and there are certain crimes like
0:31:07 bombing thousands of civilians in their homes, or slaughtering innocent men, women, and children,
0:31:15 that simply cannot be justified under any circumstances.
0:31:19 I don’t care who does it, but, and I think you’d agree with this, that principle has
0:31:25 to coexist with the reality that violence is sometimes necessary, and once conversation
0:31:31 gives way to violence, you can’t really control it.
0:31:37 I think Camus would agree with that.
0:31:39 In fact, I know he agrees with that, because in a famous exchange with another former member
0:31:46 of the resistance who criticized him for this effort to straddle both these worlds, Camus
0:31:57 replied that violence is simultaneously unavoidable and unjustifiable.
0:32:07 That’s right.
0:32:08 I think that it’s applicable in the situation of Algeria.
0:32:13 This was the argument of the leaders of the FLN, that it was profoundly asymmetrical,
0:32:23 and they had no recourse but to use the weapons of the weak.
0:32:30 But Camus would take issue with that.
0:32:34 He tried to resolve it, for example, in his play The Just Assassins, based on an actual
0:32:40 event in 1905 when a group of young Russian revolutionaries, in taking the life of one
0:32:49 of the members of the Romanov family, they justified the taking of a life by offering
0:32:56 their life in return, in other words, that they allow themselves to be arrested and hanged
0:33:03 up following the commission of this crime, this assassination.
0:33:08 But it becomes much muddier when you think about suicide bombings in our own age.
0:33:13 It’s no longer so surgical or so limited.
0:33:18 But for Camus, at the end of the day, it’s not so much that the end justifies the means,
0:33:27 but instead that the means can only justify the end, recalling what happens when you lose
0:33:37 sight of the humanity of those who are, in fact, either directly or indirectly oppressing
0:33:48 you.
0:33:50 And when he came to New York in 1946, he had already completed the manuscript to his second
0:33:56 novel, The Plague, which is precisely about the nature of resistance or revolt.
0:34:06 Now in the rebellion, and then a few years later in the philosophical essay called The
0:34:11 Rebel, he makes this terribly important distinction between what we can call the ethics of conviction
0:34:21 and the ethics of responsibility, and by these two contrasting ethics, Camus attempted to
0:34:30 explain what was taking place in France during the occupation, namely that there were those
0:34:38 driven by conviction by an idea, and that idea was the end that justified all means available.
0:34:51 And so those driven by the ethic of conviction were not only willing to sacrifice their own
0:34:58 lives, but all too willing to sacrifice the lives of countless others in achieving that
0:35:03 ideal.
0:35:04 Right, and the problem with that is that ultimately it undermines the conditions that make life
0:35:09 possible in the first place.
0:35:10 Exactly.
0:35:11 To stick with that moment.
0:35:12 Do I think the Nazis had to be defeated?
0:35:14 Yeah, of course.
0:35:16 Do I think that was possible without killing a tremendous number of innocent civilians?
0:35:21 Probably not.
0:35:22 How do I square that moral logic?
0:35:24 I don’t know.
0:35:26 Maybe it’s not really squareable, and I appreciate that Camus wasn’t a pacifist.
0:35:30 He actually was a pacifist, Sean.
0:35:32 Really?
0:35:33 During the 1930s, he was a pacifist.
0:35:37 He was an outspoken pacifist on the left in Algeria.
0:35:42 He only put aside his pacifism come the invasion in 1940.
0:35:50 But you mentioned earlier that how do we square the death of innocents in times of war?
0:35:58 Well, one of the ways in which we do try to square it is through rules of law.
0:36:05 And this is being addressed right now in the case of both Hamas and the current government
0:36:11 in Israel.
0:36:13 There are unavoidably civilian deaths at such times.
0:36:19 We saw it on World War II.
0:36:20 We saw it with the carpet bombing of Dresden, for example, which had no military usefulness
0:36:30 at all.
0:36:31 We saw it with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
0:36:38 An act that Camus wrote about and said that in some ways this signals the beginning of
0:36:46 the end for humankind.
0:36:49 That not only was this weapon invented, but it was then employed.
0:36:56 He recognizes the inevitability of civilian deaths.
0:37:01 He said more or less to his audience, French Piedmont and Algerian nationalists, “Listen,
0:37:11 if you want to carry out this war, so be it, but don’t take the lives of innocents.
0:37:21 Don’t take the lives of civilians on either side of this battle.”
0:37:28 It might be unrealistic after a certain point in a conflict, but it’s not unimportant.
0:37:37 That’s perfectly put.
0:37:40 If he was a non-pacifist, he was certainly one very, very reluctantly.
0:37:47 In that essay of his, the rebel, one of the reasons his instincts are against violence
0:37:53 is because it produces this endless dialectic of violence and retaliation, which once it
0:38:02 gets going is almost impossible to stop.
0:38:07 Once it gets going, eventually the victims become the victimizers.
0:38:11 I have to say, there is something deeply depressing about the historical arc here today, that
0:38:21 after the Holocaust, a Jewish state emerged that ultimately came to wield life and death
0:38:29 power over a population of refugees, and that the memory of the Holocaust is part of the
0:38:35 justification for that power.
0:38:37 I understand how this came to pass, and I understand the legitimate fears Israelis have
0:38:43 about Hamas, a group that says they want to wipe Israel off the map.
0:38:48 I understand why so many Jewish people feel they need a state of their own.
0:38:52 I get all of that, and I clearly don’t have any grand theories about any of it.
0:38:57 The whole thing just feels untenable that Israel has put itself in a position, and I
0:39:03 think Kimu would agree with this.
0:39:05 I’m curious if you think that’s true, that this position cannot be morally sustained.
0:39:13 Christopher Hitchens might have said this almost verbatim, so I don’t want to pawn it
0:39:17 off as an original insight, but it doesn’t matter why you’re doing it or what your ultimate
0:39:22 objective is, you simply cannot occupy people against their will without eventually visiting
0:39:28 cruelties upon them.
0:39:30 There is no humane occupation, and it feels like that’s where we are now.
0:39:35 I couldn’t agree with you more.
0:39:37 It was an inhumane occupation prior to October 7th, not that Israel’s actions prior to October
0:39:45 7th in any way justified what Hamas did on October 7th.
0:39:51 No, it doesn’t.
0:39:52 But one of the things that terrified Kimu, we think about what this widening spiral of
0:40:00 violence does to all participants that it turns victims, eventually into victimizers, is that
0:40:07 he saw this taking place with resistance movements in Algeria by the mid-1950s.
0:40:17 The only nationalist movement was the FLN.
0:40:22 The character of the FLN was truly terrifying.
0:40:28 Camus’ fears about the FLN weren’t only about what they might do to his mother or to the
0:40:39 million or so other Piedronas living in Algeria, but what they would do to their own people
0:40:47 – and he was mocked for this concern by the French Left, which saw the FLN as this
0:40:57 idealistic and authentic expression of Algerian nationalism.
0:41:04 Well, it turns out that Camus was remarkably prescient when it came to the character of
0:41:10 the FLN.
0:41:12 It was a one-party state following its independence in 1962 when it tried to become more democratic
0:41:25 in the late 1980s and early 1990s that led to the horrors of the Civil War that took
0:41:31 place between the Algerian military and the Islamic Salvation Front.
0:41:39 And still do not live under democracy.
0:41:42 Now, it casts a very dark light on what has happened in Israel, to my mind.
0:41:49 You have this growing sort of violence on the Israeli right, and now Israel has a government
0:41:59 that in many ways is as undemocratic, is as violent as the FLN was in the 1950s.
0:42:12 You have a government under Benjamin Netanyahu that has some of its members, including ministers
0:42:21 who now sit in this government, who have called for the recolonization by Israelis of Gaza,
0:42:30 who have called for the eradication of the Palestinian presence in the West Bank, who
0:42:40 have allowed and at times orchestrated the increasing number of attacks on Palestinians
0:42:49 by illegal settlers on the West Bank, and that this is moreover a government that divided
0:42:58 Israel, polarized Israel in its effort to undertake what it called judicial reform.
0:43:06 In other words, to kneecap the powers of the Israeli judiciary so that it could have open
0:43:15 season on carrying out whatever policies it wished to carry out.
0:43:23 And so the parallels while they’re not perfect are more than perplexing.
0:43:31 They’re simply disturbing.
0:43:33 Speaking of parallels, as we’re recording this, Israel is launching raids on Rafah
0:43:43 and southern Gaza, where something like half of Gazans had previously taken refuge.
0:43:50 The carnage is horrific, obviously.
0:43:54 First and foremost, there’s the humanitarian tragedy and all the suffering.
0:44:01 And then for Israel, I don’t understand how any of this is going to make them safer or
0:44:10 freer.
0:44:11 My colleague at Vox, Zach Beecham, wrote a piece on this recently, and he called this
0:44:17 a form of murder suicide in which Israel slaughters Palestinians while raising the chances of
0:44:24 its own long term destruction.
0:44:28 When you look at this, what Israel is doing right now in Rafah, do you see echoes of the
0:44:35 mistakes France made in Algeria?
0:44:38 That’s an excellent question.
0:44:42 We can point to similar, though not identical acts of horrendous violence by the colonized
0:44:51 that lead to even more horrendous acts of repression by the colonizer and both one in the other
0:44:58 case.
0:44:59 So Netanyahu and the fanatics in his government insist that total victory can be achieved
0:45:08 in Gaza of Hamas.
0:45:11 Now this was the disastrous conceit of governments in both the fourth and fifth republics of
0:45:19 France concerning Algerian nationalist movements.
0:45:23 In both cases, in France in the 1950s, in Israel in the 2020s and in fact stretching decades
0:45:33 and decades before, the dominant power refuses to accept that the war can end only when the
0:45:43 dominant powers end their fantasies of controlling the territories they occupy.
0:45:50 The French won the battle of Algiers in 1957, but that victory lost them the war by turning
0:46:02 the indigenous population against them because of the tactics they employed, tactics that
0:46:09 included torture, torture at nearly an industrial level.
0:46:16 And I think this is going to be the case with Rafa, that the Israeli military may well raise
0:46:25 Rafa, but rather than creating peace, they will have created two paraphrased Tacitus
0:46:35 about the Roman legions in Germany, they will have created nothing more than a desert.
0:46:45 The consequences to my mind are horrifying.
0:46:59 After one more short break, what would Camus say today about the war in Gaza and the protest
0:47:04 movement it’s inspired?
0:47:06 Stay with us.
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0:50:02 Or when your kid can brush his teeth by himself or dress himself or put away his own dishes,
0:50:08 it’s just less stuff you got to do.
0:50:10 Now my son is a little too young for this, but something I’m told doesn’t get easier
0:50:15 is talking about money.
0:50:17 Greenlight is a debit card and money at made for families that could give you some help
0:50:21 there.
0:50:22 With Greenlight, you can send money to your kids and keep an eye on their spending and
0:50:25 savings with real time notifications.
0:50:28 The Greenlight app also includes a chores feature where you can set up one time or recurring
0:50:33 chores customized to your family’s needs and reward kids with allowance for a job well
0:50:39 done.
0:50:40 Like I said, my kid is a little too young to learn the value of a dollar, but my colleague
0:50:44 here at Fox uses it with his two boys and he loves it.
0:50:48 You can sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com/grey
0:50:53 area.
0:50:54 That’s greenlight.com/grey area to try Greenlight for free.
0:50:59 Obviously, Columbia University has been in the news lately because it’s the epicenter
0:51:22 of the protest movement.
0:51:24 If Camus showed up to Columbia today to give a speech, as he did famously in 1946, what
0:51:33 do you think he’d say about this conflict?
0:51:36 I want to believe that the Camus that I think I know, Sean, would say more or less what
0:51:43 he said at Columbia in 1946.
0:51:47 So let me just read one passage from that 1946 address.
0:51:54 He asked them, “How is it,” and I quote now, “that we’ve allowed this atrocious accumulation
0:52:02 of crimes to disfigure contemporary Europe in such a world stripped of values?
0:52:09 What in fact could revolt itself even mean?”
0:52:14 And then he attempts to answer this question and I quote again, “We said no to the world.
0:52:22 We said no to its essential absurdity, to the abstractions that threatened us, to the civilization
0:52:30 of death that was being prepared for us.
0:52:33 By saying no, we declared that things had lasted long enough and that there was a line
0:52:43 that must never be crossed.
0:52:45 At the same time, we affirmed everything that fell short of that line.
0:52:53 We affirmed that there was something within all of us that rejected the scandal of human
0:53:00 suffering and could not, should not, be humiliated for too long.”
0:53:08 Now that’s the end of the quotation, but let me simply add, and I can never be anywhere
0:53:16 near as eloquent as Camus, that this is where the very heart of rebellion beats.
0:53:23 And I use the word “rebellion” because Camus does, but Camus would remind the students
0:53:29 at Columbia that the rebel seeks to impose a limit not just on those who oppress him,
0:53:37 but he also seeks to impose a limit on himself, that true revolt or rebellion is an act of
0:53:47 defense and not offense.
0:53:50 For Camus, and I think he would say this at Columbia, it is a never-ending watchfulness
0:53:57 over the humanity of others as well as oneself, resisting the power exercised by oppressors
0:54:07 all the while insisting on even their humanity.
0:54:13 How did that conflict eventually end, and what was Camus’ reaction to that?
0:54:19 The war itself only comes to an end after Camus’ death in 1960, so Camus died before
0:54:29 Algeria or his idea or ideal of Algeria died, he died two years before that.
0:54:36 The fallout from 1962 on politics not just in Algeria about the commanding position assumed
0:54:48 by the FLN and post-war politics, but also politics in France to this very day.
0:54:54 One of the enduring bases of support for the extreme right in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
0:55:04 Afron National, which has since been re-baptized by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, as the ressemblement
0:55:10 model, one of their enduring bases of support is with the expatriated Pierre-Demois, who
0:55:19 now live mostly along the southern rim of France, and so it’s had all sorts of consequences
0:55:29 to this very day.
0:55:30 The last thing I’d say about Camus.
0:55:32 Oh, there’s never a last thing to say about Camus, there’s always more.
0:55:37 You’re right about that.
0:55:40 He will always be worth revisiting in these moments because his work fundamentally was
0:55:49 a response to human brutality and a plea to pay attention to the language and the logic
0:56:01 that justifies it.
0:56:03 And I think, in the end, Robert, I have never really believed that the arc of the moral
0:56:10 universe is long and that it bends towards justice, though that’s a pretty thought.
0:56:17 I think history is directionless and the wider you zoom out, the clearer that is, and ultimately
0:56:23 history is just human beings acting in the world, and to the extent that decency and
0:56:29 justice prevail, it’s not because of some cosmic plan.
0:56:33 It’s because people defended those ideals in a way that preserved them.
0:56:39 And Camus wasn’t perfect, but he did that as best he could in a time when many people
0:56:46 with microphones and platforms didn’t, and I’ll always love and respect him for that.
0:56:53 I couldn’t agree with you more, Sean, as Paul said, I can’t better that.
0:56:59 You mentioned that he wasn’t perfect by any means, and I think that really does need to
0:57:06 be emphasized.
0:57:10 He was a great believer in our imperfection, and this is what this philosophy of Camus
0:57:20 is all about, that it always aspires to the relative.
0:57:25 It’s a philosophy which recognizes not just our knack for fallibility, but it also reminds
0:57:33 us of our need for humility, and I think that both, well, nearly all of us seem to have
0:57:42 lost sight of both of these qualities over the past several months.
0:57:48 Well, Robert, you know how much I adore you and I appreciate the wisdom you bring to these
0:57:54 conversations, so thanks for having another one with me.
0:57:58 Well, thank you, Sean, for inviting me, and I just can’t tell you how much these conversations
0:58:03 have meant to me over the years.
0:58:11 After Robert and I wrapped our recording, I went back and read a speech that Camus gave
0:58:15 in Algeria while the war was still raging.
0:58:20 It captures where Camus was coming from quite well, and it feels like a natural coda to
0:58:26 the conversation we just had, because it applies just as well to almost any conflict at almost
0:58:33 any time and almost any place once it’s crossed a certain line.
0:58:38 Anyway, I’ll leave you with this passage.
0:58:43 The struggle has taken on an implacable character that arouses on both sides irrepressible rage
0:58:50 and passions that can be slacked only by escalation.
0:58:54 No further discussion is possible.
0:58:59 This is the attitude that kills any chance of a future and makes life impossible.
0:59:05 What follows is blind struggle, in which the French decide to ignore the Arabs, even if
0:59:11 they know deep down that the Arab demand for dignity is justified.
0:59:16 When the Arabs decide to ignore the French, even though they know deep down that the French
0:59:21 of Algeria also have a right to security and dignity on the land we all share.
0:59:28 Steeped in bitterness and hatred, each side finds it impossible to listen to the other.
0:59:34 Every proposal, no matter what its nature, is greeted with suspicion and immediately
0:59:40 twisted into a form that renders it useless.
0:59:44 Little by little, we’ve become caught in a web of old and new accusations, acts of vengeance,
0:59:51 and endless bitterness.
0:59:53 As in an ancient family quarrel in which grievances accumulate generation after generation, to
0:59:59 the point where not even the most upright and humane judge can sort it out.
1:00:04 It becomes difficult to imagine how such an affair can end.
1:00:12 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
1:00:19 fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
1:00:24 New episodes of the Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
1:00:30 This show is part of VOX.
1:00:32 Support VOX’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
1:00:36 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
Albert Camus was a Nobel-winning French writer and public intellectual. During Algeria’s bloody war for independence in the 1950s, Camus took a measured stance, calling for an end to the atrocities on each side. He was criticized widely for his so-called “moderation.” Philosophy professor Robert Zaretsky joins Sean to discuss Camus’s thoughts on that conflict and the parallels with the present moment.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Robert Zaretsky
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This episode was made by:
- Producer: Jon Ehrens
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
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