The question of how the French philosophers regarded the issue of Palestine and zionists is often a source of disillusionment. Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida, three figures hailed for their intellectual audacity, revealed positions that were anything but uniform, and at times disappointing. All three carried the burden of European history: holocaust, antisemitism, colonialism; yet each worked through that burden in different and contradictory ways sometimes.
Sartre used to be the icon of anti-colonialism, fierce in his denunciation of France’s role in Algeria and outspoken against the Vietnam War, but paralysed when confronted with the issue of Palestine. In 1967, Les Temps Modernes, under his direction, published a major dossier on the Arab–Zionist conflict. Although he included Maxime Rodinson’s essay describing Israel as a “fait colonial”, Sartre’s own introduction insisted on foregrounding Jewish suffering in the wake of the holocaust. Palestinian political rights were acknowledged only obliquely. When Sartre and Beauvoir travelled to Cairo and Jerusalem that same year, Sartre’s reputation in the Arab world collapsed overnight.
In his final years, weakened by illness and reliant on others to record his words, Sartre, under Benny Lévy’s influence, spoke of judaic messianism. Beauvoir, outraged, dismissed these remarks as inconsistent with his lifelong values, denouncing them in La Cérémonie des Adieux as nothing more than hypocrisy: “Il ne croyait pas en Dieu. Il s’était laissé aller à employer ce mot: hypocrite.” A few years later, he accepted an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University, a gesture impossible to read as anything but political. And when Edward Said finally met Sartre in 1979, he left bitterly disappointed: Sartre would speak only of “terror and repression on both sides”, refusing to affirm the Palestinians as a people with the right to nationhood. His universalism, so celebrated elsewhere, faltered here, caught in the gravity of the Shoah and aligned with the liberal zionism of the 1960s and 1970s.
Foucault presents a different face: the eloquence of silence. He wrote virtually nothing on Palestine issue. His political focus was elsewhere: on Iran, sexuality, prisons, and the disciplinary machinery of the modern state. Yet his silence still spoke. During 1967–68, while teaching in Tunis, he witnessed anti-zionism riots charged with antisemitism. The experience left its mark and perhaps explains his caution. But when he sat at the same table with Sartre and Said in 1979, he simply refused to speak on the Middle East. Said read this silence as tacit sympathy with the zionists. Within the contours of Foucault’s thought, his refusal of “grand narratives” was consistent. Yet the irony is brutal: in a context where silence translates into complicity, his reluctance appeared as consent to the status quo.
Derrida followed another trajectory altogether. As a jew from Algeria, he was acutely sensitive to antisemitism, his closeness to Emmanuel Levinas reinforcing that sensibility. But he did not blind himself to Palestine. On visiting Jerusalem in 1988, Derrida spoke openly of Palestinian self-determination as an ethical imperative. In 1998, he went further, denouncing the occupation, calling for zionists withdrawal, while still affirming their right to security. By the early 2000s, he was even questioning the two-state solution itself, offering instead an alternative horizon inspired by South Africa: a post-apartheid democracy, rejecting ethnic hierarchy and embracing plurality. With the consistency of his deconstruction, Derrida dismantled the false binary of “pro-zionist” versus “pro-Palestine” and demanded a political horizon that exceeded stale diplomatic formulas.
Placed side by side, their stances reveal both failure and hope. Sartre longed for universality, yet remained entrapped by Europe’s own history, incapable of naming Palestinian nationhood, neglecting the obvious crimes of the zionism movement. Foucault retreated into ambiguity, refusing to be ensnared by grand narratives, but thereby appearing to condone injustice. Derrida, by contrast, pushed beyond binaries, opening a radical horizon that demanded justice for both. Said, who was bitterly disappointed by Sartre, found greater resonance with Derrida: both were critics of European humanism, both attentive to the Other, and both unwilling to endorse exclusivist identity politics.
Today, as the Palestinian tragedy deepens, the legacy of these philosophers still hangs unresolved. Sartre reminds us that even an ex anti-colonial icon may falter when shackled by his own trauma. Foucault reminds us that silence too is political, leaving traces of its own. Derrida, without offering a ready-made map, shows the courage of imagination: to conceive of a future beyond ethnic exclusivism, where justice is shared. Their divergent positions remain a mirror: do we dare to look with clarity, or do we continue to hide behind our histories?
