DANIEL DAYAN
11
names, realities that they tend to substitute. Thus "real" racism turns
attention away from racism, and criminals guilty of guilt take attention
away from criminals guilty of crimes.
The September IIth attack against the United States challenges the
French media's tale of the intifada, which over time has become rou–
tinized. It is centered on the fight of the Palestinian people to recover its
land-land whose limits are left
to
the imagination of each of us. The
tale relies on a system of semantic opposites: wealth (of Israelis)/poverty
(of Palestinians); power (of Israelis)/weakness (of Palestinians); illegiti–
macy (of lsraelis)/Iegitimacy (of Palestinians); racism/universalism; cal–
culationlspontaneity, and so on. The tale's central protagonist is the
Palestinian people, its object the conquest of independence or of liberty.
The Israelis are presented as obstacles, as impediments, as inconve–
niences; they wear uniforms and rarely have faces. The tales always end
in episodes about victims. At that point, Israelis do acquire faces, but
these are faces of executioners. (That is how the mythological face of
Sharon is constructed, whose public appearances alone are meant to jus–
tify outbursts of violence.) Of course, there is no puppet theater without
a villain. But is a journalist's work a form of puppet theater?
This tale, which has been functioning for a year, has been turned
upside down by the events of September
I
rrh, and by the wealth of
information they delivered. The oppositions of wealth/poverty,
power/weakness, racism/universalism, calculation/spontaneity did not
follow the predicted pattern. They were redeployed in anarchic fashion
and have contradicted the media 's discourse. (One almost wants
to
cite
Pier Paolo Pasolini, who praised the
1968
student revolts by saying that
young bourgeois opposed young workers-the latter in uniform.) The
progressive revelations about the various facets of the terrorist attack
suggested a new framework. New York revealed itself as a multicultural
capital, a microcosm of the Third World. The kamikaze were neither
haggard nor starving. Covered with diplomas, they had the leisure to
learn new technologies and did not remotely resemble the hapless vic–
tims they were supposed
to
be. Stepping out of Frantz Fanon's prose,
they found themselves rather with David Lodge. They belonged
to
a
new type of jet set, one that got rid of the jets after using them.
That is why French pundits argue that events in Israel have nothing
to do with events in New York or the United States and that, even if
anti-Israeli advertisements or menaces continue, they are not linked .
Repeatedly, Islamic activists insist that there is a connection. Are their
statements negligible?
