The gospel according to Putin
Plus: the meaning of "From the river to the sea" and Emmanuel Macron’s cynicism
This week at Public Seminar, our authors take a closer look at religious and political creeds. Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg discuss the divergent interpretations of “From the river to the sea” and how Israel has weaponized critiques of the slogan. Mitchell Abidor sniffs out the Emmanuel Macron’s anti-immigrant skullduggery in bestowing France’s highest honor on Missak Manouchian. And Katie Kelaidis explores how Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin curated an ideology that’s persuading some young men in America to convert to Orthodox Christianity.
The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron
Mitchell Abidor
The choice of who will receive this honor is based on merit, to be sure, but it is also political. Who gets selected and when that selection is made always speaks volumes about the state of France—or the needs and goals of its political class. What, then, is the significance of the panthéonisation of Missak Manouchian, survivor of the Armenian genocide, poet, Communist, and a stateless resident of France, a country that twice denied his request for citizenship? How is it that in a France that marginalized and even turned foreigners over to the Nazis, that still fails to integrate its immigrant communities, and in which it is widely felt that the anti-immigrant Rassemblement National will win the next election, the president has granted entry to its most sacred place to someone so, dare we say, un-French?
Putin and Patriarch Kirill’s Promise of Universal Liberation
Katie Kelaidis
Now in his fifth presidential term, Vladimir Putin is on track to be the longest reigning Russian leader since Catherine the Great. The two resilient despots have more in common than one might imagine. They both came to power on the heels of an essentially incompetent predecessor, in whose disposal they had a hand. They both pursued an expansionist foreign policy. And both, in their own way, sought to position Russia as a unique moral and intellectual leader in a time of significant technological and societal change; and in both cases, the path to this last objective ran through the Russian Orthodox Church.
From the River to the Sea, There Is Space for Many Different Interpretations
Alon Confino, Amos Goldberg
If we accept that a Palestinian calling for the “liberation of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” wants to expel the Jews from Israel, then fairness requires that the opposite should also hold true: that all the very many who have ever supported Greater Israel—from the poet Nathan Alterman (one of the most important Israeli poets, who identified politically with the Labour Party) and the signatories of the Greater Israel Manifesto in 1967 (many of whom were affiliated with the Zionist Left) to the current government and the public that supported it at the ballot box—actually supports the annihilation or expulsion of the Palestinians.