Anti-Zionism and the post-sexual revolution

An evening lecture with Prof. Bruno Chaouat at the IPU Berlin on 21 May 2025.

A year and a half has passed since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. With the passage of time, it seemed possible to analyze more coolly the university responses to these attacks. We know that American campuses, students and professors alike, were moved by Israel's reprisals in the Gaza Strip. A fever of outrage also spread across Europe. Even before Israel's retaliation in Gaza, some of the intellectual and political elite were quick to denounce the “genocide of the Palestinians”, building on the long-standing equivalence between Zionism and racism, or even fascism (an equivalence manufactured in Soviet propaganda laboratories). In America, the unrest on certain campuses led to the resignation of several presidents of prestigious universities, after being “grilled” by representatives of the US Congress for their supposed apathy in the face of an unabashed hatred of Israel and Zionism. On the right, some have exploited antisemitism against the “woke” movement and the Democratic Party, playing American Jews off against the left. On the other hand, anti- or post-Zionist Jews (a very small minority in North America) have been used as an ideological and moral weapon against Israel.

This reflection came to me when I noticed, along with others, the convergence between the violent condemnation of Israel and “Zionism” and LGBTQ struggles. It was this anomaly that led me to reflect on the latent determinations of what might be called a gender studies fixation on the “Zionist” question. Nothing, in principle, seemed to foresee such an alliance of struggles, unless one held “Zionism” and “Israel” to be enemy number 1 of the new modalities of sexual emancipation. LGBTQ, in fact, is the acronym for convergent struggles between homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender and queer identities. This acronym has become the name of new struggles for emancipation, which a priori are part of a history, that of the successive waves of feminism and then of Gay Rights. When the Democratic Party was holding its conference in Chicago, demonstrators, outraged by President Biden's support for Israel, marched under the banners “LGBTQ” and “Gaza”, confirming if proof were needed the alliance that is the subject of this investigation.

But is gender a continuation of the sexual revolution? Is it not rather a question of terminating this revolution? That is a big part of the problem that will occupy me here. After October 7, 2023, it was no longer simply “gender trouble”, it was what, in the name of this trouble, revealed the repressed nature of a fashionable theory. And it's no coincidence that this repression was a sign of the return of the Jewish question, albeit under different names.