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Classical political theory saw public sphere debates as both the mirror and the bulwark of democracy. That space now seems to have become the place where we, horrified, witness the slow yet brutal collapse of its architecture.
Some thinkers, like Chantal Mouffe, would argue that the situation is not as dire as it appears: polemos would be the ordinary, agonistic form of democratic debate. Conflict, not consensus, would be the normal, perhaps desirable, state. Against Habermas’s alleged deliberative illusion, conflict would be constitutive of any authentic politics because deep disagreements never resolve through rational discussion; they are bound to clash over time. Far from being a dysfunction to be corrected, conflict is the very substance of the political, since men and women, their interests and their values, constitute an irreducible plurality (what Mouffe calls the agonistic pluralism). In this sense, political conflict is “tragic”: it pits incompatible points of view against each other.
If that is the case, one of two things follows: either our public space suffers from no illness, or what in it belongs to pathology must be analyzed not as a failure of consensus, but as a pathology of disagreement itself. Mouffe hints at this when she distinguishes agonism, a relation between adversaries who recognize each other’s right to exist, from antagonism, a friend/enemy division that leads to civil war. In a pluralist democracy, the opponent is not an enemy to be toppled but a legitimate adversary: one vigorously contests their ideas, never their right to defend them. Hence the question: when does the adversary become an enemy? And, more fundamentally, what is it in the informational architecture of today’s public space that makes that passage possible? If the problem lies less in our inability to agree than in a disagreement that has become pathological, we must examine the very manufacture of controversies.
To grasp its mechanisms, I adopt an axiom: defending a just cause must follow the truth of the facts, not outpace them nor ignore them. I will proceed inductively and empirically, by comparing two controversies, the Dreyfus Affair and the quarrel over the designation of genocide applied to the Gaza war, to reveal the infrastructure of contemporary debate and, through it, the malaise gnawing at the public sphere. The comparison is all the more warranted since the Dreyfus Affair displays all the features of violent polemics: two clearly identified camps, a partisan press, polarization that cuts across society even within families, moral accusations on both sides, assassination attempts (against Labori, Dreyfus’s lawyer, and against Dreyfus himself), perhaps even a murder (Zola’s death, asphyxiated in 1902 by a blocked chimney, may not have been accidental). The Affair thus gathered every ingredient of polarisation, even violence; and the divide, far from staying limited to intellectuals, traversed all of France. A final common point: the two cases, in their own ways, engage the question of anti-Semitism, one on national scale and the other on a global scale. However deep their differences, they resemble one another enough for their rapprochement to be instructive.
Truth, a real and verifiable stake
In September 1894, French military counterintelligence intercepted at the German embassy in Paris an anonymous document, the “bordereau,” a handwritten letter announcing the delivery of confidential military papers. It proved that a traitor within the army was informing Germany, France’s foe since the 1870 war.
The Dreyfus Affair rested on a precise, factual question capable of being decided: Was Dreyfus guilty of espionage? To answer it, documents, graphological expertise, testimonies, and material proof were mobilized. The controversy concerned tangible facts, and above all, everyone regarded them as verifiable. The best proof of this epistemic agreement: many actors changed their minds along the way .
Georges Picquart, the glorious anti-Semite
The officer Georges Picquart shared the antisemitic prejudices of the army of his time. Appointed in 1895 head of military counter-espionage (the “section de statistique”), he saw new elements emerge. In March 1896, a torn telegram card (a “little blue”) found in the wastebasket of the German military attaché, Schwartzkoppen, addressed to colonel Esterhazy, revealed his connections with Germany. Picquart compared Esterhazy’s handwriting to that of the bordereau—the piece that had condemned Dreyfus—and found them identical. The bordereau was Esterhazy’s handwriting. Picquart later obtained the secret dossier illicitly given to the judges of the court-martial and discovered that it contained almost nothing substantial: most pieces were irrelevant to Dreyfus or interpreted in an overstretched way. He concluded the captain’s innocence.
When he shared his discovery with his superior, General Gonse, he was met with anger: the affair was closed; they would not reopen it simply because the man was innocent. Picquart refused to yield; to silence him, he was exiled to Tunisia. Fearing for his life, he secretly confided his findings in 1897 to his lawyer, Louis Leblois; they reached the vice-president of the Senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.
Esterhazy, tried before a war council, was acquitted on 11 January 1898, and Picquart was arrested just as Zola published J’accuse. On 22 September 1898, Picquart was imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi military prison, the same where Dreyfus had been held before his trial.
Picquart, whose role proved decisive, initially had no sympathy for Dreyfus: he believed him guilty, clung to the army, and intended to defend its version. If he changed his mind, it was for purely documentary reasons. He offers the exemplary case of a man driven by the facts against his own interests and, above all, against his own beliefs. The evidence forced him intellectually before it morally compelled him. The reaction of his superiors (to suppress his discoveries, forge new fakes, then imprison him) only confirmed that the Dreyfus conviction rested on a lie. We must pay tribute to this man who managed to place truth above his loyalty to the institution he served, and above his own antisemitic prejudices.
Jean Jaurès, an ideological conversion
The trajectory of Jaurès, more complex, is politically more instructive. At first indifferent, even reluctant, to Dreyfus’s cause, he was not entirely free of the antisemitism that surrounded society. His socialist framework perceived the Affair as a bourgeois quarrel between a wealthy Jewish officer and the military institution, two sides neither of which represented the working class.
But as Esterhazy’s guilt became harder to deny and as the maneuvers of the staff became clear to all, Jaurès understood that the anti-Dreyfus coalition (the army, the Church, the monarchists) embodied the reactionary forces the socialist movement must defeat. The Affair became for him a fight for the Republic. He poured over the trial summaries and, in the autumn of 1898, published Les Preuves, a methodical dismantling of the accusation. He showed in particular that the secret dossier had been communicated to the judges without the Dreyfus defense counsel’s knowledge, in blatant disregard for the elementary rules of the rule of law. “We intend to provide the proletariat the elements of discussion and proof that we have collected,” he wrote in the preface (this is our emphasis). He, too, placed evidence first and moral imperative second. Again, we must pay tribute to Jaurès, who managed to shift his political lens and revise his analytical categories.
Émile Zola, from observer to actor
Zola followed the Affair with growing unease. He tipped in the autumn of 1897, after hearing Scheurer-Kestner and reviewing the dossier establishing Dreyfus’s innocence. He understood that a spectacular shock was needed to jolting public opinion out of its impasse. His open letter deliberately aimed to provoke a defamation trial, where the evidence would be laid bare for all to see. More than the facts, it was their concealment that moved him: he considered it morally intolerable.
Colonel Henry had forged falsifications to supplement the dullness of the authentic dossier. When these were exposed in August 1898, and he took his own life in his Mont-Valérien cell, many anti-Dreyfus supporters were unsettled. The Affair ended with a grace (1899), a law of amnesty (1900) and a Cassation Court ruling in 1906 that annulled the verdict without a new trial. If their motives were more political than moral, the institutions nevertheless yielded to the weight of the evidence: Dreyfus was rehabilitated in the same year. If the controversy largely ended, it was because it had a clear, bounded object and had obeyed the rules of the administration of proof.
In the Dreyfus affair, the facts took center stage and eventually carried conviction, if not for the anti-Dreyfus camp, at least for many who might have remained indifferent. Institutional fraud (fabricated documents, closed trials, false testimony) had even precipitated the collapse of the anti-Dreyfus stance: each fraud revealed undermined the entire edifice, because each side depended on its epistemic reliability. The anti-Dreyfus camp had ultimately proven indifferent to the regime of proof, even as that proof had driven the machinery of the institutions (the Court of Cassation, the Republic).
The figure of the intellectual: its birth and legitimacy
The noun “intellectual” took hold during the Dreyfus Affair. The anti-Dreyfusards, with Barrès at the forefront, used it to sneer at Zola and the signatories of the Dreyfusian petitions: under their pen, the word carried a pejorative charge. The Affair thus invented the figure of the intellectual who defends, in one move, both the truth and the moral principles that accompany it, now inseparable.
This figure rests on a peculiar authority. Zola is neither jurist, nor military man, nor politician: he is a famous novelist, who speaks in the name of the moral competence his naturalist novels and his portrayal of the working class grant him. His J’accuse draws its power from the fact that he is not a party to the conflict, unlike Bernard Lazare or Mathieu Dreyfus. He is not Jewish, any more than most of Dreyfus’s defenders—Anatole France to Jaurès, Charles Péguy to Octave Mirbeau, to name a few; as for Proust’s Jewish origins through his mother, they have nothing to do with his involvement. These intellectuals could present themselves convincingly as outsiders to the group assigned to Dreyfus, hence disinterested (many had more to lose than to gain by defending a Jewish captain). Such a disinterested stance could thus claim universality.
Zola was not merely famous: he was morally serious, in the sense the nineteenth century understood it. The Rougon-Macquart novels had made him the unperturbed investigator of social truth, and his literary authority translated into epistemic authority. Few could address the entire nation, and that rarity amplified the weight of every voice; Zola could reach a public of the undecided.
Slow pace as a condition of seriousness
The Affair lasted twelve years, from 1894 to 1906. For twelve years, arguments accumulated, proofs emerged slowly, positions evolved, and some changed sides after examining the facts. The stenographic reports of the hearings allowed the public to follow the debates word for word; pamphlets and books were read. The controversy had depth because it had time.
Twelve years is enough to profoundly shake political life. The Affair widened the gulf between Republicans and anti-Republicans; it even helped consolidate the Republican camp. It was taken so seriously that several prominent figures had to withdraw as truth came to light: Chief of Staff Boisdeffre resigned the day after Henry’s confessions in August 1898, and War Minister Cavaignac a few days later. Again, the slowness of the process and the gravity of these resignations testified to the Affair’s seriousness.
The Gaza “genocide” case
I speak of a “genocide case” regarding Gaza because, as with the Dreyfus Affair, an accusation of extreme gravity is leveled, this time against a state. It is brought before the courts, widely contested, and it appears to be driven by anti-Semitism for many. It pits two strongly antagonistic political camps against each other and provokes demonstrations and anti-Semitic violence. The accusation is no longer treason in the strict sense but the “crime of crimes.”
Genocide, as a juridical and moral category, has often been established after the fact. The Armenian genocide was named as such only for decades. The Holocaust was fully acknowledged only years after the events. In Rwanda in 1994, while massacres were unfolding, Western leaders struggled to avoid the word and spoke of “acts of genocide” to evade their legal obligations. It took years of proceedings for the Srebrenica genocide to be legally established. The pattern repeats: atrocity occurs, evidence accumulates for months or years, researchers and jurists debate definitions, institutions eventually judge, when they do. The word “genocide” arrived late, heavily, at the end of extensive deliberation and on the basis of massive evidence—though some still deny Srebrenica, it isn’t for lack of evidence. What then justifies the accusation that Israel’s massive response to Gaza would be genocide?
Analysis of the evidentiary basis of genocide accusations against Israel
The Dreyfus affair occurred in a world where the concealment of facts was the principal obstacle to truth. The army hid documents, forged evidence, controlled what the public could learn. The rhetorical force of Picquart and Zola came from the revelation: here is what they hid! This had both probative and moral weight, because concealment was scandalous.
Gaza presents the inverse problem, one of an overabundance of documentation: satellite images, testimonies, casualty tallies, petitions before the ICJ, UN inquiries, filmed videos. The obstacle is no longer a lack of evidence, but the impossibility for each document to become decisive in an information space saturated and fragmented, where every piece is immediately enlisted within a pre-established moral frame. This is why the legal architecture of genocide could be ignored, and the verdict rendered by public opinion .
The exceedingly high legal threshold of “genocidal intent”
To be well-founded, the accusation must establish the dolus specialis, the specific and demonstrable intent to destroy a group as such, and not as an inevitable consequence of military operations, however horrific the outcomes may be.
According to well-established international jurisprudence, genocidal acts must deliberately aim at destroying the group. The slide from a volitional criterion (wanting destruction) to a cognitive one (foreseeing it as probable) has allowed the central question of the accusation to blur—the intent—regarding state responsibility . Even foreseeable, a large number of civilian casualties does not constitute genocide legally if the intent to destroy the group is not present. Yet, in the absence of a full official inquiry, we still do not know what orders and intentions guided the army, and whether the deaths of civilians were intended as such (collateral damage, as painful as it is, does not fall under genocide).
A selective and decontextualized use of declarations as evidence
To establish intent, South Africa, which brought the case to the ICJ, relied on a collection of statements by Israeli politicians. The Israeli legal team responded that these were statements taken out of context, mere “isolated affirmations.” Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence, judged the accusation unfounded: the objective, he said, was to destroy Hamas, not the Palestinians . John Spencer, a retired American officer and urban warfare expert, while acknowledging the scale of destruction, argued that Israel was not committing genocide, citing “the mass of evidence of what Israel does to preserve infrastructure, civilian life, and to provide services” .
The Amnesty International report published in December 2024 concluded genocide. It largely relied on statements by political leaders, largely lacking authority over the IDF, and gave no weight to contrary elements: reminders from the IDF’s general counsel about soldiers’ duty to respect the laws of war, declassified cabinet memos ordering the army to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza, or warnings urging civilians to evacuate their homes. The Israeli branch of Amnesty International, closest to events and the field, dissented from the parent organization’s report after its publication. This disagreement did not lead to any discussion or consideration of analytic or evidentiary methods: the Israeli branch was suspended for two years in January 2025, and it is now permanently closed.
To pick incendiary quotes from secondary figures while discarding all contrary elements is a prosecutorial flaw, especially since indicators point to massive destruction as well as a policy aiming in the opposite direction (the Israeli army, for example, authorized the distribution of vaccines, or tried to keep civilians out of danger with thousands of warning messages). The genocide accusation requires a slow accumulation of intent evidence, which may emerge only at the end of the investigation but is currently lacking. What we can say with certainty is that enough elements contradict the genocide thesis to allow us to assert, with the humility demanded by such a grave charge: we do not know whether genocide occurred.
The confusion between war crimes and genocide
Israel has likely committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, but those themselves do not constitute genocide. Its legal counsel, Christopher Staker, argued before the ICJ that “the unavoidable deaths and human suffering inherent to any conflict do not in themselves plausibly demonstrate genocidal intent” .
Scholars at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University argued that to prove genocide, its accusers would need to show that Israel sought to maximize civilian losses, and that the numerous measures taken to reduce them, however imperfect, make the genocide accusation untenable. Neither probable war crimes nor the decision to block aid to civilians for eleven weeks in spring 2025 constitutes genocide. Danny Orbach, a war historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead author of the study, stated that the accusation “is untenable in light of the steps Israel took to reduce civilian casualties, even if the IDF did not always succeed in minimizing collateral damage in every case.” The moral and humanitarian sensitivity is not, in itself, a legal verdict. This elementary distinction is something we seem to have forgotten.
Relaxing genocide
When the evidence is shaky, a remedy remains: deliberately widen and loosen the definition of genocide. So that the war in Gaza could be labeled genocide, Amnesty International explicitly criticized the international jurisprudence standard as “too narrow,” notably the criteria used by the ICJ, which would make genocide in an armed conflict extremely difficult to qualify. It favored a more “flexible” approach, inferring intent from patterns of behavior, statements by leaders, and the scale of destruction. Regarding the ICJ criterion that genocide intent must be the only reasonable conclusion drawn from the facts, the report states: “As explained below, Amnesty International considers this to be a too narrow interpretation of international jurisprudence, which would effectively exclude any genocide conclusion in the context of armed conflict.” Amnesty thus rejected the jurisprudential standard of reference and reshaped it to accommodate Gaza’s military action within its own framework. The method is thought-provoking.
The report further notes that it “found no evidence, in any of the cases, of a legitimate military target at or near the site of the attack.” But not finding a military objective does not prove that intent was to strike civilians, much less to commit genocide. The absence of proof of a military target does not establish that civilians were the intended target: Amnesty treats one as the equivalent of the other, which is a basic prosecutorial fallacy.
The strange distortion of the ICJ order
The primary source of public confusion lies in interpreting the ICJ’s January 26, 2024 provisional measures order as a ruling on the merits. The Court itself wrote: “At this stage of the proceedings, the Court is not called upon to rule definitively on whether the rights that South Africa seeks to protect exist. It only needs to determine whether the rights that South Africa claims and seeks to protect are plausible.” Deciding that a claim is plausible, which justifies provisional measures, is not the same as ruling that genocide occurred; it is merely acknowledging that the question deserves examination (and I am among those who insist that examination take place). Yet the order was widely received as a verdict, which it was not.
On April 29, 2026, Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor on leave, gave a notable interview to journalist Mehdi Hasan for his Zeteo platform. Hasan pressed him repeatedly to declare that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted genocide. Khan, who is by no means sympathetic to Israel (he was the one who sought arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in 2024), refused: “One would have to be reckless to act merely under the pressure of the clamor. One acts on the basis of evidence.”
Khan’s refusal to affirm genocide perhaps signified that the evidence was not yet assembled. When Hasan argued that “almost all experts” speak of genocide, he stood firm: “No crime is excluded if the evidence exists,” he claimed, without explicitly saying that such evidence existed.
This statement should have produced two effects: to suspend the accusation until the Court completes its work, and to shift the discussion toward the proportionality of Israel’s response and its violations of the laws of war. It did not happen; newspapers and social networks barely noted the clarification. The accuser camp is in effect indifferent to legal procedures, to definitions, and to actual proof. Those procedures, central to the Dreyfus Affair, have quietly vanished here. They prefer the infamy carried by a historically heavy word.
The speed of information
Only a few days after the start of the Israeli response in October 2023, academics, activists, and intellectuals were already talking of genocide. By October 13, Raz Segal, then a relatively little-known Israeli historian of genocides, described Israeli operations in Jewish Currents as a “case study of genocide.” Formulated almost the day after the war’s outbreak, this thesis was quickly taken seriously by media outlets and activists.
On December 29, 2023, less than three months into the war, South Africa brought a case to the ICJ under the 1948 Genocide Convention, arguing that Israel was committing genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. (Only one earlier precedent was faster: Ukraine, which brought a case to the ICJ two days after Russia’s invasion, but precisely to denounce Russia’s misuse of the genocide accusation.)
Designed for slow institutional processes, the Genocide Convention’s legal architecture unfolded at a speed it was not designed for. Barely had Gaza’s response begun, and the word genocide was spoken with authority against a situation notoriously shrouded in fog of war.
Zola’s J’accuse drew much of its power from having come after more than three years of accumulating documents, rejected petitions, evidence of forgery, and smothered discoveries. Dreyfus was a single man, his dossier straightforward, and yet it took three years for the truth to emerge. Zola’s intervention crowned a lengthy evidentiary process, and its authority also rested on this late timing.
Charges concerning Gaza arrived with astonishing speed at the start of the war, not in its middle or at its end. That is why they give the impression of flouting the very notion of proof. Let us be clear: this precocity is not always a fault, since the Convention aims to enable early warning so that “never again” does not stay a retrospective regret. But a warning is not an accusation. The accusation criminalizes an entity without carrying the weight of a proof that has yet to be assembled, in an information environment that expects it to be so.
With this real-time documentation, investigative spirit ceases to operate. Satellite images, filmed statements from Israeli officials, daily casualty tallies: the dossier seemed to assemble itself, publicly and instantaneously, as if it carried its own evidence and made investigation superfluous. In prior genocides, documents had to be unearthed painstakingly. Here, they spread by themselves, and interpretation needed only to draw on the old reservoir of antisemitic stereotypes.
This rapid deployment erased distinctions between disproportionality, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Once in circulation among activists, networks, and media, the term lost its legal definition to become a stigmatic accusation. Voiced, it became hard to challenge without being accused of “Holocaust denial.” Endowed with performative moral authority, it struck at the very legitimacy of justice: delaying judgment until verdict, epistemic scruples, the ability to weigh conflicting elements in a situation as complex as war.
The collapse of the intellectually authoritative figure
Another striking difference with the Dreyfus case: the social position of those who accuse. In the Third Republic, it was the army that produced crude forgeries and proof so fragile that they could be contested effectively. In the Gaza case, it is the camp that claims to be the heir of the Dreyfusards (an entire ecosystem of NGOs and genocide specialists, relayed by media, bloggers, TikTok users, and activists) that ignores the evidence.
This ecosystem instantly amplified preliminary judgments, short-circuiting the deliberation they would normally require. Researchers like Segal or Bartov, who considered themselves qualified to decide, removed the accusation from any deliberation (the latter indeed joined the debate a bit later than the former).
Within weeks, the word genocide moved from media to university associations, to NGOs, and to the UN. Through a typical mechanism sociologists call institutional isomorphism (imitation), complemented by the symbolic authority conferred by academic status, activists aligned themselves with a reality produced by institutions. Objectified by misread court requests, NGO reports that redefined genocide, and endless online trolling, the label of genocide became a settled fact. Collectively, these organizations produced what looks like evidence yet is only the effect of authority: one recognizes here what Berger and Luckmann called the social construction of reality.
This reality was produced by an existing legal and scholarly infrastructure: a community of genocide specialists, international jurists, and human rights organizations ready to apply this framework swiftly. The Genocide Convention, the ICJ, and the entire apparatus of international humanitarian law could be mobilized on demand. If South Africa could file its petition in a matter of weeks, it was partly because the very genre of such a petition had already been constituted. Raz Segal and Omer Bartov argued that what was unfolding matched genocide definitions and history, but they reasoned from theory and opinion, not from facts and legal decisions. Bartov, who said in November 2023 that there was no genocide yet, later changed his mind. In a New York Times op-ed headlined “I am a genocide scholar. I recognize it when I see it,” the Holocaust historian stated that he could “see” genocide. In reality, he had seen nothing: he could not even enter Gaza, as journalists and researchers were barred by the Israeli government. He relied on statements by Israeli leaders and on images of massive destruction in Gaza—hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, heritage sites, wastewater treatment plants, and farmlands. He saw a policy aimed at making Gaza’s “life after” impossible, equating destruction with the intention of genocide. Effects and intentions must remain distinct analytical categories. These scholars are unlikely to be antisemitic. They projected their analytic frameworks onto a confusing event, and journalists and social networks, often driven by malice, quickly recycled their claims.
This projection process is well known in the social sciences. Psychologist Nick Haslam proposed the notion of “concept creep” to describe the broadening of certain notions, horizontally to new phenomena and vertically to lesser harms . Thus “trauma” now applies indiscriminately to family, work, or war, making the concept vague and excessively broad. Genocide seems to be following a similar path. Why this semantic extension? Four traits of the sociology of scientific communities explain it. Professional interests: broadening a concept yields more events to study and teach, more conferences to hold, more citations, and greater public resonance. Moral entrepreneurship: Howard Becker coined the term “moral entrepreneurs” to describe actors, experts, and activists who push to have social problems recognized as grave moral threats and gain influence and resources. Incentive structures: the academic world rewards novelty and relevance more than terminological precision. The tenure, promotion, funding, and editorial policies of journals prize new, sensational, or socially pertinent theses over conceptual accuracy or replication. Disciplines as corporations: sociologist Randall Collins argued that academic disciplines function like corporations, where theories and concepts constitute cultural capital used to draw boundaries, vie for status, and fuel credential inflation. Researchers expand their domains to enlarge their corporation’s influence.
Notably, the claim to social justice and the radicalism of intellectuals go hand in hand with the exponential growth in public space remuneration. Zola took immense risks: he had to go into exile in England and may have paid with his life for his commitment. But a modern Zola, Drumont, or Maurras would enrich themselves through a global audience, via international lecture circuits, blogs, podcasts, and networks of organizations and donors (La France juive by Drumont sold more than a hundred thousand copies in its first year, and La Libre Parole was also a commercial success; but those were exceptions). The activism of intellectuals is closely tied to the fact that ideas now circulate on a highly structured market where partisan publics pay for opinions that comfort them. Advocacy and denunciation, across the political spectrum, “pay” because they activate networks, organizations, and publics ready to fund a point of view.
Fragmentation of the public space
Another characteristic: the fragmentation of the public space. In the time of the Dreyfus Affair, around fifty newspapers competed; today there are thousands of information sources, each with its own audience. A contemporary Zola would be celebrated only by the convinced and ignored or ridiculed by others. Authority has migrated to podcasters with millions of listeners, to Substack authors with loyal reader bases, to bloggers. These figures strengthen existing communities more than they convert opponents. Zola reached people who did not believe him. The capacity to adopt another point of view, to shift positions, seems compromised: in a fragmented space, speech serves mainly to provide everyone with arguments to justify their preconceived stance.
Because the public is so fragmented, a Zola-style intervention would be diluted rather than explosive. Paradoxically, the democratization of speech devalues it: when everyone has a platform, signal becomes noise. Moral and intellectual authority requires rarity and seriousness that have vanished.
Internet exposes all authority to the challenge of people without titles but with enormous audiences. As soon as a Zola-like figure speaks, a thousand voices rise, not to debate the argument, but to question the speaker’s motives, hidden funding, ethnic identity, or past statements. One attacks the person, the evidence becomes secondary.
Each camp holds the facts to be evident and suspects the other of lying or being brainwashed. The psychological space where a Zola-like intervention could operate presupposed a public uncertain about the facts, ready to doubt, susceptible to persuasion. That public no longer exists; it has grown rigid in its beliefs and dispersed spatially and socially.
Ideological coherence and incoherence
Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards were not merely for or against Dreyfus. They embodied two coherent and developed worldviews: on one side Republican values, individual rights, the separation of church and state; on the other, nationalism, military authority, religion, and antisemitism as political doctrine. These positions had philosophical depth. One could understand the ideology of the anti-Dreyfusards while opposing them.
Contemporary controversies function differently. They are vast umbrellas under which heterogeneous groups take shelter.
On the surface, the pro-Palestinian camp, the genocide accusation camp, seems ideologically coherent: progressive, postcolonial, in solidarity with the Global South, deeply wary of Western power. Yet, upon closer inspection, this coherence frays. Left-wing militants who apply anti-imperialist grids to combat the far right; Islamists with religious motivations unaligned with emancipation; liberal human-rights defenders attached to the framework of international law; postcolonial academics for whom the Palestinian cause is the last unresolved case of classical colonialism; TikTok youth with humanitarian commitments, boasting limited historical knowledge.
These groups share the genocide reality for reasons sometimes incompatible. The secular universalist and the Islamist are not natural allies; the liberal jurist and the anti-Western thinker have little in common philosophically. What binds them is not a common project but the object of their opposition. The pro-Israeli camp, equally fractured, suffers from the same inconsistency. It includes neoconservatives who see Israel as a bulwark of Western civilization against Islamism; evangelical Christians animated by theological commitments to Israel; left-leaning Zionists distressed by civilian losses but currently unwilling to label it genocide; Jewish communities acting primarily from historical trauma and existential fear; right-wing Jews justifying government policy; and far-right nationalists in Europe and America who support Israel because they project onto the country their own hostility toward Muslim populations.
In both camps, what holds disparate groups together is hatred: the object of hatred binds them more than discourse does. Hatred feeds hatred, so that hate and counter-hatred appear to be the cement of these camps and the ordinary regime of the public space.
The historical contrast is telling. The Dreyfus camp did not lack tensions: anarchists, socialists, moderate republicans, and even a few liberal Catholics coexisted there. But in organizing itself, it discovered a vision and a definition—the republican legality—that became its true shared language.
In the Gaza debate, nothing of the sort exists. Or rather, if a common language emerges as the controversy unfolds, it is the language of anti-Zionism, a concept geopolitically poor and ineffective, unable to provide a philosophical or moral foundation.
Conclusion: the divorce between truth and justice
One often cites the Dreyfus Affair as the model of democratic controversy because it shows a society capable of dividing over a question of justice and then correcting itself. The Affair was far from perfect, but it remains exemplary in that it achieved a synthesis of justice and epistemology. What contemporary controversies lack is the very desire for a factual bedrock, a figure of disinterested intellectual authority, the primacy of inquiry over conviction.
The genocide accusation mobilized a dense network of organizations, scholars, institutions, and NGOs acting in symbiosis and capable, through synergy and isomorphism, of creating a powerful reality, with categories that seem self-evident. It developed by ignoring the elementary rules of evidence. The Dreyfus Affair, by contrast, was made possible by a public-sphere architecture in which disinterested intellectuals analyzed evidence over a long institutional timescale.
This moral economy has vanished in the Gaza affair. The link between the demonstrated fact and the moral response has broken. Convictions precede facts; too many facts compete for the status of definitive argument; and too many actors confuse expertise with the authority conferred by an institution. The new information architecture allows rallying fragmented publics around emotional realities that overwhelm the psychic space. It is this conversion of values into pseudo-factuality that characterizes contemporary debate.
The Dreyfus controversy unfolded within the logos space, of rational argument. Some disagreements can be settled, and are thus more rational than others. Contemporary controversies (on climate, vaccines, immigration, identity) unfold more and more on the terrain of identity and affect; they become both more intense and less solvable. Dealing with values, identities, and moral visions of the world, they cannot in principle be settled. There is no equivalent of the bordereau that can be submitted for examination. The Gaza genocide question has been converted into a moral controversy, drowned in a jumble of facts. The strength of the Dreyfus camp lay in the link it forged between truth and justice: morality could not be separated from epistemology. The camp that today calls itself the camp of justice has become indifferent to proof and truth. By dissociating the two, it has emptied its claims of substance and reduced them to a mere gesticulation. It aligns with the anti-Dreyfus camp, which did not change its mind because, in truth, it did not care about truth. Those who claim to inherit the Dreyfus camp resemble them more than they would care to admit. They, too, essentially scorn truth. Their demand for justice is but hollow rhetoric, lacking depth or gravitas. When used too broadly, too loosely, too rapidly, the word genocide functions more as a political rallying cry than as a juridical and moral qualification. There is a grave distortion of our vocabulary and of the political itself here.
A mark of our era’s confusion: we are left with turning to the courts, hoping they will do their job without prejudice. Until then, we must mourn the dead and suspend judgment.