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Classical political theory imagined the debates of the public sphere as both the reflection and the safeguard of democracy. That space now seems to have become, for those of us who observe it with dismay, the scene of the slow yet brutal collapse of its very 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, rather than consensus, would be the normal—and perhaps desirable—state. In opposition to what Mouffe calls Habermas’s deliberative illusion, conflict would be constitutive of any authentic politics because profound disagreements are never resolved through rational discussion; they are destined to clash persistently. Far from being a dysfunction to be repaired, conflict is the very substance of politics, given the intractable plurality of people, their interests, and their values (what Mouffe terms the agonistic pluralism). In this sense, political conflict is “tragic”: it pits irreconcilable viewpoints against one another.
If that is the case, one of two things follows: either our public space suffers from no ailment at all, or what in it appears as pathology should be analyzed not as a failure of consensus, but as a pathology of disagreement itself. Mouffe hints at this when she distinguishes agonism—the relationship between adversaries who acknowledge each other’s right to exist—from antagonism, the friend/foe split that leads to civil war. In a pluralist democracy, the opponent is not an enemy to be destroyed but a legitimate adversary: we vigorously contest their ideas, never their right to defend them. This raises the question: when does the adversary become an enemy? And, more fundamentally, what in the current public space’s information architecture makes that passage possible? If the illness lies less in our inability to agree than in a disagreement turned pathological, then we must examine the very fabric of contemporary controversies.
To understand these mechanisms, I start with an axiom: defending a just cause must follow factual truth, not precede it or ignore it. I will proceed inductively and empirically, by comparing two controversies—the Dreyfus Affair and the dispute over whether the Gaza war constitutes genocide—to reveal the infrastructure of today’s debate and, thereby, the malaise that gnaws at the public sphere. The comparison is particularly apt because the Dreyfus Affair displayed all the hallmarks of violent polemics: two clearly defined camps, a partisan press, a polarization that pierced society even within families, moral accusations on both sides, attempts at assassination (against Labori, Dreyfus’s lawyer, and against Dreyfus himself), and perhaps even a murder (Zola’s death, asphyxiated in 1902 by a blocked chimney, may not have been accidental). The Affair gathered all the ingredients of polarization, and the divide crossed beyond intellectuals, seeping into every corner of France. A final common thread: both cases, in their own way, raise the issue of antisemitism, one on a national scale and the other on a global scale. Despite their differences, they resemble each other enough for the comparison 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 note announcing the delivery of confidential military papers. It proved that a traitor within the army was feeding information to Germany, France’s foe since 1870.
The Dreyfus Affair rested on a precise, factual question capable of being settled: Was Dreyfus guilty of espionage? To answer it, people mobilized documents, handwriting analyses, testimonies, and material proof. The controversy hinged on tangible facts, and, above all, everyone deemed them verifiable. The strongest proof of this epistemic agreement: a substantial number of actors changed their minds as the case evolved .
Georges Picquart, the Glorious Antisemitist
The officer Georges Picquart shared the antisemitic prejudices of the army of his time. Appointed in 1895 to head the army’s counter-espionage service (the “statistical section”), he encountered new elements. In March 1896, a torn telegram—an imperial little blue—from the German attaché Schwartzkoppen, addressed to Commander Esterhazy, revealed Esterhazy’s connections to Germany. Picquart compared Esterhazy’s handwriting with that of the bordereau; they were identical. The bordereau had been written by Esterhazy. Picquart then accessed the secret dossier illegally supplied to the war council judges and found it nearly devoid of probative value: most pieces bore no relevance to Dreyfus and were misinterpreted. He concluded Dreyfus’s captaincy was innocent.
When he shared his discovery with his superior, General Gonse, the latter grew irritated: the affair was closed; there was no reopening simply because a man was innocent. Picquart refused to bow to pressure; in order to silence him, he was sent to Tunisia. Fearing for his life, he secretly confided his findings in 1897 to his lawyer, Louis Leblois; they eventually 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 at the very moment Zola published J’accuse. On 22 September 1898, he was imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi military prison, the same one where Dreyfus had been held prior to his trial.
Picquart’s role was decisive, yet he initially held no sympathy for Dreyfus: he believed him guilty, was loyal to the army, and intended to defend that version. If he changed his mind, it was for purely documentary reasons. He provides a paradigm of a man who is led by the facts against his own interests and, above all, against his own beliefs. The evidence compelled him intellectually before it compelled him morally. The reaction of his superiors (suppressing his discoveries, manufacturing new fakes, then imprisoning him) only confirmed that Dreyfus’s conviction rested on a lie. We should honor this man who managed to place truth above loyalty to the institution he served as well as above his own prejudices against Jews.
Jean Jaurès, An Ideological Conversion
Jaurès’s trajectory, more complex, is politically more instructive. Initially indifferent, even reluctant, to the Dreyfus cause, he was not entirely free from the prevailing antisemitism of his time. His socialist framework led him to see the affair as a bourgeois quarrel between a wealthy Jewish officer and the military establishment, two sides that did not represent the working class.
Yet as Esterhazy’s guilt became harder to deny and the maneuvers of the general staff came to light, Jaurès understood that the anti-Dreyfus coalition (the army, the Church, the monarchists) embodied the reactionary forces the socialist movement needed to defeat. The Affair transformed into a fight for the Republic. He delved into the trial records and published, in the autumn of 1898, Les Preuves, a meticulous dismantling of the accusation. He showed, among other things, that the secret dossier had been shown to the judges without the Dreyfus defense attorney’s knowledge, flouting the simplest rules of due process. “We want to provide the proletariat with the elements of discussion and proof that we have gathered,” he wrote in the preface (we are quoting). Here too, the evidence came first, moral imperative second. Once again, praise is due to Jaurès, who managed to shift his political lens and revise his analytic categories.
Émile Zola, From Observer to Actor
Zola followed the Affair with growing unease. He shifted in the autumn of 1897, after hearing Scheurer-Kestner and learning of the dossier establishing Dreyfus’s innocence. He understood that a spectacular shock was needed to move public opinion out of its deadlock. His open letter deliberately aimed to provoke a defamation trial, in which the evidence would be laid bare for all to see. More than the facts themselves, it was their concealment that moved him: he deemed it morally intolerable.
Colonel Henry had manufactured falsifications to compensate for the dossier’s insecurity. When they were exposed in August 1898, and he killed himself in his Mont-Valérien cell, many anti-Dreyfusards were unsettled. The Affair ended with a royal pardon (1899), a law of amnesty (1900), and a Cassation Court ruling in 1906 that nullified the verdict without referring the case to a new tribunal. Although their motivations were more political than moral, the institutions nonetheless yielded to the weight of the evidence: Dreyfus was rehabilitated in that same year. If the controversy ended largely, it was because it had a clear and bounded object and obeyed the rules for the administration of proof.
In the Dreyfus Affair, facts took center stage and eventually swayed conviction, if not among the anti-Dreyfus camp, at least among many who might have remained indifferent. The institutional fraud (fabricated pieces, closed hearings, false testimonies) had even precipitated the downfall of the anti-Dreyfus position: each fraud revealed undermined the entire edifice, for each camp depended on epistemic reliability. The anti-Dreyfus camp proved indifferent to the rule of evidence, even as the evidence carried the verdict within 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, led by Barrès, used it to mock Zola and the signatories of the Dreyfusard petitions: under their pen, the term carried a pejorative meaning. The Affair thus invented the figure of the intellectual who, in a single movement, defends both truth and the moral principles attached to it, now inseparable from one another.
This figure rests on a particular kind of authority. Zola was neither jurist, nor military, nor politician: he was a famous novelist who spoke in the name of the moral competence that his naturalist novels and his depiction of the working world gave him. His J’accuse drew its force from not being a party to the conflict, as Barthe Lazare or Mathieu Dreyfus could be. He was not Jewish, just as most of Dreyfus’s defenders—from Anatole France to Jaurès, from Charles Péguy to Octave Mirbeau, to name a few—were not Jewish; Proust’s Jewish origins, on his mother’s side, had nothing to do with his engagement. Those intellectuals could present themselves as apparently detached from the group to which Dreyfus had belonged, thus disinterested (many stood to lose more than gain by defending a Jewish captain). Such a disinterested stance could, in turn, claim universal reach.
Zola was not merely famous: he was morally serious in the sense understood in the nineteenth century. The Rougon-Macquarts had cast him as the unflinching investigator of social truth, and his literary authority translated into epistemic authority. Few could address the whole nation, and that rarity gave weight to every voice; Zola’s could reach the undecided public.
Slow Pace, Condition of Seriousness
The Affair lasted twelve years, from 1894 to 1906. For twelve years, arguments accumulated, proofs emerged gradually, positions shifted, and some changed camps after examining the facts. The stenographic records of the hearings allowed the public to follow the debates word for word; brochures and books were read. The controversy ran deep because it had time on its side.
Twelve years is enough to deeply unsettle political life. The Affair widened the rift between Republicans and anti-Republicans; it even helped to consolidate the Republican camp. It was treated with such seriousness that several prominent figures had to withdraw as the truth emerged: Chief of Staff Boisdeffre resigned the day after Henry’s confession in August 1898, and War Minister Cavaignac a few days later. Again, the slow pace of the process and the severity of such resignations testified to the Affair’s gravity.
The Gaza Genocide “Case”
I refer to the charge of genocide in Gaza as a “case” because, just as in the Dreyfus matter, an accusation of extreme gravity has been leveled at a state. Brought before the courts, widely contested, it seems to many to be driven by antisemitism. It sets two strongly antagonistic political camps against one another and generates protests and antisemitic violence. The accusation is no longer about high treason but about an alleged “crime against humanity.”
As a legal and moral category, genocide has often been established post hoc. The Armenian genocide was not named as such for decades. The Holocaust was only fully recognized years after the events. In Rwanda, in 1994, as massacres unfolded, Western leaders strained to avoid the word and spoke of “genocidal acts” to sidestep legal obligations. It took years of proceedings for the Srebrenica genocide to be legally established. The pattern repeats: atrocity occurs, evidence accumulates over months or years, scholars and jurists debate definitions, institutions eventually judge when they do. The word “genocide” arrives late, heavy, after a long deliberation and on the basis of massive evidence—though some still deny Srebrenica, not for lack of evidence. So what underpins the accusation that Israel’s massive response to Gaza amounts to genocide?
Analysis of the Evidentiary Basis for Genocide Accusations Against Israel
The Dreyfus Affair unfolded in a world where the concealment of facts was the principal obstacle to truth. The army hid documents, manufactured evidence, controlled what the public could know. The rhetorical power of Picquart and Zola lay in the revelation: here is what they had hidden! This had probative and moral force because concealment scandalized the public.
Gaza poses the opposite problem: an overabundance of documentation—satellite images, testimonies, casualty tallies, petitions to the International Court of Justice, UN investigations, filmed videos. The obstacle is no longer lack of evidence but the impossibility for each piece to be decisive in an information-rich, fragmented space where every document is quickly enlisted within a pre-set moral frame. Hence the legal architecture of genocide could be overlooked, and the verdict left to public opinion.
The High Legal Threshold of “Genocidal Intent”
To be founded, the accusation must establish dolus specialis, the specific and demonstrable intent to destroy a group as such, and not merely as a byproduct of military operations, however horrific their consequences.
According to well-established international jurisprudence, genocidal acts must aim at the deliberate destruction of the group. The slide from a volitional criterion (desire to destroy) to a cognitive one (to foresee it as probable) has allowed questions about intent to blur the central point of the charge, namely state responsibility. Even if casualties are numerous, they do not by themselves constitute genocide unless there is an intent to destroy the group. Yet, in the absence of a full official inquiry, we still do not know what orders and intents guided the army, or whether civilian deaths were intended as such (collateral damage, however horrific, does not equal 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 political leaders. The Israeli legal team replied that these were taken out of context, mere “isolated assertions.” Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence, deemed the accusation unfounded: the objective, in his view, was to destroy Hamas, not the Palestinian people . John Spencer, a retired American officer and urban warfare expert, while acknowledging the scale of the destruction, argued that Israel was not committing genocide, citing “the sheer volume of evidence showing that Israel is preserving civilian life and infrastructure and delivering services” .
Amnesty International’s December 2024 report reached a genocide conclusion. It largely relied on statements by political leaders, largely devoid of authority on the Israeli Defense Forces, and gave little weight to contrary elements: reminders by the military prosecutor general about soldiers’ duty to respect the laws of war, declassified cabinet orders mandating greater humanitarian aid to Gaza, or warnings urging civilians to evacuate. The Israeli branch of Amnesty International, closer to events and on the ground, dissented from the parent organization’s report after its publication. That disagreement produced no discussion or debate about the methods of analysis and collection of evidence: the Israeli branch was suspended for two years in January 2025 and remains closed today.
To pick out incendiary quotes from second-rate actors and dismiss all contrary elements is a probative vice, especially since the indicators point to massive destruction as well as a systematic policy in the opposite direction (the Israeli army, for instance, allowed vaccine distribution or attempted to divert civilians away from danger with thousands of warning messages). The genocide accusation demands a slow accumulation of evidence of intent, which may emerge only at the end of the investigation but this is currently lacking. What we can say with certainty is that enough counterevidence exists to prevent confidently concluding that genocide occurred: we cannot know for sure whether genocide occurred.
The Confusion Between War Crimes and Genocide
Israel has undoubtedly committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, but these, in themselves, do not constitute genocide. Its legal representative, Christopher Staker, told the ICJ that “the inevitable deaths and human suffering inherent to any conflict do not by themselves demonstrate a plausible genocidal intent” .
Researchers at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center argued that to prove genocide, prosecutors would need to show that Israel sought to maximize civilian casualties, and that the numerous steps taken to reduce civilian harm, though imperfect, render the genocide accusation untenable. Neither likely war-law violations nor the decision to block humanitarian aid for eleven weeks in spring 2025 amount to genocide. Danny Orbach, war historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead author of the study, stated that the accusation “is untenable given Israel’s measures to limit civilian casualties, even though the IDF did not consistently minimize collateral damage in 100% of cases, and even if those measures were not always effective.” What morally and humanely hurts is not, in itself, legal verdict material. This elementary distinction, however, seems hard to grasp now.
Softening Genocide
When evidence is shaky, one remedy remains: deliberately broadening and loosening the genocide definition. For Gaza’s war to be labeled genocide, Amnesty International explicitly criticized the international jurisprudence’s “too narrow” definition, including the ICJ criteria, which would make genocide in armed conflict exceedingly difficult to prove. It favored a more flexible approach, deducing intent from patterns of conduct, statements by leaders, and the scale of destruction. Regarding the ICJ criterion that genocidal intent must be the sole reasonable conclusion drawn from the facts, the report asserts: “As explained below, Amnesty International considers that this interpretation is too narrow for international jurisprudence, effectively excluding any genocide conclusion within the context of armed conflict.” Amnesty therefore rejected the guiding judicial criterion and reformulated it to fit Gaza’s military actions within its own framework. The approach is thought-provoking.
The report further claims it “found no evidence, in any case, of a legitimate military objective at the attack site or nearby.” But not finding evidence of a military target does not prove that the intent was to strike civilians, much less to commit genocide. The absence of evidence of a military target does not amount to proof that civilians were the target: Amnesty treats one as the equivalent of the other, a elementary prosecutorial fallacy.
The Strange Deformation of the ICJ’s Order
The public debate’s main source of confusion lies in the ICJ’s January 26, 2024 provisional measures order being read as a merits decision. The Court itself stated: “At this stage of the proceedings, the Court is not called upon to rule definitively on whether the rights Africa South Africa seeks to protect actually exist. It must merely determine whether the rights Africa South Africa claims and seeks to protect are plausible.” Judging a claim as “plausible”—enough to order provisional measures—does not establish that genocide occurred; it merely acknowledges that the question deserves examination (and I, for one, insist that this examination take place). Yet the order has been widely received as a verdict, which it was not.
On April 29, 2026, Karim Khan, then-prosecutor of the ICC on leave, gave a notable interview to journalist Mehdi Hasan for his platform Zeteo. Hasan pressed him to declare that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. Khan, who is by no means sympathetic to Israel (he was the very prosecutor who in 2024 sought arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant), refused: “One would have to be a reckless prosecutor to act merely under the pressure of loud voices. We act on the basis of evidence.”
That statement should have produced two effects: to halt the accusation until the Court finishes 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 prosecutorial camp is in practice indifferent to judicial procedures, legal definitions, and actual evidence. These procedures, which were central to the Dreyfus Affair, have quietly disappeared here. They are replaced by the infamy stirred by a single loaded word with a heavy history.
The Velocity of Information
Just a few days after Israel’s response began in October 2023, academics, activists, and intellectuals were already speaking of genocide. By October 13, Raz Segal, an Israeli historian of genocides then little known, labeled the Israeli operations in Jewish Currents as a case study in genocide. Framed almost immediately after the war’s outbreak, this thesis quickly earned serious attention from media outlets and activists.
On December 29, 2023, less than three months after the war began, South Africa brought a case to the ICJ under the 1948 Genocide Convention, arguing that Israel was committing genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. (Only faster precedent was Ukraine, which brought a case to the ICJ two days after Russia’s invasion, but precisely to challenge Poutine’s abuse of the genocide accusation.)
Designed for slow institutional processes, the genocide framework’s legal architecture was deployed at a velocity it had never anticipated. Soon after Gaza’s response began, the word was spoken, and applied authoritatively to a situation notoriously shrouded in the fog of war.
Zola’s J’accuse drew its power in part from the accumulation of documents, rejected appeals, falsification proofs, and suppressed discoveries after more than three years. Dreyfus was a single man with a straightforward dossier, and yet it took three years for the truth to emerge. Zola’s intervention crowned a lengthy evidentiary process, and his authority rested in part on that late timing.
The Gaza accusations arrived with startling speed, at the dawn of the war rather than in its middle or at its end. This precocity gives the impression that it dispensed with the very notion of proof. This urgency is not always a flaw, since the Convention aims to enable early warning so that “never again” is not merely a retrospective regret. But an alert is not the same as an accusation. An accusation criminalizes an entity without bearing the burden of evidence it has yet to assemble, in an information environment that expects it to be so.
With this real-time documentation, the investigative spirit ceases to operate. Satellite images, filmed statements by Israeli leaders, daily casualty tallies: the dossier seemed to assemble itself publicly and instantly, as if it carried its own obviousness and made the investigation superfluous. In prior genocides, documents had to be exhumed with care. Here they spread on their own, and interpretation had only to draw on the old reservoir of antisemitic stereotypes without much effort.
This rapid deployment erased the distinctions among lack of proportionality, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Once within activists’ and networks’ and media’s circulation, the term lost its legal definition to become a stigmatizing accusation. Pronounced, it became hard to challenge without being accused of “denyism.” Invested with performative moral authority, it struck the basic conditions for justice: delaying judgment until a verdict, epistemic scruples, the capacity to balance contradictory elements in a situation as complex as war.
The Collapse of the Intellectual as an Authority
Another striking difference from the Dreyfus Affair: the social position of those who make the accusations. In the Third Republic, it was the army that produced crude forgeries and evidentiary pieces so fragile that they could be effectively challenged. In the Gaza case, it is the camp that proclaims itself the heir of the Dreyfusards—a whole ecosystem of NGOs and genocide specialists, amplified by media, bloggers, TikTokers, and activists—that ignores the evidence.
This ecosystem instantly amplified provisional judgments, bypassing the deliberation they would normally require. Researchers like Segal or Bartov, convinced of their own competence to decide, removed the accusation from any deliberation (the latter, admittedly, entered the debate a bit later than the former).
Within weeks, the word genocide moved from the media to university associations, to NGOs and to the UN. Through a mechanism sociologists call institutional isomorphism (imitation), coupled with the symbolic authority granted by university status, activists aligned with a reality produced by the institutions. Objectified by misread court requests, NGO reports that redefined genocide, and the endless repetition of social-media trolls, the label “genocide” became an established fact. Together, these organizations produce what seems like an evidence but is merely an effect of authority: this is the social construction of reality, as Berger and Luckmann described it.
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 quickly. 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 kind of petition had already been constituted. Raz Segal and Omer Bartov supported that what was unfolding matched the legal and historical definitions of genocide, but they reasoned from theory and opinion, not from the facts and judicial decisions. Bartov, who had stated in November 2023 that genocide had not yet occurred, later changed his mind. In a New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a genocide expert. I recognize it when I see it,” the Holocaust historian asserted that he saw genocide. In reality, he had not seen anything: Gaza was inaccessible to him, as Israeli authorities had barred journalists and researchers from entering. He relied on statements by Israeli leaders and on footage of massive destruction in Gaza—hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, heritage sites, wastewater treatment plants, and farmland. He perceived a policy aimed at rendering the Palestinian life revival impossible, conflating the war’s effects with genocidal intent. Effects and intents must remain distinct analytical categories. These researchers are likely not antisemitic. They projected their analytic categories onto a confusing event, and newspapers and social networks—often driven by malicious intent—quickly recycled their claims.
This projection process is well known in social science. Psychologist Nick Haslam proposed the notion of “concept creep” to describe the widening of certain concepts horizontally (to new phenomena) and vertically (to less severe cases). 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 conceptual expansion? Four features of the sociology of scientific communities explain it. Professional interests: expanding a concept provides more events to study and teach, more conferences to organize, more citations, and broader public resonance. Moral entrepreneurship: Howard Becker coined the term “moral entrepreneurs” to describe actors, experts, and activists who work to have social problems recognized as grave moral threats, thereby gaining influence and resources. Incentive structures: academia rewards novelty and relevance more than terminological rigor. Tenure, promotion, funding, and editorial policies favor fresh, sensational, or socially meaningful theses over precise concepts or replication. Disciplines as corporations: sociologist Randall Collins argued that academic disciplines function like corporations, with theories and concepts acting as cultural capital to draw boundaries, compete for status, and fuel credential inflation. Researchers widen their domain to augment their corporation’s reach.
Notably, the claim to social justice and the radicalism of intellectuals go hand in hand with the exponential growth of remuneration in the public sphere. Zola took immense risks: he had to exile himself in England and may have paid for his commitment with his life. But a modern Zola, a Drumont, or a Maurras would profit from a global audience, the international circuit of conferences, blogs, podcasts, and a network of organizations and donors (Drumont’s La France juive sold well from the first year, and La Libre Parole was also a commercial success; yet these were exceptions). The activism of intellectuals is closely tied to a world in which ideas circulate on a highly structured market; audiences aligned to a cause compensate ideas that comfort them. Advocacy and denunciation, from all political sides, are financially rewarding because they activate networks, organizations, and audiences willing to pay for an opinion.
The Fragmentation of the Public Space
Another defining trait: the fragmentation of the public space. In the Dreyfus era, roughly fifty newspapers competed; today there are thousands of information sources, each with its own audience. A modern Zola would only be celebrated by the convinced and would be ignored or ridiculed by others. Authority has migrated to podcasters with millions of listeners, Substack authors with loyal readers, and bloggers. These figures reinforce existing communities more than they convert opponents. Zola, by contrast, reached people who did not share his views. The ability to adopt another perspective, to change one’s position, now appears compromised: in a fragmented space, speech mainly serves to supply everyone with arguments to justify their preexisting stance.
Because the public is so fragmented, a Zola-style intervention would be diluted rather than explosive. Paradoxically, democratizing speech has devalued it: when everyone has a platform, signal becomes noise. Moral and intellectual authority now requires rarity and seriousness that have vanished.
The Internet exposes every form of authority to the challenge of anonymous yet widely read voices. As soon as a Zola-like figure speaks, a thousand voices rise, not to discuss the argument, but to question the speaker’s motivations, his hidden funding, his ethnic identity, his past statements. The focus shifts to the person; the evidence becomes secondary.
Each camp holds the facts to be obvious and suspects the other of lying or having undergone brainwashing. The psychological space in which 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 stiffened in its convictions and cracked into spatial and social fragmentation.
Ideological Coherence and Incoherence
Pro-Dreyfus and anti-Dreyfus factions were not simply “for” or “against” Dreyfus. They embodied two coherent and well-developed worldviews: on one side, republican values, individual rights, and the separation of church and state; on the other, nationalism, military authority, religion, and antisemitism as a political doctrine. These positions had philosophical depth. It was possible to understand the anti-Dreyfus ideology even while opposing it.
Contemporary controversies operate differently. They are broad umbrellas under which heterogeneous groups seek shelter.
At first glance, the pro-Palestinian camp, the genocide-accusation camp, appears ideologically coherent: progressive, postcolonial, solidarity with the Global South, deeply distrustful of Western power. But a closer look reveals that this coherence frays. There are left-wing activists applying anti-imperialist frameworks to combat the far right; some supporters or allies of Islamist movements motivated by religious aims rather than emancipation; liberal human-rights advocates tied to the international-law framework; postcolonial scholars who view the Palestinian cause as the last unresolved case of classic colonialism; young TikTok users driven by humanitarian concerns but with limited historical knowledge.
These groups share the reality of genocide for reasons sometimes incompatible. The secular universalist and the Islamist are not natural allies; the liberal jurist and the anti-Western thinker don’t have much philosophically in common. What unites them is the object of their opposition, not a shared project. The pro-Israel camp, a coalition just as fractured, suffers from the same incoherence. It includes neoconservatives who treat Israel as a front line of Western civilization against Islamism; evangelical Christians animated by theological commitments to Israel; left-leaning Zionists anxious about civilian losses but reluctant to label the situation genocide; Jewish communities acting mainly out of historical trauma and existential fear; right-wing Jews justifying their government’s policy; and far-right nationalists in Europe and the Americas who support Israel because they project onto the country their hostility toward Muslim populations.
In both camps, what holds such disparate groups together is hatred: the target of hate binds them more tightly than rhetoric does. Hatred fuels hatred, so that hate and counter-hate appear as the cement of these camps and as the ordinary regime of the public space.
The historical contrast is telling. The Dreyfus coalition was not without tensions: anarchists, socialists, moderate republicans, and even some liberal Catholics mingled within it. Yet as it organized itself, it found a shared vision and definition—the republican legality that became its common language.
In the Gaza debate, nothing of the sort exists. Or rather, yes, a common language gradually emerges as the controversy unfolds, but it is the language of anti-Zionism, a politically poor and ineffective concept that fails to provide a philosophical or moral foundation.
Conclusion: The Divorce Between Truth and Justice
We often cite the Dreyfus Affair as the model of democratic controversy because it shows a society capable of splitting over a matter 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 grounding, the figure of a disinterested intellectual authority, and the primacy of investigation over conviction.
The genocide accusation mobilizes a dense network of organizations, researchers, institutions, and NGOs that work in symbiosis and can, through synergy and isomorphism, create a powerful reality, categorizing events in self-evident ways. It was built by ignoring basic rules of proof. The Dreyfus Affair, by contrast, was made possible by an architecture of the public sphere in which disinterested intellectuals analyzed evidence over a long institutional time frame.
This moral economy has disappeared in the Gaza case. The link between the demonstrated fact and the moral response has broken. Moral convictions precede the facts; too many facts contend for the status of definitive argument; and too many actors confuse expertise with the authority conferred by an institution. The new information architecture enables gathering scattered publics around emotionally charged realities that invade the mental space. This conversion of values into pseudo-fact is what characterizes contemporary debate.
The Dreyfus controversy unfolded within the space of logos, of reasoned argument. Some disagreements can be resolved, and some are more rational than others. Contemporary controversies (on climate, vaccines, immigration, identity) take place more and more on the terrain of identity and affect; they become more intense and less soluble. They concern values, identities, and moral visions of the world, and by principle cannot be resolved. There is no longer a direct equivalent to the bordereau to submit to examination. The Gaza genocide question has been converted into a moral controversy, drowned in a stew of facts. The strength of the Dreyfus camp lay in the close tie it forged between truth and justice: morality could not be separated from epistemology. The camp that now calls itself the camp of justice has become indifferent to proof and truth. By dissociating the two, it has emptied its claims of their substance and reduced them to a mere gesticulation. It ends up resembling the anti-Dreyfus camp, which did not change its mind because, in essence, it did not care about the truth. Those who believe they inherited the Dreyfusards resemble them more than not: they, too, ultimately disregard the truth. Their call for justice is but a hollow rhetoric, lacking depth or gravitas. Used too broadly, too loosely, too quickly, the term genocide functions more as a political rallying signal than as a legal and moral qualification. There is a grave perversion of our vocabulary and of politics itself.
A sign of our era’s confusion: we are left to rely on courts, hoping they will do their job without prejudice. Until then, we must mourn the dead and suspend judgment.