It's hardly news that Foucault was a supporter of Israel. Indeed, that was quite characteristic of the French leftist intellectuals of his generation. After all Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir were likewise supporters of Israel too (De Beauvoir as I recall received a number of awards from Hadassah and other Zionist groups for her work in supporting Israel). I suspect this had a lot to do with guilt feelings over the degree of French collaborationism with the Nazis during WW II (the French police and civil service, by and large, were very helpful to the Gestapo in rounding up Jews to be sent to the concentration camps).
Jim F.
On Thu, 30 May 2002 13:36:46 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
> Excerpt from a piece on Sartre by Edward Said in the LRB
> <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/said2211.htm>:
>
> >Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to
> >contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his
> >daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased
> >to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming
> >with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and
> >journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn't until much
> >later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got
> >some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about
> >Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon
> >and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in
> Tunisia
> >and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War.
> >Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his
> >horror at the 'anti-semitic' anti-Israel riots of the time, common
> >in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian
> colleague
> >of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a
> >different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been
> >deported because of his homosexual activities with young students.
> I
> >still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the
> >Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in
> >Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. 'Very exciting,
> very
> >strange, crazy,' I recall him saying about those early days of the
> >Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say
> >that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short
> >while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself
> from
> >all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by
> Gilles
> >Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had
> >fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing
> >support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.
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