A Charismatic Figure within a Complex Reality

The lectures that Paul Gauthier gave after his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1952 became so popular that they were delivered again and again, accompanied by the colored slides he took during the trip, in several towns and villages near Dijon, where Gauthier worked as a theology teacher at the Grand Séminaire. Gauthier’s charisma and visual sensibility attracted the attention of a cameraman, who suggested to Gauthier that they travel to the Holy Land together and make a film about the life of Jesus Christ. Gauthier, who at that point (1954) had abandoned his career as a teacher to become a worker-priest in Jacques Loew’s mission of prêtres-ouvriers in Marseille,^{Footnote 24} saw this opportunity as an extension of the working apostolate he had chosen for himself, since, as he said, “more workers attend cinema than Mass.”^{Footnote 25}

They departed in November 1955 for what Gauthier thought would be a short absence but in fact turned out to be a long and life-changing experience. When work on the film had finished, he decided not to return to France but to become a worker-priest in Nazareth, while exploring the new Jewish society of Israel, which greatly aroused his curiosity. Thus, for the next eleven years, Nazareth in particular and Israel in general would become his home. While he had set out to search for traces of the life of Jesus for a film, Gauthier ended up “incarnating” him in his own life.

Gauthier first spent a couple of months in Nazareth in 1956, and after a short return to Paris, he settled in the Galilean city in 1957. Soon after his arrival, he became a recognized figure in the local landscape, inspiring the sympathy and respect of both the Arab population of Nazareth and the Jewish authorities. Even the Israeli daily press showed an increasing interest in him. For example, an article from December 1958 reads:

Gauthier’s choice of wearing khaki clothes and a tembel hat (a round brimless hat), both clear hallmarks of the Jewish pioneers, was a statement that would differentiate him from both the many Christian clergymen living and working around religious institutions in Nazareth, and the Arab population of the city, most of which opted for a more traditional clothing style.

Nazareth in the 1950s was a city mired in social crisis. The Israeli-Arab War (1948) had left Israel’s Arab population in a fragile situation. Many Arabs, especially residents of rural villages, had fled or were forced to leave their homes and became refugees in the neighboring Arab countries or in large Arab towns within Israel. Nazareth took in a great share of internal refugees, provoking the emergence of a social crisis. This is how Gauthier described the situation in the document he wrote for Vatican II:

This crisis stood in stark contrast to the economic and social situation of the Jewish population at the time. The first decade following the establishment of the State of Israel was characterized by rapid economic development.^{Footnote 28} Gauthier even wrote enthusiastically on this subject in the document prepared for the Council, as a remarkable example of the redeeming aspect of labor:

However, the truth is that the fruits of this economic development barely reached the Arab population, which became the poorest sector in the country. For example, the headline and opening from a daily Israeli newspaper from October 1958 reads:

Nevertheless, the economic gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel concerned Gauthier less than the disparity between the wealth and living conditions of the clergy of the numerous religious institutions established in Nazareth and those of the general population, in “a city which should shine with all the glory of the Gospel, as the home of social justice and peace.”^{Footnote 31} The denunciation of this dissonance between the Christian spirit of care for the poor and the material conditions of the Church would become one of the main items on Gauthier’s agenda at the Council.^{Footnote 32}

From the time of his arrival, he dedicated all his efforts to finding a solution for the work and housing crisis he had encountered in that city. In his Les mains que voici. Journal de Nazareth (published in 1964), Gauthier describes the first steps of the enterprise that had begun in 1956:

The Housing Cooperative: A Bridge between Jews and Arabs

It did not take Gauthier long to learn his way around the young state’s political apparatus and to identify the different officials who would help him execute his project. Directly following the 1948 war, and up until 1966, a separate military regime was put in place to deal with the Arab population. Gauthier soon succeeded in creating personal communication channels, and he “conquered the hearts of both the military regime officials and the representatives of the various government departments in Nazareth,” as was written in an article on his behalf in the Israeli press.^{Footnote 34} For example, in his Journal de Nazareth, Gauthier recalls a friendly visit from representatives of the Israeli government and the Histadrut (the national trade union), who had come to Nazareth to ask for Gauthier’s advice on how to improve the living conditions of the Arab citizens, and who listened to what he had to say “with surprising attention and good will.”^{Footnote 35} And indeed, shortly after that meeting in 1957, the Israeli civilian and military authorities gave their accord to the creation of the cooperative and promised their financial and technical support.^{Footnote 36} Thanks to Gauthier’s intervention, it would be the first time the State of Israel invested money in Arab construction, financing three-fifths of the houses’ cost outright and giving long-term loans for the payment of the rest, also financed in part by donations Gauthier had collected in Europe.^{Footnote 37}

Gauthier was well aware of the polarities of Israeli reality and politics.^{Footnote 38} On the one hand, working and living among the marginalized Arab workers in Nazareth, Gauthier witnessed the effects of the military regime on the Arab population. Nevertheless, when describing his experience in Nazareth both in his writings^{Footnote 39} and in the interviews he gave to the Israeli press, he found it important to remark upon the “goodwill” of the Jewish leadership toward the Arab population; he saw his cooperative as not just a solution for the work and housing problem, but also as a bridge that would put an end to the suspicion and hostility between Jews and Arabs in Israel. As he says in an interview for a Hebrew newspaper from April 1959:

Throughout his life in Nazareth, Gauthier saw himself as a mediator between Jews and Arabs in Israel, helping at the local level to bring about peace between the two peoples.

An Apostolate of Poverty

As mentioned previously, Gauthier settled in Nazareth while in search of traces of the life of Jesus. Spiritually nourished by the religious experience of Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), the French Catholic priest who traveled to Nazareth and the Middle East to imitate Jesus’s life of poverty and manual labor,^{Footnote 41} Gauthier had placed these two principles as the pillars of his theology.

First of all, he made the decision to live in poverty, and he demanded the same commitment to poverty from all Catholics, directing his critique specifically at the influential clergy of Nazareth, many of whom were “tragically unwilling to apply pontifical directives on fair salaries,”^{Footnote 42} despite owning large properties. For Gauthier, poverty should be a precondition for any missionary work:

In Nazareth, Gauthier strictly adopted the principle of poverty as his lifestyle. He asked that his salary be food alone, but when the cooperative fellows insisted, he would only accept to be paid the bare minimum.^{Footnote 44} He gave up the apartment offered to him at the cooperative to a large family who had been living in an ancient cave in the Schneller Quarter in Nazareth (a piece of land under German Christian ownership) and made his residence instead in an extremely humble hut. A journalist who visited Gauthier in 1966 provided a description: “The hut, made out of bits of tin and tree branches, is almost empty of furniture. It has only two beds and a bookcase full of philosophy books in different languages. Here lives Father Paul Gauthier.”^{Footnote 45}

In an earlier article from 1958 another journalist wrote that the hut did not even have electricity or running water.^{Footnote 46} Gauthier transformed the ancient cave into a meeting and prayer space for his small group of disciples, a few young European and Latin American Catholics, members of Les compagnons de Jesus Charpentier. In May 1967, only a few weeks before the war, an article about Gauthier and his group had appeared in the mainstream daily newspaper Maariv:

An Apostolate of Manual Labor

Indeed, despite his relatively advanced age by the time of his arrival (forty-two), his lack of training, which caused him to endure much physical pain while working, and the “oppressive” Israeli heat,^{Footnote 48} Gauthier spent most of his years in Israel as a manual laborer. Manual work was for him the most profound religious experience, an activity that allowed him to feel as if he were physically incarnating Jesus. His Journal de Nazareth is full of descriptions of the spiritual experience of labor:

Through this experience of hard manual labor, Gauthier felt the two thousand years separating him from the father of Christianity disappear. That was, according to his own testimony, the answer he used to give to his fellow workers when asked why someone like him, who certainly had other options in life, would choose this kind of work.^{Footnote 50}

Gauthier saw collective labor as an act of religious love. For him, the spiritual meaning of collective work is based on the idea that the individual effort is a potential relief for one’s fellow workers. By taking the heaviest stone, he says, one reduces the suffering of one’s comrades. Thus, for humanity to take hard work upon itself is an act of brotherly love.^{Footnote 51} For working people, as for Jesus before them, “work is a redemptory sacrifice.”^{Footnote 52} That is why, Gauthier says, in an attempt to promote a working apostolate among the Catholic clergy, the task of the priest is to offer this sacrifice to others as God’s gift.^{Footnote 53}

Besides the physical effort that makes work a religious sacrifice, Gauthier also noted the potential of the meditative dimension of manual work. Monotonous and intellectually unchallenging, it leaves man’s mind free for contemplation and prayer. In his own words:

It was during these long hours of digging that Gauthier claimed to have reached the highest religious and social insights, which would shape the theology he would write throughout his years in Israel and disseminate at Vatican II. For example, he narrates the occasion when, while digging a trench, Ps 130, De Profundis, appeared on his lips and revealed itself to him in a new light. Although the trench reminded him of a tomb, he suddenly understood that the abyss from which the author of the Psalm is calling God at its beginning is not the shadow of death, as it is traditionally interpreted. “No: the abyss from the bottom of which I cried out to You, Lord, is this depth of the misery of my digger brothers, the lowest of the laborers, the damned of the Earth. De Profundis had never taken on such a meaning.”^{Footnote 55}

Consequently, the last verse of the Psalm, which is usually translated in French as: “C’est Lui qui rachètera Israël de toutes ses iniquités” (And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities; Ps 130:8 LSB), is freely translated by Gauthier as “C’est Lui qui délivrera l’humanité de ses injustices” (He will liberate humanity from its injustices).^{Footnote 56} In Gauthier’s contemporary scenario, wherein Israel is no longer the oppressed and the weak, humanity takes the place of the biblical Israel, and social injustices that of personal sins. Devoid of political connotations at this point, the statement expresses a religious aspiration to imitate Jesus in his carrying of the burden of the Cross, along with the burden of human suffering.

The Kibbutz: A Source of Sublime Wisdom

During his years in Israel, Gauthier established close relations with Jews, relations that went much further than pragmatic dealings related to his workers’ cooperative. He studied Hebrew while staying and working in kibbutzim (collective agrarian settlements) and showed interest in the kibbutznik lifestyle. He found in the kibbutz a social corrective to the unjust economic and social system dominating the modern world, which was responsible for marginalizing and oppressing the people for whom he claimed to be speaking up. As he wrote in his Journal de Nazareth:

This statement is rather ironic, since it is well known that Ben Gurion, whom Gauthier presents here as the prototype of this remarkable Zionist “new man,” was the same politician who, as prime minister, strongly rejected and opposed every initiative attempting to abolish the military regime oppressing the Arab population,^{Footnote 58} a regime whose consequences Gauthier witnessed daily. This dissonance could suggest that during his years in Israel, Gauthier was much more driven by a messianic-eschatological consciousness than by a real political-historical connection with his surroundings.

Even at a time when the Catholic Church targeted atheism as one of its biggest concerns—as formulated in the conciliar declaration Gaudium et Spes 19, “Thus atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age”^{Footnote 59}—Gauthier did not hesitate to voice his admiration for the kibbutz in his remarks at the Council. For example, in a lecture from 28 September 1965, Gauthier warned of the dangers of a crusade against Marxism and atheism, arguing that although many kibbutzim in Israel define themselves in those terms, couples and families there live a life of faithfulness and love. From them we learn, he added, that the spirit of fraternity and solidarity exists also among humanist atheists.^{Footnote 60} “In the kibbutzim,” he wrote to the Council fathers, “there is no exploitation of man by man, but a certain wisdom, a more human way of life.”^{Footnote 61} Moreover, Gauthier identified in this new Jewish structure a fulfillment of the “Christian” values presented in the New Testament and put into practice by the early Christian communities in first-century Judea:

It is clear that his experiences working and living in the kibbutzim led Gauthier to the conclusion that Christians should learn from these Jews how to fulfill the Christian beatitudes regarding social issues.^{Footnote 63} His aspiration was for Catholic priests to learn from this new Jewish way of life, and for them to use it as inspiration for a new apostolate oriented toward the vast majority of modern-day society, which, being largely secular, would no longer accept clericalism and paternalism.^{Footnote 64} He thought that this experience could provide tools for worker-priests serving in working-class neighborhoods such as the Paris suburbs.^{Footnote 65}

Hence, he made an agreement with Kibbutz Ginosar, on the northern shore of Lake Tiberias, and began bringing over groups of Christian volunteers—members of the fraternity he founded—to work in the different manufacturing and agricultural branches for a period of six months, side by side with kibbutz members “in great friendship,”^{Footnote 66} while studying Hebrew in the kibbutz ulpan (the Israeli system for adult Hebrew learning). The success of this partnership eventually went so far as to reach the ears of Pope John XXIII, who in 1960 delivered a special greeting to the kibbutz for their hospitality toward the many Christian pilgrims who had sojourned there, as reported in the Israeli press:

Staying in kibbutzim also allowed Gauthier to connect with another central aspect of the Israeli experience. While Nazareth allowed him to feel close to Jesus, the kibbutzim offered him the connection with biblical nature and landscapes. The kibbutzim he visited in the Jezreel Valley, on the shores of Lake Tiberias, and in the Negev desert provided Gauthier with living proof that “the Holy Land is not a relic. It is a reality.”^{Footnote 68} And it was a reality that reverberated with biblical references, not only in his own mind, but also for his fellow Jewish workers. This is reflected, among other places, in a paragraph from his journal in which Gauthier narrates his day working as a shepherd in Kibbutz Mishmar HaNegev:

Of course, the flock and the shepherd are central motifs in the Christian tradition, a fact that charges Gauthier’s experience with unambiguous messianic overtones:

Just as the shepherd helps the lost sheep to rejoin its flock, reflects Gauthier, we too need to be prepared to receive the lost flock of Israel with love when it finally finds its way home.^{Footnote 71} This reflection hints at hidden vestiges of the traditional Christian aspiration of converting the Jews, which Gauthier probably could not help harboring, despite feeling so comfortable among them, or perhaps because of it.^{Footnote 72}

In the kibbutzim, Gauthier was exposed to a new approach to reading the Bible, different to the one his religious background had taught him. Gauthier noticed that the kibbutzniks, like most modern Jews, read the Bible as a historical book and “in a naturalistic sense.” And indeed, the Bible played a central role in the Zionist ethos. It was, for the founding fathers of the Zionist movement, not only an instrument for galvanizing the internal unity of the Jewish people and motivating them to engage with Zionism, but also a weapon in the struggle for the land itself.^{Footnote 73} The historical dimension of the Bible, emphasized in modern Israel, is what gave the Jewish people, in their own eyes, the right to the land, and the justification for the Jewish return to it.

Gordon and the Redeeming Nature of Work

It is not by chance that the principles we presented here—the centrality of manual work and an unmediated connection with the soil and the biblical landscapes—were the two elements that nurtured Gauthier’s religious experience in the years he spent in Israel. These were also the pillars on which rested the Jewish nationalist ethos of the Tnu‘at Ha‘avoda (the Labor Movement), a general name for the Zionist workers’ movements and parties (mainly the Socialist parties) that played a central role in the building of the State of Israel.^{Footnote 74} These pillars were best formulated and developed by the Zionist philosopher and pioneer Aaron David Gordon, “the theoretician” of organic Jewish nationalism.^{Footnote 75}

Aaron David Gordon (Podolia, today in Ukraine, 1856–Degania, today in Israel, 1922) grew up in a traditional Jewish family but was attracted to secular studies and Zionist ideas. In 1904, at the age of forty-eight, he immigrated to Israel and—as a worker, a philosopher, and a writer—became a symbolic figure of the Jewish settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Gordon called for the sanctification of labor through the renewal of manual Jewish labor, not only as part of the Zionist nationalist project but, most importantly, as an individual means of redemption.^{Footnote 76} For Gordon, physical agricultural labor was a means to achieve humanity’s desired return to nature, and the thing that would enable the individual and the nation to reconnect with their most profound source of life.^{Footnote 77} He succeeded in finding in physical work the romanticism that so many young men and women who had left their lives in the diaspora in Europe to build a new world in the Land of Israel, only to be disheartened by the extremely harsh conditions prevailing in the land at the turn of the century, could not. In the face of despair, Gordon found a source of hope in manual labor as a way for Jewish people to connect with the land of their supposed ancestors. At the same time, he emphatically negated the diaspora, which, according to him, was responsible for the state of atrophy in which Jewish existence found itself in his day. In a letter from 1909, published in a compilation named Letters of a Worker from Palestine—that Gauthier mentions in his Journal de Nazareth ^{Footnote 78}—Gordon writes:

As seen previously with Gauthier, we have here a description of manual work as a religious experience, capable of providing redemption to the land, the people, and the individual. However, contrary to the Christian’s view, for Gordon, this work has a prominent nationalistic element. Work leads to redemption only when it is performed by the Jewish people on the land to which their soul is inextricably linked. Thus, it is not only toil but also, and perhaps primarily, the ancient history of the Jewish people that links them to the land and gives them rights to it.^{Footnote 80} Gordon’s thought had clear political content that was either missed or dismissed by Gauthier.

Another element that attracted Gauthier to Gordon is the religious, mystic tone he utilized in his writings, which in Gauthier’s eyes contrasted with the secular-Marxist atmosphere he found in most of the kibbutzim he visited. Nevertheless, Gauthier was also aware of the existence of religious kibbutzim and spent in Kibbutz Yavne a Shabbat that left on him a deep impression, as reflected in his diary.^{Footnote 81}

It is not surprising then, that Paul Gauthier was deeply moved by the ideas of this Jewish thinker, of whom he had become aware when, during a visit to Kibbutz Degania—the first kibbutz in Israel, established in 1909 on the southern shore of Lake Tiberias, a region which, in Gauthier’s words, “was nothing but swamps and malaria, and yet forty years later is an earthly paradise”^{Footnote 82}—he had been taken to the Gordon Museum.

Like Gordon, Paul Gauthier had also moved to Israel at a relatively advanced age to experience physical toil among poor laborers. As mentioned previously, he also describes the physical effort of work as a source of religious joy and personal redemption:

Gauthier found in Gordon’s philosophy a suitable articulation of his own romantic ideas about labor. However, there is a significant difference between the two, a difference that perhaps speaks more broadly of the divergent ways in which Judaism and Christianity view the essence of religious duty. For Gordon, it is labor itself that provides human beings with the opportunity to live a life in the image of God, in the sense of “being partners with God in Creation.”^{Footnote 84} Gauthier agrees with Gordon that work means a partnership with God in creation, as well as redemption for humans and for the land.^{Footnote 85} However, Gauthier felt that, while containing some of the truth, Gordon’s words “are inexact from a theological point of view.”^{Footnote 86} This is because, while Gordon emphatically insisted on the material and spiritual dimensions of work as being one and inseparable,^{Footnote 87} Gauthier insisted in presenting them as two different spheres of redemption: temporal and eternal, earthly and divine:

In the earthly sphere, the accelerated development of the State of Israel is a vivid example of the power of work to “help build the earthly city,” which can bring temporal and material redemption to those who, like the Jewish pioneers, are fully invested in it. However, there is, for Gauthier, a second, Christian dimension of work, which makes work redemptive due to its connection to the figure of Jesus and the sacrifice Jesus made for humanity. Since Zionism—and Gordon’s philosophy within it—refused to go beyond the first dimension of redemption and “communicate with the Carpenter of Nazareth,” the Zionist process of redemption cannot be complete.

Indeed, Gauthier’s reference to work as an “offer of fatigue and sorrow,” brings us back to the concept of sacrifice, which Gauthier, following the Christian tradition, placed at the center of his theology of work. It is worthwhile mentioning that Gordon, on the other hand, was entirely against the idea of sacrifice, as can be gleaned in particular from his personal letters.^{Footnote 89}

The Six-Day War and Gauthier’s Radical Turn

Paul Gauthier’s religious experience in Israel lasted eleven years. During this period, although he was in daily contact with the Israeli authorities, fostering his workers’ cooperative in Nazareth, he avoided making critical statements pertaining to the national and international spheres of Israeli politics. A similar religious, apolitical attitude motivated Gauthier, four years earlier, to send a letter to Pope Paul VI inviting him to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (though he later found out that the pope had already secretly decided to make the pilgrimage as early as July of that year).^{Footnote 90} The short visit took place in January 1964, and although the Vatican took extreme care that the pope not make the slightest reference to the local and political situation, the impression on Vatican observers was that that pilgrimage marked the beginning of a thaw in the Church’s rejection of Zionism.^{Footnote 91} Gauthier’s statement should be seen in light of this precedent and the atmosphere created by the debates on the Nostra Aetate conciliar resolution regarding the Church’s stances toward Judaism and the Jewish people.

However, in June 1967, Gauthier would suddenly be confronted with a new political situation that would undermine his messianic, apolitical state of mind regarding the State of Israel. Paul Gauthier and an associate, Sister Marie-Thérèse Lazcare, spent the war mostly on the Jordanian side of Jerusalem, trying to assist the civilian population affected by the events. The French Catholic journal Cahier du témoignage chrétien dedicated the volume of July 1967 to the diary of Sister Marie-Thérèse, in which she recounts her experience of the war. References to the bullying and cruelty of the Israeli soldiers toward the civilian Arab population, including forced expulsions, looting, and razing houses, can be found throughout the diary, although not without emphasizing that there were humane attitudes to be found among the Israeli forces as well.^{Footnote 92} In that short volume there is also an article by Paul Gauthier about the war. This paragraph reflects the spirit of the article:

From this paragraph we learn that Gauthier’s position regarding the war was not unequivocally negative, and that he did not automatically support the Catholic world’s hostile reaction, including Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of the Israelis’ use of force and the demand for an immediate solution for the Arab refugees and for the creation of an international regime to take control of Jerusalem.^{Footnote 94} Even after the beginning of the war, and faced with the sight of Israeli soldiers entering Jerusalem, Gauthier still believed in the Israeli pioneer spirit he so admired.

Far from denying the rights of the Jews to have a state in the land of Israel, and while acknowledging that the Jewish state emerged as a response to a monstrous injustice—the ravages of the Holocaust and World War II—Gauthier’s claim was simply that “war is useless if it does not lead to a more just state of things than the one against which the parties are struggling.”^{Footnote 95}

The way the close relationship between Gauthier and Kibbutz Ginosar came to an end sheds light on Gauthier’s change of heart regarding the State of Israel. In an interview I conducted with Atallah Mansour, a Christian Arab journalist and writer who was close to Gauthier in his years in Nazareth, he told me the story of Gauthier’s departure from Israel, a story not related in any of Gauthier’s writings. According to this testimony, a few days after the end of the Six-Day War, Gauthier published an article in the North American press (since the article was rejected by the Israeli censorship) denouncing the abuses he had witnessed perpetrated by the victorious Israeli soldiers upon the civilian Arab population of several villages. The members of Kibbutz Ginosar felt deeply betrayed. They posted the article on the kibbutz billboard, marked with a big sign reading “our friend.” Gauthier no longer felt welcome there. A few days later he would leave the country with no personal belongings, never to return.^{Footnote 96} Gauthier crossed over to Jordan and spent the next few years working among the poor population and the refugees there. From the Jordanian side of the border he began to see Israel in a completely different light.

The most telling example of what I see as a radical religious as well as political transformation is a lecture he gave at the First World Conference of Christians for Palestine, in Beirut in May 1970, and which he likely reproduced in Europe later.^{Footnote 97} Far from the feelings of friendship and admiration Gauthier expressed in the books he published before 1967—some of which have been cited in this article—this lecture shows a completely hostile approach to the State of Israel, its authorities, and even the kibbutzim. One intimation of this change of heart can be seen in the way he retold the story of the aforementioned visit of the Israeli authorities, who had come to Gauthier seeking advice on the humanitarian situation of the Israeli Arab population. As previously stated, this encounter was described in Gauthier’s diary as extremely friendly, despite Gauthier’s gently questioning the priorities of the State of Israel when it came to protecting Jews above anyone else.^{Footnote 98} Yet, in his lecture given thirteen years after the event, Gauthier would provide his audience with a very different version of the answer he had given in that meeting to the Israeli authorities:

Later in the lecture, Gauthier would even allude to a resemblance between the Israeli troops and the Nazi soldiers.^{Footnote 100}

The Histadrut was treated in much the same way. In 1966, only a year before the war, in his attempts to enlighten the Catholic world about the State of Israel in the entry for the French Catholic encyclopedia, he writes: “The government and the workers’ union (Histadrut) make great efforts to build friendships with all people, especially with young nations, and willingly and generously lend them technical and social assistance.”^{Footnote 101} Four years later, however, in front of an anti-Israeli audience, the Histadrut would be presented as an imperialistic entity, “which became a Zionist instrument of the Jewish workers to conquer the labor market and eliminate the Arab workforce”^{Footnote 102} and which used its relations with the new Arab neighbors only as propaganda to appease international public opinion.^{Footnote 103}

Finally, even the kibbutzim, which, as we have seen, had elicited so much admiration from Gauthier in the past, were not spared from his contempt. This is how Gauthier recalls the invitation that Kibbutz Ginosar extended to him and his companions to come and spend a period of time in the kibbutz:

Gauthier continues, explaining that, when wealthy Jews purchased the land upon which the kibbutz was established from Arab landowners hailing from Egypt and Lebanon, there had been Palestinian peasants cultivating it who were then left without the means to make a living. This situation provoked a rivalry between the Jewish settlers and the villagers, until one night the members of the kibbutz decided to attack and destroy the Arab village, expelling the inhabitants and bombing their houses. “That is why,” he says, “while working in the kibbutz fields, we came upon the ruins of a village. The establishment of the kibbutz came at the expense of a ruined Palestinian village, first dispossessed from its lands by Zionist money, and then razed to the ground by Israeli force.”^{Footnote 105} This was the fate, Gauthier continues, of over a million Palestinians terrorized by Israeli forces and made to flee their homes to become refugees.^{Footnote 106}

The identification of Zionism with capitalism and imperialism, absent from Gauthier’s writings prior to 1967 (except for a brief mention of Jewish lifestyle in the city of Tel Aviv),^{Footnote 107} converted for him the whole geopolitical conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East into a class war: the poor and oppressed against the imperialist rich. This is what, according to him, happened in the Six-Day War: “In this context, the Six-Day War of 1967 appeared to us as one battle in a global world of the exploited peoples against the rich nations, in this case, of the Arab people against Israel and the USA.”^{Footnote 108}

While Gauthier’s writings contain no explicit explanation of his political shift, I wish to suggest two possible directions. The first is a religious disappointment with himself and with the Jewish people for having failed to fulfill the messianic roles he had assigned both to himself, as a bridge of peace between conflicting peoples, and to the new Israeli state, as a model of a just society that would serve as an example to the Christian world. After witnessing the postwar events, including the driving of thousands of Palestinians into exile and the demolition of their houses—actions that were later documented by prominent historians, such as Benny Morris^{Footnote 109} and Tom Segev,^{Footnote 110} to name a couple—Gauthier felt he could no longer serve as a “neutral” mediator willing to spread the social message of the “model society”—a society that in his eyes no longer fit that description.

The second is the political choice of positioning himself on the left side of the political map. In doing so, he would align himself with many Catholic intellectuals who, following the Six-Day War, began to identify Israel as an outpost of capitalist imperialism.^{Footnote 111} In this revolutionary zeitgeist of the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, being anti-Israeli became part of the anti-establishment agenda of those who stand with the masses and the oppressed third world. Consequently, a wave of pro-Palestinian literature appeared in the French Christian intellectual landscape. This was the case with the widely circulated French weekly Témoignage chrétien, together with the monthly Lettre and the Protestant Christianisme social, which declared their support for the anti-Zionist struggle and solidarity with the Palestinians from 1968 onward.^{Footnote 112} This was likewise the political stance adopted by Latin American theologians from the 1970s and until recent years.^{Footnote 113}