Israel, 1969
This chapter recounts how Nathalie Sarraute cancelled a government-sponsored lecture tour to Israel as she disapproved the French government's policy. It explains that the policy prevented Nathalie from going to Israel under the aegis of diplomatic services. It also points out that the French's condemnation of Israel was due to an attack on Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces in December 1968, which prompted French president Charles de Gaulle to announce a blanket embargo on arms sales to Israel. The chapter implies how Nathalie continued to feel strongly about the issue in Israel, which was evident in Monique Wittig's letter to her two years later following a discussion about the Palestinian question. It also looks into Nathalie's eventual assumptions of her parents' generation and considered that there was simply no way of talking about Jewishness without raising the resurgent spectre of anti-Semitism.