Rome – So what is this that we continue to call Israel's war against Hamas, which has lasted for three months and which Israel promises to extend for another year? What is it if not a methodical massacre of the Palestinian people, their dispersion, their removal from the land where they have always lived, their slow annihilation? What is it if not a combination of deportation and genocide? Even the Nazis had thought about transferring the Jews to Madagascar, before moving on to the “final solution” made of crematoriums and forced marches. Like today the fascists in power in Israel, who would like to transfer the Palestinians to Congo, while meanwhile proceeding with their extermination through bombings and ambushes.
As the Turkish empire did at the beginning of the First World War, rounding up the Armenians, forcing them on a forced march away from the border with Russia, and gradually killing around a million of them through beatings, fatigue and mistreatment. Erdogan doesn't want it to be called genocide, but we call it that.
What's this daily accounting offered by the media with indifference, and with the bureaucratic clarification of the obvious, that is, that these are figures provided by the Gaza administration, i.e. by Hamas? Not the diagram of a virus, which strikes subtly and at random, but the result of deliberate, programmed actions, controlled by algorithms, barring errors.
A 4 year old girl? It was a mistake, we are sorry. Today in all there are twenty-two thousand, tomorrow there will be twenty-two thousand one hundred and fifty, in four days twenty-three thousand. Among these are a handful of Hamas leaders, mostly shot far from Gaza. And then 8000 Hamas fighters: more or less like the Palestinian children killed (7000), for whom there were no apologies. Everything planned, everything calculated.
What is this extermination of women and minors, this massacre of journalists, doctors, educators, artists, athletes? What are these adolescent amputees without anesthesia, these newborns without oxygen, these old people without wheelchairs, these sick people without stretchers? A revenge that must repay the defeat suffered in one day, the horrendous rapes, the massacre of young Jews in the rave party? Or not rather a replication, a multiplication, a protraction over time of that horror? Which and how many sufferings will be enough to balance the suffering of that day? Or maybe it's collateral damage. The price that must be paid to defeat Hamas: an elusive chimera, which will continue to reproduce itself until the people of Palestine can live free and respected. So, a virtually unlimited price. Or better: an all-out domination project.
Afraid that the war will spread? Certain. But does anyone worry that it will shatter European civil conscience? In Italy, as elsewhere, there are those who maintain that Israel, whatever it does, has the right to do. There are those who say that democracy and peace are advancing in the Middle East on tanks with the Star of David. There are those who think of Israel as a Western bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, and for this reason any weapon is legitimate in its hands. There are those who say that condemning Israel is anti-Semitism in disguise: it is meta-historical and metaphysical anti-Semitism, which has always been there and always will be. AND defending Palestinians from massacre is a manifestation of this anti-Semitism.
They do not realize that the result of all this is not the fight against anti-Semitic, but its strengthening. It is not the increase of Israel's security, but its discredit and therefore its isolation. This is the tragedy within the tragedy: the livid face of Netanyahu – corrupt and ruthless executor of death, unable to prevent the attack he knew about and now committed to prolonging the war as his alibi – false representation of a people who have suffered enough to still having to suffer, from a State that loses every day a piece of what it is entitled to, as long as it does not proclaim itself as the state of a single people, or the only state of that land: the legitimacy of existing.
A part of the Italian Jewish community is preparing to defect on the next Remembrance Day against the hypocrisy of those who commemorate the dead Jews instead of defending the living ones. Pernicious mistake. Instead, we must prepare to celebrate it as and more than ever. If it ever was, and it isn't, this time it will have the flavor of an obvious ritual less than ever. The memory of the Shoah is a common good and is an irrevocable heritage. It must be defended and not confused with the defense of the misdeeds of Israeli governments who betray their own history, their dignity as a symbol of something that must not be repeated
#Let39s #remember #Shoah #thinking #Gaza
