Israel-Gaza, dissent is not anti-Semitism. The comment
The ax ofantisemitism brandished by the Jewish State – and by many of its communities around the world – against any form of dissent expressed against it is a dangerous act of intimidation and contains within itself the seeds of an even more fearful form of “racism” functional to the manipulation of language, to the obscuring of reason and the dissimulation of truth. Who wields the sword of his own holocaust for obfuscate his crimes and justifying the extermination of another people is in bad faith. It is evident that such an inversion of meaning is instrumental and has as its primary objective that of “refreshing” the feelings of guilt generated by the Second World War, or the Shoah, and putting the interlocutor in check. In short, silence him, reduce him to silence, nip in the bud any form of conversation or dialectical exchange on the topic.
One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote “What cannot be spoken about must be kept silent”. A proposition often used, distorting its meaning, to dismiss any thorny topic, including that relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, citing the lack of knowledge on the part of one or the other interlocutor as an excuse. Apart from the misrepresentation of Wittgenstein’s heroic and ascetic clarity, we have arrived at a further simplification of the reasons for the centuries-old conflict. It smells of censorship: it has been condensed to one date, October 7, and to one action, the Hamas attack against Israel and its population, as if there had been no before. As if 76 years of Israeli oppression against native Palestinians, summed up in acts of deportation, segregation, persecution and stripping of all rights and freedoms, had never happened.
Contesting Israel, its policies, its government, its choices and its conduct in the war in Gaza does not make those who dissent an anti-Semite. If we really wanted to give him a label at all costs, we could say that he is anti-Zionist, although this wording has also been assimilated to the first and as such considered prosecutable by law, both in the United States and in Europe. However, the point is another: on what basis have we come to assimilate any form of dissent towards Israel and the policy pursued by its Government as anti-Semitic? Many Jews were and remain radical and staunch opponents of Zionism, of Netanyahu and of his alliance with which he governs Israel. According to a Jewish extremist fringe, they are traitors and renegades. But are we sure this is really the case? The terminological misunderstanding between ‘dissent’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ is generating confusion with uncertain outcomes. Going forward on this path, there is a good chance of resulting in a witch hunt of much more serious proportions than the one that is triggering the Cancel Culture in the world.
The famous phrase, mother of many tragic misunderstandings for which we have not yet stopped paying the consequences, “A land without a people for a people without a land”, was created in 1843 by a British clergyman, Christian Zionist, the Reverend Alexander Keith. Since then it has not stopped causing damage and has been widely used both in Christian circles in favor of the creation of the State of Israel, and by Jews to support the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. According to some scholars, the phrase never gained widespread currency among Zionist Jews. Israeli historian Anita Shapira has a completely different opinion, stating that the slogan had some success among Jews who lived between the 19th and 20th centuries. In one case or another, what is undeniable is the effect it had on the collective imagination of entire generations, and its absolute groundlessness. Formulated by those who had never set foot in Palestine, it was accepted as dogma by those who had no idea what or who actually was in Palestine.
To better understand the misunderstanding, it is worth putting the numbers on the actual composition of the inhabitants in Palestine at the time in which the unfortunate phrase was conceived. According to the German historian Alexander Scholch, in 1850 the residents of Palestine were approximately 350,000, a third of whom were concentrated in 13 cities; among these approximately 85% were Muslims, 11% Christian and 4% Jewish. Based on Ottoman data collected between 1918 and 1920, there were 689,275 inhabitants, of whom 84,660 Jews, and approximately 70,000 Christians. From the census called by the British in 1922, following the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine, it emerged that the population had increased to 757,182 inhabitants, divided into 590,890 Muslims, 82,498 Jews, 73,024 Christians and 9474 inhabitants belonging to other groups.
Then regarding the word ‘genocide‘, which has been improperly debated for months, even if it were the private and exclusive property of a single segment of humanity, very few have remembered until today that it was coined to define the extermination perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenian population. Coined in 1944 by the Polish jurist of Jewish origin Raphael Lemkin, it was publicly used in the Nuremberg trials of 1946. Here is how Treccani defines the term Genocide: «serious crime, of which single individuals or state bodies may be guilty, consisting in the methodical destruction of an ethnic, racial or religious group, carried out through the extermination of individuals, the dissociation and dispersion of family groups, the imposition of sterilization and the prevention of births, the dismantling of all social, political, religious, cultural institutions, the destruction of historical monuments and archival documents, etc. etc. ».
And speaking of improper debates, I’m sorry to have to include them in the long list of maître a pensée who have fueled terminological controversies in recent months, including Liliana Segre. The indefatigable senator for life, speaking at a conference entitled “The increase and change in anti-Semitism after 7 October”, organized by Shoah memorial in Milandeclared that “What Israel is doing is not genocide”, then urging everyone “not to use this word which is truly frightening, a similar comparison becomes blasphemy”.
According to the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center-Cdec, 400 incidents of anti-Semitism were recorded in the first four months of this year alone. Comparing the data with that of the previous two years, we see that the phenomena have doubled: from 230 in 2022, to 454 in 2023, suggesting that those in 2024 will be triple. In the report on anti-Semitism in the world published by the Anti-Defamation League, an international American Jewish NGO, it is reported that “the war in Gaza has unleashed a tsunami of hatred against Jewish communities around the world”. However, what these studies do not say, and do not clarify, are the criteria on the basis of which these episodes are classified. Paradoxically, this article could also fall among the forms of “anti-Semitism” denounced in the reports.
While waiting for the courts and History to judge and decide whether or not it is genocide, what is taking place in Gaza is beyond a doubt a carnage of industrial proportions never seen before. The New York playwright of Jewish origins Tony Kushner, a few months ago, declared that the Israeli war looks a lot like ethnic cleansing. And what is taking place before our eyes, live, like a reality show, if it is not a genocide it is still something that closely resembles it. And it’s one defeat for everyone. A defeat for humanity, refractory to horror, incapable of discerning between reality and fiction, accustomed to the banality of evil and deprived of every trace of love and charity. A humanity that demonstrates, once again, how history and memory have served no purpose.
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