“Everyone is talking about the two-state solution. Elly too, but I told her: I don’t believe much in it. It would mean a structuring of relations and an institutional recognition that part of Arab society cannot accept.” Melvin Schlein, the father of Democratic Party Secretary Elly Schlein, speaks about the conflict in the Middle East. American political scientist and academic, 84 years old, professor of political science at the Franklin University of Lugano, now retired, Melvin Schlein speaks from his home in Agno, Switzerland, about the relationship with his daughter and also about the war between Hamas and Israel. with Corriere des Ticino.
Melvin Schlein, the son of Ashkenazi Jews who fled the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913, grew up in New Jersey. “We were very poor, nothing but stereotypes,” he remembers. He has had a 40-year academic career as an expert in international politics, after a doctoral thesis on the reunification of the two Germanys – “I saw it right twenty years in advance” – and an experience as a volunteer on the kibbutz of Nahal Oz , near Gaza, not far from the birth of the State of Israel: “The situation on the border with the Gaza Strip has never been easy – the professor now says –.” Even in the 1960s we had machine guns under the bed slept. The October 7 Hamas massacre was experienced with “horror and great concern” for family and friends living in Israel: “It is not the first time that we have seen an intensification of the conflict, often after periods of detente such as those reported by … were initiated.” the Abraham Accords, and I have to say that I am not very optimistic about the prospects of a solution. Concerned about incidents of anti-Semitism in Europe – “The frequency of the incidents and the numbers coming from France, for example, are impressive” – Elly Schlein’s father remembers being bullied as a child as a “dirty Jew” by his Eastern European colleagues: ” Once they covered me with bruises.” Like many Jews, I discovered that I was Jewish this way: I didn’t know it, others taught me.
In the family, says the professor – with Democratic leader Elly and her other daughter Susanna, an adviser at the Italian embassy in Athens – “we always talked a lot about politics, maybe that explains the paths our daughters took.” Do you share the Democratic Party’s position on the war in Israel? ‘Elly urged a humanitarian ceasefire. You don’t have to be an expert to understand that a dozen Hamas commanders killed are not worth thousands of civilian casualties, the price of the military operation is disproportionate and it is a strategic mistake for Israel.” Melvin Schlein defends his daughter from those who are her accuse her of not distancing herself from Hamas: “That’s not true.” There was and is a decisive condemnation. Even if, unfortunately, a certain part of the left eventually joined the ranks of historical anti-Semitism, the ever-present right-wing part certainly did not disappear. It is an evil that we carry with us, always ready to reawaken, and now it has found new strength.”
The future, Professor Shlein concludes, hangs by a thread: “There are pacifist voices in Israel and also in Gaza. Today they have become a silent minority, but I would like to believe that this spirit and this dialogue, built over a long time, have not died under the cries of opposing extremists. At least I hope so.” And this shows the distance to her daughter, who has been calling for the two-state solution Israel and Palestine since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East: “I told her: I don’t believe in it that much.”