Palestinian citizens evacuate their homes after Israeli bombings in Gaza City, Gaza, on October 10, 2023. Ahmad Hasaballah (GETTY IMAGES)
The monstrous massacres carried out by Hamas against Israeli Jews on October 7 left me deeply horrified. Nothing justifies these fanatical attacks, and certainly not the question of the Palestinian people, whose righteous cause is overshadowed by these acts of barbarism.
For many, Hamas terrorism concealed and continues to conceal the terror of a state that has mercilessly acted against unscrupulous fanatics for two million Gazans, resulting in 3,000 deaths. And as Netanyahu has announced, this is just the beginning.
Hatred is not new, but now it has been unleashed by some and others. It creates the madness of collective guilt of the enemy people, which in turn leads to the worst atrocities and massacres, even of women, children and the elderly.
The contextualization of the horrors of October 7th, which is essential for any understanding, inscribes them above all in the long history of the Israeli people, who for thousands of years were victims of Christian anti-Judaism and later of racial anti-Semitism, which condemned them to the annihilation of their homeland Israel has long been threatened by hostile states. Israel was not an oasis of refuge, but rather a citadel in war.
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This tragic history has created the tragedy of the Palestinian people. The latter were partially expelled from their country as a result of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and sent to camps in Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank, where they remain overcrowded. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the entire West Bank, called Judea-Samaria by Israel, was occupied and colonized not only by one state but also by thousands of Israeli settlers, who now number 800,000.
The result of the Shoah, a word meaning catastrophe, was the Nakba, a Palestinian word with the same meaning, which was virtually catastrophe for Arab Palestine.
Just as it is necessary to keep alive the memory of the millions of victims of Nazism, this respectful memory cannot justify the domination exercised by Israel over the Palestinian people, who are innocent of the crimes of Auschwitz.
Should the curse of Auschwitz be the privilege that justifies all Israeli oppression?
The colonization of the West Bank, which began in the same century as decolonization in Africa and Asia, is in many ways similar to those in which uprisings and repressions led to an increase in bloody killings of civilians by both the oppressors and the oppressed. The difference lies not only in the intensification of colonization, but also in the original conflict between two antagonistic sacralizations of Jerusalem and Palestine.
Centuries of Christian anti-Judaism, later racist anti-Semitism, and three years of Nazi extermination have nurtured the Zionist myth of returning to the original homeland, even though the land of Canaan was populated for centuries by Arabs who became Muslims or Christians and never became a proponent of Palestine Land was without a people waiting for its landless people. Israeli historians agree that the location of Solomon’s Temple on the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque is a legend, that the myth is a reality stronger than reality, and that the belief has been repeatedly expressed that Jerusalem is the only and eternal capital of the Al-Aqsa Mosque The Jewish State and Palestine are the eternal home of the Jewish people. No less mythical is the holy place of Al Aqsa, from which the Prophet supposedly ascended to heaven to meet God.
In fact, Israel has changed the Jewish situation. The thousand-year humiliation of the subjugated, frightened and landless Jew was followed by Jewish pride in the military exploits of the Hebrew people and the agricultural achievements of the kibbutz. The number of universalist Jewish intellectuals sensitive to all forms of oppression, humiliation and colonization has declined in favor of intellectuals sensitive primarily to the fate of Israel; and for some of them the Torah has replaced the Communist Manifesto.
The concept of the “Israelite denomination”, a purely religious affiliation, was replaced by the concept of the Jewish people, present in Israel and, for example, France.
This radical solidarity, which must be understood, has led to the unconditional justification of all of Israel’s actions, including the oppression of the Palestinian people. Westerners, and especially Europeans, who feel guilty for the genocidal ravages of anti-Semitism, have spoken out in favor of the Jewish nation.
Israel, the child of European and Western anti-Semitism, has become the privileged outpost of the Western presence in a dangerous Arab world. Recent Philo-Judaism (which has reduced but not eliminated ancient anti-Semitism) benefits Israel, while at the same time Israel’s existence has generated enormous anti-Judaism in the Arab-Muslim world.
From 1948 onwards, strategic and military considerations were added. Israel gained its independence thanks to its victory over the Arab states that sought to destroy it at its founding, and developed military power superior to that of neighboring states that remained hostile for a long time.
An authoritarian Israel was imposed that ignored the countless UN resolutions to create a Palestinian state. There was a special moment when Arafat and Rabin shook hands and the Oslo Accords were signed, which provided for the existence of two states. But the murder of Rabin by a fanatical Jew and the disappearance of the Israeli left led to the hegemony of a nationalist-religious coalition that wanted to annex the entire West Bank and is continuing its course.
Under these conditions, it is difficult to see the possibility of a Palestinian state comprising 800,000 Israeli settlers who are radically hostile to it, and it is difficult to imagine that Israel will withdraw its settlements.
The outlook is bleak; Violence tends to increase on both sides, with indiscriminate attacks and equally indiscriminate massive repression. One-sided truths prevail and hide opposing truths. Hatred and fears flood the mind.
It is not impossible, but unlikely, that joint action by the United Nations and Western and Arab states will produce a decisive result. It is not impossible that the conflict will spread, engulfing and inflaming one nation after another. You have to fear the worst.
May our minds at least resist madness. Our mission is not only to reject hatred, but also to do everything in our power to create the basis for mutual understanding, not only between Israel and Palestine, but also between the European supporters of both peoples, without leaving a cause forgotten to advise. fair
Edgar Morin He is a philosopher and sociologist and author of “Lessons from a Century of Life” (Paidós, 2022).
Translation of news clips.
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