After a year of war, we are all worse (and it wasn’t easy)
A year ago, on the eve of October 7, Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine were experiencing the most “stable” period of apparent peace in their recent history. Quotation marks are obviously a must: it was a peace founded on the brutal dominance exercised by the most right-wing government in the history of Israel, on Palestinian territories governed in the West Bank by the ineffective and corrupt leadership of Abu Mazen, and in Gaza controlled instead by the corrupt leadership, fundamentalist but in its own way effective of Hamas. Having disappeared for decades now the political idea of an agreement and any will that went in that direction, Netanyahu’s government, full of right-wing extremists and national-religious fanatics convinced that the basis for controlling the entire land between the sea and the river is the Bible, fed and cajoled the extremist Hamas government, convinced that there is no place for Jews between the same sea and the same river.
The massacre beyond imaginable
With bribes and beatings, Netanyahu, besieged by Israeli squares protesting against the constitutional reform, had thus achieved about two years of almost total absence of attacks by Hamas. He boasted about it to his friends, but above all to his internal adversaries: the many who protested against his reform, the few who reminded him that a country rich in multi-million dollar start-ups but poor in prospects for lasting peace, and now devoid of that minimum good which is respect for others could not have a future. He responded by indicating the horizon of the Abraham Accords, a regional peace to be signed with the Saudis and the Gulf countries, ignoring the Palestinian question and putting the Ayatollah’s Iran and its threatening Hezbollah allies in an increasingly obvious corner, which continued to constantly threaten Northern Israel from Lebanon, launching rockets and evoking cataclysms. We will never know, exactly, how October 7th was possible: all the forces concentrated on the Northern front, or too much trust in the guarantees bought by Hamas, which we also treat as if it were a single thing while it was, even then, a gang made up of gangs at the end of their strength and at the limit of humanity? What else, beyond the arrogance of thinking that they would never have dared to think and realize the unimaginable from Gaza, knowing exactly that in that way they would have faced the massacre that was carried out with cruel punctuality, before the indifferent eyes of the world ?
An old age in power
Be that as it may, a year has passed, and what we predicted then, out of the blue, has really happened. Israel responded as everyone expected, including the Hamas leadership, brutally massacring an already exhausted population. The count of deaths declared in Gaza is around 40 thousand, the count of future ones, related to the destruction and the health and humanitarian crisis that follows this destruction, multiplies that figure by two, or by three, or by four. Who knows. The Israeli hostages, civilians kidnapped and taken to the Gaza underground on October 7, those who are still down there, are Netanyahu’s last thoughts. Who, today, with the scalp of Nasrallah and having ridiculed the threats of old, parched Islamic priests in Tehran, and above all those of their young followers who seriously believed they could defeat Israel militarily, can easily move towards an old age still in power. Incredibly, after the bloody failure of October 7 and after the war crimes with which he brought “tranquility” back to Gaza. And today he can say – as Arturo Cohen, a left-wing militant in a far-right country, explains very well to the audience of the Feltrinelli Foundation – that the important thing is to destroy the enemies in the North. “Sorry for the hostages, but in short, we are at war”, interpreting, but not too much, the mood of the prime minister and of an important part of Israeli society today.
The Middle East is a worse place
One year after the October 7 massacre, in short, the Middle East is a worse place. That aberrant crime, that massacre and mass kidnapping, was followed by other crimes, dimensionally and quantitatively larger, carried out by a regular army, which will leave a long tail of even more imposing destruction and hatred. No one has had the strength to impose a global public discourse on the need for a different perspective to that claimed by the Netanyahu government and by Hamas and its allies, perfectly opposed in their specularity: between the sea and the river there is only room for ” us”. Obviously, both fans down here don’t agree with me. And so, finally, we come to us. These days we read, always perfectly mirrored, two clear and flawless versions of the facts. On the one hand, there are those who only talk about October 7th, the horrible mass crime that affected young people, women, children, and incredibly many pacifists, proud opponents of Netanyahu.
On this side we are talking about a pogrom, a barbaric act of anti-Semitism and inhumanity. Which evidently it was, and which must not be forgotten: it was not resistance, it was not legitimate defense, it was an attack on defenseless civilians. Point. On this side there is no mention in any way of the barbarity of those who wanted to raze half a strip of Gaza to the ground, exterminating entire families, as part of a fight against terrorism which will certainly have killed many militiamen and destroyed arsenals, but which has certainly given new reasons for local and global resentment for those who say that Israel only knows the language of state violence, while also imposing martial law in the West Bank and continuous new colonizations, which have nothing to do with the fight against terrorism, also because the attitudes of the settlers closely resemble those of terrorists of all latitudes. On the other hand, leaving aside those who actually talk about resistance and legitimate action, which also exist, we only talk about what Israel did from then on in Gaza. As if October 7th had not existed, as if the project of extermination and erasure imagined by the Iranian government and its partners was not prior and instrumentally played on the skin of the Palestinians. As if it were not substantially independent of any attitude or policy implemented by Israel.
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