The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been one of the favorite operating fields for the Italian intellectual and political provincialism. After the first Republic, in which the great parties responded with different and articulated internal sensitivity to geopolitical and ideological scenarios larger than a language of land planted in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea, the tragedy of history has often turned into an operetta. Not that of the Palestinians, who indeed their condition of minority and submission have seen it really become a tragedy, nor that of Israel, gradually slipped from the place of the ideal of independence and safety of the Jewish people who survived the Shoah to a small rectum along the axis of various fanaticism, religious and supremacy. I do it short, having made it long many other times.

Two peoples, two states

The operetta of our narrative and political contemporaneity on the Middle Eastern events have seen it fully at work, of course, after 11 September. After the twentieth century, in fact, the hope of seeing the slogan of the “two peoples and two states”, a new phase of history, which however accepted the ancient paradigm of the conflict of civilization, of the clash without cracks between us and them, between the West and the rest of the world, between democracy and Islam, succeeded. From there, substantially never revoked, the stories and positions on that conflict – those on the historical perspective and those on the contingence of inhabitants, repressions, terrorist attacks – have joined the two narrative and dialectical poles: “Israel defends themselves from those who hate him unjustly and would like to destroy it through wars and terrorism”; “The real and only victims of the story are the Palestinians”. Of course, even in a time that gradually became the property of the algorithms of digital simplification, which then infected the analog reality in a perverse relationship, there were more complex and articulated positions, even among those who chose a clear belonging. But in short: both the political and journalistic debate have increasingly markedly attributed to the story and positions on the Middle Eastern conflict a function of identity and identification. I tell you who I am, to tell you who I am, and to tell you (e) reader that we are of the same pasta: it happened and happens on the Middle East, but also on other identity issues. It is a mutual strengthening mechanism, for a copy, a vote or an extra click, and it is often difficult to understand if the egg or hen was born first, or not to give in to the doubt that they are actually two hens.

“The genocide of the Palestinians”

Of course, the exceptions have been there, even if rare. We are talking about those intellectual, journalistic and policies voices capable of keeping a point of conviction and analysis not to anchyllable to consent, perhaps to create, more or less voluntarily, schools of epigones, more or less gifted. They are not necessarily figures that bring “third” thoughts compared to the tracks. Indeed, for their authority and depth, they have been taken to sources of inspiration or hoisted in noble fathers, cited or implicit, consenting or more often not. We are talking about voices that are read constantly even by those who know that they often do not share, as long as they know that by those who have deep and different beliefs, you can much learn, if equipped with solid categories and topics. When it happens that it changes your mind or tone, of course, it has a specific weight that changes the trajectory. This is what happened for the writing of Omer Bartov, among the most important scholars of the Shoah and genocides: “My inevitable conclusion is that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people. I grew up in a Zionist family, I lived the first half of my life in Israel, I served in the Israeli army as a soldier and official and I spent much of my career. By studying and writing on war crimes and on the Holocaust, so it was a painful conclusion for me to reach, to which I resisted as long as possible, “he wrote in the New York Times of July 15.

The conflict beyond good and evil

In the Italian debate of the last few weeks, the creaking had made themselves felt, increasingly clear. Even in newspapers historically attentive to the reasons of Israel, who perhaps had put the expulsion of Israeli tourists on the front page by some restaurant but not the rubble of Gaza, who were also told in a commendable way by the reporters in the internal pages, we read more explicit accusations in the state in which Netanyahu had transformed Israel. But the real veil, that constant swamp that legitimizes the belonging even in front of the abomination, rose it Giuliano Ferrara yesterday, on the sheet. The founder of a newspaper that has always been and undoubtedly a paladin of the “values of the democratic West”, and convinced defender of the reasons of Israel, retraces his beliefs with consistency. He started from October 7, from his belief – expressed constantly in these two years, almost – that there was no alternative to a very hard military action by Israel. The initial manager of the club does not stop indicating in Hamas, well before the “pogrom of 7 October”, and when exactly twenty years ago Sharon’s Israel left the Gaza strip and obtained “burned synagogues”. Not even this time it seems to consider the internal drift to Israeli politics, colonization as the form of the mind and above all of the bodies, embodied in the and ride of the successful cynicism of Netanyahu, which we have tried to tell, notes and then decisive. But what matters most, the true and significant variation of course is the definition of a “conflict beyond good and evil”. Reaffirming the solidarity with the post-7 October choices, Ferrara writes that he would never “think that things would be arranged in an infernal circuit, such as the Riviera di Gaza (the reference is to the delusional video released by Trump, editor’s note) and a creeping annexation for hunger. One account are the victims of war, the martyrology of each day administered by the terrorist killers, one account is to tolerate a concentrational universe. Without escape in a territory of which you are responsible.

“Too little, too late”

Of course, the always-critics will say that it is “too little, too late”. It would certainly be interesting to discuss the issues I wrote above, and of the general setting for which the protection of Israel’s reputation from infamy and abomination that is perpetrating on the skin of the people of Gaza has great importance. I prevent all the objections, which I know, to return to the bottom point: this article marks an important climate change. The recognition of the state of Palestine, as Macron does, or his negation because “times are not mature”, as Democratian says Giorgia Meloni, fall at the highest level in the mechanism of political position that serves to declare identity.

More important, if there was still an elite willing to change their mind and then to discuss it so that it changes the political action, and if there were still newspapers that recognize that at certain times the pro-Israel propaganda, as well as sadistic for the victims of the war, is pathetic for those who sign it, would be to read and meditate these words of Giuliano Ferrara: “A state and a people who have beat the psychological center since 1948 An ethical delegitimization that invests Jewish and Gentile, nation and diaspora, and that has had the outlet in the questioning of this same survival anxiety, identified with the annihilation and expulsion of another people without shoes, without water, without flour. discuss this cursed and creeping material, of this snake which has become the engine of the humanitarian war against Israel, of its condemnation and confinement in the absolute evil of malnutrition, of the loss of controlling a occupying force on the territory and on those who live in it, old women, women and children. Almost two decades ago he had left those lands in the hope of dying and had in return the fire of the synagogues and the power of terror with Hamas, to deny the question of the final inhumanization in a right war, with the hostages still imprisoned, alive and dead, in the secrets of terrorists. Israel, as well as a duty of humanity that overcomes any ideological formula of a humanitarian type “.

End of this scandal, yes, should be the only goal of man and woman, of street and government, of good will. But of course – this is my thought, of course – Netanyahu has exactly the opposite goal. The scandal that is destroying a people and, secondly, what remained of the democratic soul of his country is actually insurance on his political life. In the enormity of the humanitarian scandal, another scandal, not just a little.