The truce in Gaza is welcome, but peace is a mirage
It is not the end of the war, and there is no need to even specify it. The ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas, with the mediation and future supervision of the USA, Qatar and Egypt, freezes – if all goes well – a tragedy almost 500 days long, which lies on the horizon of many misfortunes more long-lasting. It does not restore life to tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Israeli raids, it does not restore the “before” life to the hostages who will gradually be freed, nor life tout court to the Israeli victims of October 7th. It will not give a fair trial to hundreds of Palestinians arrested by Israel for months or even years and who will be freed, nor – on the other hand – will it guarantee Israel that some of these, after long detention in the hands of the enemy, will no longer be motivated than ever to seek revenge by sowing terror.
Palestinian homes destroyed
It does not return hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza to their homes reduced to crumbs, it does not restore children and parents to those who lost them, and it does not give rise to any realistic hope of a finally peaceful future for Palestinians and Israelis. The very timing of the agreement, spread over many months and even the next few years, is almost a guarantee of failure: as explained to Avvenire by Gershon Bashkin with the authority of someone who knows the parties in conflict like perhaps no one else in the world. One provocation, one mistake, will be enough to bring Israeli troops back into the heart of Gaza, as previously announced by Netanyahu.
The desire for revenge and fragility
The fragility, the smallness of this (obviously) more than necessary and blessed pause in the conflict is all the clearer when compared with the vastness of the problem, with the long root of this cancerous war, with what would have served and still would serve to not always finding oneself on the edge of a new explosion, of new blood shed to spray the already flourishing field in which the plant of resentment and the desire for revenge grows, the true evergreen of that war and that land. Serving, not just today, are numerous social components up to the majority, both among Israelis and among Palestinians, willing to recognize that the right of others to be on that land exists. I am not talking, not here, about the political-institutional formulas – two peoples for two states, a binational state, and so on – all worn out by time, but first of all, above all, of the human idea that the other people there he can stay there, even if – from each opposing point of view – some of his children have done us and ours a lot of harm. That some pieces of the other’s history are hostile to the humanity and life of one’s own part, but this does not take away the full right to be part, precisely, of a division of cohabitation. It is a very radical perspective, in its banality, it is on it – more or less consciously – that paths of pacification after wars and civil wars have been built everywhere in the world. We need leaders educated in the politics of compromise, leading peoples ready to accept the renunciation of a part of what they consider their right, for a smaller but pacified and lasting good.
Abuse and violation of the law
Nothing is further from this, from the Israeli and Palestinian reality of today. With Israel extremely unbalanced, in society and only consequently in the buildings of politics, at the ends of the spectrum of the global right, and in a time in which the right is truly not afraid to show itself close to the original prototype throughout the world. With a society convinced that there is no alternative to war, because the whole world hates Israel, and every criticism ends up in the same unmentionable cauldron. On the other hand, with a Palestinian society that has radicalized in response to the ineptitude of the historic leaders of the PLO, and the obtuseness of an Israel that is in turn increasingly guided by the fanatical millenarianism of the national-religious, not by chance Rabin’s murderers and of the peace process buried together with the twentieth century, which considers its right to land founded not on law but on the Bible, and that is – ultimately – on the abuse and violation of the rights of others.
We could go on for a long time, and many, depending on the empathy that prevails in them, will read in these words a lack of understanding of the Palestinian cause, or of the Zionist one. What is not debatable, unfortunately, is that today’s fragile truce is many things, but not the first half of tomorrow’s peace. We must be satisfied with the temporary end of the carnage, rejoice for some innocent people freed and returned to their lives. This, after all, is the fate of a world that has stopped thinking that the future is possible. It’s as true down there as it is up here. What makes the difference is only the luck of being born up here, and not down there.