I admire those who, despite knowing what awaits them, face situations. Last night Eden Golan came out to sing at Eurovision despite the fact that the Israeli delegation had been segregated (yes: we are talking about segregation), waiting for the start of the show in a secluded room. And she came out knowing that she was going to be booed.

The same thing has happened in schools in our country, where graffiti has been seen against people of the same citizenship, the same culture, the same religion. There have also been rallies in front of Israeli schools, where students went to class knowing that adverse looks awaited them. And the same has happened with Jewish places of worship. Despite this, fear has not paralyzed them.

This is what was felt by those who, knowing everything was lost, led the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Those who rebelled in the extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau also knew it. They faced a superior enemy and certain death, but their personal dignity and collective survival were at stake. Let us not forget that the walls of the concentration camps were built with words and gestures rather than with bricks, barbed wire, barking and shooting.

There is something deep in Western pathos that tends to stigmatize difference and dogmatize statements. Fortunately we have overcome (or almost) the references to the “village idiot” or the “class fat man”, but it is not difficult for us to stigmatize dissidence. Historically, autos-da-fe, quermés or lynchings have been the way to eliminate the discrepancy and, through an emotional transfer, wash away one’s own guilt by attributing it to another person, who necessarily had to be corrected.

We have been shaken for months by the images of the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza. No sane person can fail to be moved by images of people, on either side, injured or dead. However, unlike the first, where Russophobia has not been unleashed but rather a person is clearly accused, in the strip the culprit is not a leader but a people. And anti-Israelism is a refined form of anti-Semitism.

Let us not forget that if the state of Israel exists it is because all the countries of Europe have been expelling and persecuting the Jews for ten centuries. So they had to return home forcibly. But in that territory there was already a settled population. During all these months I have not read a single article about the responsibility of the West in the formation of said state, from the expulsion or genocide of the Jews to decolonization, as if Western responsibility had been washed away by recreating it on movie or television screens.

The solution to the Middle East problem will come when Israel accepts that the creation of two states, with access to the sea, is inevitable, but above all when Palestine accepts that it must pursue it through peaceful means. Or put even better: when it expels from its territory the fundamentalist groups that have nested there. Its population does not deserve to be confused with the fundamentalists. The Basque Country is infinitely better since its own society reproached the violent for using this route.

Israel is a country of just ten million people surrounded by other countries with a population of almost 150 million. Virtually all of them have carried out violence against the Israeli population since 1947, which obviously has not facilitated dialogue in Palestine. Against the only democracy in the region, something ignored in all public debates. A place where no one is condemned or executed for their way of being, which is the great lesson we learned, or so it seemed, after the barbarity of totalitarianism in Europe.

There is only one thing worse than deceiving others: deceiving yourself. The easy thing is to join the trend that seems to be the majority. It’s trendy. The drama of the current situation is undoubtedly the death of innocent people, even more than the war itself, than the collapse of civilization, but it is also not the persistence of relativism, but something worse: the return of dogmatism.