There is no god, country or cause that can justify the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas militias on the populations of southern Israel. The cruelty and savagery shown by the Palestinian terrorists on defenseless civilians is of unfathomable moral baseness. Some have compared them to beasts… But there is nothing more human than blind hatred and extreme brutality. After all, we are the true heirs of Cain.
It doesn’t take much to make killers. It is enough to combine fear, resentment and fanaticism with an indoctrination that presents the other – guilty of having another god, another language, another ethnicity, other ideas – as an existential threat and dispossess him of his human condition. Behind them are those who move the threads from their offices, protected in their bunkers, manipulating human lives as if they were pieces of a board game. This is how it has been throughout history. And this is how the leaders of Hamas have acted.
On the consciences of Yahia al- and Muhammad Deif – if they have any – will weigh the death not only of the hundreds of Israelis massacred by their men, but also of the Palestinians who die in Gaza under the retaliatory bombings of the Israeli army , sacrificed on the altar of the messianic – and no less calculated – vision of the radical Islamists who have ruled the tortured region with an iron fist since 2007.
“The inhabitants of Gaza will end up turning against Hamas”, predicted this week the former Palestinian negotiator Gait al-Omari, who participated in the failed Camp David summit in 2000. A laudable wish, but a dubious one. Did the German population turn against Hitler when their cities were leveled by British bombers during World War II, causing tens of thousands of deaths? The Germans didn’t do it then and the people of Gaza won’t do it now either. And not only because they are suffocated by an implacable dictatorship, which also – the protests of 2019 were repressed with great harshness – but because all external aggression tends to create a union sacrée.
We are also seeing it in the strongly divided Israel, where the disgraced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ended up agreeing a government of concentration with the opposition leader Benny Gantz, who until just a week ago was looking for a way to dislodge him from power and prevent the its alliance with the ultra-right and fundamentalist religious groups would destroy Israeli democracy. His maneuvers to subdue justice – and get rid of the corruption cases that grip him -, the extremist drift, the arrogant and disastrous policy towards the Palestinians, the resounding security mistakes, all this is now behind. Also the massive protests against the Government… It’s time for war. Unit time.
And yet, we must not forget the serious responsibility that the current Israeli Government, and Netanyahu in person, have in the current state of the conflict. “The attack by Hamas is the result of the conjunction of a fanatical Islamist organization and an imbecile Israeli policy”, stressed the historian and former ambassador of Israel to France Elie Barnavi.
The contempt for legitimate Palestinian aspirations, the mistreatment of the population of the occupied areas – which even Israeli oenages have described as apartheid -, the progressive reduction of the territory of the West Bank, which should be the basis of a Palestinian State , the violent flogging of the Jewish settlers to the Palestinian peasants, tolerated – if not encouraged – by the far-right government… could not end without consequences. “We will have security when they have hope”, said the former head of the Shin Bet (internal security) Ami Ayalon to our colleague Gemma Saura. Hope is what Palestinians have been denied for decades. Netanyahu’s dream of signing peace with the major Arab countries (the Abraham Accords) while ignoring the Palestinians, as if they had magically ceased to exist, has had an abrupt awakening.
The world is witnessing the tragedy repeated a thousand times divided. Each chooses his side, mourns his victims and ignores the other’s. No nuances. That’s how it’s always been, why should it be any different now? We see it in the chancelleries, where the split in Ukraine between the West and the Global South, between the right and the left, is being revived. We see it on social media, where pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian show seamless alignment, selective blindness, no room for compassion.
After the horror suffered by Israel, it is now Gaza’s turn. Some have compared the impact of the Hamas attack on October 7 with the 9/11 attacks in the United States. The same causes threaten to lead to the same consequences. Just as the Americans did then, Israel is now preparing to launch a punitive military invasion, which will bring more death and more pain. And that it can end as badly as in Afghanistan, which the US once again abandoned in favor of the Taliban after 20 years of a useless war.
But that will come later. Now the trumpets of revenge are sounding, a spiral that has dragged Israelis and Palestinians into a perennial tug-of-war for decades. And that, as Confucius warned more than two millennia ago, damages both: “Before embarking on a journey of revenge, dig two graves”, he wrote. One day, when the ashes of destruction and death cover the false dreams of victory, they will have to sit down and talk again.
