War of weapons, war of consciences

An old right-wing friend, a usually mild-mannered person, about the events in Palestine said, livid with anger and with a look I did not know him with: I hope the Israelis destroy that rabble forever. Tone aside (not always...) this is the concept expressed by all parties, by the 'unified' journalism and political communication of the West. In reverse ranks, equal and opposite concepts can be heard from supporters of the Arab cause.

Hatred has taken over, armed with a verbal violence, a fury, an inability to assess the motives of others that leaves one stunned. Black or white, no nuance is allowed. The enemy is someone to be done away with in every way, even by extermination. The moral fall of our consciences dismays, in the wake of the horrible example of the neo-liberal elites. In obvious difficulty on the terrain of world power, they have become assertive, resentful, brutal. Victorious against their enemies - first fascism, then communism - they have disposed of the residual 'bourgeois' morality, with its hypocrisies but also with a certain style, rigour and sense of limits, to end up in the whirlpool of a nihilism that has lost all ethical anchorage. The war of weapons is transferred to the terrain of consciences, poisoning them. What is more, it loses all sense of reality.

The writer heard from the voice of his parents the story of 10 June 1940, the day Italy entered the war. The mother, a teenage tailor's student, after hearing Mussolini's speech, experienced the stark reality of war in just a few hours. Genoa was bombed by the French air force the same evening. It was the beginning of years of running at breakneck speed to the shelters to the sound of sirens, the din of bombs, fear, destruction, the smell of blood, the terror of not finding one's home and of recognising friends, relatives, acquaintances among the rubble. Father was an Alpine soldier in Mondovì and was mobilised the same day. He reached the nearby front and began firing at soldiers whose familiar alpine valley speech he recognised. He saw his first comrades die, a foretaste of the dramatic Russian campaign in which he participated. Cold, hunger, death, the discovery of the humanity of the Russian peasants - the enemies - the fortunate return home among the rubble of the defeated homeland.

This is war. We are not pacifists with a rainbow flag. We must take into account the possibility of conflict - pòlemos is the father of all things, wrote Heraclitus two thousand five hundred years ago - maintain fortitude and know how to face those who threaten us. However, we are unable to accept the furious bellicose language, the spread of hatred, the tenacious will of masters and servants to obliterate the motives of others and their very existence, the denial to the enemy of the status of man.

In 2022 they have convinced us that Russia is evil, they have spread a devastating Russophobia that has not spared the art, literature, history of that great country. They are invaders, yes, but of Russian lands by history, language, and sentiments, to defend themselves from the geopolitical encirclement of the 'good' westerners, whose inverted supremacism (we, those of tolerance, multiculturalism, and 'rights') is the mask of imperialism, of the will to power, of colonialism. We have forgotten that two neighbouring and brotherly peoples are massacring each other. Mourning, destruction, blood, pain. Today, for the joy of those who do lucrative business with weapons and the war economy. Tomorrow, the big business: the billionaire reconstruction (the Black Rock fund is in the front row) of what will remain of a destroyed nation, which has lost, between flight, refugees, emigration, war dead, half its population.

A new awareness was opening up in the face of the Ukrainian conflict, and then the Palestinian scenario exploded. Here Manichaeism reached intolerable levels. If the pro-Western friend wishes for the end of the Palestinians, others hope for the beginning of the total destruction of the Jewish state. Personally, I sympathise with the Palestinian cause. From the comfort of our living room, sipping a drink in front of the television broadcasting the images chosen by the powers that be, can we imagine ourselves in the condition of a Palestinian in Gaza, the West Bank or a refugee camp? How would we feel if they had driven us or our parents out of the village, out of the land, out of our affections and interests?

The plight of those who have fled, who have become exiles with no hope of return, and of Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, is less onerous. They have a home, a job, of course, but they are, like the few remaining Christians, second-class citizens, since as of 2018 Israel is officially a state on an ethno-national and confessional basis. The non-Jews - also Semites - do not in fact have the same civil rights as their fellow citizens, much to the chagrin of the 'only democracy in the Middle East' narrative.

Giulio Andreotti uttered a phrase as sharp as a sword in the Senate in 2006: “I believe that each of us, if we were born in a concentration camp and had no prospects to give to our children, would be a terrorist”.  Especially knowing that their land and homeland was taken from them by foreign powers to offer it to outsiders, descendants of those who had settled there a good two millennia earlier. Today's dead, the destruction, the insatiable hatred are children of that 1948 event: the hearth of the dispersed Jews was born, that of the Palestinians was extinguished.

Hamas's action was undoubtedly vicious. But inhuman is the condition of too many, locked up in refugee camps, deprived even of water, driven out in successive waves by settlers animated by the arrogance of those who feel not only invincible, but superior. Hard to imagine a solution: hatred calls for hatred. And it is from this logic that we must escape, first and foremost we, the proud westerners always on the right side of history. More 'just', more 'tolerant', the only ones capable of understanding and accepting the reasons of others. As long as they do not conflict with the interests of the oligarchies in power and as long as we can observe events from the reassuring cone of light at home.

The gilded niche, our status as a wealthy minority in a world that does not love us because it no longer believes our lies is based on old and new abuses. The power of the entity known as the West (the US, Britain, Israel and down below the European valvassins) is in fact based on the power of arms. It works as long as the guns win. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, before that in Vietnam, in Lebanon, the creaks were evident. Unheard messages. Today the tiger is wounded and becomes more ferocious.

Equally, we have a duty to understand some Israeli reasons: after 75 years, they are no longer mere occupiers. Many are the children and grandchildren of people born in the land of ancient ancestors, whom they shaped and advanced. No matter what, they will remain, resisting armed. What, then, is to be done? Geographical location makes it impossible for Europe to disregard the fate of the State with the Star of David. Having fallen to them, it would probably be our turn. This is precisely why the arms solution is wrong, short-sighted, impossible to sustain over time.

Unless we accept the logic of extermination. Hamas wants the destruction of the 'Zionist entity' and the dispersal of its population. On the other hand, the Israeli interior minister declares that the enemies are not men and the war is 'between children of light and children of darkness'. A language that men of good will cannot listen to without shuddering. So, no chance of agreement: it becomes legitimate to kill, to cut off electricity even to hospitals, to order the inhabitants of Gaza to flee to a non-existent elsewhere. Did Lord Balfour, the British prime minister who in 1917, in the midst of the First World War, wrote the 'declaration' in which he promised something that was not within his moral grasp, the birth of a Jewish state on Palestinian land?

The leader of the colonialists decided as if the land, the feelings, the history, were a stroke of a pen on an open map on the table of the general staff. The recipient of the declaration was a member of the very powerful Jewish Rothschild family, a hereditary monarchy based on wealth. Must we therefore become the enemy of every Israelite? Not by a long shot. The sins lie with those who committed them, yesterday, today, always.

That is why, with the same intransigence with which we reject anti-Semitism, we are repulsed by statements by government officials in Tel Aviv who extend to the entire population the responsibility of those who -Hamas- attacked them with such violence. The concept of collective guilt must be erased from the horizon of free men. Christianity has long accused the Jews of killing Jesus. A stain. Their descendants - dispersed by the Romans in 70 A.D. - were not to be marginalised or persecuted. Precisely because of its history, Judaism cannot behave in the same way with an oppressed people.

Many Israeli citizens are against the policies of their governments. Noble figures like Martin Buber, a Jewish communitarian intellectual, spent his life pursuing co-existence between Jews and neighbouring Arab peoples. This shows that there are no collective absolute enemies and that we must shy away from the attitude of opposing ultras. We abhor the idea of the 'final solution', the annihilation of the Other.

I go back to the memories of my father, a simple man, to his bewilderment as a boy shooting in the mountains at French soldiers whose words he understood, to his gratitude to Russian peasants who shared a bit of food, teaching him how to defend himself from the frost. Every war, finally, is 'civil' war. in the sense that it affects another like me. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an internal tragedy is that those who fight and hate each other often know each other. The physical distances are minimal, the inner, moral, practical ones immense. Everyone has 'good' reasons to hate their neighbour, in the pursuit of wrongs and revenge. Everything, however, stems from an initial injustice, that of the imposition of a foreign state in terms of language, religion, history, on the territory of others, in reparation for a wrong two thousand years earlier.

Jewish was Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher who wrote the strongest words on the Other. “The Other man is not indifferent to me, the Other man concerns me, affects me. In French we say it concerns me with something I am concerned with, but regarder also means to look something in the face in order to take it into consideration. That is, before being a subject, man is in relation to other men, an ethical as well as a social or political relation. For Lévinas, what characterises man is his 'inevitable possibility' of relating to the Other. The epiphany, the manifestation of the Other occurs in dialogue, in the face-to-face. “The true nature of the face, its secret lies elsewhere: in the question he addresses to me, which is both a request for help and a threat”.

The threat remains, the hatred we breathe, the incommunicability, the conscience clouded by the desire to destroy, the indifference before the grim accounting of death and ruin. The banality of evil (Hannah Arendt), as long as it is of the Other, the enemy, the darkness that hides 'us', the light. No. Every victim questions us and forces us to make the effort we do not like to make: to recognise the Other.

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Translation by Costantino Ceoldo