Israel-Hamas War: “Who can think that Israelis will live in peace after the irreparable has been done? »

By approving the war waged by its government in the Gaza Strip, Israeli public opinion is endangering its own future and world peace, believes Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé in a column in “Le Monde”.

We are witnessing the death of empathy. To the triumph of censorship and powerlessness. To the spread of monsters that give birth to each other. Not one alarm is too much to give the measure of the danger weighing on the world.

There is no longer an adjective to describe the horror underway in Gaza. After hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, journalists (nearly 70 have been killed to date, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists), members of the medical services and the United Nations (136, according to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres), it is now the cemeteries which are being bombed [according to an investigation by the New York Times].

How can we not conclude that there is a desire to put an end to a people and not just Hamas? Israeli leaders do not hide it. Quoted by Le Monde, the Israel Hayom newspaper reports the objective of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as transmitted to his advisor Ron Dermer: “Reduce the population of Gaza to its lowest possible level. » Can we be clearer? By the hundreds of thousands, Gazans from the north were ordered to take refuge in the south. They are now invited to crowd at the door of their homes: in Rafah. What is the next step ?

What a large part of Israeli opinion persists in not understanding is that it is approving a policy which, under the pretext of protecting its people, will dispossess them of their future. The war against Hamas presented by his government serves the ruthless application of a plan of destruction, erasure, annexation. The Palestinians will survive as they have survived for the past seventy-five years. But at what cost, for them, for Israel and for world peace?

The monumental responsibility of the United States

How many children killed, amputated, sacrificed for the capture of a militiaman? How many families exterminated? How many desires to live transformed into desires to kill? Every day, every hour, every minute is too much in Gaza and for the rest of the world. Here in Lebanon and in neighboring countries, everyone's minds are racing. Each one, each one their hatred, their rage, their mourning. In this physical and mental massacre, the responsibility of American policy is monumental.

Unconditional support of the State of Israel, the most powerful democracy in the world has betrayed its role as guarantor of freedom. Its policy in the Middle East records a succession of nameless defeats and nothing related to the benefits it claimed to obtain. It does not protect Israel, it prevents it from growing, from overcoming the past, from converting to the present, from inventing a new time.

Who can think that Israelis will live in peace after the irreparable has been done? Who can believe that they will be able to overcome the consequences if they do not mobilize en masse to defeat Netanyahu and demand an immediate end to the war?

What stopped the Mossad from doing what it does so well: eliminating heads? What was stopping him from attacking Hamas leaders abroad before sending thousands of children to their deaths? I remember the landing of Ehud Barak, disguised as a woman, in the center of Beirut in April 1973.

The soldier and a small team had climbed the floors and liquidated three leaders of the Palestinian resistance in a quarter of an hour: Kamal Nasser, Youssef Al-Najjar and Kamal Adwan. It is precisely the name of the latter that the hospital now bombed in the north of the strip is named. The place where poor people, thirsty and hungry, undergo operations without anesthesia; where we see a father lying down receiving his dead baby in his arms; where the image of a dead child becomes more bearable than that of a living child, burned from head to toe.

Some still dare to speak of the “purity of arms” and lyrically praise the ethical scruples of the Israeli army. What is this morality that wants entire families to be massacred in the name of a potential armed presence in an apartment building? Should we remember that many more civilians died in Gaza in two months than in Ukraine in two years?

I heard on a major French news channel someone defending the continuation of the bombings by acquitting his conscience with a short sentence: “The Gazans are receiving trucks of aid”… This man persisted in believing that no suffering could not meet his. Does he know that the slow entry of trucks causes people to eat spoiled food, when they find it, to delay death?

A few words to heal resentment

If only the Israeli army would stop at nothing to get somewhere. But she moves forward in the void. There is nothing in these lines that in any way minimizes the appalling behavior of Hamas on October 7. The pain of the Israelis, their shock in the face of the atrocities which accompanied the disappearance of their own, the rapes, the torture, the brutal return of terror in our memories, the full extent of this misfortune inhabits my thoughts in the same way as the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. But how many Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs, like me, have had access to this memory traumatized by Western Nazism and anti-Semitism? How many had the means to take stock of it, even though they had nothing to do with it?

For my part, it was during an analysis session that I was able to take a giant step forward in my understanding of peace. “I owe you an apology,” my analyst, who was Jewish of Belarusian origin, told me. “I am one of those who believed that Israel was a land without people for a people without land,” he added. This sentence, believe me, changed my life. She showed me that sometimes it only takes a few words to heal resentment.

It is this phrase – this movement of humanity and recognition – which has been missing from all the “peace processes”. This lack now translates into the permission to forget that these are human beings that we have been crushing for eighty days. And what is the international community doing? It allows permission, it makes Einstein’s prediction more relevant than ever: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch and do nothing. »

As an individual dies several times in his or her life, the inhabitants of the region are called upon to die if they want to live: to give up part of the past in order to move forward. To find each other again. The Bible cannot continue to serve as a land register, nor the Koran as a political or military treatise. If God is not returned to God, a homeland to the Palestinians, humanity to itself, we will all become lost, no longer knowing who is who, who wants what, who has the right to what. Language will be reduced to self-reproducing with nothing and no one in it.

Dominique Eddé is a Lebanese writer and essayist. She is notably the author of “Edward Said. The novel of his thoughts” (La Fabrique, 2017)

Source: Le Monde