Laura Moses-Lustiger: "Israeli suffering has blinded me to that of the Palestinians"

Laura Moses-Lustiger is a French-Israeli law student and novelist, great-niece of Cardinal Lustiger [who was archbishop of Paris]. In this text, she recounts her shock and anger after the October 7 attacks, and her subsequent shame for not having shown empathy toward the Palestinians under the bombs. In her opinion, the vocation of the Jewish people is to bring "their share of light to the world."

Some situations are intolerable and must be condemned. When Hamas committed its massacre on October 7, raping, killing and kidnapping civilians, women, men, children and the elderly - the number of victims rose to 1,200 dead and almost 200 hostages - my predominant feeling was horror and anger. A black anger. You have to realize that in this small country that is Israel, which has an area of about 20,000 km² (compared to France's 549,087 km², for example), everyone has lost someone. In my case, friends; in others, brothers, mothers and children.

I see this anger and collapse today in my relatives on the "other side." More than 20,000 Gazans have died since the bombing began; 2.3 million of them have been left homeless, without access to water or electricity. In practical terms, this means that an entire population has no roof, cannot be warmed or protected from the rain, cannot drink to quench its thirst, go to the bathroom or wash. These millions of people are stripped of their most basic dignity, not to mention the constant terror caused by the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Israeli suffering, Palestinian suffering

After October 7, I spoke with a friend who very calmly explained to me that all decolonization wars were fought with violence, using Algeria as an example, rationalizing my deaths and including them in the course of history. And I am ashamed to realize that until now I have felt the same lack of empathy towards yours. The magnitude of Israel's suffering blinded me to that of its neighbors. In a fragmented, polarized world, where the majority of people access information on social networks subject to algorithms, it is up to us to open our eyes to the plurality of suffering; realize that it is possible to mourn one's own dead while taking into account those of others, and judge both as intolerable.

If the numbers tattooed on my grandfather's arm and the stories passed down by my grandmother, a girl who had to remain hidden, have taught me anything, it is that indifference can cost lives. And this contributed to the extermination of many members of my family, in France, Germany and Poland. However, this legacy has also taught me that sometimes it only takes the will of one man to save others. In my grandfather's case, that of an American soldier during a death march; in my grandmother's case, that of two nuns who ran a Catholic boarding school.

The boycott is a nonviolent protest tool that has long been used by Protestant and Catholic churches. In 2015, the Cardinal of Cologne called for a boycott of the World Cup in Qatar, an ecological and political aberration.

repair the world

An important concept in Judaism is that of "Tikun Olam", the repair of the world. And I firmly believe that the survival of the Jewish people, despite the destruction of the temples, the exile, the pogroms, the Inquisition and the Shoah, is due not only to the will to live, which is almost a fury, but to the willingness to contribute their part of light to the world. And that's what we have to do now. Except it's not the world we have to fix, but our house. The one we share with a people who have suffered alongside us since 1948, the year of our war of independence and its Nakba.

On October 20, my mother sent me this quote from philosopher Simone Weil: "Pain and suffering are a currency that passes from hand to hand, until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on." Like everything on the internet, I don't even know if the quote is true. What I do know is that my mother had just returned from spending the day harvesting tomatoes in a field on the outskirts of Gaza after the disappearance of the labor force, but also after several months of demonstrations against the radicalization of the government of Benyamin Netanyahu and the colonization.

I can imagine what that quote did to my mother, as she drove home at the end of the day, tired, desolate and angry, watching the sky change color, and as she got closer to the city, seeing the people leaving. He hurried back home with the purchase in hand. A feeling, in the face of the greatness and banality of everyday joys that know no borders, religion or language, that of hope in man.

With this hope I see that the Palestinian cause, whether it is Gaza or the occupation, is not only a cause of the progressive camps, nor of the Arab world, but also a Jewish cause. If the last 75 years have taught us anything, if the wars, intifadas and the thousands of deaths since 1948 have enlightened us, it is that the only solution to this tragedy lies in coexistence and peace between our two peoples.