© 2023 fdR / RESY CANONICA
It is a difficult time to ask questions. It always is, in the face of deaths, particularly civilian deaths. Yet, from my observatory, which as some may have realized is dedicated to dismantling the traps that war, violence and indoctrination set for us, and into which we invariably fall, these questions must be asked. They concern not only others, but also us.
If, when Hamas penetrated Israel, its men had taken selfies together with defenseless civilians, without harming a hair on their heads, if it had planted a Palestinian flag somewhere and then, once its tactical capability was proven, withdrawn back to Gaza: how would the world have reacted? What about Israel? What about us?
What if Hamas had invested all the money gone into building underground tunnels and its military apparatus in transforming, instead, the Gaza Strip into something that, before, had never been seen? Where would we be today? Here is another question, which many Gaza residents are silently, out of fear, asking (and I know this from firsthand experience)?
If the Israeli establishment had decided to regard the Palestinians not as a procrastinable nuisance, but as a non-erasable fact with which to rationally relate? How would the Palestinians themselves have reacted? What about Israeli society? What about the world? Us?
Questions. Delicate ones, but not untimely: they interpellate the Islamists' blatant strategy of murderous brutality, but also Israel and, not least, our relationship, and that of governments, to the news coming from the world and that land.
Palestinians will never come out free from actions like those carried out by Hamas. Never.
Israelis will remain suspended in a kind of confused and inconclusive vortex.
However, we will also remain prisoners, distant spectators, of the unmentionable idea that only blood makes the news.
(gianluca grossi)