© 2025 FdR 7 rESY CANONICA
The ardour — and the overheating — over the Gaza Strip has followed the predictable dip on the thermometer. That is the fate of every fever. But it is also the consequence of a built-in flaw in the protests we have witnessed: not for a single moment did the demonstrators accept the necessity of pinning responsibility on Hamas as well. A party — a “resistance movement” — that holds (absolute) governing power in the Strip knew perfectly well how Israel would respond to the 7 October attack.
By acting as it did, Hamas effectively called down that unleashing: it pulled the pin on the grenade, hoping for the disastrous fusion — consciously and unconsciously — between street protest and an apocalyptic, suicidal reading of Palestinian resistance.
That said, it is striking to observe how Europe is undergoing an epochal shift to which very few seem alert — and fewer still offer any intellectual resistance. The war in Ukraine has triggered a surge of belligerent rhetoric and a sprint towards rearmament. This is an age of wholesale disorientation, embodied by a political and media class that is simply not up to the task.
A curtain of indifference has descended over Europe’s societies. Why? I have written it repeatedly, including on Faccia da Reporter: to challenge the official version of the Russia–Ukraine war — manufactured and upheld by every government and by dutiful, mainstrema media — to laugh, out of sheer despair, at the warlike orgy now playing out in Brussels and across Europe’s chancelleries, carries a very high and very concrete price.
It is the price demanded by independence and by the freedom of critical thought. Paying it is an honour reserved for the few.
No wonder, this time, nobody takes to the streets.
(gianluca grossi)