2024-01-07 13:31:46
Opinion Israeli writer
The world has decided that Israel is to blame
As of: 12:31 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Author Julia Fermentto
Quelle: Ziv Berkovitch
“I was a citizen of the world,” says Israeli writer Julia Fermentto. Until October 7th, the day of the pogrom, after the entire globe turned against Israel. Here she writes about the radical change in her self-perception.
I was a global citizen until October 7th. As a writer who speaks four languages, I felt cosmopolitan, traveling freely from one place to another: I worked in England, completed a semester abroad in Italy and did my doctorate in America. I traveled through China and Russia and flew to Hong Kong for a city trip. I moved around in the world without fear, completely carefree. It seemed to me that I could live wherever I wanted, that I could integrate into any society, and even assimilate into a foreign culture if I wanted to.
Since October 7th, all of this has been over and done with. My trust in the world and my sense of freedom have evaporated, dissolved as if they had never existed. First: Our neighbors slaughtered us, raped us, set our houses on fire. Second: Immediately afterwards the slander against us broke out. The deployment of the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza had not yet begun when the Western world was already screaming: The Jews are murdering! The Jews are slaughtering! The Jews are on fire!
The word “genocide” was thrown into the air like candy in Ramallah or on Berlin’s Sonnenallee on the same day. In shock, I looked at the hot-blooded demonstrations against Jewish existence in Eretz Israel, I heard them chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” I read the disinhibited comments in the newspapers and saw the lies in the social media Networks against Israel, against the Israel Defense Forces, against my people were spread.
I cry every night
I also listened to the thunderous silence that dominated the world’s reaction in the face of the largest massacre against Jews since the Shoah, in the face of the brutal, serial rapes of Jewish women, in the face of the lives of 240 innocent Jewish hostages. I listened very carefully to the silent sound of silence, it is engraved on the tablet of my heart. All facts are meaningless if they fall on deaf ears. The Western world has long since decided that Israel is guilty, no matter what the facts say.
The West’s criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war is neither precise nor relevant. And it is already having corresponding consequences: Israelis are being disinvited from conferences and festivals, publishers are terminating contracts with Israeli writers, and Israeli film productions are being postponed indefinitely. There is no distinction made between whether I am a settler, a Tel Aviv peace activist, an opponent of the occupation or a right-winger – in the eyes of the world, Israelis are the same as the government. According to this monolithic view, we are all cast from a single mold without distinction. All are murderers, including those murdered by Hamas.
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Why do I get so personal and tell you that since October 7th, I haven’t slept a night without crying and thanking God (or whoever that is there) for having a state and an army? Because I know only too well what happened in the last pogrom against us. Back then we had neither one nor the other. I and you know only too well how that ended.
The world condemns Israel and I am prepared for this to only get worse. The current wave of anti-Semitism is growing and is flooding the world’s metropolises with its poisonous water. And me? I’m here in our little, sunny Tel Aviv. Stroll through Basel Street, cross Herzl Street, cycle along Ben-Gurion Boulevard and keep thinking about this quote from the Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian from his novel “For Two Thousand Years”: “Have you forgotten that? fortunately there are still anti-Semites? And that, thank God, there are still occasional pogroms? No matter how much you have assimilated over the past hundred years, the pogrom of a single day will set you back tenfold. And then the miserable ghetto welcomes you again with open arms.”
From the Hebrew by Gundula Schiffer
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Here you will find content from third parties
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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