2023-10-20 20:32:52
The war between Hamas and IsraeldossierIsraelis or Palestinians, Jews or Arabs, novelists or poets, five authors attempt to answer the question that has haunted them since the massacre of October 7: how to get out of it?
The remark comes out, almost nonchalant: “Stop your whining!” We are on a French television channel in continuous debate on the war in Gaza, in what historian Vincent Lemire aptly calls “the binarity, or inanity, of the French political debate on the conflict.” The only goal is to victimize oneself more than the other; when we feel that we are losing the game, we should immediately change our rhetorical stance and accuse the other of exploiting our historical misfortunes, or even exaggerating them – “stop your whining”. And yet, since this monstrous attack of October 7 and its repercussions on other innocent people, what could be more relevant than a whine? “For death has ascended through our windows, It has entered our palaces; It exterminates children in the streets, and young people in the squares,” described the prophet Jeremiah. Faced with the tragedy that is playing out in this region of the world since the massacre perpetrated by terrorists seeking above all to make any peace agreement impossible between Jews and Arabs, we need more than ever to hear from those who understand the magnitude of it. .
Writers, historians, intellectuals and poets, they each answer in their own way the question that leaves them no respite – how to get out of it? With the organized attack consisting of torturing, burning alive and massacring communities of peace activists, including children and grandmothers, Israelis who supported the peace process lost all empathy for the other side. Likewise among the Palestinians, including the most moderate, facing incessant and relentless bombings which are only the announcement of an offensive which risks causing upheavals and deaths on a scale which should haunt the conscience of the world. . We must therefore “imagine a strategy other than that of blood”, as the writer Sayed Kashua suggests to us, whose dual Israeli and Palestinian cultures today seem to be in insoluble conflict. Let’s not stop the whining, not now.
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