2023-11-01 05:10:07
Foto: Jannoon028 de Freepik.
For us Israelis, the refugee status we have imposed on millions of Palestinians for 75 years, the occupation we have imposed on millions of others for 56 years, and the siege we have imposed on the millions of Palestinians in Gaza for 16 years have eroded our moral principles. They have normalized a situation in which there are people who are worth less. A lot less.
Corruption often advances into the depths of the abyss at a constant speed with terrifying periods of acceleration, but there are also hopeful moments of slowing down… until Black Saturday on October 7.
The incomprehensible cruelty to which we have been exposed – which demonstrates the extent to which occupation and siege corrupt both the occupied and the occupier – has penetrated our soul. And, like nuclear power, it has spiraled us into a moral hell.
A few days were enough for a wanton and systematic killing of civilians – children, women, the elderly and men – at the hands of members of an organization that has lost any semblance of humanity to eliminate some of the barriers that we still seemed to have.
We have created a society in which people on the other side of the border have been stripped of their humanity.
Today, Israel is a country and a society where calls to eliminate Gaza are not just the stuff of pathetic, marginal people leaving comments on social media. It is a country where ruling party lawmakers openly and brazenly call for a “second Nakba,” in which the defense minister orders millions of civilians to be denied water, food and fuel, a country whose president, Isaac Herzog, the moderate face of Israel, says that all Gazans are responsible for Hamas’ crimes. (If I hadn’t seen the latter myself, I wouldn’t have believed it.)
In Gaza, with its 2.3 million inhabitants, more than half of them children, living under a government that combines totalitarian dictatorship with religious fundamentalism, our president could not find a single Gazan – man, woman or child – that he was not responsible. Thank goodness no news channel has commissioned a poll to find out the percentage of the Jewish community that supports ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
And perhaps not only in Gaza; why stop there? When political and military leaders lose all restraint and endorse ideas to deal a brutal blow to civilians, we are creating a society in which the process of stripping people across the border of their humanity has been completed. .
And when that happens, hell is near. On October 8, we took a giant leap in our campaign of moral corruption, and now we are dangerously close to the black hole. It is no wonder that there are thousands dead in Gaza – thousands! – and that the voices wondering whether we have done enough to prevent the innocent from being harmed are barely heard in the Israeli public debate.
And that’s not all. No social moral corruption is directed solely outward. There is always an enemy within: the same enemy that the police commissioner declared war on last week when he ordered his subordinates to use force to prevent protests against the war in Gaza and against the harm to innocent people. And he proposed deporting the protesters to Gaza.
It is likely to express pain over the death of children in the Strip (there are already more than 1,700) [Más de 2.000 el 24 de octubre] Not only will it earn you a place on one of the police commissioner’s buses. It will also get you suspended from work or school, as has happened to dozens of people in the last two weeks.
And that is not the worst scenario, because compassion for the children of Gaza can also end in an attempted lynching by a fascist mob, as happened to journalist Israel Frey. (Confession: I am proud to say that he is a friend of mine.) In short: how do we define the regime of a country that treats its critics this way? I know how not to define it.
Not far from us, on their own path towards the black hole, flutter those who call themselves members of the “progressive left.” They are finding it difficult to condemn without hesitation – and without running away from the “context” – a satanic orgy of destruction of Israeli civilian communities near Gaza along with their residents. Some even babble something about decolonization being an ugly process; That is what happened in Algeria and Kenya, for example.
I read that and I die of shame. It may not have been understood, but the fight to end the occupation and achieve the independence of the Palestinian people is part of the universal fight to defend the human rights of all, and not the other way around. The idea of the sanctity of human life, the noble idea that every person has basic rights that should not be undermined, is not a tool to implement Palestinian independence, but quite the opposite. Palestinian freedom and self-determination are designed to move towards a reality in which people enjoy the protection of their rights and are free to lead their lives as they wish.
Those who are confused about this issue are not humanitarians. Those who are confused about this issue are not expressing a complex and profound moral thesis, they are simply giving themselves over to supporting terror.
Being human is hard work. Remaining human in the face of inhuman cruelty is much more difficult. Despite what we often think, humanitarianism is not a natural human trait. The desire to take revenge is much more natural, to blame everyone on the other side, to drop thousands of bombs on them, to wipe them off the face of the earth. The history of humanity is full of examples, and apparently we have learned nothing.
These are terrible times. We have lived through a horrific trauma perpetrated by human beings who have lost their humanity, and now we bomb, murder and starve people, and above all we harden our hearts to the point of petrification. Moral corruption is no less dangerous to our survival than Hamas.
This article was originally published on October 23 in Time and reproduced on CTXT. Translation by Paloma Farré.
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