I realised it’s high time I wrote about what’s happening close to us, in the land of Isaac and Ishmael, rather than out of personal interest due to my godchild living in the West Bank.
With whom, incidentally, we still sporadically exchange messages, me asking if he’s alright and him responding, as always, identically: “We are all ok. Thank you, brother.”
After all, we never discussed politics over the phone, he never said more words on these matters, even during times of tension like now, not that they ever went away. At most, he would add a “Tough, but…” before “We are all ok…”, and even that was rare.
The only change I noticed in our conversation, as I sit here writing this text, is the absence of the “classic” question he used to ask at the end of our conversations – “When do you think you’ll visit us?”, which was always followed by “Love to have you with us”…
…lives go on, current events come and go, new issues emerge demanding our attention, yesterday’s headlines quickly become routine and of lesser importance, priorities shift involuntarily to other news that currently seem more important, “front-page”…
So, what did I say in my 4-5 articles since last October?
To summarise: I said that despite my personal, human relationship and my unequivocal support for the Palestinians’ inalienable right to have their own state, their own land, to govern their own fate, if for some reason I had to take sides in this long-standing conflict, it would be Israel.
I said that the extremist Hamas, which controls the fate of the Palestinians, undermining, disarming, and neutralising any moderate voices, committed to a path of endless conflict and faithful to its declared vision of erasing the state of Israel, expelling Jews, and creating a Palestinian state, based on Islamic fundamentalism, in the image of Iran and the Caliphates, covers that “some reason” I mentioned earlier.
I said that by resorting to history and oversimplifying and idealising Israel, its policies, and practices, portraying it as an eternal victim with an angelic face, we do not serve the truth.
Even that wasn’t sincere, as much as it tries to appear, only traces of sincerity in this tormented history, which were also internally sabotaged. It neither embraced coexistence, let alone the two-state solution; it sadistically undermined it, pushed it to extremes with continuous settlements, the Judaization campaign of the West Bank, the fragmentation of its territory…
I also said that, instead of resisting Jews and Israel, the oppressed and cruelly wronged Palestinian people should first and foremost gather in a square and hang their failed leaders who led them to this miserable state of non-existence and misery, to beg for a state, 75 years after it was offered to them.
These and many other things I wrote, and you understand that such a list of positions could go on for quite some time.
Now, however, what’s been happening for so many months can’t leave anyone indifferent with arms crossed.
And no, I don’t mean hypocritically, like recently from the side of the European Union, when Ursula realised she couldn’t go to elections without showing some sensitivity, and Biden is balancing, burdened on one side by hunger affecting him and driving away traditional voters, and on the other side, Netanyahu threatening to beat him in the elections if he overdoes it.
It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong; we’re not discussing that. We note that what’s happening, the degradation, will haunt the days to come, it will be the shame of our generation.
