Today, the newspaper brought blood as usual/was dripping like the trachea of a slaughtered lamb.” These verses by Felix Grande have haunted me most of my life, but what we have witnessed in the past months in Gaza simply defeats them, annuls them. Our time has known of atrocities committed yesterday or 100, 500 years ago, and one by one they break the soul. If we remotely put ourselves under the skin of any Gazan, or for that matter, also a West Banker or Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, we will end up accepting, with the self-character of Primo Levi in Auschwitz (If this is a Man): I stopped understanding a long time ago
. Except that the current perpetrator is on par with the victim of that time.
So much is analyzed, said, reiterated, accumulated, denounced, deplored, etc. The feeling of emptiness and uselessness takes hold of those of us who still realize it and care. And once again comes to our aid the thought, undoubtedly controversial, of the Jewish-Italian historian Enzo Traverso, with his new book, Gaza in the face of history (Akal, Mexico, 2024, 110 pp). His work has explained to us why the nation called Israel is not the Jewish people as it was conceived before 1948, inside and especially outside Zionism, which, like other isms in history, has become a caricature monster. Horrible. Its lethal capacity far exceeds that of the Tsarist, Polish or fascist pogroms.
The Israeli armed forces, the IDF, are one of the best equipped armies in the world. Today, their use of new weapons is, in fact, a testing ground for this post-artificial intelligence panoply, and an experiment in the future, as Carl Amery said of Nazism, documenting how Hitler invention
a Germany as Arcadia. Today we see it in the annexation by means of devastation and genocide of the remaining territory of Palestine, and it appears in the delusions of the Make America Great Again, the new European far-right nationalisms and the tragic jokes of history, such as the scarecrow Milei.
The IDF is the police of the West against the enemy East. Formidable, effective, fearsome. As Traverso writes to justify his new essay, written in recent months and partly published in The poster, The countries of the global South “have expressed unanimous outrage at the destruction of Gaza, while the West – that is, the vast majority of their governments and media – has supported it, if not facilitated it, digging an ever deeper furrow between their elites and public opinion.” He cites feelings of stupor, disbelief, discouragement and rage
that have assaulted him in recent months. He assumes that his thinking is discordant
with the axioms of that small part of the world we call the West
and is guided by Edward Said’s invitation to intellectuals to make a counterpoint when their voices were heard less and less immersed in the media din
.
To locate perpetrators and victims, Traverso turns to the extraordinary essay On the nature of destruction (1997), by W.G. Sebald, in which the writer wondered why the German people remained silent and gambled on forgetting the bombings and atrocities suffered by their cities after losing the war in 1945. Traverso warns that Gaza is not the Second World War, “but historical analogies – which are never homologies – can serve as a guide.” Sebald speaks of a guilty nation, which knows it; for Israel and Gaza a different assessment is needed than that of Sebald, but the nerve of his investigation is exemplary.
The roles seem to be reversed, the historian notes: “While Gaza is being destroyed under a hail of bombs, Israel is presenting itself as the victim of the ‘greatest pogrom in history since the Holocaust’” (that is, on October 7, 2023). With the stench of the Reichstag fire that won’t dissipate, the supposedly most infallible intelligence service in the world has been caught in a cruel hit-and-run operation by its most important, neighboring enemy, which it has had under its thumb and under surveillance for years: Hamas. Which is not, how often will it have to be repeated, the Palestinian people, who exist no matter how much the rich world plays dumb.
For Traverso, the destruction of Gaza is the epilogue of a long process of oppression and uprooting, described by Said in August 2002 during the second Intifada: Gaza is surrounded on three sides by an electrified barbed wire fence; imprisoned like animals, the inhabitants are unable to move, work, sell the fruit and vegetables they grow, go to school. They are exposed to attacks by Israeli planes and helicopters, while on the ground they are shot down like rabbits by armored vehicles and machine guns. Hungry and miserable, Gaza is, from a human point of view, a nightmare, made up of thousands of soldiers dedicated to the humiliation, punishment and intolerable weakening of every Palestinian, regardless of age, sex and state of health.
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How big must the cynicism be to call October 7 a pogrom? The State of Israel has become the world’s biggest liar with its totally false Holocaust and biblical analogies. bullshit: cow shit. But the West, which invented human rights, continues to swallow such a millstone.