by Eugenio Lanza –
Israel bombs a school and two ambulances in Gaza. The weakest individuals on Palestinian territory were killed: the wounded and the displaced
In practice, the definition of terrorism. So simply and.
Disbelief, pain, anger: these are the feelings that pervaded our consciences in the hours following the carnage. A few days later, however, the time is perhaps ripe for a more structured reflection.
After telling us that Hamas cutthroats were holed up in long underground tunnels, in order to justify the ground invasion, it seems that in the past week the IDF has received new information on the enemy’s position. Some militiamen were in fact hidden in the emergency vehicles of the Shifa hospital, others still in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the far north of Gaza. Hence the “reasons” for the bombings and the subsequent massacre of civilians.
Lies, lies, falsehoods.
Told relentlessly and without shame, to humiliate the victims more than to justify the massacres, in the certainty that no one will ever oppose this barbarity. The Western world, which until a few months ago was horrified by the war in Ukraine, finds itself voiceless in the face of such plastic and manifest violations of international law. Almost no voice is raised to denounce such crimes. Above all, it goes without saying, no one intervenes in defense of the country that has been attacked, invaded and illegally occupied for decades. And it is precisely in the dissonance between this approach and the one adopted twenty months ago that the crux of the matter lies. It reminds us that it is only the interests of the various actors involved, and their mutual relationships of power, that determine global dynamics and war actions. Stop. Diplomacy and law? Empty words, invoked every other day, for the use and consumption of the warlords.
Geopolitics has never been more alive than today.
In this sense, Tel Aviv’s reaction to the words of António Guterres (secretary general of the United Nations), guilty of having made the world aware that the conflict in Palestine did not begin on 7 October, is emblematic. After attacking the Portuguese diplomat head-on, in fact, all UN officials were denied entry visas for the country. In short, diplomacy and political confrontation are fine, but be careful not to take them too seriously!
In this regard, the strong discrepancy between the narrative of the aforementioned Russian attack on Ukraine and the story of the events in Gaza also emerges crystal clear. With a great simplification of reality, and by applying the typical schematisms of the mainstream media, we could assert that these are two very similar events: there is a sovereign state, the executioner, which illegally invades the territory of another country, the victim. However, if in February 2022 these roles were shown in a clear and well-defined manner, in the autumn of 2023 they magically become much more nuanced, as if the international law manual had been forgotten outside the editorial office. The lens focused on conflicts has evidently become a little opaque, so much so that it is almost no longer possible to frame the invader-invader dichotomy, once so dear to all commentators in this part of the world.
However, there are two constants that have remained unchanged in this year and a half. First of all, we have the evergreen of closed-ended questions, addressed to people in order to give them the license of legitimate interlocutor. Like: “Do you condemn Hamas/Russia?”. Adherence to banal and reductive ideological formulas, imposed as a sine qua non for being able to participate in the debate, is unfortunately a mechanism that never seems to go out of fashion. Secondly, the tendency remains to take a photograph of the conflict at the moment in which it experienced its last explosion, and to stare at it intensely without letting oneself be distracted by anything else. Anyone who tries to investigate the reasons for this more deeply, perhaps even looking at the past, is immediately censored. The story is expelled with disdain from all television lounges, because it risks averting attention from this hypnotic polaroid. And we agree that Cicero claimed that this discipline was a teacher of life, but by dint of cultivating it we risk developing critical or even heterodox thinking, and with wars underway we just can’t afford that!
This being the climate, the tenor of the statements by Amihai Eliyahu, minister of culture of the Netanyahu VI government, who on Sunday 5 November raised the possibility of an atomic bomb on Gaza is not surprising. And we are even less surprised that, following these shameful utterances, Bibi did not relieve him of his duties at all, but only temporarily suspended him. A slap, a good-natured slap, at most an invitation to greater verbal continence, that’s it.
Beyond the words, however, what continues to scare us is the bloody obstinacy with which the Israeli attack in Palestine is proceeding. At the moment, it shows no signs of stopping or decreasing in intensity. A possible ceasefire would slow down the war effort, Netanyahu explained last week. The conditions for silencing the weapons are not there, US Secretary of State Blinken then confirmed.
In short, those who want peace must be patient: there must be a lot of blood under the bridge.
