The State of Israel claims to boast a unlimited ethical credit only because they were a people discriminated against at the time, or as a people attacked for their very existence, referring to the extermination camps of Hitler’s Germany and then, inappropriately, to the fateful day of October 7, as if it were a small, new holocaust.
It seems that on the basis of this credit it can carry out bombings and massacres, starve and thirst civilians, explode radio devices remotely, killing and maiming, block humanitarian aid and starve the Palestinian population: crimes against humanity.
If all the people who have been persecuted for their ethnicity, religion, color, could boast the same unlimited ethical credit in the world there would be absolute chaos.
For example, if the Native Americans left the reservations and rebelled, to take back their ancient lands: there would inevitably be clashes and deaths, even among the whites, but no unlimited ethical credit would be granted to the Indians, who would be brutally repressed. Yet they would have plenty of them.
Perhaps the Armenian people, persecuted and massacred by Turkish troops, would be authorized to take revenge against those around them? Or the Kurds, who have suffered so much, without ever finding territory, rights and identity, what would they be authorized to do? Or the Tibetans again? What would the last Indians of the Amazon not be morally authorized to do to defend themselves from the incessant assaults of timber and pasture speculation, other than shooting arrows at whoever comes? They do so, but the Brazilian state sends the military to repress them.
So why is only the State of Israel granted this unlimited credit? It is certainly aanomalybut which has precise historical-political reasons. On the one hand, the sense of guilt of Germany, Italy and other European nations who collaborated in the extermination of the Jews during Nazi-fascism; on the other, the US interest in having a strong ally, which watches over its strategic interests on the other side of the Mediterranean, to which almost everything can be forgiven; furthermore, the very roots of Zionism, of the idea of the great State of Israel, lie in the Western economic-financial fabric, which is its prerequisite.
Obviously the historical roots of the almost century-old Arab-Israeli conflict are very complex and it is not my idea to examine them in this writing, the focus of which concerns a cultural area in a broad sense. Naomi Klein, in an article recently published in “The Guardian” and taken up in Italy by “Internazionale” of 18-24 October 2024, analyzes the use of memory by the Israeli authorities, aimed at keep the trauma openrather than trying to process it. The museums on the Holocaust, superimposed on those on the victims of October 7, 2023, the use of sensory stimuli and virtual reality, fulfill this function.
Klein states, together with Marianne Hirsch, an expert in re-enactment of the drama at Columbia University, that “if it is true (as Israeli propaganda says) that the holocaust can return at any moment and that Israel is the only bulwark to avoid it, then a kind of alibi is constructed for whatever Israel intends to do, an alibi whose horrible implications we have seen in the last twelve months.”
Another horribly interesting cultural fact in this centuries-old conflict is that relating to the count of the dead and, above all, of different weight and value of the dead themselves. When Israelis die, the exact number and often even the name is given, when Palestinians die, an approximate number is given, in heaps, without a name.
In Lebanon hundreds of people have died and many others have been maimed or injured, due to the simultaneous explosions of their “pager” devices: a horrible massacre, in a terrorist manner, yet it has been talked about for a few days and it is was dismissed as a Mossad action against Hezbollah. If even two or three cell phones had exploded at the same time in any European country, we would be talking about the victims for weeks, one by one, wondering how it was possible, who is responsible, who could have planned such a cowardly and sinuous, to hunt down the alleged cyber-terrorists… As if, just over two thousand kilometers to the south-east, the dead had another weight: they were taken for granted, without importance.
If you think about it more deeply, this macabre inequality is merely the mirror of the inequality, on an ethnic-religious basis, between Israelis and Palestinians during life. The former with the right to water for the fields, to harvest olives and fruit; the latter with rationed water, gutted by machine guns during the olive harvest, because “they were lurking among the trees”. The former are free to move, the latter subjected to incessant, oppressive limitations on freedom of movement. We could continue, because Apartheid pervades people’s lives in all contexts, discriminating against them on a racial basis.
This psychopathic idea of the good dead man and the bad dead man or, even worse, of our deceased hero and the others classified as “an indistinct bunch of savages”, takes us back to the Eurocentric colonialist thoughtwhich then became generically Western, with the contribution of American cinema to the collective imagination, with its faceless screaming Indians who fall in bunches in front of the volleys of rifle fire; later supplanted by other thriller genres, now more intriguing, but in which very often the ghosts of the Apaches to be exterminated re-emerge, in the form of Arabs, Orientals, extraterrestrials, or eternal Russian spies.
Not the imagination in power of the seventies of the last century, but Power controls the imagination, in the twenties of the twenty-first century.
Thus even an individual indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity and attempted genocide, like President Netanyahu, could become a superhero in the flattened minds of those who believe they are always besieged by primitive miscreants.
The European Union and its individual states are called into question, provided that it is truly free from North American hegemony. European culture has recently maintained, with difficulty, a certain degree of cultural pluralism, with more or less significant differences from country to country, but is increasingly receiving authoritarian and repressive pressures from dissent, inclined to encourage armaments and a war economy .
It becomes important that culture and art seriously commit themselves to peace and balance on the planet, to prevent the crude waste of fascist, colonialist, militarist, patriarchal and violent ideologies from regaining the upper hand in today’s social fabric, which appears often anesthetized and confused, or at best doubtful and divided. It’s time to create.
Let us not be closed off by the destructive non-culture of war!
