One day all the accomplices will say that they were against the genocide

The poet Wislawa Szymborzka , in her poem " Vietnam," wrote: " Are these your children? -Yes." From these verses we come to today, where we feel called to say "no" to an ignoble piece of history, which cannot happen under the eyes of contemporaneity and cannot be cloaked in sugar-coated excuses in the face of the genocide of a people. And precisely at this moment, as a shock seems to be stirring in the streets, we want to quote a book that, in recent months, has weighed on us, with its title, like a millstone: One Day Everyone Will Say They Were Against. Omar El Akkad , translated into Italian by Feltrinelli, was born in Cairo, and then arrived in the United States by way of Doha and Canada.

In his professional experience, he has covered the war in Afghanistan, the Guantanamo trials, the so-called " Arab Spring" uprisings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. But in this book just mentioned, he is not a reporter, he is simply a man who believed—like many of us—in the Western promise of freedom and justice for all and who now, faced with the massacre in Gaza, writes of his indignation towards the two Wests: the European one (increasingly retreating, submissive, and incapable of diplomacy) and the one across the ocean, prisoner of violent language and complicit in so many dramatic stories, which will weigh on future history.

El Akkad writes: "As always, the dead will pay the moral debt of the massacre. At the beginning of this campaign, one of the most frequently cited justifications was the absurd theory that Palestinians in Gaza were being collectively punished for voting for Hamas. It is virtually unnecessary to point out that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the last elections, or that the collective punishment of a civilian population for its political choices would be subject to a much more refined standard of scrutiny if that population were not a politically powerless group, and moreover composed of people with dark skin. It is needless to point out that Hamas has been funded for years by the Israeli government for a strategic reason, namely, to maintain in power an entity that shared, at least in part, its contempt for peace or the two-state solution, or that the occupation and reign of terror inflicted on the Palestinians long predate the creation of Hamas." We don't need simplifications; we all need to further "complexify" what we have before our eyes to be able to discern the hypocrisies not only of Israel, not only of its ruthless leader, but of an entire West in retreat.

Faced with this horror, we need to regain our historical awareness and remember when, in 2014, we ignored an Israeli newspaper that published an article with photos of Palestinian children, writing " the explosives of the future ." And then, seven months before that infamous October 7, 2023, we ignored another Israeli article, headlined: "When genocide is permissible..." . And we ignored it when Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister, said he was fighting " the animals." Ibrahim Halabi, originally from Aleppo, a teacher in Gaza for several years, who died in this genocide five months ago (from what we can learn from his family, currently missing), comes to mind. Professor Halabi said he was in love with philosophy born in the West. He quoted a passage from Nietzsche, which we should reread in these hours, alongside the text from El Akkad . The philosopher writes: "What is the supreme pleasure for men who live in a state of war in that small community continually in danger, where severe ethics reign? […] The pleasure of cruelty. The actions of the cruel person cheer the community, which for once abandons the gloom of constant fear and constant caution."

What did Professor Halabi mean by quoting Nietzsche, other than that some political groups have established the idea of ​​law and order to tame everyone and, at times, shake the torpor of consciences with the tragic pleasure of violence? We have the text of El Akkad before us, the marches around Italy, the students who, with civic responsibility, deserted university lecture halls... We remember the words of Halab, who lost his life while waiting in line for food... We cannot say we don't know. It's all there for all to see. We will not be able to be good souls, one day, remembering this genocide, defined as such even by the inspectors appointed by the UN. We need to invest in solidarity, rather than destruction. We need to know how things really are. As Pope Leo said yesterday, government leaders who truly care about their people work for peace.

*Professor of General and Social Pedagogy (Lumsa University, Rome)

FROM

Dorella Cianci