SETTEOTTOBRE
L’ESPRIT DU TEMPS
Soon it will be one year since the pogrom with which Hamas declared war on Israel and the West. The Setteottobre Association, which was founded in Italy to combat resurgent anti-Semitism in our societies, has decided to initiate a reflection on what has changed after October 7, 2023, in our individual lives and collective lives.
Dora Anticoli
Nothing is the same after October 7.
In my early childhood years at home we were constantly talking about the Holocaust, our family’s deportees and how my parents had managed to hide and save themselves. So vivid were those tales that terrified I imagined living those moments always in perpetual flight. At that point, however, my mother was able to reassure me by saying, “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again! Now there is the State of Israel, and no Jew will have anything to fear anymore!”
October 7 overturned this belief.
Israelis, Jewish and non-Jewish, have been tortured killed and deported, taken from their homes, now as then, with the same desire for annihilation. And all before the eyes of the world, with evidence and footage used by the terrorists themselves as a boast. In those moments I thought that not the Israelis, but a coalition of Western countries would enter Gaza and release them dead and alive. The opposite happened, Israel defending itself was criminalized.
It is not possible to come to terms with it.
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