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.
Luigi Mattiolo
Soon it will be one year since that tragic October 7 in which the State of Israel suffered the bloodiest and most cowardly attack in its history. I experienced it with a mixture of horror, dismay and disbelief. I shared with my many Israeli friends the anguish of those moments, the inability to admit that such ferocity could be unleashed against the Jews, that such a level of aberration could emerge to mortify, humiliate and massacre innocent civilians while bragging about it in front of their parents, and that that abyss of inhuman cruelty could be perpetrated as a tool of struggle to be inscribed in the epic of the Palestinian people.
Since then, endless days have passed for those in Israel who mourn their murdered loved ones and those who wonder about the fate of their family members they have never heard from again. By my undeserved good fortune I was not directly involved, and any of my feelings or thoughts about what happened discount this privileged position of mine. But that does not prevent me from experiencing very difficult times. From October 7 onward, in fact, a wave of rejection, of genuine revulsion at Israel’s motives, has risen. A country besieged from the North, from the South, from the East, hit in its vital centers by continuous missile and terrorist attacks, seeing its very survival undermined from all sides, its population terrorized, its schools closed in vast regions of the country, its economy on its knees fails to mobilize understanding and support in our Western public opinions. On the contrary, it is brazenly placed in the dock. He is blamed for having had a disproportionate reaction to the attacks he continues to suffer, for not turning the other cheek, for not coming to terms with those who proudly profess its destruction, its erasure from the map. It has thus proved most difficult for me and for so many like me to try to re-establish the sequence of events, the connection between cause and effect, the distinction between Israel and all of us and the armies of those who attack Israel to strike at the values we are supposed to believe in, individual and collective freedom, respect for human dignity, democracy. Israel’s democratic and liberal identity has been completely disavowed, victims and perpetrators have been put on the same level, even the highest international institutions ever created in human history have accused Israel of pursuing the genocide of the Palestinian people, composed of thousands of individuals who live, work and have found their place in society in Israel. A death-wish terrorist acolyte like Hamas, which has been ruling Gaza with an iron fist since 2005 and using its brethren as human shields, has been granted a salvific function by the Palestinian people, as the only authentic and effective defender of the legitimate aspiration for the creation of its own state. In other words, in our world, which we thought evolved and vaccinated against the virus of violence and oppression, it has been admitted that rape and murder under certain circumstances can be a useful and therefore justifiable tool of political struggle.
If the same reading has not been applied to other liberation struggles that have also dotted our history-from Vietnam to Eastern Europe, to name a few-there must be a reason. I have pondered this reason for a long time, coming to the conclusion that when the victim is a Jew, the inconceivable becomes acceptable, the unspeakable is absurdly contextualized, circumscribed, deprived of its truth.
I believe this is the whole destructive essence of anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that I have never believed was buried by history, but of which I have often found obvious traces in the most unexpected circles and interlocutors, but which has now become a manifesto around which without modesty — apart from some hypocritical dissimulation with so-called anti-Zionism — a collection of enemies of Western civilization as we have hitherto understood it is gathered.
Since October 7 nothing has been the same in Israel and for Israel. The country has never been so endangered, so isolated and doomed. Now really his survival is jeopardized. The hope, which I am sure is not illusory, is that the Israeli people will be able to overcome the ordeal, even if it means sacrifices and bitter choices; that they will be able to regain their cohesion; that they will be able to share at every level the priorities of the moment, which for so many Israelis center on the return of the abductees. Conversely, it is perhaps illusory to hope that in our Western world, prosperous and far from the line of fire, we will recognize the deep reasons, the founding values that unite us with Israel and never with its enemies, who will have to be held accountable for their crimes first and foremost by the Palestinians, whose fate is clearly irrelevant to most of those who profess to champion their cause.
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