The Torments of a Left-Wing Jew

There is a war that is also fought with words. From the dispute over the word genocide to that over the word extermination. I am not very passionate about this dispute. The gravity of the facts is enough for me to occupy myself twenty-four hours a day. But I would like you to read some of the messages I receive every day.

How are you? What do you think about what is happening? What do you think about Netanyahu? But how can you as a Jew tolerate what they are doing in Gaza? But you don't care about the Palestinian deaths, you only care about your people in your ghetto, you have always been made that way. You have no right to call yourself a leftist, you support a Nazi state.

A Jew does not attack another Jew, you should not say the words you say about Netanyahu, about his government about Israel, we are surrounded by enemies, the whole world is against us, we must be very careful about helping our encirclement, helping the enemies, you should be ashamed of the words you say, you are committing a sin, you are a traitor.

Well, you are fucking hypocrites. First you kiss Israel's ass in every way and now you want to participate, for Israel, in a demonstration against the genocide that Israel is committing. They should eat your dogs.

Left for Israel? Saint Honoré for diabetics. Serial killer for single women. Childhood Pedophiles. Lardo di Colonnata for low-calorie diets. Mafiosi for the judiciary. Taliban for women. Corporal punishment for a new educational model. Pd for workers

Fascists for…

So for 18 months every day, the messages I receive chase each other. So as not to read the worst ones.

Between a rock and a hard place, always, all my life. I know what it means to be between a rock and a hard place, in an existential sense. Between those who accuse you of betraying your people if you attack the government of Israel, because you consider it guilty of crimes in Gaza, and those who accuse you of betraying the left, because you are not always and in any case on the side of any Palestinian, because he is the weakest. When faced with the images of the dead in Gaza, or of the assault on the bakeries these days, as well as when faced with the images of the boys who died at the Music Festival on October 7, I don't need acronyms or affiliations to know what to say. Also because I've been saying the same things since I was a kid.

Terror or the denial of other people's rights leads to hitting a dead end. If you erase the human and national rights of the Palestinians, in addition to committing an inhuman act, you will never solve anything, their right to self-determination will always pop up again in more or less or not at all acceptable forms, if you think of erasing Israel from the map with terror, in addition to pursuing an inhuman desire, you will clash with a capacity for resistance that history has already demonstrated.

I am 62 years old, my mother took me to meetings of Sinistra per Israel when I was 14, before that I was active in a socialist Zionist scout movement, the one that founded many of the Kibbutzim in Israel, a peace movement, which teaches respect for others, which identifies with the Israeli left, the one today led by Yair Golan, the toughest opponent of the Israeli government, the one who used words that caused a scandal. For the crudeness with which he called for military actions in Gaza. The one who was expelled from the reserve for having said them. So for about fifty years I have positioned myself on the idea that the only possible solution to this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is to have two states for two peoples (even if I know that this newspaper has a different idea). In those years, towards the end of the Seventies, a Sinistra per Israel magazine had this slogan on the cover: Only peace is revolutionary in the Middle East. I still believe it, I think that only by building peace, which is based on the awareness that in that land two rights clash and not a right and a wrong, can we one day stop the spiral of hatred and war.

Perhaps for this reason, I feel like saying whenever I deem it necessary, both in the Jewish world and in the Italian left, and to friends and relatives in Israel, the truth of the things we see. It is clear that the state of Israel, like all states, has the right to its own defense, but it is equally clear that the reaction that the government of Israel has put in place after the massacre of October 7 has long since exceeded the limit of any possible comparison. I know that Hamas hides behind the Palestinian civilians that it uses as a shield, I know that it had and has operations centers, weapons depots, launching devices, under hospitals, inside schools, inside mosques, but one cannot help but judge the price that the civilian population of Gaza is paying as something unacceptable. Even the use of hunger as an instrument of war is not acceptable, this too is part of a morally unacceptable price.

So when Grossmann writes that the tragedy of October 7 cannot be a justification for the level of suffering we see in Gaza, he is right, and when Dan Meridor, a former minister in the Begin government, that is, from Netanyahu's party, the Likud, lists with impressive precision all the blame for it, he gets to the heart of the objective problem: "You continue without success after almost 20 months a war that involves death, suffering and terrible destruction of terrifying proportions" and again "the ethical code of the IDF (the Israel Defense Forces) requires the soldier, among other things, to maintain a human face even in battle and not to use his weapon or his force to hit non-combatants or prisoners and to do everything possible to avoid harm to their life, body, honor and property. Does anyone teach these things to the soldiers in Gaza every day?" And again Meridor: “I am not addressing the racists among you, for me they are out of the question. We have already ousted their Cahanist spiritual fathers outside the law (…) but not all parliamentarians are like them, where are you? You have eyes and you do not see? You have ears and you do not hear? Do you not ask yourselves where all this will lead us?”.

And Hamas terrorism? Is that acceptable? Obviously not. But why has my left, in these last 25 years, spoken so little about it? Has it had eyes and ears in all directions? Why has the anti-Semitic and exterminationist statute of Hamas, the one that praises an indivisible Islam – including Palestine from the river to the sea – never sparked a mobilization as radical as the one we see today, rightly, without making comparisons, for Gaza?

And has the profession of destruction of Israel proclaimed by Iran and its followers, such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, ever provoked a moral revolt in the Italian left? I wouldn't say so. Indeed, albeit in a reduced form, the European Union still maintains trade relations with Iran. Perhaps the left, my left, should reflect on this when it proposes freezing the EU-Israel trade agreement. We have diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, and obviously with China - the one that in Hong Kong has wiped out the independentists and persecutes the Uighurs, keeping almost a million of them in concentration camps. Does this mean that I put all these atrocities on the same level as what is happening in Gaza? No, absolutely not. I just want to ask politics, and in particular my political area, if we apply the same sensitivity towards all the injustices in the world.

Does this mean to diminish the human tragedy of Gaza? No. I am just trying to look at a drama with ancient roots in all its complexity. Looking at history from only one point of view does not interest me. It has never led anywhere.

I have always thought that Arafat and Rabin, when they finally shook hands in 1993 to stipulate a peace treaty based on territorial compromise, in exchange for security, were each convinced that their version of history was the right one; but they were equally convinced that trying to share the same interpretation of the history that preceded them would have been impossible. And that therefore the effort that needed to be made was not to standardize the narratives, but to agree on the future. Two peoples, two states. For the people of Israel, May 15, 1948 is the date of the legitimate foundation of the State of Israel, legitimized by the vote of the United Nations in November 1947 that divided that territory into two portions, one for the Palestinian state and one for the state of Israel, as a result of the end of the British Mandate. For the Palestinians, that same date is the beginning of the Nakba, the catastrophe, the word that sums up the forced exodus of approximately 700,000 Palestinians, mostly expelled by the Israeli army, partly fled during the 1948 war, from their homes to which they keep the key. For the Israelis, May 15 is a day of celebration, for the Palestinians it is a day of mourning. But we must go further.

I am impressed by the amount of demonstrations I have seen in Israel in these 18 months against the war, by their participation and their strength, I am equally full of respect and admiration for the Palestinian demonstrations in Gaza against Hamas, and I was greatly struck by Abu Mazen who called those of Hamas "dogs", like Olmert who accuses Netanyahu and his entire government of committing war crimes. Each of these demonstrates how foolish it is to consider a people as a uniform whole, and how terribly wrong it is to impose collective punishments. Israel is not a uniform unicum, and neither is the history of Zionism, but its birth as a movement for the self-determination of a people remains, which is an inalienable right; just as the Palestinians are not a uniform whole and among them there are those who believe in dialogue and compromise to realize the dream of a state and there are those who believe only in force and terrorism.

So, there remains my hammer and my anvil, between which I feel continually crushed. How do you get out of it? By being aware.

In Gaza, the drama of the population must be stopped immediately, all necessary aid must be brought in, the fighting must stop, an international body must be established to deal with the reconstruction and government of Gaza, relief must be brought to an exhausted population, and the disarmament of Hamas must be requested to ask Israel to leave the Strip. Obviously, the release of all hostages must be requested. Then there must be an absolute stop to the violence of the settlers in the West Bank, supported by the ministers of the Israeli messianic right, and the continuous construction of new colonies must be stopped. Those colonies are illegal, as is the occupation. And the same form of law that applies to Israeli citizens must be applied to those Palestinian inhabitants, to abolish every form of unacceptable inequality. Those territories occupied in the 1967 war, as already written in the Oslo Treaty, must be the territory of the Palestinian state if, as I hope, we succeed in getting there. Their occupation must end. Palestinian terrorism must be eradicated. However, we cannot remain silent about the amount of hatred that circulates around Italy and the world. The aversion to the Israeli government, which turns into hatred towards any Israeli, towards all Zionism, towards the very fundamental right to the existence of the state of Israel. And sometimes towards Jews. Throwing a couple out of a restaurant in Naples, just because their country of origin is stamped on their identity card, is called discrimination, racism, each of us must call things by their correct name; and displaying a sign in a shop in Milan that says, in Hebrew, that Israelis and Zionists are not welcome in that shop, is just as much racism. And that is exactly what we on the left support when we point out that it is uncivilized to lock up an immigrant who lands on our shores, not for the guilt of an act committed, but for the guilt of being born. How come I have not seen a great uprising for these acts of pure discrimination? I am not interested in the dispute over the level of anti-Zionism or anti-Israeliism that must be reached to call it anti-Semitism. I am interested in an egalitarian battle against all discrimination. I am interested in not getting to the point in Washington, where two young men, Israelis, of whom you are a fervent pacifist, were killed because they were leaving a Jewish museum, shouting a free Palestine. I am interested in having all this remembered in the demonstrations called to demand an end to the bombing of Gaza and the entry of humanitarian aid, because it all comes together. We must make our closeness felt to the forces in Israel that are contesting the war, and are demanding the release of the hostages, and to the Palestinian forces that are contesting Hamas, we must condemn Netanyahu's behavior without ever forgetting to condemn Hamas, we must avoid collective sanctions against an entire people, and fight every form of discrimination, whether anti-Semitic or not.

The latest Eurispes survey published in these hours says that for 37 percent of Italians Jews only think about accumulating money, and that 35 percent believe that the choices of the Israeli government should influence the attitude towards Jews. These are ugly numbers to reflect on. It is not enough to say we are against anti-Semitism, we must be able to work for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and the rest of the Arab-Islamic world by abandoning Manichean and univocal visions, interrupting every form of discrimination. Let's stop the massacre in Gaza, let's bring the hostages home, let's stop the hatred. Two peoples, two states, two rights.

More on these topics: