A few weeks ago Hamas, which has traditionally vowed to destroy Israel, won the Palestinian general elections. Just a few days later, on 27 January, it was the international Day of Memory of the Shoah. Coincidentally, two days later I went to see Spielberg’s masterpiece Munich. Thoughts cloud my mind but one unresolved problem always remains: why is there so much bloodshed around Jews?
The Holocaust is a fact of history: no one in his right senses, who has an in-depth feeling for the way we Europeans think and have thought throughout the last 2,000 years, will have any real problem believing that Hitler could have done what he did, even though his race gave us Beethoven and Goethe and built Cologne Cathedral. The killing of Jews is not a Nazi invention but a European one, not modern but ancient. Jews were already hated and detested by pagans for their arrogant claims and be given a special protected status under the Roman Emperors, then persecuted and killed for centuries by Christians for their refusal to convert. Hitler did not invent the idea of doing away with the Jews once and for all. He only devised the most efficient and vast system yet.
Hamas too have vowed to wipe Israel off the map, just like the newly elected Iranian President. But is it the same thing as Hitler’s idea? Many spin doctors, like Giuliano Ferrara (La 7), insinuates that the Nazis’ and the Muslims’ anti-Semitism are one and the same thing, that the hatred of Jews implies an intrinsic hatred of Israel. But this is evidently not the case: in most Arab-Muslim countries, even those most opposed to Israel, Jews have been and remain respected and protected members of society. It has always been like this, ever since the days of Mohammed.
The persecution of Jews is a stain on our collective European conscience and the setting up of the State of Israel, through the good offices of western governments, was a deliberate act of political atonement, most probably conjured up to wash off that same stain. The idea that was concocted to atone for that original sin, an idea that still survives after 60 years, was that the Jews deserved to have Israel given to them on a silver plate for all the suffering that they went through in the two millennia under Christians and Adolf Hitler.
The Palestinians, ethnically closer to the original Jews than the so-called Jews from the Nazi Diaspora, were left completely out of the equation. They were there on the ground: tillers of the land, goatherds, small time craftsmen, peasants but also merchants, professional people. Some of them were incorporated inside the new State, a perennial voiceless minority in a democratic regime. The others, millions of them, were left out in the cold, in no man’s land, a people without a country.
We need not go over the history of Palestine of these last 60 years. It has been a story of political insanity, obtuse thinking, gross prejudice, obdurate incommunicability, of one side demanding everything and the other giving nothing. But it did not start that way. For centuries, the natives of Palestine were ethnically and denominationally a mixture of Jews, Copts, Byzantines and Muslims who lived in close contact and communion with each other, with the Muslims, who since the seventh century had been the overlords in the region, getting preferential treatment over the other denominations.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Palestine became a British Protectorate and Jews started arriving from Russia and other places but many bought property from the Palestinians – as Englishmen have been buying property from the Maltese – that is legitimately, openly and this continued right down through to the forties. Successively, especially after Hitler came to power in Germany, the majority of Jews arrived in such an abject state that many could not afford to buy their future in Palestine and many actually turned on their heel and emigrated to the US!!
If 1947 had not happened, I bet Palestine would have slowly become a natural second home to many European Jews, pretty much the same way that Malta has become a second home to many British ex-pats, and Palestinians would have probably welcomed them with open arms. But that did not happen. Politics, as usual abetted by unfounded myths and spurious historical reconstructions, had the presumption to re-write history over the heads of the legitimate populations of the region, and it landed them into a quagmire of biblical proportions.
Which is the way out? Some lateral thinking perhaps? Why not go back to basics, reconstruct one country, one multi-ethnic people as in the olden days? Forget the Gaza strip, the West Bank, the wall. Forget religious animosity: most Jews had become atheists after the Holocaust anyway, and most Palestinians are not Muslim fundamentalists but generally secular minded people. Such a future is possible – only a couple of months ago the Palestinians of Ramallah voted a Christian woman as their new mayor – but it is so difficult to conceive as things stand. The atmosphere in the Middle East is poisoned, positions are taken to the extreme and emotions run high.
War is so easy to make, peace so difficult to construct. What is needed is that everyone takes one step backwards, concedes the existence of the other, of everyone’s legitimate right to the same country, Palestine. The Israelis under Sharon took two steps backward when they evacuated their illegal settlements in the Gaza strip and lately in the West Bank. Noblesse oblige. Hats off. Now it is the turn of Hamas.
Violence breeds more violence. Spielberg’s masterpiece Munich brings that out with such brutal clarity: in the end the Mossad lead hit man Avner is so disillusioned by the whole mad game of revenge that he even refuses to go back to his beloved Israel where he is considered a hero. No, not on those terms. The only way forward for Palestine is to leave the madness of its past and invest in the sensibility of its future. The good news is that even in such difficult times, there are young people on both sides, anonymous but tenacious, who are working together for that goal.
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