I don’t know about you, but I haven’t slept well this week. The awareness that a genocide is taking place in real time in Palestine, the calls for solidarity made to different governments which have remained, most of the time, unanswered, the hospitals which have become refuges on which bombs are thrown: it is said that there have been more deaths in less than two weeks in Gaza than during the five years of the second Intifada. The latest figures suggest around 1,000 children died under Israeli bombs, financed, I remind you, by the United States. It’s unimaginable. This is genocide. The Israeli government responds to an intervention by Hamas, of course abject, by deploying its army, one of the most powerful in the world, on civilians, in a place where half the population is minor. Will they answer for these acts, which are, as defined by international law, war crimes? I maintain, with many others, that it is in no way endorsing the actions of Hamas to denounce the response of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which compares, in its speeches, the Palestinian people to animals. Their dehumanizing rhetoric has a long history and has, at other times in history and among other populations, served the ethnic cleansing desires of Jews during the Holocaust (“parasitic vermin,” according to the Nazis). ) to the Tutsis in Rwanda (“harmful insects”, it was said).
I went to express my support for the Palestinian community during a demonstration this week in my city. I came alone, after teaching. I wondered where were all these people who say they are for decolonization, who say they are left-wing, who say they are against dispossession, and I wondered where were all these white trans and queer people with whom I had come to demonstrate a few weeks earlier in the same place for the right to life and self-determination. I would have hoped to see more solidarity between the struggles. Then, different people took turns speaking. People were singing softly. I felt my eyes fill with water. When a member of a Jewish progressive group sang a song of friendship, a lament, I started to cry. At first I was ashamed of my tears: I am not Palestinian, I found that my emotions had no place there. I would have liked to be more measured. A few minutes later, I was still crying when I ran into an acquaintance. I apologized, I didn’t want to overwhelm him with my excesses. She replied: “Emotions are the only thing that allows us to hold on to our humanity. » I nodded, managed to calm down, and continued walking.
She convinced me that I must continue to cry. This changes nothing, politically, and does not change my guilt for living in such great comfort and not being able to further help a population who, at the moment, no longer have access to water, food, electricity. My tears have no impact, my words probably don’t either. But my tears and my words are on the side of resistance, of the thread that connects all living things, and I wish myself, yes, to continue to cry, to continue to feel deeply, down to my marrow, my guts, the scandal of the horror and injustice, and never getting used to it.