In their new essay October 7, 2023 Israel Gaza. The confrontation of tragedies, the two Middle East specialists Benoît Christal and Gallagher Fenwick attempt to understand the consequences of the horror, in “both camps”. A few weeks after the attack of the terrorist group and the bombs which began to rain on Gaza, they went to collect the words (and the sorrows) of Israeli civilians who survived the Hamas attack, relatives of the hostages as well as Gazans, victims of a real massacre since then.
How to put words to the unspeakable? It is also impossible to remain indifferent to what is happening before our eyes in the Middle East, where any form of peace now seems lost. Far from being another chapter in the eternal Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Hamas assault of October 7, 2023 proved to be a dramatic turning point in the region. The unprecedented massacre which left 1,140 Israelis dead provoked a large-scale military reaction from the Jewish state in Gaza, having so far killed more than 30,000 inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave. Despite international pressure to impose a ceasefire, fighting continues after more than five months of war.
Faced with this conflict where everyone is often called upon to choose their side, “this book serves neither to convince nor to accuse, but to record and testify, to prevent these tragedies from sinking into oblivion”, underline the two authors. The collection of various testimonies, which also includes interviews with soldiers, former diplomats, journalists, doctors and photographers, is an apnea dive into traumas and painful memories, a choral narrative that highlights before the crazy cruelty of this fratricidal war.
Minute by minute, hour by hour, we read the moments of terror of Elad Poterman when armed members of Hamas burst into his house during their invasion of Israeli territory. The stories collide, intertwine and echo each other, like that of Palestinian doctor Ala Shatal, who describes the agony of the patients in the hospital destroyed by IDF shells, or that of Yonatan Zeigen, who shares his last exchanges with his mother, Vivian Silver, moments before she was captured by members of the terrorist organization.
Without being completely a work anchored in raw current events or a historiographical analysis of events, the proposition is grafted into an intermediate time, that of speech. Unvarnished and with modesty, the authors humanize the stories while tracing the contours of a multifaceted catastrophe made up of numerous wounds. Beyond the extent of the gap that separates Israelis and Palestinians, we discover, throughout the chapters, points of contact, a sort of resonance among the two enemy peoples. Yes, there is a lot of pain, suffering and anger, but there is also, paradoxically, a form of hope, however tenuous, through each lived experience.