Since the start of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, we have read numerous interventions in the media to denounce the massacres and kidnappings of Israeli civilians committed on October 7 by terrorists from the Gaza Strip or to demand an immediate cessation. Israeli bombings which kill Palestinian civilians, including many women and children.
“Or”, but very rarely “and”…
In other words, the compassion displayed in the media and on social networks is most often of variable geometry. Those who protest against the death of children caused by the bombs raining on Gaza, against the deprivation of water, food and care which strike an entire civilian population taken hostage generally have nothing to say about the women, children and old people massacred by Hamas, nor on the rapes and mutilations of young women whose only crime was being Jewish. We thus see anti-racist activists turning a blind eye to the murderous anti-Semitism of Islamists, and feminists remaining silent when women are victims of atrocious sexual violence. Is it possible that it could be otherwise?
Some will tell us no. That if you are “white” and “right-wing” you will only sympathize with Zionist victims, in other words, those who look like you, those from your camp; and if you are “non-white” or “left-wing”, your compassion will go exclusively to Gazan civilians, and perhaps even to Hamas, which will appear to you as the armed wing of the oppressed.
If these people are right, if compassion can only be of variable geometry, if we can only really consider as our fellow human beings who, by their skin color, their religion, their culture or their language, we resembles, then the world in which we live can only be a world of conflicts, wars, massacres, a world irreducibly divided.
This Manichaeism which seems dominant today can obviously only lead to simplistic solutions to this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has lasted for seventy-five years. We were thus able to read in the comments of articles published here, in Quebec, that the Hebrew State was “colonial”, that it had established an “apartheid” regime or even that we could resolve this problem by referring Israelis in the countries of Europe or America from which they came. Conversely, eradicating Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, reoccupying Gaza or sending an international military force there, maintaining ad vitam aeternam Palestinians in puppet states, fenced off by walls and militarized crossing points, eaten away by new settlements of Jewish settlers, without future, without hope, appears just as senseless, and above all unrealistic.
Compassion is not only about suffering with others, it is also about trying to understand them, being able to put oneself in their place, at least in thought. From this point of view, we can of course understand the anger, the revolt, the hatred and the desperate desire to fight by any means that motivates many Palestinians. But we can also put ourselves in the place of the Israelis. If we had seen hundreds of our loved ones being brutally massacred, being kidnapped, would we not also thirst for revenge?
The only realistic solution
But we shouldn’t be fooled either. The extremely violent reaction of the Israeli army was exactly what Hamas wanted when committing its atrocities on Israeli territory. Its leaders obviously knew that the Israeli response would be terrible. To make above all political gains, they did not hesitate to sacrifice the Gazan population, whose deaths, which number in the thousands, represent in their eyes only propaganda tools and “collateral damage” in the ongoing struggle. to destroy Israel and establish an Islamic state.
The ultimate consequence of Manichaeism is that it grants the adversary the incredible privilege of dictating our reactions. Even if we can think that the current Israeli government also finds its account in this conflict which unites the country and makes us forget that it was recently strongly contested, the fact remains that Israel has fallen, voluntarily or not. , in the trap that Hamas set for him, and that it was very difficult to do otherwise.
Since it can only be satisfied with the destruction of the adversary, Manichaeism cannot provide other solutions than merciless war. Humanism, for its part, allows us to glimpse the slim hope that after the shock, the Gazan population will reject Hamas which plunged it into this murderous impasse and that, for its part, the Israeli population will convince itself that the Netanyahu government, which stubbornly refuses to give in, has no other solution to offer him than a future made of terror, walls and barbed wire.
Sometimes compromise and peace ultimately appear to be the only realistic solution.