Sitting by the fire in the countryside, between my dog who moaned with happiness and my cat who purred with pleasure, reading the moving novel What I know about you, by Éric Chacour, I almost wanted to give thanks to God, since it was the Thanksgiving holiday. Although I may be an atheist, the need to thank someone comes over me in the perfect, sweet moments, when I am overwhelmed by gratitude – surely from the remnants of my Catholic upbringing.
It is in the face of horror that I lose faith in humanity, since God does not exist.
The bloody Hamas attack in Israel finally made me spend my recent week of vacation in front of the 24-hour news channels, with my nose in the newspapers and social networks, discovering minute by minute the scale of the massacre, until to surround my eyes, which are now turning, like the eyes of the world, on Gaza, where the destruction of a hospital left hundreds of dead.
My mother called me, shocked by the images and lost in the trenches of opinion. Why this incredible violence? How far will this go?
If there is one thing I usually avoid commenting on, it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The roots of this confrontation are so deep that we have the right to remain silent so as not to add fuel to the fire by saying stupid things. It seems like you would have to be a historian, a political scientist, a lawyer in international law and a specialist in religions all at once to cover every aspect of this conflict which has just reached a stage where almost everyone says that peace is now here. impossible.
But who, in the last 20 years, has listened to those who advocated peace?
Can generations of Israelis and Palestinians who grew up in fear, trauma and hatred ever hope to get along?
I know just enough to understand that to the attack by Hamas, which did not hesitate to kill and kidnap children, women and old people, Israel’s response will be terrible, and that other children, women and old people will perish en masse, which will bring us to the brink of the abyss.
I still think of the title of Larry Tremblay’s latest book: Of hells and children. We have not stopped seeing the corpses of children in this corner of the world transformed into hell, where two million Palestinians are stuck on a tiny strip of land from which they cannot escape, despite bombings and a blockade. And I tell myself that any human being trapped can become violent.
When I was little, documentaries about the Holocaust started to be shown on TV. It took a good twenty years after World War II for the general public to truly discover the crimes of the Nazis. I will never forget the shock it gave me, these images of the death camps. For a long time, I pulled adults’ sleeves, asking them: why did we do this to the Jews? No adult was able to really answer me. It took me a lot of reading to understand anti-Semitism, and what the expression “crime against humanity” also means.
Volodymyr Zelensky is rightly concerned about the weariness of Western countries towards the war in Ukraine, because the longer it lasts and our lives are not in danger, the less urgency we feel. For a long time, weariness and disinterest have surrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which only inflames geopolitics enthusiasts, activists and, of course, those mainly concerned who clash during demonstrations in major Western cities. Except that a lot of people don’t understand what’s going on there, Guy Nantel could do a vox pop on that.
But we don’t need a doctorate to understand that we are no longer facing “tensions”, or even a “conflict”, and how will we avoid escalation and even more conflict? horrors if no one agrees on the subject?
This ends up catching up with us all, because it is not normal that in Canada, we fear for synagogues and mosques. That one more teacher is murdered in France, that a terrorist opens fire in Belgium, that a 6-year-old child of Palestinian origin is stabbed to death by a neighbor in Chicago.
I don’t like these speeches that compare killers to animals. Animals do not act out of cruelty, and when I look at Angie and Nanette sleeping next to me, it is clear that what has been said about dogs and cats is false.
No, these are indeed men who act with cruelty, who are fathers, brothers, husbands. To what degree of dehumanization have we reduced them so that they themselves abdicate their own humanity by mercilessly massacring?
In an interview on France Culture, the Quebec writer of Palestinian origin Yara El-Ghadban, summoned by the host to denounce the Hamas attack, had to respond that since October 7, “I have been asked to justify my humanity and to remember my humanity. I would have liked this indignation to be heard; it’s been 50 years of occupation, 75 years since the Nakba [ce que les Palestiniens nomment la “catastrophe”], and I am an heir to the Nakba,” underlined the Montrealer whose grandparents were chased from their village. I know Yara, one of the most humanistic people you can meet, I felt bad for her.
The Jews and Palestinians who are talking about peace right now are the bravest in the world, because you certainly cannot call those who have both feet in war idealists.
In his essential book Human specie, published in 1947, the French resistance fighter Robert Antelme, who survived the Dachau camp, wrote this about the Nazis’ dream of changing our species: “No, this extraordinary illness is nothing other than a culminating moment of the history of men. And this can mean two things: firstly, that we are testing the solidity of this species, its fixity. Then, that the variety of relationships between men, their color, their customs, their formation in classes mask a truth which appears dazzling here, at the edge of nature, as we approach our limits: there are no human species, there is a human species. It is because we are men like them that the SS will ultimately be powerless before us. It is because they attempted to call into question the unity of this species that they will ultimately be crushed. »
In these dark days, I envy Nanette and Angie’s species.