In Montreal, terror has made its way to schools. Far from the fighting which continues to claim lives in the Gaza Strip and in Israel, the destructive madness of war has crept in almost everywhere, causing an outbreak of anti-Semitic gestures that are being denounced from all four corners of the world. In Montreal, the Jewish community can no longer send its children to school with peace of mind since shots were fired against two schools, one of them attacked twice in a few days. The news went around the world. From the seeds of hatred nothing good blooms.
Since that bloody day of October 7, the terrain of hostility and murderous animosities has only expanded. Its borders have long gone beyond the lines where the first ground of hatred foments, between the authorities of Israel and Hamas. Across the globe, hate crimes have been perpetrated, the results of the worst of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. On both sides of this war, extremist sympathizers seem incapable of stopping to show support or solidarity. They must hurt too: someone, somewhere, must pay for the affronts that people in the Middle East suffer.
Sadly, tragically, it must be noted that of all animosities, it is that against the Jews which ignites the most in the news. There is an increase in hate crimes in several countries, including Canada, where Montreal is champion. Around the world, Molotov cocktails have been thrown at synagogues, Stars of David have been drawn on homes, Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated, synagogues have been attacked. In Montreal, bullet holes and cartridge cases were found by the police near two schools, which aroused the opprobrium and indignation of the entire political class. It is not chic to see this here, at home.
Security devices have obviously been added around the schools, and despite the courage of the Jewish community, which has chosen not to give in to this campaign of terror and to continue sending its children to the targeted schools, insecurity reigns. . In the spring of 2021, after an escalation of Israeli-Palestinian tensions which left hundreds dead and thousands injured, the same scenario occurred in Montreal. Jewish representative organizations and families talked about how it was not good to live in Montreal, to take the street to go shopping, the alley to play with friends or even the way to school. In France, this Sunday, some 182,000 French people took to the streets to denounce anti-Semitism, the demonstrations of which have numbered in the hundreds since the attack perpetrated by Hamas against Israel on October 7.
Every time the Middle East bleeds, Jews around the world pay by the hundreds of thousands for the political strategy of the government of Israel alone. This is not normal.
How can we escape this cycle of hatred and detestation, which crosses continents and is transmitted from generation to generation? If you haven’t read it yet, you should immerse yourself in the thoughts and prose of the Lebanese-Quebec playwright Wajdi Mouawad, who first published in Releasethen in The duty, a punchy text entitled “They will not have our hatred”. He recounts, in lucid poetry, the path of the one in whom “the seed of an immortal and ineradicable flower” was planted very early on, the hatred, which made him hated “by inheritance”. “One of the flowers of hatred which spreads most easily in our regions and which gives off the most invasive scent is the flower of anti-Semitism”, writes Mr. Mouawad, who invites us not to fall into the trap set by Hamas on October 7, or to “ensure that the aftermath is above all anti-Semitic”.
Just as we must not give in to campaigns of terror, we must also not help seeing a world where nuance can find its way and allow successive condemnations of all Islamophobic discourse and all anti-Semitic outbreak; that we can experience in the same breath the horrified reaction to the atrocities committed on October 7 on Israeli civilians and the immense pain for the unspeakable and murderous drama experienced for more than a month by the Palestinian people besieged in Gaza; that feelings of humanity can coexist, without hatred forcing us to choose a side, for the people targeted at the heart of this lost conflict, whether Jewish or Palestinian.
After concrete actions of protection and prevention, education and dialogue will always remain the strongest ramparts to erect so that this violent stupidity that hatred engenders does not sneak into a sanctuary called school.