In this column first published in Release, the Lebanese-Quebec playwright explains how he freed himself from his hatred for those who were not from his clan. He calls for people not to fall into the trap set since October 7 by Hamas which wants the “after” to be above all anti-Semitism.
It has only just begun and we already have to “dress up” the aftermath. An aftermath which, at the rate things are going, will arrive to us as bruised as last October 7. “Bending up” the aftermath is preparing to welcome something about which we still know nothing, it is trying to heal a time that has not yet arrived, so that, freed from its murderous impulses, it can be a real afterward. . The will of governments as well as their geopolitical issues are beyond our control. And if we can express ourselves, we cannot, in a short time, act on the events that impact us and this inability, from the moment the question of action arises, creates in everyone an unbearable feeling of incapacity.
What can I do against Hamas? What can I do against the supremacist fringe of the Israeli government? What can I do against Hezbollah? What can I do against the Iranian government? What can I do about American policy in the Middle East? What can I do against the bloody cynicism of Vladimir Putin? What can I do about the discord that is undermining Europe? What can I do against Xi Jinping’s opportunism? Perhaps the question should not be asked in these terms and instead of aiming for what is beyond my reach, bring the target closer and ask myself: “What am I capable of acting on? »
The most concrete answer is also the simplest: on me. I can start by acting on myself and asking myself, in light of the situation, who I really am. What is this situation doing to me? How is she transforming me? How does she reveal myself to myself? What does it say about who I am and what I believe I am? What is the edema that it highlights and which threatens my brain?
If “dressing up” the aftermath now means ensuring that what preceded it does not happen again, a radical change is incumbent on everyone. It is not enough to say that others, Israelis or Palestinians, must change, but to recognize that something in me must transform. For real. It is the sum of the transformation of each person that will ensure that this after will be one.
Immortal flower
Born in Lebanon in 1968 into a Maronite Christian family, I have by no means lacked love. My parents sacrificed everything for me, fleeing the Lebanese civil war for the sole purpose of allowing me to study peacefully. But, due to ignorance and prejudice; due, also, to the fact that Lebanon lived five centuries under the Ottoman yoke forcing each faith to close in on itself, due to both historical and intimate parameters, my parents, in addition to love and affection , also planted in me the seed of an immortal and ineradicable flower: hatred.
And from a very young age, I knew how to hate those who were not from my clan. At 8 years old, I danced at the announcement of the death of Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt and in September 1982, I considered that after the assassination of Bachir Gemayel, the Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Chatila camps, massacred by the Christian militiamen, had only gotten what they deserved. I didn’t have to learn to hate: I hated by inheritance. And if I hated consciously, happy to hate, happy to hate, I was not aware of how much I was a slave to this hatred, because my hatred was visceral and, not animating me in an intelligible way, I had no no way to question it.
Because this hatred comes from far away and is transmitted from generation to generation. Realizing this is difficult, just as it is difficult for someone carrying an empty backpack to feel the weight add up if, from day to day, someone dropped a stone into it. The weight increases without you noticing it. So it is with this hatred. It grows without our knowledge, grows, takes root, takes root forever, becomes so entangled with our identity that we end up developing thought patterns to legitimize it, transforming us at the same time into an eternal victim.
Paradoxically, it took war, exile, the discovery of another language, the discovery of art, the quality of certain teachers (Gérard Pouchain, Sylvette Montale, Philippe Guettier, be eternally thanked here); it took friendship, the death of my mother, Sophocles, Kafka, François Ismert, the theater, travels, words, poems, love stories, for me to become aware of his presence.
She appeared to me in all her horror, a sort of pitiless epiphany, and, realizing my monstrosity, I wanted to tear her away from me. But hatred planted from birth cannot be uprooted. It is an immortal plant, imbricated forever, and in whom it was sown, it remains. Discovering a land conducive to its flowering, I could no longer trust myself, I could no longer presume on myself. I was forever duty-bound to stand guard, to be careful, and to constantly make sure that nothing was wrong with her, neither feeding nor watering her, because if you can’t get rid of her, you can. isolate it, put it under glass, stop nourishing its soil, work day after day to dry it out to prevent it from flowering.
But to achieve this, we must start by no longer denying its presence and, on the contrary, accepting it. Remember that every river has a swamp that keeps it healthy. Swamp where poisons and pollution that could kill it will settle. If this is true of rivers, it is also true of humans. This plant of hatred is my swamp where everything that is nauseating in my home is deposited. My responsibility then consists of preventing the swamp from overflowing, to prevent it, by strong dikes, from invading my mind, putrifying my link to the world. This responsibility, these dams, this vigilance are what I call an effort of empathy, humanity, sensitivity and love.
Inhuman wills
Delphine Horvilleur pointed out to me that a biblical image that could correspond to that of the swamp could be that of the tree of life from the Garden of Eden. Why was there a forbidden tree in paradise? Precisely to remind us that evil is not separated from life, to remind us of the constant vigilance that we must have in the face of its presence.
In this sense, it is not the swamp that is bad: it makes the river powerful; it is not the feelings we experience that are bad: they teach us to overcome them; it is our giving in to their bestiality that is bad.
However, if the plant of hatred has the capacity to give flowers of multiple hatreds, each deploying a different perfume towards a different group to be hated (Muslim, black, homosexual), it turns out that one of the flowers which unfolds more easily in our countries and which gives off the most invasive scent is the flower of anti-Semitism. I have observed it everywhere I have lived. In the Middle East, Europe, North America. A moment of distraction and it blooms again.
All the clichés that are part of this hatred are deep within us. It is so easy to hate the Jew. They are a people of extraordinary convenience. It’s all his fault. Past evils, present evils and even future evils, there is x in the equation of our frustrations, the unknown which fits our hatreds as we wish.
At a time when the images of Gaza reach us in all their violence, when the deaths number in the thousands, at a time when the colonization of the West Bank continues, when inhuman wills coming from the worst of the extreme right have right to speak in an Israeli government that is openly racist and for which military brutality is the only possible response, at a time when forces of mad darkness are working on both sides to prevent the slightest hope, where empathy is with civilians Palestinians, but where the memory of the Israeli victims of October 7 is being diluted and the hostages are no longer, for public opinion, only a secondary detail, it is vital to see the trap into which the Hamas by feeding and watering the plant of hatred making anti-Semitism flourish everywhere. Two thousand years of Christianity, part of whose propaganda consisted of repeating that the Jews murdered Christ, have formatted us to be fertile ground. Europe knows this well.
What is happening in Gaza is monstrous. The bombings must stop, the deaths must stop, the hostages must be freed. We must find how to do so that Hamas cannot restart its work of destruction, which constantly asserts that it will do so again. We must find another path to justice that is not that of destruction for which the Palestinians have been paying a terrible price for so long. The Israeli government must agree to integrate by integrating the Palestinians and Arab countries into this battle against Hamas and stop believing that Israel alone against all can ensure its survival.
But for all this to happen, I, for my part, only have wishes.
Living in fear
On the other hand, I know that the flower of anti-Semitism has never been so well nourished, so well watered by the images that come to us from Israel and Gaza, never in a long time has it been so opulent. Islamophobia is rumbling throughout France and it is a leprosy as devastating as any form of hatred.
One observation, however, is essential. Many people who are told “anti-Semitism” rightly respond “yes, but we must not ignore Islamophobia”, and they are absolutely right. But when we say “Islamophobia”, most of us who are not Jewish do not have the reflex to say “yes, but we must not ignore anti-Semitism”. This difference is one of the symptoms of the danger that awaits us.
By reading the news every day, I must build higher and higher dikes within myself to prevent the swamp from overflowing. However, this is precisely where we find the trap set since October 7 by the destructive spirit of Hamas: to ensure that the aftermath is above all anti-Semitic. May the aftermath be a grave for every Jew, wherever he may be. May the aftermath be a time when every Jew lives in fear, terrorized, viscerally distrustful of the world. May the aftermath be another form of diaspora. May the aftermath be synonymous with exile for every Jew.
It is this trap that we must each fight against. In this place, it is possible to act: to become aware of what the situation is trying to do to me, to fight against it, to ensure that the swamp does not overflow and by all means to dry up the plant of hatred in order to have hope. that the next generations, undoubtedly still distant, one day manage to cut the macabre thread of its transmission.