After the Civil War, my mother's family found it difficult to cope with their social situation. My grandfather, 48 at the time, was a major manufacturer in Mataró. They periodically came to arrest him, and my grandmother would say, "I don't know where he is." In January 1939, Italian troops arrived in Mataró, and my grandfather took to the streets.
The eldest son had finished his law degree, which my grandfather considered useless for business. He sent him to Kemnitz, Germany, to study textile engineering. He spent there from 1939 to 1944.
I asked my uncle many times, "How is it possible that I didn't see the Jews being killed?" He explained: "One day the Gestapo would come and empty a house, take the whole family, and no one knew anything else. We didn't ask."
When the war was going well, many Germans believed that "sacrifices had to be made" for victory. As my uncle admitted, no one asked questions. But in 1943, the bombing began, becoming more and more intense. It was said that an entire Wehrmacht army had been annihilated in the USSR. "Everyone, including me, began to ask questions about those missing people. It's a burden I'll carry all my life, not having done anything... not even asking."
That is the fault of all Europe.
We will never be able to explain to our children that the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been a spectacle we have witnessed and for which we have done nothing. Can there be any doubt today that what Israel intends is to drive all Palestinians out of Gaza? What sense can there possibly be in the systematic destruction of infrastructure and homes? And preventing food from reaching them, forcing the Palestinian population first to the north and then to the south, bombing schools, destroying hospitals...? Says Omer Bartov, Holocaust historian: "What Israel sought from the beginning was to render the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable and weaken the population until it was either eliminated or forced to leave the territory by any means possible."
Karl Jaspers speaks of "metaphysical guilt." "There is a solidarity among human beings (...) in relation to crimes committed with their knowledge. If I do not do what I can to prevent them, I am also guilty."
A complement to the crime is silencing the accusations and descriptions of the events. This is especially difficult today; the images are everywhere. Netanyahu has said: "We must pause; we could lose the support of the people who help us." The United States. Pure cynicism.
"The shame of the destruction cannot be erased; trust in the world was partly destroyed by the first attack and completely destroyed by the torture. It cannot be recovered," said Jean Améry, referring to the first decades of the State of Israel.
The Jewish cause was a bulwark of cosmopolitanism against the ethnically defined community. Likud has destroyed it. Let us remember that Mandela said that South Africa's liberation from apartheid would not be complete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
The ethnic cleansing of 1948, with 750,000 Palestinians driven from their homeland, an episode known as the Nakba, was terrible, but it still left room for the solution proposed by Yitzhak Shamir, who served as Israeli prime minister in the 1980s: one territory with two states. Now, Israeli policy is geared toward making this impossible. The policy of destruction in Gaza and the Jewish colonization of the West Bank have a single, complementary goal: a greater Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians.
The two souls of Israel are personified by Vladimir Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky was a disciple of fascist nationalism and Laborism, and Netanyahu's father was his secretary. New York Times in which they said: "The statements of Begin's party are a guide to its current line. They speak of freedom, democracy, and anti-imperialism, and recently they openly advocated a fascist state. Their actions reveal what can be expected in the future."
With victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars and continued US support, Israel became the West's spearhead against the Islamic world. They transformed a small state threatened by its neighbors into the most important military power in the Middle East.
Today, Israel's communicative power is unparalleled, demonstrated by its ability to silence its surroundings, to influence US policy, to silence Europe...
The Middle East conflict is more serious than Germany's desire to dominate Europe in 1939, which started the world war, but today there are no two blocs in the world as they were at that time. China is not a state with an imperialist policy beyond its surroundings. China's great military achievement was the Great Wall, a work of defense and a renunciation of colonialist expansionism, when in the 16th century its ships were larger and more modern than European ones and Africa was an unexplored continent. That is why Israel now has a free hand and, as seen in the Abraham Plan, can reach agreements with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab Emirates. This led to Hamas's suicidal and murderous attack in October 2023.
Now, the more difficult it is to maintain trust in the future, the more important it is to maintain it.
