To be killed for being Jewish, in the name of a free Palestine, is atrocious and has no possible justification. It's just as abominable as the opposite: to be killed for being Palestinian in the name of Israel. And we know where this leads: less than a century ago, persecution for belonging to a group ended with the establishment of extermination camps, because the existence of the other had become a crime.
But today, mutual hatred is so raw, and has so many real reasons to be understood, that we are entering a phase of contemporary history even more dangerous than has always been the case. We live in a constant shift of roles, groups that are simultaneously victims and executioners, in a politically motivated confusion between the right to defense and the thirst for revenge, and in the delirium that absolute security is possible through the annihilation of the opposite, as Netanyahu says in Gaza. As the Jew George Steiner observed: "The imperative of survival has forced Israel to torture, humiliate, and expropriate [...]. The State of Israel is reducing Jews to the common condition of the nationalist man."
The democratic malpractice in vogue everywhere is leading us to the horror that winning elections and staying in power is no longer possible without the daily, deliberate, and fundamentalist cultivation of an enemy, often constructed from the sublimation of a historical (and, if necessary, theological) trait disguised as a political argument. God.
And since we live in a world of factions, where the opposite is not only not a person, but the embodiment of evil, when an ideology finds a just banner, it doesn't let go. It's not easy, but this isn't the time to be convinced by absolutes that end in bloodshed.
