The blockade by Israeli police of worshippers attempting to access the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to hear Palm Sunday Mass is an episode of extreme gravity regarding the State of Israel's attitude towards religious pluralism. In other words, it seems that Zionism is no longer content with attacking Islam, but is now also turning against Christianity. Roger Palós's article in this newspaper, which explains the apparently contradictory reactions this event has provoked, is highly recommended: while Israel received criticism from international leaders of very diverse profiles (from right-wing and left-wing social democrats like Macron or Sánchez to neo-fascists like Meloni or Orbán), the Spanish and Catalan right and far-right have sheltered, or deflected, or looked the other way when condemning the Netanyahu government's behavior regarding one of the most important pilgrimage sites for the Christian faith, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where, according to tradition, Jesus was buried. How is it that politicians who constantly claim to defend Christian values against the impious left suddenly refrain from making their voices heard in the face of such an affront?Meanwhile, Israel continues its wars. Also in the informationally relegated West Bank, where a few days ago a 28-year-old shepherd was murdered by Israeli settlers while trying to protect his sheep. Also in the West Bank, a couple of farmers and their two children, aged five and seven, were murdered, this time by Israeli soldiers. The Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, has celebrated Passover by including the death penalty in its legal system: specifically, Palestinians who kill Israelis in the occupied West Bank may be sentenced by military courts to be hanged by the neck, in strict application of the law of retaliation (Gandhi refuted it with these words: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and we will all end up blind and toothless"). The opposition parties were absolutely against the measure, but the Minister of National Security, the settler Ben-Gvir, celebrated it by opening a bottle of champagne he had brought for the occasion: he could not do it inside the hemicycle (an usher prevented him), but he could do it in the Parliament's corridors. Israel had applied the death penalty only once, and it was against the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, in 1962 (Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which the thinker developed the idea of the banality of evil, is almost mandatory reading). It is sarcastic, to say the least, that it is new Nazis, precisely usurping the memory of the Holocaust, who are now bringing the death penalty for those who are already victims of occupation and war crimes.While all this is happening, Israel's ally, the USA, is torn between the exasperating daily threats of a completely derailed Donald Trump against the rest of the world and the still timid hope represented by the No kings protests.
