We citizens are exposed daily to political combat, that heap of shouting and manipulation that they shower upon us like a golden shower (without us ever having told them that we like to be peed on). We don't deserve it; we just voted for them. Why do they punish us by insulting our intelligence, calling us idiots or amnesiacs, or both? Few of the figures currently occupying the representative bodies are there out of a democratic vocation. It's a bad thing to say, but most, judging by their demeanor, are interested only in power for power's sake. If they have principles, they hide them very well. If they act according to values that go beyond those imposed by law, they don't show it in their actions. And now that populism based on widely disseminated lies is becoming normalized, the atmosphere has become even more nauseating. I hate them all because I deeply believe in democracy, freedom, the common good, and justice, and they are busy shuffling these civic niceties like someone shuffling mountain shit.
I'm making this general feeling of being fed up with politics, but right now it's the debate over Gaza and the extermination of the Palestinians that demonstrates the level of degradation in which we live. From the very beginning, when Israel ferociously launched its offensive against the Strip, there were plenty of voices warning, very elegantly, very sensibly, that the word "violence" couldn't be trivialized. genocide, that I should be careful because the matter is very serious, etc. For many years now, the work carried out by Zionist propagandists has conditioned and determined the debate surrounding the Palestinian cause. Israel's tentacles in the Western media are abundant and persistent, and they have had the power to decide how and when the colonizing and theocratic ignominy that was the founding of this state (decided according to biblical principles, something very modern and democratic) was discussed.
But let's return to the debate over terms, and to the obsession with entrenching ourselves in deciding whether or not it is genocide. This shift in focus alone strikes me as a victory for Netanyahu and his exterminating madness. I think of the mothers who must feed their children and cannot. I can't imagine a greater horror, a more immense suffering. Watching the child you gave birth to dwindle and dwindle, dwindling to bones, dying every minute in your arms without you being able to do anything. I think of the child struck by the precise sniper bullet aimed at its tiny head or its tiny heart. I think of the destruction of hospitals, the constant bombing, the constant manipulation of the population like insects fleeing a fumigator. I think of the absolute destruction of all that exists, that grayness that covers everything, and of the deep eye sockets of the girl with her torn hair, the faces that stare into the camera, increasingly gaunt. I think of the filthy water and the hunger every minute, every eternal hour. Who warns us about the importance of weighing words precisely and not yet saying genocide? What are they thinking? Let them hide their cold equanimity where it fits, which is nothing more than proof of their complicity with criminals. Let them keep it all, their intellectual superiority, which they want to flaunt because clinging to linguistic rigor in the face of what's happening is nothing more than cowardice. Exactly the same as those who were with the Nazis while the gas chambers were operating at full speed. I wish it weren't genocide, and I could continue reading books about the Holocaust, believing even though culture and memory are antidotes to barbarism. And the fact is that no one has done more against the cause of the Jews and the memory of the Holocaust than Netanyahu himself.
