A group of Jews and Palestinians celebrated a Passover Seder in Barcelona for peace and reconciliation. This banquet, the central rite of the Jewish Passover, has served to highlight a central idea of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. "No one will be free until we are all free," chanted those attending at the end of the event held on Wednesday afternoon in front of the Palau de la Generalitat.
The Passover Seder (Passover dinner) commemorates the Exodus, the Jewish people's flight from Egypt to regain freedom after 430 years of slavery. It is a ritual that highlights the pain for the past without freedom and, at the same time, the hope that "next year we will be free", as those gathered in the Plaza Sant Jaume in Barcelona exclaimed.
They were few but they were not alone. Various organizations in thirty countries and more than half a thousand cities in Europe, the United States, Israel and Palestine also organized Seders for peace and freedom in which they called for an end to the war in Gaza, the exchange of Jewish hostages for Palestinian prisoners and an end to the supply of weapons to the parties to the conflict.
The organizations that joined the Barcelona Seder defend the idea of coexistence based on the formula of two states as defended by the association A land for all: One land for all, two states, one homeland. The goal is to share the land, not divide it.
There are also Jewish groups, outside and inside Israel, who dream of a unified state for Israelis and Palestinians, with equal rights and accessible to both Jews around the world and Palestinians displaced from their homes in 1948, as well as their descendants.
The October 7 massacre, the Israeli offensive in Gaza, Hamas terrorism and the right-wing of Israeli society make the idea of a single state more utopian than ever. Still, there is a minority of Israelis and Palestinians who do not renounce it.
