Sometimes – right now, for example – you are tempted to think that the world's evil, cruelty, hatred, racism and injustice find their most terrible and concentrated expression in the Holy Land. God began his creative work there, starting with the Garden of Eden, but that was a long time ago and it seems that today he doesn't remember it, or that he wanted to forget it. Although there they all pray to Him, Satan won the serpent.
How can one begin to talk about the horror that consumes Israelis and Palestinians? Perhaps pointing to its root, the apartheid system imposed by the State of Israel. Yes, yes it is apartheid. Many are outraged when it is said, but it is true. Only apartheid there is worse than that of South Africa, the country that invented it. I know the original, I've been to both lands, and I think I know what I'm talking about.
For those of us who lived in South Africa in the darkest times, moving from Israeli territory to Gaza or the West Bank is reminiscent of moving from rich and white Johannesburg to black and poor Soweto. With the difference that the barriers between the two are fiercer in Israel than in South Africa thirty years ago, more militarized. There were no soldiers guarding the borders between Johannesburg and Soweto. There was free traffic. Anyone who tries to pass from the Gaza Strip to Israel without documents, or without passing through weapons detectors, will be shot.
It just happened the other way around. The volcano exploded. Gaza's masters, Hamas, sent their troops across the border last weekend to shoot and kill men and women, babies and the elderly, kidnap and rape, and revel in filming videos to commemorate the atrocities.
Nothing, nothing, nothing can justify it. It is good to point out the context of the crushing apartheid that Israel imposes. The injustice and racism and violence embodied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his followers should be condemned every day. But to refrain from condemning last weekend's killings by Hamas is despicable. There are many who have not condemned them, including (oh, surprise!) Vladimir Putin. There are fewer in democratic countries, but there are, as here in Spain, including political parties.
It is almost unbelievable the hypocrisy, or the moral blindness, or the degree of idiocy, but the people who most indignantly condemned the famous kiss of Luis Rubiales are the same ones who have not said a peep against the barbarity of Hamas. That kiss, that kiss, was the scandal of the century, but the savages of Hamas rape girls whose friends lie dead next to them, and nothing. shut up Or not don't be quiet Understanding it, justifying it.
The State of Israel oppresses them, so, OK, free range, license to kill or rape anyone who occupies Israeli land, even if they are foreigners passing through a music festival, even if they live in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, where they killed babies, where, as Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari explained this week, most of the inhabitants are, or were, left-wing, Israeli Podemites opposed to Netanyahu and the military occupation of Palestinian lands.
And another thing. What does Hamas represent? Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since elections were held in 2006, never repeated, is another version of ISIS, the Islamic State. It represents a misogynistic, theocratic and murderous system that has done nothing to alleviate the poverty of its people, with the sole mission of killing Jews and destroying the State of Israel.
I have always considered myself pro-Palestinian, although with more nuances the more I have learned. Not everything is good and bad. I have met several Israelis inside their country, and more Jews outside, who deplore the occupation and the systematic discrimination that their Government imposes on the Palestinians. But the same people also point out that Israel is surrounded by enemies and must protect itself. And that they have a democratic system, unique in the region, to defend. Yes, I tell them, democratic as white South Africa was back in the day... for which they don't have much of an answer. But I will say the following: any reader of this paper, whether left- or right-wing, would feel infinitely freer living in Tel-Aviv than in Riyadh or Damascus or – where the main sponsors of Hamas reside – Tehran.
I think of a brilliant Israeli writer, David Grossman. This same week he denounced the killings by Hamas "in cold blood" as the height of barbarism, but he also acknowledged that it is the price that has been paid for the "crime" of the Israeli occupation. Imagine a resident of Gaza denouncing the crime just committed by Hamas. He was murdered the next day, and so was his family.
The question I ask myself today is: What is being pro-Palestinian? If being so means identifying with what Hamas represents, I don't want to know anything about it. If you mean the desire to destroy the State of Israel, preferably through the extermination of all its Jewish inhabitants, Nazi-style, bye. Now, if what is meant by being pro-Palestinian is fighting for the rights of the Palestinians to have dignified lives within their own sovereign state, alongside Israel, here yes. It is a good ideal, the only conceivable solution to the longest and most intractable conflict in the world.
The pity is that today we can't even dream of it coming true. The biblical revenge carried out by Israel today in Gaza will make sure of that. And we condemn her too. Another scare. Palestinian children are dying under the missiles, the strip will be in ruins. But let's not forget that this is what Hamas wanted. Those who ordered the slaughter of Israelis knew full well that the consequence would be the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, a price they are more than ready to pay even though they know they will never achieve their goal of destroying the Israeli state. It doesn't matter to them. They insist on it to perpetuate their absurd, nihilistic and unique reason for being, the same as their enemies on the Israeli radical right: so that the cycle of hatred and violence continues, an eye for an eye in the Old Testament, in saecula saeculorum.
There is no happy ending in sight. On the contrary The worst of the two sides are the ones who are winning. There was a time, many believe, that God cared about the Holy Land. not anymore It seems not.
