GAZA. BEING BORN IN A STRIP

The number one of Hamas (who currently resides in Qatar from where he released a video showing him praying to his God, thanking him for the massacre of Israelis by his people) is called Ismail Haniyeh and was born in 1962, the same year as I was born.

 

- by Vito Mancuso

    

The number two of Hamas (who is currently in the Gaza Strip and is already dead to the Israelis) is called Yahya Sinwar and was also born in 1962. I could have been their classmate, sitting in the same desk, playing ball together. Only on paper, of course, because in reality, while I was born in an industrious town in Brianza, part of a relatively prosperous nation-state, they were both born in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip with no state to represent their nation (not by chance I had to write 'Strip', not state). What does it mean to be born in a Strip? What does it mean to be born and grow up in a refugee camp of people thrown out of their homes and expelled from their land, and without any credible prospect of being able to overcome that condition by finally having a nation-state and having a home again? It means growing up on bread and hate. Sometimes there may even be a lack of bread, hatred, however, never; indeed, it is certainly increased by the lack of bread.

It may be the same year I was born, but I cannot help but wonder what it would have been like for me to grow up in those conditions. What would I have become, having come into the world in the same year as Hamas number 1 and number 2, if I had been born there, to parents driven from their homes and their land, and seeing the hopes of re-establishing a modicum of decency in my living conditions instead of growing diminishing day by day to the point of non-existence?

 Do not think that this speech of mine is intended to justify or even judge less harshly the 7 October massacre perpetrated by Hamas militants, or rather terrorists. No, no justification of any kind. However, I am convinced that one should not deprive oneself of the intelligence that searches for the causes because only in this way can one get to the real root of the problems. One of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all time, Baruch Spinoza, whom I will quote extensively in this article, wrote: 'I have endeavoured hard not to deride, nor to pity, nor even to detest the actions of men, but to understand them' (Political Treatise, I, 4). Understanding: this is what it is all about, and so the question is: can the Hamas massacre be traced back to the conditions in which Palestinians have found themselves since 1948, which have become increasingly intolerable? "Can the 'largest open-air prison', as the Gaza Strip has rightly been called, and the continuous theft of land by Israeli settlers in the West Bank be a sufficient explanation for the murderous hatred of Hamas? To this question I answer no.

 I am not saying that the social and political situation of the Palestinian people is not at play in the genesis of that hatred; I am saying that it is not sufficient to explain the repeated beheading of Jewish children, taken as the most tragic symbol of the massive massacre. If the iniquitous conditions in Gaza were reason enough, we should logically conclude that the more than two million Palestinians in the Strip would be willing to perform the same act: all ready to slit defenceless little girls and boys' throats. Of course, I cannot know for sure that this is not really the case, but my reason refuses to proceed with such gross generalisations because its task is structurally another: distinction. Distinguishing is the job par excellence of properly conducted reasoning, and just as it cannot be inferred from the aggression and disregard for the property of others by Israeli settlers that all Israelis are ready to trample international law underfoot, so too it cannot be inferred from the Hamas massacre that all the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are ready to commit the unspeakable crimes of a few days ago.

 But if socio-political conditions are not enough to understand the Hamas massacre, what other factors must be summoned? The answer is not difficult: hatred. Not hatred as a hotter-than-usual blaze of wrath that can sometimes set the soul on fire, no; far more radically, hatred as a persistent and systematic ideology that, coldly and totally in possession of its faculties, thinks of nothing else but the enemy and its elimination. Hatred as the fuel of a human being's life. Because this is the point: that one can make hatred one's source of energy, one's life source, one's reason for existing. Hate can lend a kind of macabre vitality and lucidity to the mind.

Said Sami Modiano, a survivor of Auschwitz: 'It is not true that hatred is blind, it has very sharp eyesight, that of a sniper, and if it falls asleep its sleep is never eternal, it returns'. And that hatred has very sharp eyesight is shown by the thoroughness with which Hamas prepared and conducted the massacre.

 Back to its leaders. One can be born in the same year, in the same city or refugee camp, even in the same family, and have different, even opposite lives. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are indeterminate beings. Fortunately or unfortunately, freedom does exist. Another Auschwitz survivor, the Viennese Jewish psychologist Victor Frankl, reflecting on conditions in the death camp, wrote: 'Everything that happens to the soul of man is the result of an internal decision. In principle, every man, even if conditioned by very grave external circumstances, can in some way decide what will become of himself'. One can read the Koran and draw from it teachings of hatred and violence; one can read it and draw from it teachings of love and peace. The same applies to the Bible, where there are also passages of fiery hatred and others of glowing love. Why do some read their holy book in the first way and others in the second? The same applies to every other reading, starting with the most important one of all, our life: why do some interpret it as hatred and others, all things being equal, as a desire for peace?

 After observing human actions in their genesis and development with the strictest detachment, Spinoza comes to the conclusion that 'hatred can never be good' (Ethics IV, 45). I completely agree with him. Never means 'never', even when it comes to responding to hatred received. Especially when it is the state that is acting, as Spinoza specifies: 'Everything we appetite because we are affected by hatred is vile and unjust in the state'. The defining characteristic of a true politician is the ability to confront the enemy with determination but without hatred, because, as Spinoza always wrote, 'everyone who is guided by reason also desires for others the good that he appetites for himself' (Ethics, IV, 73). Do you desire land? Give land even to your enemy. Do you desire water? Give water to your enemy. And so for every other vital good. Behind these words of the greatest Jewish philosopher, I see the noble face of Yitzhak Rabin.

 

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