Laura Moses-Lustiger is a Franco-Israeli student lawyer and novelist, great-niece of Cardinal Lustiger. In this text, she recounts her fear and anger after the attacks of October 7, and her later shame at having lacked empathy towards the Palestinians under the bombs. According to her, the vocation of the Jewish people is to bring “its share of light to the world”.
Certain situations are intolerable and must be denounced. When Hamas carried out its massacre on October 7, raping, killing and kidnapping civilians, women, men, children, old people - the number of victims amounting to 1,200 dead and nearly 200 hostages - my overriding feeling was fear and anger. Black anger. You should know that in this small country that is Israel, whose surface area is around 20,000 km² (while France has, for example, 549,087 km²), everyone has lost someone. In my case, friends; in others, brothers, mothers, children.
I see this anger and this collapse today in my loved ones on the “other side”. More than 20,000 Gazans have died since the bombing began. 2.3 million of them are homeless, they have no access to water or electricity. Which means, in concrete terms, that an entire population does not have a roof, cannot heat itself or protect itself from the rain, drink to its thirst, go to the toilet or wash. These millions of individuals are stripped of their most basic dignity, without saying anything about their situation of constant terror due to the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Israeli suffering, Palestinian suffering
After October 7, I spoke with a friend who, very calmly, explained to me that any war of decolonization was fought through violence, using the example of Algeria, rationalizing my deaths and including them in the course Of the history. And I am ashamed to realize that until now, I have felt the same lack of empathy towards his people. The extent of Israeli suffering blinded me to that of its neighbors. In a divided, polarized world, where the majority of people access information on social networks subject to algorithms, it is up to us to open our eyes to the plurality of suffering ; to realize that it is possible to mourn one's dead while taking into account those of others, and to judge both intolerable.
If the numbers tattooed on my grandfather's arm and the stories passed down by my grandmother, a hidden child, have shown me one thing, it's that indifference can cost your life. And it contributed to the extermination of a large number of members of my family, in France, in Germany, in Poland. However, this legacy also provided me with proof that sometimes it only takes the will of one man to save others. In my grandfather's case, that of an American GI during a death march; in that of my grandmother, of two sisters who ran a Catholic boarding school.
Repairing the world
An important concept in Judaism is that of “Tikkoun Olam”, that of repairing the world. And I firmly believe that the survival of the Jewish people, despite the destruction of the temples, the exile, the pogroms, the inquisition and the Shoah, is not only due to the will to live, which It almost resembles a fury, but that of bringing one's share of light to the world. And that's what we need to do now. Except that it's not the world we need to repair, it's our house. The one we share with a people who have suffered alongside us since 1948, the year of our war of independence and their Nakba .
On October 20, my mother sent me this quote from the philosopher Simone Weil : “Pain and suffering are a currency that is passed from hand to hand, until it reaches someone who receives it but do not transmit them. » Like everything else on the Internet, I don't even know if the quote is true. What I do know is that my mother was returning from a day spent harvesting tomatoes in a field on the edge of Gaza after the labor force had disappeared, but also after several months of protests against radicalization of the government of Benyamin Netanyahu and colonization.
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I can imagine what this quote did to my mother, as she came home at the end of the day, despite fatigue, desolation and anger, watching the sky change colors, and gradually she was getting closer to the town, seeing people hurrying home, shopping in hand. A feeling, faced with the grandeur and banality of daily joys, which knows no borders, no religion, no language, that of hope in man.
It is with this hope that I see that the Palestinian cause, whether it concerns Gaza or the occupation, is not only a cause of the progressive camps, nor of the Arab world, but also a Jewish cause. If the last 75 years have taught us anything, if the wars, the intifadas, the thousands of deaths since 1948 have been able to enlighten us, it is the fact that the only solution to this tragedy is based on cohabitation and peace. between our two peoples.
la-croix.com
The big difference between Oct 7 and the Gaza-WB wars are that all Palestinians are being targeted in the latter. |
