The day after the massacre of October 7 In Israel I published in the Mexican press a reflection written with pain, fear and trembling. Pain, in the face of the acts of unspeakable cruelty perpetrated by the terrorist group Hamas, where more than 1,200 people were murdered, men and women, the elderly, children, babies, and whose scenes of torture, rape, desecration, kidnapping and slaughter had been propagated by the aggressors themselves on social networks. Fear, because the conflict had reached extremes of theological hatred that in my opinion blocked any possible political solution. And trembling, because, given the correlation of the opposing forces, with actors like Putin, the ayatollahs of Iran and Trump, the world ran the risk of being on the brink of World War III, which could be nuclear and be the last. Having said all that, knowing the anti-Semitic hatred spread, even then, by a growing sector of social networks, I allowed myself to call for moderation:
“Israel’s response should not be the law of retaliation. Only a strategy of firmness, but also of responsible containment, supported by the UN and the main Western countries, could mitigate the apocalyptic tremor that surrounds and envelops us.”
Three years have passed. Now my pain is much deeper. To that pain of October 7 – lacerating, because it reminded me of the pogroms that my maternal grandfather witnessed in Tsarist Russia – has been added to the pain caused by the violent death of thousands of non-combatant Palestinians during the subsequent Gaza war: men and women, the elderly, children, babies.
Three years have passed. Now, my fear is much more serious. I believe that the war has deepened those hatreds to an extent perhaps insurmountable for the next two or three generations. In this climate of exacerbation, any political solution seems almost impossible.
Three years have passed. Now, my trembling has turned almost to despair. I don’t think we are (yet) on the threshold of a Third World War, but all the actors I pointed out then have radicalized their position. Putin does not seem to play a central role (for now he is contained by the Ukrainian resistance), but he pulls the strings of destabilization in Western Europe. The collision between Iran and the United States has inevitably come to pass, without the Iranian leaders having lost their totalitarian dominance at home and their lethal influence abroad. And judging by the outbursts of hate in Europe itself, October 7 could be just the beginning of a universal conflagration.
Three years have passed. I wanted to warn against the “law of retaliation” because the Old Testament mentions it, with very clear warnings: “Fathers will not die for their children, nor children for their parents; each one will die for his sin.” Perhaps this “responsible containment” would have sparked international solidarity led by responsible Western countries to exert unprecedented pressure on Iran, which ultimately financed the operation. And perhaps this endless war could glimpse the beginning of a solution through a professional, substantial and permanent international presence in the conflict zone.
The truth is that “responsible containment” may never have been viable. Israel did not seek that war: it reacted to it and the reality it found in Gaza, after eighteen years of having handed over the territory to the Palestinians, was overwhelming. The Hamas terrorists turned that strip into an immense arsenal of war, using their own population as hostages: 500 kilometers of tunnels; hospitals, schools and mosques converted into weapons and missile depots; an entire population oriented to the preaching of death and a very powerful propaganda apparatus. As a consequence of the massacre of October 7 – whose images are much crueler than those that have been made public – the reaction was relentless: 30,000 Hamas terrorists were killed, but along with them thousands of innocent civilians.
That is the tragedy of this endless war. However, perhaps it is possible to imagine a particular solution for Israel and, linked to it, a solution for the Jewish people. An exit is not a solution. It is only a first step. An act of responsibility and congruence.
For Israel, the way out is political. Hopefully the Israeli voter will elect a new government on October 27. Hopefully this new government will establish a truth commission that promptly and impartially investigates and documents the army’s conduct in Gaza. The version of genocide – which, like a virus of obfuscation and hatred, spreads across the globe – must continue to be refuted with irrefutable data. If the international Gaza reconstruction commission is ever consolidated – excluding the Hamas terrorists, of course – the Israeli government must support it. And although today it seems like the greatest of utopias, this new government should show openness to a possible dialogue that eventually leads to the creation of a Palestinian State that coexists in peace with Israel.
For the Jewish people inside and outside Israel, the way out is realism. Those of us born immediately after the Holocaust came to believe in the definitive decline of anti-Semitism. We thought that the death of 6 million Jews had been a sufficient price. We were wrong. The Holocaust was not a sufficient price. There will never be a sufficient price. And the global reaction after October 7 has made this clear. “When there is not a single Jew on earth, there will continue to be anti-Semitism,” Dr. Marek Edelman, a heroic survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, told me many years ago in Poland. He was right. Regarding anti-Semitism, we must lose all hope. It is an ancient hatred embedded in a sector of humanity. And yet – or for that very reason – it is necessary to combat it in all places and at all times.
–Glossed and edited–
*El Comercio opens its pages to the exchange of ideas and reflections. In this plural framework, the Diario does not necessarily agree with the opinions of the columnists who sign them, although it always respects them.
