My 7 October 2023 began in the morning at 8.00, the first news circulated on social media of an attack that resembled the usual launch of rockets from Gaza and that terrible “normality” to which low intensity war had always accustomed us. As the hours passed, however, the drama of the terror that was taking place on the southern border of the country emerged: the capture of the hostages, the succession of images of brutality and violence in the kibbutzim, the horrid celebratory cries of the people and Gaza. A new pogrom was taking place before our eyes, it was really true, it was history repeating itself. Suddenly we found ourselves faced with the change of a paradigm: Israel, for the first time since its foundation, appeared defenseless, vulnerable, it seemed to have failed in the social contract for which it was founded, according to which Jews should never again be vilified, persecuted, massacred.
I tried to give rational space to what happened to the profound anguish of the first days. Trying to go beyond feelings and disorientation. October 7 represents clear testimony to the strategy of horror that was in fact slowly encircling Israel. In the south, Hamas, a terrorist force that has gone far beyond consolidating its power and has implemented its primary objective: the elimination of the State of Israel and its people. To the north, Hezbollah, the Shiite militias, a close subsidiary of Iran, the true interpreter of Islamic fundamentalism which sees the meaning of its very existence in erasing Israel from the map. To the east, Judea and Samaria, the territories reconquered by Israel after the Jordanian invasion of 1948. There a corrupt and inconsistent Palestinian Authority, which is no longer in a position to control those terrorist groups capable of transforming the plateau that dominates the plain most populous of Israel in a missile and artillery base from which other massacres could come. October 7th raised awareness that the enemy does not act with a conventional army, but with a strategy that makes carnage, rape and destruction the weapon that can erase the identity and dignity of a people.
What was Israel supposed to do in the face of this siege? Who should you negotiate with when faced with someone who exists only for your extermination? The choice was dramatic and October 7 marked the end of any peaceful solution, since the Palestinian people, like the Lebanese, are hostages of criminal organizations that absolutely do not pursue the creation of an independent state, but dominate in terror and with terror. and only for one purpose, to take root, dominate, destroy Israel in a plan that belongs to Islamic fundamentalism, which dreams of the expansion of the great caliphate and the subjugation of any people who do not recognize themselves in Islam. The front between the Western world and fundamentalism certainly passes through Jerusalem and we are faced with a clash between these two dimensions. It is no coincidence that two American aircraft carriers, the USS Truman and Roosevelt, are stationed in front of Haifa together with a nuclear submarine full of Tomahawks.
And yet October 7 is a point of no return in terms of politics and strategy which also sees silent allies of Israel’s legitimate reaction. There is an Arab world which, unlike 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, was careful not to implement oil blackmail or any other form of pressure. Riyhad, which has begun a process of normalizing relations with Israel and the West, was about to sign the Abraham Accords before 7 October and has suspended all financing of terrorism for more than two years. Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, Sudan had already taken this direction of normalization with Israel since 2020. For this Islamic world, Iran – which with its fundamentalism uses terrorism as a weapon – represents a danger for two reasons: on the one hand, it can do it also has leverage over the Arab masses, and on the other hand, precisely through terrorism and its blackmail, it represents a constant threat to every form of structured power.
Faced with Israel’s attack on Gaza and Lebanon, many say that the Jewish State responds to horror with horror, but they fail to accept that there can be no possible agreement with terrorism. Making an agreement with terrorism means legitimizing it, making it grow and allowing it to reorganize. An individual or a people who surrenders to terrorism, surrenders to martyrdom: as Sinwar said, terrorism needs the blood of the Palestinians. This reading cannot be ignored.
What is at stake is not (only) the tragic death toll and (only) the problem of Israel’s survival, but the overturning of a series of balances of power that would condemn the Middle East to Islamic fundamentalism and backwardness, as they have known all those peoples who today rejoice at seeing their murderers of yesterday eliminated. In Syria, Lebanon, Iran, the common people oppressed by those regimes celebrate the military successes of Israel which is beheading the terrorist leadership.
It is astonishing to see, however, how in the West and in Italy the streets, in their radical anti-Americanism, praise Hamas and Hezbollah, with the slogan “free Palestine” and fuel the old and new anti-Semitism and the fantasies of a Zionist conspiracy. It is in these hours as we are writing that demonstrations were held in Milan evoking the idea of the Zionist conspiracy, a typical topic of Nazi and fascist propaganda which abhorred the Pluto-Jewish Masonic democracies. The inevitable Israeli reaction has rekindled in Europe and in the world a never-dormant feeling of hatred against the Jews, demonstrating that the current face of anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, to such an extent that a Jew or an Italian citizen who supports Israel, like someone writes, he should be banned and punished because he shares the strategic choices of another state. Anti-Semitism is a thousand-year-old archetype that belongs to our culture, never dormant and which re-emerges violently whenever socio-political circumstances reactivate its hatred, which today takes shape against Israel and again against all Jews and their supporters. Certainly if anti-Semitism is linked to a vision of the Jewish world as a scapegoat to which humanity’s sins have been attributed, seeing Israel today reverse its destiny by defending itself with clarity and determination is destabilizing. The Jew culturally condemned to be a victim reacts today, today it is no longer Shoà.
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