Much has been said in recent weeks about the Flotilla affair. We live in insanely complicated times, where it's hard to stop and distinguish, weigh, and qualify what to do in each case, or how to position ourselves or not in the face of the countless disasters that surround us. The war in Gaza, or anything related to Palestine, has kept us ahead of our time and divided us for many decades, and it has now taken on tragic dimensions, given how Israel is capable of mounting a response to the attacks its citizens suffered two years ago. There is very likely a great deal of overzealousness here, or a disproportionate armed, military, or warlike response, even though using the word "genocide" is a last resort, or a way to draw attention to a series of massacres that should be investigated by international justice.
Left-wing Nostrat activists, however, also go too far, though their excesses are theatrical and in good faith, however much they may be driven by a certain clearly anti-Semitic ideological blindness. It is one thing to criticize the Israeli response and another to question whether Israel should exist as a state, or to celebrate the deaths of Israelis, or even of Jews in the US. For a certain left, what is happening in Palestine is identical to what is happening on the planet Arrakis, in the films – and the novel – by Dune: a murderous colonial invasion, perpetrated by more or less Nazi "bad guys" against a pure, authentic, savagely free, and mystical people, masters of the desert and the magic dust, who only want to preserve their land and their ancestral traditions. This fairy tale mentality is animated not only by the Hollywood imaginary but also by its real-life actors, with Javier Bardem playing the same role on both sides of the stage. However, things aren't that simple, and falling into certain ideological or factual simplifications only allows for propaganda, elevates facile slogans, and fuels a stupid moral superiority aimed at elevating narcissism and reassuring troubled consciences. War is deplorable and tragic, but it seems there are people jealous of the attention it deserves, and who want to stand in front of it for photo ops. As if it weren't terrible enough.
Netanyahu must be criticized, but siding with certain bread-and-butter activists, with a narrow-mindedness that makes angels weep, useful idiots to the most terrorist Islamist cause, is also counterproductive. A genocide is something very brutal, the most brutal, and it doesn't need starlets or progressive lawyers with toupees to remind us that all this is a disaster, because the news already tells us that. I don't know if a free Palestine would be an Islamist state, one of those that stones adulteresses and hangs homosexuals from cranes (it seems so), but perhaps it would be better to have another totalitarian Islamist state than several million more deaths among the rubble. Wars must stop, which requires political intelligence and humanism, not the antics ofinfluencer nor false victim ridicule.
