Do not take infamy for granted

PalmThose who support the Israeli government in its war of ethnic cleansing in Palestine take a dim view of the clamor for peace and support for the Palestinian people that has been felt around the world in recent months. They say that when a protest is so widespread and unanimous, it's due to the herd effect (people who are thoughtlessly swayed by an opinion they perceive as dominant), and also to the desire to feel good about oneself simply for supporting a good cause: in other words, what is now called posturing. To herd and posturing, they add ignorance: they get carried away by slogans, they lament, instead of properly informing themselves about a long-standing and complex conflict.

There may be people who join a protest or a mobilization for trivial reasons, but the strength that the pro-Palestinian movement has acquired around the world cannot be explained either with simplistic (and biased) analyses like those we have mentioned. That so many people are rising up across the West in defense or support of a people with whom the vast majority of the protesters have no ties or relations must be due to other motives. In the photo that motivates this article, for example, taken by Isaac Buj, we can see pro-Palestinian graffiti that someone posted on a pedestrian crossing in the center of Palma. It says, in English: Free Palestine now'Free Palestine now.' What makes someone in Palma make this graffiti?

Globalization has two faces: the most common and darkest, we know well: the ability of great commercial and political powers (they are the same thing) to create fictitious needs and convince us to buy goods and products that we don't really need (turbocapitalism is essentially based on this). But then there is another, more positive side, if only because every idea contains its own negation. In this case, globalization contains the ability to create global debates and spread awareness about certain problems among people around the world. The ability, even, to raise a global awareness of the common good, if you will. And that ability is much less appealing to authoritarian, autocratic, or despotic rulers, like those currently in fashion. They rightly see it as a crack through which their desire for total control escapes.

The Israeli war against Palestine, and its current episode with the martyrdom in the city of Gaza, is a case in which the official story (there has been a terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel, which will be two years old on the 7th, and a response must be given) is not accepted by global citizens, one: the international community of states and the great institutions of geopolitics, but the Internet has made it possible for an international community of citizens to also begin to exist, who exchange and discuss information freely and at high speed from one end of the planet to the other: this is not always positive, because it is the route through which toxic content also circulates. But it can also be an ideal way to exercise critical thinking and freedom of expression, so often invoked in vain.

A greater atrocity

In this case, what this global citizenry does not accept is not that Hamas's attacks were not repulsive and worthy of punishment, but the response in the form of the law of retaliation: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and so we will all end up one-eyed and in the lurch, said Gandhi. What is not accepted about the actions of the Israeli government is the presumption that an atrocity must be met with a greater atrocity, the idea that the massacre of 1,400 people must be avenged with the extermination of more than 60,000. Nor is it accepted the violation of international law and the planned use of particularly savage war crimes such as the bombing of hospitals and schools, attacks on refugee camps, murders in food lines, and the subjection of the population (particularly children) to hunger and thirst until they die.

Such a flagrant abuse of power is unacceptable, especially by a state that has historically presented itself as the representative and standard-bearer of democracy in a part of the world where it doesn't exist. This is why, for example, pro-Palestinian graffiti ends up appearing on a pedestrian crossing in Palma: there is a part of humanity that refuses to accept the failure of its own species as a supposedly rational and moral group. This isn't all bad news, all things considered.