Today’s date, 10/7, will remain in the public narrative in much the same way that we no longer need to explain what 9/11 means. Both are associated with human casualties, not only those resulting directly from the attacks that took place on those days, but also from what happened before and after them. Neither date represents an accidental tragedy; both were the consequence of social and political developments unfolding over a much longer period.
In that sense, the backdrop to 10/7 is the much longer history of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That act was the product of decades of occupation of Palestinian land and the flourishing of settler colonialism and Zionism, dating back to 1948.
Just as the Americans turned 9/11 into a martyrdom myth, a story that it had happened because of their values, and then used it to legitimise several military interventions in which millions of innocent people were killed, so Israel today will create a commemoration intended to justify the genocide. Some lives are worth more than others, even when the loss of life is so utterly disproportionate.
What is there to say today, three years after the world became accustomed to the unimaginable? Justice is slower than even the old sayings would have us believe; international courts are proof of that. Even if a verdict of the kind that should have been delivered by now eventually comes, what consolation can it possibly offer the victims? What consolation is it to those who lost their lives, and to those who are dying today and those who will die for generations to come because of the systematic destruction of everything that makes survival possible: water, food, olive trees, schools, hospitals, culture?
There is another parallel between 9/11 and 10/7: the possibility that these were desired events, and that those who could have prevented them instead allowed the bloodshed to begin to carry out criminal designs that had already been conceived.
Unfortunately, the intellectual elite is still engaged in the futile argument over who is leading whom: is the United States the senior partner, or is it Israel (the Israeli lobby or Epstein’s blackmail)? This is a rhetorical question, and ultimately an irrelevant one. Both states have blood on their hands; they have waged and continue to wage illegal wars and kill with impunity. Other states communicate with them, trade with them and cooperate with them in “other spheres”, as though evil could somehow be separated from “peace and cooperation”!!!
Resistance to genocide is certainly not to be belittled. Many of us are engaged in one way or another, but sometimes this resembles an attempt to appease our own conscience. “At least I am doing something; I am not silent, I am not turning a blind eye to Evil.” But we need to look at ourselves through the eyes of Palestinians, as if in a mirror. I am thinking above all of those “lucky ones” who have, in the meantime, found a way out of the hell of Gaza. When they find themselves in an apparently friendly environment, such as Ireland or Spain, they experience another shock when they realise that all of us are, in fact, carrying on with our lives as normal, largely preoccupied with our own worries—which are legitimate, but nowhere near as terrible as those faced by people in Palestine.
Instead of 9/11 and 10/7 serving to deepen our moral awareness and conscience, they have become sources of new disasters. In fact, we should say that the disaster is one and indivisible: it is human. It is the tragedy of the human spirit, the tragedy of a humanity living like a bipolar person or a schizophrenic.
While the horror in Palestine continues—and now in Lebanon and Iran as well—the conversation about civilisational values must begin there, rather than with the competition over whose civilisation is older or richer.