War between Israel and Gaza: Cursed by hope | International

“In dark times, will it also be sung?”

Bertolt Brecht

Like most of us, I didn't know what to say, not to my family, not to my colleagues, not to myself. Therefore, on Monday [posterior al ataque de Hamás en Israel] First thing in the morning I texted my friends Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, who I had written about in my novel Apeirogonasking them how they were doing amid the terrible turmoil that broke out over the weekend.

One is Palestinian. The other is Israeli. One is in Jericho. The other is in Haifa. Both have lost their daughters to violence and live in the Holy Land of Pain.

I told them in a WhatsApp chat that I thought my muteness was a statement in itself. Clearly, this was evasion on my part. And I knew it. I asked them how they were handling it on a personal level.

Bassam responded to me after half an hour. He quoted a poem by Mahmud Darwish: “Tomorrow, the war will end. / The leaders will shake hands. / The old woman will continue waiting for her martyr son. / The girl will wait for her beloved husband. / And those children will wait for their hero father. / I don't know who sold our country. / But I saw who paid the price.”

He went on to say: “We know that one day it will happen, but the question is when; You cannot occupy millions of people without resistance, this is the origin of the problem and it must be resolved. “We will continue to raise our voices as loud as we can to make our future better and safer for ourselves and our children.” So far, more than 1,400 people killed and more than 4,000 injured; We will see more bloodshed and more deaths before we see the end. The end is peace and justice for everyone on this earth.”

In less than a minute, Rami, his Israeli friend, had sent a sad tear emoji.

Their answers impressed me deeply. They were simple. Of course, in this particular conflict, simplicity is an achievement.

Bassam was saying that the war would end. In his opinion, peace is inevitable. Time changes everything. It is not true that only the dead know the end of the war. Who would believe that, 20 years after the Holocaust, there would be an Israeli embassy in Berlin and a German embassy in Tel Aviv? Who would have dreamed that the Wall would fall? Who would have thought there would be relative quiet on the streets of Belfast?

Bassam is not sentimental. He spent seven years in Israeli prisons. He lost his beloved daughter to an Israeli bullet. However, he is a man who fits the Gramscian construction of pessimism of intelligence and optimism of will. In other words, these are the darkest of times, but Bassam's duty is to believe that there is possible change lurking in the afterlife. To refuse to believe it would be to die.

In a way, he has been cursed by hope.

Rami has also been cursed for his sense of hope. As an Israeli, he is aware that the occupation has corrupted the soul of his country. “Nothing ends,” Rami has said, “until the Occupation ends.” He is not surprised by what happened last weekend. He's just surprised it hasn't happened sooner. This doesn't mean he doesn't break her heart. He breaks it. His heart breaks for everyone, Israeli or Palestinian or others, who are forced to visit his country of pain.

HG Wells once said: “The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.” It can be interpreted in two ways, as an optimist or as a pessimist. Or perhaps it is better to interpret it as a mixture of these two things, a peso-optimist or maybe a pessimistic.

It reminds one, of course, that the other side of desolation is a form of consolation.

Where does one find comfort in these moments? Nowhere is the short-term answer. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – that can be said about the conflict that does not inflame one side or the other.

Language is useless.

And yet, it is the only thing we have.

In the past, Israeli strategists viewed their incursions into Gaza as a form of “mowing the grass.” You go in, weed, cut and wait for it to grow again. But this time the grass has decided to rebel. He snuck under the fence. The fence didn't work. And it never will.

Rami and Bassam have a paradigm that they constantly repeat when they travel the world talking about their plight. “We don't have to love each other,” they say. “We don't even have to like each other, although we wish we could. But what we do have to do, to prevent us from talking two meters under the ground, is to understand each other. This is the most crucial thing. We must know each other. It's not enough, but it's something."

Do you have a precise solution? No. Federation, confederation, one State, eight States, 12 States, who knows? Maybe take down the banks, they say. Or find a way to sanction hate. Hitting people where it hurts most: in the pocket. Maybe, just maybe, you can also hit them in the pocket that is sometimes located over the heart.

One thinks of the Nick Lowe song that asked us: “What's so fun about peace, love and understanding?”

The song is almost 50 years old. She keeps singing.

From time to time it is heard properly.

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