It must be realistically acknowledged that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict replicates and consolidates in the Italian public debate the same logical and moral patterns that for several decades have made the political question of former Mandate Palestine not only unresolved, but unsolvable.

The force of a fait accompli

I say irresolvable, of course, on a principled level, because things happen and history proceeds even when it is the sheer force of a fait accompli that drives the processes, as indeed seems to be happening, and not as of today, in that bloody strip of the Middle East.

The blackmail of deployments

In the extreme polarisation of the clash and – it has to be said – in the extreme disproportion of the available media forces to the advantage of the Palestinian side, it is practically impossible to avoid incurring the misunderstanding or suspicion of intolerable ambiguity for anyone who tries to step out of the rails of the obligatory alignments. In fact, very few try to do so under the constant blackmail of the accusation of treason or complicity with the enemy.

Moving away from binary logic

Mind you: getting out of these tracks does not mean taking a median position, i.e. recognising everyone the same amount of right and wrong, but getting out of that asphyxiating logic of contraries, whereby the either-or approach is presupposed to every factual circumstance or assessment of merit, which is on the contrary conditioned by the need to defend one or the other trench.

The fallacy of the logic of contraries

However, as should be well known, the logic of contraries is subject to an inevitable fallacy, since contraries cannot both be true (and just), but they can both be false (and unjust), in which case they attract, not repel.

Victimising and recriminatory rhetoric

The most characteristic form of the logical-moral perversion of any discourse on Israel and Palestine is to conclude that what happens in one camp is the simple consequence of what happens in the other.

‘7 October does not come from nowhere’ was the most famous and infamous expression of this spirit, precisely because it was UN Secretary General Guterres who uttered it. But the rhetoric of the conflict is on both sides full of declinations of this victimising and recriminatory formula, even if due to the disproportion of media force, mentioned earlier, the loudest and most frequent always concern the exculpatory statements recognised to Palestinian terrorism.

Neither equidistance nor equalisation

Breaking out of the forced logic of this scheme does not at all mean equating the violence on the Arab side with the increasingly frequent violence on the Israeli side, nor does it mean equating Palestinian responsibilities with those of the Jewish state in these almost eighty years of permanent war. But it also means admitting that the debt of truth owed to Israel – whose very existence has been considered, from the beginning, a pure manifestation of colonial imperialism – in no way determines a credit for violence justified by the impossibility of a peaceful agreement and by the accumulation of grief that, with the culmination of 7 October, Israel has had to painfully suffer for the mere fact of existing in spite of everyone.

Two peoples, two states: formula or obstacle?

It can be assumed, as it would be honest to do, that the logic of ‘two peoples and two states’ has always and unfailingly been used by the Arab side not as a political objective to be achieved, but as an obstacle to be placed in the way of normalisation of relations between Arabs and Jews, and that the creation of a Palestinian state was rejected, in 1948 as in 2000, by the Arabs (not only Palestinians) precisely because it would have entailed recognition of Israel.

The ‘river to sea’ on both sides

‘Two peoples, two states’ has been a constant indictment of Israel, certainly not a constraint or limitation on the Palestinian leadership. But one cannot conclude on this basis that the Palestinian ‘from the river to the sea’ is at this point legitimately contrasted with a Jewish ‘from the river to the sea’ and the construction of Greater Israel, which stands out not only in the ravings of Jewish supremacists, but now also in the official acts of the Knesset as the true fulfilment of the Zionist ideal, thus made to coincide with the defamatory image constructed over the years by anti-Israeli propaganda. Zionism as racism. Zionism as occupation. Zionism as deportation.

The moral passepartout of arbitrariness

Charging the other side with the responsibility for one’s own has always been for Palestinians and pro-Palestinians and has unfortunately now also become for many Israelis and pro-Israelis the moral passepartout for any arbitrariness and abuse. And this is exacerbated precisely for the Jewish state, which has always been the designated victim of truths denied and strenuously contested by the anti-imperialist vulgate.

Anti-Semitism as an autoimmune disease

Just as anti-Semitism remains an autoimmune disease of our civilisation and an identifying trait of the anti-Zionist resistance – that is, of the hatred against that new kind of ‘collective Jew’ that has been the state of Israel since 1948 – and is the screen of the Gaza tragedy, which is certainly not its origin, thus the fascist and supremacist drifts of part of Israeli politics are not a product of 7 October, but the fruit of a root buried in the democratic history of Zionism and now re-emerging, in more favourable conditions for its sprouting, in the psychological and political climate determined by the Hamas pogrom.

Public legitimisation of injury

So ‘explaining’ anti-Semitism on the basis of what Jews do and not on what anti-Semites are is proof of the full public legitimisation of anti-Jewish prejudice (when not hatred). But also explaining the monstrous “It’s either us or them” of Israeli government propaganda as a side-effect of the monstrosity of Hamas and a necessary step for the salvation of Israel is a lie perfectly symmetrical to the anti-Semitic lie and equally destructive of any prospect of peace for the fifteen million people (half Jews and half Palestinians) living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.