An almost paradoxical aspect of the argument Francesca Albanese spends on Liliana Segre, sealed by a delightful reference to the ‘stumbling blocks’ of logic, is the contradiction of an axiom typical of the intersectional left.

It is the idea that one’s identity, one’s experience, strengthens or weakens one’s legitimacy to express certain ideas or at least certain demands.
“From what pulpit of privilege does the privileged one on duty dare to lecture and not listen to the victim on duty?”

On the contrary, in this case, having suffered genocide would in some way make Segre even less entitled to speak, as she is emotionally overinvolved, possibly jealous of her own genocide .

A logical category that, at least from the left, would be considered aberrant if it were applied (to give just two examples) to a woman who had an abortion or to a black man who had been abused by the police.

Refusal to see differences

In so much humanitarianism one does not arrive at the capacity to understand that the UN definition of ‘genocide’ , which is objectively broad, leaves room to distinguish between what happens, for example, in Gaza, the West Bank, Ukraine, Kurdistan and what the Shoah was.
Which was, to oversimplify a little, that thing whereby, as the ‘stumbling stones’ in our cities remind us, quite apart from a context of war, all people belonging to an ethnic group were taken from their homes and schools, imprisoned, put on a plunged wagon like beasts, taken to a camp, brutally tortured, serially murdered, burned.

Now, I believe that any person who retains a modicum of common sense, as well as humanity, can agree that there is something different in this even from the most blatant dehumanisation we are witnessing and the even declared desire for ethnic cleansing on the part of some Israeli authorities.

From a person with a modicum of common sense and humanitarian spirit, one would expect, perhaps, an acceptance of this diversity, which Segre has pointed out, rather than a censure of a bad diagnostician as a ‘former cancer patient and not an oncologist’.

This delegitimisation extends as far as the Day of Remembrance, towards which there is objective weariness, as a ritual that is not only empty but worse than empty: hypocritical compared to what is happening before our eyes today.
But there is no logical consistency in the idea that the events in Gaza should delegitimise the Day of Remembrance.

Not least because, at least from the left, it should be clear, and evidently it is not, that the role of Remembrance is not that of a consolation medal to yesterday’s victims (which in the obscene pro-pal vulgate would be today’s executioners, as if the people incinerated in Auschwitz also deserved such an indictment) but is first and foremost a warning to the children and grandchildren of yesterday’s executioners, which would be, as a country, ‘us’.

But why so much passion for the need to qualify the Gaza tragedy as genocide, which has even risen to the status of a 21st century ‘man vs. no man’ ?

Gaza as checkmate to the ‘system’

I do not believe that the reason lies in the need for ‘national self-absolution’ for past crimes, as some claim. This latter instance is present in the country, but it is mainly declined in post-fascism embodied by the‘So what about the Foibe?’ and its akin.

Instead, I believe that the psychosocial origin of this ‘left-wing’ instance rests, in Italy and elsewhere, on a different need: that of the ‘anti-system’ battle.
Just as on the one hand we instinctively defend Judaism and Israel as alleged frontiers of the bourgeoisie and the Atlantic order, on the other hand we project onto Gaza, onto the genocide consumed in the shadow of the West – and with our presumed complicity – the systemic error that collapses all credibility of Western society.

Gaza becomes the coveted child that finally cries out that the king of the ‘western system’ is naked; that its values are pharisaism.
In this perspective, the ‘genocide’ becomes the psycho-social mad checkmate necessary to put the ‘system’ on the back foot: every complexity, every distinction, every acknowledgement of others’ responsibilities is a smokescreen to be furiously chased away, because it risks obscuring the values mad checkmate that reveals the ‘system’ for what it is.

Why not Ukraine?

I believe that the lukewarmness, when not the lividity, manifested towards Ukraine by circles often overlapping with those who are vocal about Gaza lies in similar reasons.
Of course, one can invent rationalisations that explain the phenomenon on the basis of the sending of weapons or different diplomatic relations (as if it were really the actions and omissions of the Draghi or Meloni governments that brought people to the streets and triggered the virality on social networks).
This kind of analysis is as accurate as someone trying to understand the dynamics of a stadium’s fan base by observing the movements of the ball on the field.

For those circles, Ukraine was, and still is, at best the daughter ‘already protected by the system’; at worst the fig leaf of the ‘system’ that claims to be democratic-liberal, if not even the match that the ‘system’ is ready to light in order to unleash war again.

If in the case of Gaza complexity is the opium of the peoples peddled by the ‘system’ to protect its own discrimination, in the case of Ukraine complexity becomes the antidote to the toxic propaganda of the ‘system’.

Similar reflections could also be discerned in the stubborn (and no longer virtuous) defence of the ‘system’.
These are politically human reflexes; which is precisely why it is good to keep them distinct from humanitarianism.