Hamas militiamen attacked civilian and military targets in Israeli territory last Saturday, killing hundreds of people and causing panic among the population. The Israeli government’s answer has been swift, including the bombing of defenceless towns, causing hundreds of civilian casualties and sowing destruction and horror in Gaza. The Israeli authorities threaten harsh retaliation in a long and bloody war. In previous reprisals, the Israeli state’s military machine has not stopped until casualties among Gazans have reached unconscionable proportions, up to thirty times greater than the damage the Israeli population or army would have suffered. And now they are threatening that this time it will be much worse.
It must be stressed that two million Palestinians have been living in Gaza for several decades in a dramatic and cruel situation brought about by Western powers.
Locked up and blockaded in a “ghetto” built by the State of Israel, which subjects them to complete humiliation, unable to leave or enter the territory, unable to receive the materials necessary to build the infrastructure they need, without the medicines they need for their hospitals or access to the energy sources they require. The Palestinians are besieged and subjugated by the military might of the Israeli army, which periodically bombs cities and villages, causing thousands of deaths among the population. They are subjected to a policy that can only be described as one of extermination, which sometimes progresses slowly but sometimes explodes, causing thousands of victims.
It is a policy that flouts all UN resolutions and violates the fundamental rights of the Palestinians with the complicity of the United States and the European Union.
Hamas’s strategy, which claims to seek the liberation of the Palestinians, only drags them into dead-end situations that turn the Gazans into a bargaining chip. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, fear is spreading among a large part of the Israeli population in the face of the forced mobilisation towards war and combat. In a painful paradox, leaders appear who end up being pawns in a crazed game of interests, geostrategic or group-based, in which human lives or the suffering of populations are irrelevant.
For some time now, any attempt to seek a peaceful solution through dialogue has been dynamited, leaving the Palestinians without hope of a nonviolent solution that would make possible a dignified coexistence between the two peoples. With the future closed, thousands of young Palestinians now see violence as the only way to transform their situation. Belief in the supposed “necessity” or “inevitability” of violence as a means of conflict resolution empowers the violent. In this way, people can come to elevate and sustain in power the enemies of their own future.
How is this spiral of maddening violence to be stopped if those responsible for the massacre direct proclamations calling for revenge and disproportionate violence, masking it in the “right to self-defence”?
The internationalisation of the conflict and the nuclear danger on the near horizon brings us all to a manifest crossroads. In these circumstances, our hopes lie not in the conscience of today’s leaders, but in the voice of the people and of those who manage to make themselves heard by sending a message in favour of stopping the escalation of violence despite the pressure of governments and the media that promote irresponsible warmongering.
Every denunciation and every act that signifies a call for nonviolence is an act that builds the reality that, in the future, will be evident. We all need to strengthen the consciousness of nonviolence and in this sense, it is a very opportune moment for people of religion and the different voices of spirituality to express their commitment and their call for a world without violence.
From Convergence of Cultures and the Humanist Party, we also want to encourage the thousands of volunteers who are preparing to participate in the 3rd World March for Peace and Nonviolence in the coming year, to give a sign that it is necessary to change the world and it is urgent to stop wars and overcome the different forms of violence.
