The massacre of the Palestinians: conscience and exemplarity of the West in question…
For nearly seven decades, Palestine has been marked by an uninterrupted series of tragedies, bearing the scars of constant human rights violations. Recently, an unprecedented escalation of violence has ravaged its lands, with daily abuses, acts of torture, point-blank shootings and bombings of civilians, perpetrated by the Israeli army.
These acts of brutality, following the clashes of October 7, 2024 initiated by Hamas and the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades, plunged the region into deep despair.
The figures bear witness to unspeakable horror: 35,000 Palestinians snatched from life, without even counting the countless injured, une tragic reality described by international human rights organizations and the UN as a “open-air carnage.”
This mass extermination, particularly in Gaza, is taking place under the gaze of an international community which, despite its commitment to human rights, seems frozen, mute, even complicit. Indeed, Western countries such as the United States and Germany continue to supply Israel with weapons, adding a weight of silence to the tragedy.
In France, media coverage where everything is equal tends to put the critical situation in Palestine in the background, preferring more entertaining or controversial subjects. This editorial selection, often echoing the country's political line, allocates only a few minutes to this daily tragedy in the news bulletins, which could be interpreted as a strategy aimed at diverting attention from the issues.
This approach, criticized by Pascal Boniface, seems to want to divert attention from issues concerning oppressed peoples, thus indirectly 'after-sales service' for war crimes. It creates a bipolarity in the debates, failing to provide the nuances necessary to understand such complex subjects, and forces us to take a position, all in a context of censorship by the saturation of superficial information.
This way of proceeding attenuates the public's mind on the urgency and severity of the events unfolding before our eyes, by trivializing the suffering of an entire people to a simple peripheral note of the news.
This indifference, this turning away from the agony of the Palestinians, reveals a sad reality of our time. While we live in an era of hyper-communication, where every injustice should theoretically spark a wave of emotion and action, Palestine remains like an open scar, a cry for help drowned out by the incessant noise of the global indifference.
Faced with this, we are led to ask ourselves: when will the international collective conscience awaken? Why this inaction in the face of such injustice? Are Palestinian lives so worthless in the eyes of the world that they are treated with less regard than those of animals, as a far-right Israeli minister has sadly suggested?
Western history is full of examples where the demonization of a people served as a prelude to their oppression or extermination. We can evoke the stigmatization of the indigenous peoples of America, described as “savages” by European colonizers, to legitimize the conquest and confiscation of their lands or the slave trade. Likewise, Jews have been the subject of myths and slander throughout European history, culminating in the horror of the Holocaust in the 20th century, where the Nazi regime singled them out as the cause of the evils of the German company.
More recently, in Rwanda, propaganda exacerbated ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, culminating in the 1994 genocide, where Tutsis were portrayed as enemies to be exterminated.
In each of these cases, dehumanization was used as a tool to justify the unjustifiable, transforming prejudices into deadly policies.
The dark reality of our times is laid bare, not hidden in the shadows, but displayed in the relentless spotlight of social media, making us, humanity, helpless witnesses to this tragedy. This reality, broadcast relentlessly, removes any possibility of denial from the Western world. In the face of an atrocity so overwhelming that it compels us to look away.
History will record these moments of intense pain, this moment of crisis revealing the direct complicity of the Western world, not only through deafening silence and blatant inaction, but also through acts favoring Israel.
These behaviors signify an unprecedented moral decline, leaving an indelible stain on the fabric of our time. The West will face the difficult task of convincing future generations that human rights are universal.
The historical review highlights a reluctance on the part of the West to take full advantage of lessons learned in previous conflicts, exemplified by the wars and their adverse consequences in Algeria, Indochina, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Bosnia, among others.
This recurrence of errors suggests a gap in the assimilation and application of the lessons learned from these sad experiences. This tendency to repeat the mistakes of the past is also manifested in the current situation of Palestinians, who endure prolonged suffering, thus underscoring a persistent inability to avoid historical mistakes in the management of contemporary crises.
Allegations regarding the desire to terrorize the Palestinian people highlight a tendency to favor material and political ambitions, often to the detriment of humanist values and principles. This approach raises questions about the ethical integrity of certain factions of Western civilization, which could be compared to an 'empty cookie', thus suggesting a lack of moral foundation essential to a culture authentically anchored in values and principles.
It is likely that current and future generations will perceive the Enlightenment story not as an unshakable truth, but rather as a founding myth void of all meaning. The clear discordance between the ideals once proclaimed and the actions to support the oppressor that we witness today highlights the inconsistencies intrinsic to this discourse.