Lhe day of October 7 changed Israel. She changed him profoundly, inflicting pain that we thought we would never experience again. A pain that our grandparents, and their grandparents, talked about. They told us about the marauders coming to burn and pillage, the soldiers rounding up people to shoot them in a pit, the inhumane barbarity and the complete lack of mercy.
This pain is deeply engraved in all of our memories. We wrote books about her, composed songs, we stood on memorial days, we studied her in our history classes. But no one thought we were going to relive it in our flesh. No one believed that one day our post-trauma would become trauma again.
According to Plato, every new thing we learn is, in reality, a reminiscence. Today, we realize that this new pain is the reminiscence of an old pain. Once again, as in the horrors of the Holocaust, as in Kishinev [pogroms ayant eu lieu en Bessarabie en 1903 et 1905]as during the pogroms of Bogdan Khmelnitsky [chef cosaque ayant fait massacrer des dizaines de milliers de juifs au XVIIe siècle, en Ukraine], one person stands in front of another, a weapon in their hand.
And, just when the victim pleads with a pleading voice, just when the executioner has a chance to show mercy, the exact opposite happens. Very young children, women, the elderly, embryos, entire families, brothers and sisters, couples – all human bonds are severed with the stroke of a sword. Victims are stripped of all identity, and nothing makes their lives worth sparing. The killers came to kill as many as they could. One home after another. One life after another. Destroy. And destroy again.
No denial possible
October 7 changed the Israelis. Something in our faces changed. The color of life seems to have faded. We talk among ourselves and, instead of sentences, we only say words. One starts a conversation with the word “madness”the second responds ” What a nightmare “the third adds “simply horrible”. This is what our discussions look like. The shock is so great that, for the moment, we only seem to feel it in our bodies. We have not yet found words to express it.
Not that we haven’t experienced terrorist attacks in the past. Many people have been killed here. Lives have been shattered. In 2002 [la seconde Intifada, qui démarre fin septembre 2000, est marquée par une forte augmentation des attentats-suicides contre les Israéliens], we were terrified to enter a café because we knew that at any moment a suicide bomber could appear. Rocket attacks on Israeli cities are almost routine for us.
You have 60% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.