Ln June 13, 2023, I was in Gaza to present my History of Jerusalem in comics (Les Arènes, 2022), in front of an audience of Palestinian students, university colleagues and regulars from the French Institute, which hosted the meeting. Three weeks earlier, on May 24, 2023, I presented this same work to colleagues and students at Bar-Ilan University, in Israel. In both cases, the exchanges were rich and warm.
In Gaza as in Bar-Ilan, students had anticipated future publications of this comic strip in Arabic and Hebrew, by translating a few boards with their teachers. At the end of these meetings, we shared cakes and fruit juice while talking about this and that, carefree.
Since then, the world has shifted on its axis. These happy memories were buried in the din of massacres and bombings. Eighteen Bar-Ilan students died in the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023 or in the fighting that followed, and 5,000 of them are mobilized within the Israeli army. The French Institute in Gaza was bombed on November 3, 2023, and Ahmed Abu Shamla, who had worked there for twenty years, was killed in an Israeli bombardment, while he had taken refuge in Rafah with part of his family. .
Beyond these two points of observation, the scale of the ongoing tragedies allows us to understand the trauma these two societies are going through: 1,200 Israelis died on October 7, which, on the scale of the French population, would correspond to more than 9,000 deaths in a single day. And 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza have died since October 7, which, again, on the scale of France, would correspond to nearly 700,000 deaths in two and a half months. These figures are dizzying: yes, what is unfolding before our eyes is dizzying and almost indescribable, because unprecedented.
Faced with such a surge of violence, the French political debate remains marked by its binary inanity: everyone is ordered to choose their side, as if our positions as observers could be confused with those of the families of missing Israeli hostages or Palestinian civilians. drowned under bombs. Our role, away from combat, does not, however, consist of “playing war” by pretending to be on the battlefield, because we are not there.
The act of denouement
Far from the clash of arms, we can and we must, on the contrary, remain lucid to coldly analyze what is at stake: nothing less than the fifth and final act of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that of the outcome, which risks to conclude with the annihilation of one or the other of the belligerents.
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