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The multi-award-winning Israeli writer breaks a long period of silence to express his despair with a "cry" in verse.
It is normal for ordinary people to be unable to articulate a word to describe something unspeakable. But when this happens to one of the most important writers in the world, “someone who for decades, with words, not only narrated, but also shaped reality,” as Francesca Cafferi of Repubblica writes, then it is certainly not a good omen.
More: David Grossman: "We have nothing left but to live in hatred"
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If an intellectual today wants his speech to have morality and honesty, he cannot skip two dates. February 24, 2022 and October 7, 2023. And that is not enough. He must describe exactly what happened on these two dates. That is, to say that Russian troops invaded Ukraine and that Hamas terrorists – let's call them "militants" – invaded Israel, to murder and kidnap civilians. When we simply talk about the war in Ukraine, we essentially equate the invader with the defender. The aggressor with the victim. And when we do not refer to October 7, 2023 at all, but to what happened after, we simply show our prejudice. Can such a speech describe, interpret and teach? Can it be a guide for thought? A reliable guide to analyzing and synthesizing events?
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The truth is that domestic current affairs have made public debate monothematic. But right now, not so far from us, atrocities are happening that do not seem to concern our European conscience at all. In the context of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Palestine, Hamas is engaging in atrocities that increasingly underscore the need for Western vigilance. Boneless Israeli hostages after their release reveal merciless torture. The wrong bodies are deliberately given to relatives, while propaganda material from the terrorist organization was placed in the coffins of dead babies. A man who learned that his wife and children had been murdered was forced to kiss his torturer on the forehead upon his release, as part of a propaganda fiesta, while other hostages were forced to watch their fellow hostages being released, a psychological torture that topped off their physical torture. Amit Sussana told the UN after her release that she was raped, hung upside down, and punched. The parents of four Israeli hostages described how their daughters were kept in cages during their captivity. They had no access to toilets, cooked for their Hamas torturers, who sexually abused them, and received no treatment for illnesses they contracted during their months-long captivity. They forced one of them to pose as the dead woman so her mother could see the video.
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An entire people apologizes to the children, the mother, the father, the grandfather who were taken hostage on October 7, 2023 by the Kibbutzim of the South Israel, were brutally tortured and murdered by Hamas terrorists, who were returned in coffins and buried last week.
The country's first citizen, President of the Republic Yitzhak Herzog, apologized to the families of the dead hostages because the state proved incapable of protecting them and did not have time to release them alive. The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, General Archie Alevi, took responsibility for the failure of the army and all intelligence services for the failure to protect Israeli citizens.
More: VIKTOR Y. ELIEZER: Sliha, the apology of a people in Hebrew
