‘Israel has the right to defend itself’— the sacred 11th commandment
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I remember the poignant Oct. 7 testimony of a mother, Hadas Kalderon, a survivor of Kibbutz Nir Oz whose two children had been taken hostage. She had begged the kidnappers to spare them, adding, as if to soften them up, that she assumed they were parents themselves and would therefore hear her heart-wrenching plea: “My children don’t have to suffer this war. It’s not their war.” As Israeli soldiers, who had just neutralized the attackers, knocked on the door of her shelter, she wondered how she could know it was not the terrorists. Responding to the calls of the rescuers, she cried out: “But where were you?”
This brave lady would later recount: “I can hear my son screaming in my ear every day, ‘Mommy, save me.’ That’s what I hear every day, and I am heartbroken.”
Israeli civilians will always remember that day as another pogrom.
Even if, when it comes to pogroms, Israel is no stranger to them, ever since April 9, 1948, and right up to the present day. During the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris, “70 percent of the victims were noncombatants, and the prisoners were executed.”
It is worth remembering what Israel is called today: a state above all international laws
Salah Guemriche
What is named “the only democracy in the region?”
While this is not a matter of drawing a historical parallel, it is worth remembering what Israel is called today: a state above all international laws.
Israel is a free state, free to do whatever it wants with total impunity. It is free to trample on international law, to colonize and massacre populations, while the leaders of the “free” world do not lift a finger. And when they do lift a finger, it is for … a veto. It is also worth recalling this historical fact: Israel is the only country in the world against which the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice can do nothing, despite all the UN resolutions: more than 60 of them. What about human rights? This clearly has nothing to do with this state. “Israel has the right to defend itself” sounds like the 11th commandment.
Even what happens in Israel’s prisons is none of the international community’s business, or so we are told: it is a matter of national sovereignty, of course. Humanitarians working for nongovernmental organizations in the region are in a good position to know this, albeit unwillingly. Even those from Israeli groups like Physicians for Human Rights — Israel. Founded “with the aim of promoting a just society in which the right to health is granted equally to all people under Israel’s responsibility,” it may denounce breaches of the most basic human rights, but there are always some warmongers in the Knesset to brandish the famous 11th commandment, echoed all over the world and notably through the French media.
“Israel has the right to defend itself,” including in Lebanon. And even by means forbidden by the laws of war, as was the case with the explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies. This is what the mayor of Saraain in the Bekaa Valley had to say: “Fatima Abdallah (10) was doing her homework at the living room table. She heard her father’s beeper ringing and wanted to take it to him. It exploded in her hands and she died instantly.”
So, yes, “enough is enough” in the words of the assembly founded in 2001 by Madeleine Reberioux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Today, this cry, even though it has returned, is telling you: Stop these massacres. Stop this injustice, which is unworthy of leaders whose ancestors knew the worst and who, in the name of that worst, now believe they are authorized to reproduce abomination and desolation.
Of course, this does not mean that the “abomination of desolation” of modern times (the Shoah) has been erased. But through territorial compensation, the international community corrected one abomination with another, one injustice with another. Yet, all one had to do was follow the advice of the great science historian Yeshayahu Leibowitz: “It’s no longer a matter of liberating the Occupied Territories, but rather of liberating Israel from the Occupied Territories.” You sound like Gen. Charles de Gaulle on Algeria. Yes, “liberate Israel from the Occupied Territories.” So that, one day, perhaps the kibbutz called Kfar Aza (in Hebrew: “Gaza Village”) will be a mere suburb of the city of Gaza.
- Salah Guemriche, an Algerian essayist and novelist, is the author of 14 books, including “Algeria 2019, the Reconquest” (Orients Editions, 2019), “Israel and its Neighbor, According to the Bible” (L’Aube, 2018) and “Christ Stopped at Tizi-Ouzou: An Investigation into Conversions in Islamic Lands” (Denoel, 2011). X: @SGuemriche
