“Words have meaning”: this reminder from the Quai d'Orsay on the announcement of the first conclusions of the International Court of Justice in The Hague in the case brought by South Africa against Israel, accused of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Words have a meaning and, in this case, the word “genocide”, coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust by the jurist Raphaël Lemkin, a survivor of Nazi extermination, has been distorted by the accusing country, a friend of Iran, and by the judges in The Hague. Admittedly, the Court has not yet delivered a final opinion. But it ordered the Hebrew State “to prevent any act of genocide and to prevent and punish its incitement”. Hamas immediately applauded this news, trumpeting the need to “force the occupiers to implement the Court's decisions”.

Hats off to the illustrious analyst of French political life, Jean-François Kahn: a year ago, in an interview he gave us for our special issue “Resist the cretinization of the world”, he warned - with his customary brio - against the “fascisation of the mind”, while pointing out that fascism does not come from the rise of the far right or the far left, but from the junction of the two extremes. Here we go!

The Belgian political class is perhaps more characterised than any other in Europe by its denial of what is currently happening in the Middle East. This has been particularly true since the pogrom of 7 October, which seems to have moved people far less than Israel's response. In recent weeks, there has been one appalling and revolting comment after another:

Among the arsonists fanning the flames of the Israel-Hamas conflict that is about to devour the Middle East and perhaps the world, Recep Tayyip Erdogan occupies a major place. President of a large Muslim nation, a member of NATO and calling for its integration into the European area, he has issued a resounding and sinister proclamation. On 26 October, three days before the centenary of the Republic founded by Atatürk, Erdogan declared before his country's parliament: “Hamas is not a terrorist group, it is a group of liberators protecting their land!

Surrounded by European Union countries that consider the Palestinian Islamist organisation to be terrorist, Switzerland continues not to apply sanctions to Hamas, nor to ban its leaders from its territory. But since the attacks on 7 October, the Federal Council (government) has decided to use the word “terrorism” to describe the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. It has also announced that it is going to carry out a “detailed analysis of financial flows” to the Middle East, a very Swiss way of saying that the government intends to control the sources of funding for Hamas.

Since 7 October and the bloody attack by Hamas on Israeli soil, little has been said about the situation of Israeli Arabs, also known as “Arab citizens of Israel”. According to the latest demographic data, they represent 21% of the Israeli population, descendants of the 160,000 Palestinians who remained (or were not expelled) in the territory granted to Israel in 1948. As for the right to nationality, it was not until the late 1960s that they gained access to it. Today, although they enjoy the same rights as the Jewish population, including the right to vote, they are still victims of discrimination. Already fairly badly regarded, recent events have made Israeli Jews even more wary of them. The situation is particularly complex because most of them still share very strong links with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Friends or family members who chose to leave or were forced to do so during the exoduses of 1948 and 1967.

Whatever barbaric atrocities they commit against Israel, the Palestinian jihadists of Hamas remain heroes in the eyes of the Arab-Islamic Street. These fanatical and savage terrorists are seen as an army for the liberation of Palestine by the majority of people in the Arab world. They are seen as soldiers who “fight in the way of Allah: they kill, and they are killed”, because “Allah has bought the believers, their persons and their goods in exchange for Paradise” (Koran, verse 111 of sura At-Tawbah). Victims of an irrational reading of reality, the overwhelming majority of Arab populations imagine that they are surrounded by Jews and their atheist accomplices who are constantly plotting against the Ummah, the nation of Islam. This plunges them into a veritable paranoia!

After all the hatred and barbarity that has been unleashed on Israel, and the bloody response of the Israel Defense Forces that has claimed several thousand civilian victims in Gaza, can we imagine any way out of the current conflict other than the destruction of Hamas? In other words, the total crushing of its military structures and the dismantling of the politico-religious diktat it has installed in Gaza. As we wrote in these columns the day after the attacks on 7 October (Screen Watch, n° 38, October 2023), putting Hamas out of action is not only imperative for Israel’s security, but also for the honour of the just cause of the Palestinian people, so sullied by Hamas’s bloody crimes.

Since the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October, the conflict has been raging once again in the Middle East, while its inevitable import is causing considerable damage in Europe and Belgium in particular, not least because of a worrying resurgence of anti-Semitic acts. Physical and verbal attacks, tags, publications and other visuals comparing Israel with Nazi Germany... The list of manifestations of hatred towards the Jewish community is long, so much so that Jewish schools and places of worship are under tighter control throughout Belgium, particularly in Brussels and Antwerp. Young people are particularly affected by this conflagration. It was therefore essential to provide schools as soon as possible with a distanced look at the tragic events currently unfolding in Israel and the Gaza Strip. The French Ministry of Education therefore undertook to provide a teaching aid on this subject as soon as possible. The fact sheet was finally published after four long weeks. And its content is disappointing, to say the least. A look back at a difficult birth.

7 October 2023 will remain an indelible date in the history of Israel and in the conscience of the world. A massacre without a name, crimes that even the most necrotic of imaginations would have been incapable of devising. Innocent people had a rendezvous with death at its most despicable. A death deliberately inflicted by fanatical men who had no more than a vague and deceptive notion of humanity.