Stars of David on the walls. Until a few years ago they were symbols of a terrible past, but to be studied at school. Today they appear in disgrace and we pass by, at most a sigh. Sometimes accompanied by swastikas and insulting phrases against Jews. The stumbling blocks to remember the victims of the Shoah are destroyed, as are the images of the witnesses who still dare, under guard, to remember what happened.
Liliana Segre, branded as a Zionist agent, at 95 years old. In Italy it’s still going well, despite this
here at every event and for any cause Palestinian flags wave along with anti-Jewish slogans. In universities, a boy wearing a kippah risks being spit on, insulted, if not lynched. In Amsterdam, the statue of Anne Frank is guarded by four uniformed officers, after repeated attacks.
We all read his diary at school, apparently in vain. How useless seem the praiseworthy trips to the shrines of the martyrdom of a people, to the concentration camps of Poland and Germany. In Leicester, UK, products made in Israel have been banned. In some Irish cities, pharmacies no longer sell Israeli products. Berlin’s police chief has strongly advised against wearing Jewish signs in some neighborhoods.
Jews = Israel = Netanyahu = Gaza. In this illogical but now habitual succession, there is the tragic sin of Western history: identifying a religion with a people and a people with its rulers. It is not just ignorance, but a deliberate, strategic misrepresentation: to make the guilt fall from the top of the parable to the base, and therefore the necessary condemnation and expiation. That is, persecution, cancellation of a lineage, of a “race”. Unfortunately it took centuries for the Second Vatican Council to erase the horrible stigma of “perfidious Jews”. To ask for forgiveness for the atrocities committed on those who were called “deicides”. So that we recognize that our faith begins with the faith of Israel, and that Jesus was, and is, Jewish. For this reason, Christians above all have the moral duty to be clear with words, attentive to their meaning. Jews are not responsible for the massacres in Gaza.
Jews are believers, Israelis are the inhabitants of a state that has the right to exist, which has horribly suffered the worst pogrom since the years of Hitler and Stalin and which has a prime minister to oust. An eternal guilt cannot be attributed to a people, turning a blind eye or even justifying its perpetrators. There is far-left anti-Semitism, the result of an ideology that lives on the equation Israel = USA, where the USA is evil. There is far-right anti-Semitism, the result of the perverse and supremacist ideology of race. They are extremes that meet and they appeal to younger people. May Christians remain firmly immune from this terrible temptation, stubbornly standard bearers of peace, of understanding, of support for the human being who has no identity card, language, religion, culture. May our Jewish brothers not feel betrayed by us once again.
(Reuters photo)
