It is settled: we are living through a war that does not speak its name. It began in the sands, with the fury of the cannons and the thunder of supersonic fighter jets. It changed shape and made its way into the cities, with stones, with children and adolescents. And now it carries on in the abominable gurgling of a man, his hands bound, calmly strangled.
It is a war, even if it does not speak its name. Must one — whether one approves its ends or condemns them — understand, if not excuse, its mechanisms and its means?
It is intolerable to us to see a man murdered in his prison, be it a military prison. And we think, in this regard, that the media were not greatly moved by this murder. One must not forget that these particular deportees are the same who, in other countries where the Muslim religion is the state religion, are locked away at the edges of the desert or even shot on sight, for the good reason that they themselves shoot down those countries’ forces of order.
But it is also intolerable to us to see the State of Israel — which we love for what it represents to us, and because it remains one of the few democracies in this part of the globe — practice this sort of collective response to this type of crime.
The society sprung from the People of the Book, this society born at once of Theodor Herzl’s dream and of the nightmare of the Holocaust, cannot respond with a massive retaliation — and therefore, in a sense, an anonymous one (see the error acknowledged by Tsahal [the Israel Defense Forces] regarding the involvement of 7 of the expelled Palestinians) — to a power founded on hostage-taking and political monolithism.
This expulsion of more than 400 Palestinians remains for us not only a wrong, in that it violates human rights, but a blunder, in that it settles — and can in no way settle — a problem that plainly is a matter neither of the tooth, nor of the eye, but of the word.