"Genocide. Presented the book by Rula Jebreal

Rosalba Panzieri

In the Nassirya Fallen Hall of the Senate of the Italian Republic held the press presentation of Palestinian writer Rula Jebreal's book entitled "Genocide. What Remains of Us in the Neo-Imperial Era."

"A sniper can't shoot a child twice by mistake."

Rula Jebreal, a journalist and writer, has written for Piemme Editions a book, described by Senator Alessandra Maiorino, who organized the presentation event, as "a necessary punch to the gut that repeats itself on every page."

On May 29, at the Senate of the Republic, an entire room of auditors was squeezed between the impossibility of listening and the impossibility of pretending nothing was happening as speakers recounted the horrors that are ravaging the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. 

The author's words pass through ink impregnated with the memory of blood, the latest outcome of a massacre of the innocent and defenseless, hell on earth for those who live it, which is being consummated in worldvision, in Europe's total inaction, when not complicity.

It is precisely of complicity that Rula Jebreal speaks in her book and to the audience, of suicidal support with which the West is arming Netanyahu to exterminate children and civilians, wondering and wondering how we will be saved from this shame and the anger of the victims. "One hundred percent of the bombs," says Rula Jebreal, "that the government of Israel drops on the heads of Palestinian children are produced in 3 countries, namely the United States, Germany and Italy. I don't say that, Borrell, the former European foreign minister, who a few days ago called for stopping sending these bombs if you are really alarmed and angry about the number of victims, says that. This is a Western Israeli genocide."

The testimony of Mark Perlmutter, U.S. surgeon for MSF

If one wants to imagine hell, one must build in the mind a place where helpless children burn in flames, orphaned, starving, thirsty, amputated without anesthesia, dying of septicemia, intentionally targeted by snipers. If one wants to understand the philosophy of hell, one must think of the destruction of life and of every sacred embankment, thinking of a place where doctors are executed for serving life and with them journalists are killed for serving truth. Today that place is Gaza, as Mark Perlmutter, an American Jewish surgeon with Doctors Without Borders, recounts. "Gaza is the worst reality I've seen in 30 years of work," says the surgeon, "in horrific scenarios, but none come remotely close to this. The last time Israel violated the ceasefire agreed with the Palestinians was 2:30 a.m. I was called in urgently and in the emergency room the floor was entirely covered in blood, there were children bleeding from life-threatening hemorrhages, others with amputated limbs clinging laboriously to my legs with their only remaining limb. The hospital was completely lacking in proper equipment and materials, I had to choose who to save and who to let die." Words, those of Dr. Perlmutter, that become stones of a way of the cross in Jebreal's book and that place before the fall of the Geneva Conventions, which allow doctors to operate for life in war zones. 

"There is a doctor, an orthopedist, who was tortured and raped by an Israeli female soldier with a vegetable soaked in a pig's blood to make him confess where Hamas was hiding, then his fingers were broken. We talk a lot about the Jewish hostages, but no one talks about the 350 doctors who are currently in prison in Israel are in prison without charge, without being represented by any counsel, without having the opportunity to defend themselves. They too are hostages, but the West is not dealing with them." As the FNOMCeO Central Committee recalled and denounced, "doctors are witnesses of peace in places of war." The surgeon concluded his speech by explaining that one should not be afraid to use the term genocide to narrate the extermination that is taking place in Gaza.

Condemning genocide is not the same as supporting anti-Semitism

Jurist Chantal Meloni points out the various aspects, extensively described and argued in the book, that can be traced back to war crimes with atrocious novelties, including forced disappearances of doctors and medical personnel. "A reflection is needed because it was in Italy that the Hague Court, the international criminal court, was established in 1998. Late last November, this court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation, against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now a de facto international wanted man. The government has a duty to respect the value of this warrant."

Rula concludes by saying that it was not she who chose the title, but the search for truth, as well as the words of leading international experts that guided her, and that to brand those who fight against the extermination of another people with anti-Semitism is offensive and manipulative.

What is certain is that phenomena such as gruesome tourism organized by some Israelis, who pay to see with their telescopes children being blown up, is a desecration of the horrible memory of every extermination, every genocide that has passed and that we should never have seen again.

The greatest defeat of a human being is to become what they did to him.