Understand violence and evil with the philosopher Martin Steffens

In this conflict, we are witnessing a rise in violence, which seems to never have to stop. How to understand this dramatic mechanism?

It is in reality a universal reflex: to recognize himself as human and convince himself of being, man needs not only to distinguish himself from the animal, but also to deny humanity to a part of his fellow men, to repel them on the fringes. The margins are not only those that we exclude, but all those who disturb us, both the beggar and the disabled person. However, it is these margins that, disturbing us, remind us that life is greater than our only person.

The fact that the former Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, immediately said: “We fight human animals”, is disturbing. Because the logic which commanded the attack on Hamas was precisely the same. From the moment when one and the other denies humanity, everything becomes allowed: famine, murders of children … And all this concerns us: during the national wars which torn Europe barely a century ago, Christians were wildly maintained.

In France, political parties and citizens are rocked to find out who from Palestine or Israel deserves our support …

Diabolizing one of the two camps makes it possible to convince yourself that there is the party of evil against that of good. Besides, some take pictures of the horrors committed by only one of the two opponents to convince himself that he is the bad while – “fortunately” – the other is the right one; In other words, the one that can be supported by making sure to be on the “good side”. In reality, what is played out illustrates the presence of evil that inhabits all humanity.

But refusing to condemn a camp, is it not to run the risk of refusing to condemn the evil in short?

On the contrary, the only way to look in the eye is to see that it is at work everywhere, on both sides. Commenting Iliad, The philosopher of Jewish origin Simone Weil notes that this text, written by the Greeks victorious of the Trojan War, accounts in the same way of the sufferings endured by the Greeks and by the Trojans. By describing the evil on each side, The iliad Do not say who of the two camps was right, but on the contrary that everyone ended up the force he believed to have.

For Simone Weil, this poem tells, not the acts of heroes like Ulysse or Hector, but the ravages of the blind force. The more warriors believe to handle the strength, the more in reality it dominates them. Today, this blind force takes on the face of nationalism, if we hear the authorization, even the obligation, imposed from above, that our compassion stops where the stranger begins.

There is certainly evil on both sides, but the UN believes that Israel, and not Hamas, is guilty of genocide.

Hamas does not direct a state. He could therefore only lead an asymmetrical struggle, by practicing terrorism, taking hostages. If Hamas had the power of a modern state, it would pose an existential threat to Israel. What must question us is the report of each camp to its stranger, to its margin. Arab and Jewish nationalisms are identity. They refuse in principle the possibility that on the other side of their borders, something calls them up, opens them.

The project of razing Gaza in order to make it a Côte d’Azur for tourists, imagined by the American administration and supported by the government of Benyamin Netanyahu, is instructive. Because the tourist is the one who cannot bear the margin: he wants to be at home everywhere, to have air conditioning in hot countries … Nothing should shake him up. I concern with concern this world where great states confine their people in security without otherness, roughness, or face.

Locking yourself in fear is already dying. In the West, we no longer have children for fear of the future and discomfort. We go out by refusing the adventure of living. Admittedly adversity exists – it will always exist -, but to erect fear in principle from our action is to give up before adversity.

For Christians, the painful history of the Church and Europe with Judaism makes it difficult to condemn the actions of Israel.

However, it must be done, firmly but humbly. Humbly because we too, Catholics, had the intoxication of asserting ourselves loved by God to the exclusion of others, particularly of the Jews. But firmly because, otherwise, we let our mistakes reproduce exactly. When, after the wars of religion, the European nations, notably Protestants, tried to found their religitimacy religiously, they referred to the Old Testament, where an elected people prefers to everything else. The New Testament lends itself much less to this use, because Jesus, instead of calling to fight the Roman occupier, designates a new elected people, that of the margins. We meet the hemorrhoidal woman, the Roman centurion, the lepers and the children …

But isn’t it a bit easy? Can we blame the one who lived in his flesh the assault of another for being afraid of it now?

On the contrary, it is the most difficult path. The question is: “What to do with our injuries?” We can, as citizens of Israel, be united with the Palestinians who lived the Nakba, in 1948, as them had experienced the pogroms. In his book Apeirogon, Colum McCann tells the story of two fathers, Israeli and Palestinian, who each lost a daughter, one killed in an attack in Jerusalem, the other by a TSAhal soldier. A crucial choice presented itself to them: harden or recognize that in front, the other experienced the same thing. They now walk the world together to testify. Everyone admitted that he had the same injury as the other, without competing.

Perhaps the only solution to this conflict will be the transfer of generation: youth, which is tired of suffering and which is sufficiently connected to know that in front they also suffer, will rise and make things happen. In any case, even if one cannot demand it from the one who suffers, a detachment is not impossible. There are so many works born in the suffering that indicates light.

What can Catholics do in the face of this conflict?

The church is a turning point. It must recall, in time and in setbacks, our commune fraternity, beyond routes and borders, however necessary they. In order for this voice to be hollow but generous, the church must pay from his person, being really present in the wounds of the world. During the plague epidemics, rather than fleeing the sick, she founded religious orders which were specially dedicated to them.

Maybe there is still a way out, then?

“Perhaps”, it is a word that does not have the power of what is, but which has the very small power of what could be. Perhaps we arrive at the end of a model: that of the humanism of the Enlightenment, which values ​​man sure of himself, standing, in progress, for a humanism of the fallen man, more universal and more carnal. We must be where there will never be any machines to replace us: console, listen … The passage is difficult, but perhaps this is the beginning of something else.