Commentary
The imperceptible whisper of peace
So what is left of the Passover holiday? Here, only the tiniest sliver – faint to the point of being imperceptible – of hope is spreading.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!” (Mark 23:47). The Gospel verse dances in my head as I trudge through the crowds in the Old City, attempting to climb to the Esplanade of Mosques, the most tragic place in Jerusalem.
It is from here that every bloody turn in the escalation of Israeli violence began. Such as, in 1967, the destruction of the entire Palestinian neighborhood adjacent to the Wailing Wall and just below the Dome of the Rock, or the famous walk by Ariel Sharon that triggered the Second Intifada in 2000, marking 10 years of violations of the Oslo Accords, with the resumption of settlements in the West Bank on an increasingly massive scale. Or the repeated, equally provocative walks by Ben Gvir in these awful years we are living through, not to mention the police raids inside Al-Aqsa Mosque itself, “The Farthest One,” so sacred to Islam across the entire Middle East.
But what do they have to celebrate here, in front of this Wailing Wall where no one wails anymore, I wonder as I bear witness, in deep puzzlement, to yet another thunderous dance by a throng of families in traditional dress, the men with their sidelocks and phylacteries, the women in their turbans and wigs, and their tribes of wild children... Of course, they are celebrating the week of Passover, which this year coincides with that of all the Christian denominations, as numerous as the churches in Jerusalem.
But what Passover, and what Resurrection, can there be with the news coming in every morning from Gaza and the West Bank! Perhaps if there is ever a time in which we can understand what abyss of despair broke down the remaining bulwarks of Greek and Roman civilization, it is ours. Perhaps then as now, there was an unconditional surrender of the mind to nothingness, in the chill of the proven impotence of our reason to stop the limitless gratuitousness of evil: of savagery, idiocy, the will to dominate – and cowardice. As if crashing down, the pride of humanitas knelt down before the victim, and in the despondent cry of a naked man, stripped of all power, as he was killed, suspected that it found the ultimate and highest divine word, the only one free from falsehood, the only one not to take the lord's name in vain. “When not an echo / answers / to his high cry / and with great labor, Nothingness / gives form / to your absence.” Father Davide Turoldo wrote those words. And 40 years earlier, in the midst of extermination, Edith Stein threw in the towel on behalf of reason: “The world is on fire ... the human will is blind ... unable to find its way.”
What a paradox, then, that the Holy Land – “holy,” not sacred, because it is a place unseparated from the divine, an earthly place of birth and death – is an invention of the Constantinian era, the era when religion became the instrument of kingdoms. Jerusalem has been a showpiece for distant kingdoms ever since, though never so much as today: climbing up the ramparts of the Citadel and the so-called Tower of David – actually a fortification erected by Herod the Great, administering the kingdom of Judah on behalf of Rome in the first century B.C. – one gets a perfect picture of what it is like to thrive in the shadow of a distant empire.
After all, at the end of the “history of Israel” that is illustrated inside the Citadel, beginning with David himself (10th century BCE), we see the proclamation of Jerusalem as the “one and undivided capital of the State of Israel,” in 1980, without the slightest mention of the opposing opinion of the UN, i.e. of the rest of the world. An impossible move without the imperial support of the United States.
So what is left of the Passover holiday? Well, those families with children and sidelocks and phylacteries must surely know, dancing undaunted under the empty gaze of the soldiers armed to the teeth who are manning the checkpoints to the Esplanade. Here, only the tiniest sliver – faint to the point of being imperceptible – of hope is spreading, shall we say, among “the rest of Israel”: one never knows how many people it consists of, because it has no resonance, barely a trace of it can be found on the web. Nevertheless, it can be found. It is a network of peace NGOs – often Israeli-Palestinian ones – that brings together 50 to 160 of them, depending on who you’re listening to, and it's called “It's Time 4 Peace.”
They are organizing a grassroots peace summit right here in Jerusalem for May 8 and 9. Nivine Sandouka tells me about it. I meet her in the Re:Street space, a meeting place created in the spirit of the Jerusalem Model, that is, the idea of a civil society animated by new generations, capable of breaking the chains of opposing narratives, and working with a certain amount of pragmatism, and many initiatives of economic, social and cultural emancipation, toward reconciliatory and restorative justice.
Nivine, a brilliant 40-year-old Palestinian woman with an extraordinary career in advocacy for rights and democracy, is now Regional Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a group of a hundred or so NGOs funded in part by USAID, which Trump shut down. But that is not enough to stop it, not even for a moment. They even managed to screen the film No Other Land here, despite the fact that it is banned in Israeli theaters. A whole book wouldn’t be enough to describe her energy, her light.
Then you open your cell phone and see updates from Gaza and the West Bank. And Lebanon. And you re-enter the Old City through the Lion's Gate. From there, you get a view of the only “Perpetual Peace” that is on offer in Jerusalem. Already in shadow, crowded with stones and writing, is the Arab cemetery. In the background, in full light, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, as far as the eye can see, lies the Jewish cemetery. It looms over the valley of Jehoshaphat, where the Eternal One will judge the living and the dead at the end of time.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/limpercettibile-sussurro-della-pace on 2025-04-20