We modern humans, immersed in an era of ready-made sauces, TV series, and calculators that do the math for us, have transferred our passivity into history as well.
But unfortunately, history is far from over: it is anything but fast, simple, or easy to digest. Events are not disconnected from one another, and even if we pretend to understand this, what we are witnessing right now is slowly taking root, already shaping what will happen tomorrow. A tomorrow that we will probably never see.
It’s like when we are children: things happen that we often forget, but they continue to shape our behavior until the day we die. And the funny thing is, we don’t even realize it.
But while our children are entertained by Netflix, Palestinian children are currently witnessing a much darker spectacle: the genocide of their people. They don’t know it yet, but all the atrocities, the pain, the blood, the screams, the shattered lungs, the sight of their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters lying dead under the bombs, these images will be seared into their minds, fueling resentment again and again, forming the foundation of a future conflict. Who wouldn’t join a militant group to avenge a childhood destroyed by human cruelty?
And that is exactly what happened to the Jews: persecuted and oppressed for centuries, they found refuge after the Holocaust, only to become oppressors themselves.
The most radical among them, those who want to see every last Palestinian turned to ashes, are probably the ones who have carried the weight of their ancestors’ suffering on their shoulders.
Oppressed peoples internalize pain, transform it into identity, and often into resentment and vengeance. And internalized resentment is like a tumor: always there, lurking, ready to invade the entire body as soon as the immune defenses let their guard down.
These are foundational traumas, the very fuel of tomorrow’s rage. As Fallaci once said, war is an absurd atrocity, and it is hypocritical to rejoice over a successful heart transplant while thousands of hearts stop beating under the bombs. But the problem goes even deeper: war is not just a horror, it is a self-sustaining system. Because the truth is, human beings do not forget; they accumulate.
And if, in a fight, there is always a third party who benefits, who is this part of the world that calls itself “civilized” while merely watching? It is the “democratic” West, once a pioneer of colonialism, now a supplier of weapons and resources, ensuring that we continue to witness the gravest atrocities of our time. A spectator only in appearance, because in reality, it is also an indirect cause of this cycle of violence, a hidden director, fueling the conflict while pretending to want to solve it.
Pain must be recognized on both sides. One must be that Palestinian child who saw his mother torn in half, who saw blood splatter across the rubble. One must be that Jewish child who saw his family exterminated and listened to stories of unspeakable horrors. We need a shared memory.
Maybe I’m writing about utopias, but dividing the world into good and evil, seeing reality in black and white, reducing everything to a big bad wolf and a helpless lamb, this is pure foolishness. Breaking this endless cycle of violence requires a radical act: someone must lay down their weapons.
Otherwise, we are not just watching a war; we are witnessing the birth of the next one.
