25 giugno 2010

FAQ Shalit

A quattro anni dalla cattura, Bernard-Henri Lévy risponde a qualche domanda sull'affaire Shalit. Perché tanto scalpore per questo ragazzo? In fondo tutte le guerre portano prigionieri, perché Gilad non viene trattato al pari degli altri? Primo: "There are international conventions governing the status of prisoners of war, and the sole fact that this one has been sequestered for four years, the fact that the Red Cross, which regularly visits Palestinians in Israeli prisons, has never been granted access to him is a flagrant violation of the laws of war". Ma soprattutto, non stanchiamoci di ripetere che "Shalit was not captured in the fury of a battle but during a raid in Israel, when Israel, having evacuated Gaza, was at peace with its neighbor".

Dire che Shalit è un prigioniero di guerra "is tantamount to judging that the fact that Israel occupies a territory or has ceased to occupy it changes nothing in terms of the hatred one believes it deserves. It means accepting the idea that Israel is at war even when it is at peace, or that we should make war against Israel because Israel is Israel". Per essere chiari, allora, dobbiamo spiegare che
Shalit is not a prisoner of war but a hostage. His fate is comparable to that of, not a Palestinian prisoner, but a kidnap victim being held for ransom. And he must then be defended as we defend the hostages of the FARC or the Libyans or the Iranians -- we must stand up for him with the same energy devoted to the defense of, say, Clotilde Reiss or Ingrid Betancourt.
Ostaggio o prigioniero di guerra, come volete, ma non si sta esagerando? Perché tutta questa attenzione su un singolo? Perché "he is going through what sometimes happens, in times of extreme tension in world history, to individuals in no way predisposed to play a part who suddenly become the captors of this tension, those who attract the resultant lightning, the points of impact of forces that, in a given situation, converge and clash". Questo ragazzo, suo malgrado, rappresenta ormai "the unending violence of Hamas; the mindless urge to exterminate of its supporters; the cynicism of those 'humanitarians' who, like those of the Free Gaza flotilla, refused to take a letter from his family; or, once again, the double standard whereby he does not benefit from the same wealth of sympathy as, precisely, a Betancourt". E' un simbolo, uno specchio.

Dunque Israele potrebbe (o dovrebbe) liberare centinaia di prigionieri palestinesi per un singolo ostaggio? La questione è annosa. Nel 1982, Israele ha liberato 4.700 combattenti per otto soldati; nel 1985, 1.150 (tra cui il futuro fondatore di Hamas) per 3 israeliani; dopo la guerra del Libano del 2006, numerosi esponenti di Hezbollah sono stati rilasciati in cambio di due corpi. Potrà sembrare folle, ma è la cultura israeliana:
Against the cruelty, first of all, of the famous reasons of State, against the workings of the cold monsters and their terrible laziness, at the opposite of the glacial intransigence Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia was not afraid to decry in the wake of Aldo Moro's kidnapping by the Red Brigades and the way he was abandoned by his "friends," calling it another face of terrorism, this categorical and irrefutable imperative: between the individual and the State, always choose the individual. Between the suffering of only one and the turmoil of the Grand One, the one alone must prevail. A man may be worth nothing, but nothing -- and especially not the swaggering, chest-inflating pride of the Collective -- is worth the sacrifice of one man.