“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Martin Luther King
Dear Papillon,
many years ago, driven by curiosity and a certain recklessness, I went to Israel and saw many things.
It was November, and it was warm — a beautiful kind of warmth, the kind you only get in true in-between seasons. I remember the olive trees and the desert. I remember the strange sensation of floating so easily in the waters of the Dead Sea, and the gazelle that seemed to be waiting for us at dawn among the ruins of the Masada fortress. We had planned every step of the journey, searched for trains, hotels, things to do, things to eat, things to say. We left convinced that we would surely discover the secret of why so many different worlds meet there, and how they manage, despite everything, to coexist.
It was 2013, and I had not yet truly reflected on the unusual title of the guidebook I had bought: Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It took me ten years to fully understand what it meant.
Of course, I knew about the situation. I had passed through those checkpoints myself, walked alongside the wall with all that barbed wire, breathed that air, read the news in the papers. And yet, somehow, there was a kind of veil that prevented me from truly understanding — from really believing it, perhaps.
I remember one detail, among the many that made that trip feel so ambiguous. I was going through airport security. Among the many questions that seemed absurd to me, the officer asked:
“If I were to open your bag right now, would I find any explosives?”
At the time, I simply could not reconcile all that beauty with the sense of tension I had felt for more than a week — as if I had reached into a basket to pick a ripe, juicy fruit and instead found myself trapped in the ground, caught in deep roots so tightly intertwined that they could not be undone.
“Life here is so different,” I thought, once I returned home. And that thought ended up in some compartment of my mind, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, filed under: Things I can do nothing about.
In recent years, I have thought a lot about that trip. Almost every day. Every time some horrifying piece of news reached me. Especially in the past few days, because, as you may have read, the Israeli parliament has approved a law that effectively imposes the death penalty on Palestinians and marks a point of no return: the legal — even juridical — declaration of a distinction between lives that matter and lives that do not.
And every time, in recent years, when I read things like this, I cannot help but ask myself: are we really sure there is nothing I can do?
Some might think this is a problem tied to religious fundamentalism and extremist beliefs. But in reality, it is not only that. This is about the erasure of a people, about delusions of omnipotence rooted in reasons that are anything but divine. Always this underlying obsession with finding an enemy to defend against and to fight.
Coming back to the specific case, the issue is not only the law itself — which already feels out of step with the stage of human development we should have reached — but the context in which it arises, and the way it has been celebrated. Quite literally with pastries and champagne. And I find myself asking: who gets to propose and approve laws like this, and at the same time behave this way?
A law built on a selective definition of “terrorism,” which obviously applies only to one part of the population — the Palestinian one — and supported openly by political figures who have made violence part of their everyday language.
A disturbing formula: a discriminatory system, violations of international law, and above all, the transformation of law into a tool of supremacy.
But what unsettles me most is not even just this.
This shift comes after years of massacres of the Palestinian population, after threats and attacks involving foreign countries, with the complicity of wealthy and foolish allies, after having shattered and overturned even the smallest fragments of humanitarian law, and after trying to convince the world of the legitimacy of a violent and corrupt way of acting. And still, it provokes nothing more than weak statements and timid reactions from the international community.
And I think that when such an extreme measure meets no real opposition, the problem is no longer only those who approve it or those who suffer from it. It becomes everyone’s problem. And I believe that when criminals are allowed to act without consequence, they simply continue.
I must say, I am astonished by how slowly everything moves. I am surprised by how long it takes to call things by their name, to refuse to enable pathological and inhumane politicians, I am bewildered by how slow the world is, even as it spins at 1,700 km per hour.
Perhaps, dear Papillon, there comes a point when even a snail must begin to question the reasons for its own slowness.
Yes, we have done something. A small “no,” a tiny flag raised. But how much more is there to do, I ask myself — and immediately after I press myself further: what can I do?
Perhaps more than I have always told myself.
To keep informing myself, even when it is uncomfortable. To speak, even when it is difficult. To ask questions, even when answers do not come. Not to stop exposing myself. To sign, to vote, to choose carefully whom to give voice and power to. To speak with those who think differently, without necessarily trying to convince them, but without stepping back when I feel that what I believe is right — and human.
To use, as long as I can, all the rights that this democracy places in my hands, simply because they are not guaranteed, and because somewhere there are those who do not have them.
And above all, I can continue. We can continue, dear Papillon. Continue not to look away. Continue not to consider inevitable what is not inevitable.
So what do you say — shall we continue?
Ilaria Serpi
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