"For the truth, for Israel": the conquest of a successful result
lunedì 18 ottobre 2010 English 0 commenti
Dear friends, since we started, in June, projecting the event “For the truth, for Israel”, we have twisted and turned many times: outdoors, indoors, bipartisan, in September, in October… It started within our small family, Sharon and I and some dear friends such as Giancarlo Loquenzi, the editor of the daily online "L'Occidentale", who bombarded us with his sharp and sudden ideas; Robert Hassan, who obsessed us with problems of budget; Raffaella, who gave us the gift of her kindness and chocolates and much of her time. We also had an international promoting committee that worked with commitment: French philosopher Shmuel Trigano; Dutch MEP Bastiaan Belder (Epp); former German MP Gert Weisskirchen (Spd); president of the Jewish Community of Rome, Riccardo Pacifici; professor and writer Giorgio Israel; journalists Giuseppe Caldarola, Angelo Pezzana, Daniele Scalise, Carlo Panella; producer of musical events David Zard; Anita Friedman, president of “Appuntamento a Gerusalemme”.
Giuliano Ferrara immediately accepted to make his "Il Foglio" the daily home of this event, and the journalist Giulio Meotti was extremely instrumental for our aim. Day after day, they printed entire pages that our friends from all over the world wrote for us. Ferrara's passion thought us that we were going in the right direction – albeit with detours and changes of dates and locations... When we finally decided, Senator Gaetano Quagliarello, President of Magna Carta Foundation, helped us finding the conference hall, which was kindly offered to us by the Rome Chamber of Commerce. It was the most beautiful place we could ever imagine: the Temple of Hadrian, a wonderful indoor space facing a very popular square, piazza di Pietra, where we placed a maxi screen to follow what was going on inside.
When the D-Day came, we succeeded to fill up the whole indoor and outdoor space with people, banners, with great human passion: according to the estimates there were three thousand people. We had to apologize dozens of times with all the ministers, vice-ministers, members of parliament, writers, Italian and foreign journalists who wanted to come in and talk. Some of them could not even take the floor. In sum, the event featured 63 speeches. Giancarlo, who chaired the evening, has been a real hero, managing to stem the run to the microphone. While President Aznar was speaking, Minister of Foreign Affairs Frattini was waiting; as Minister for Equal Opportunities Mara Carfagna was grabbing the floor, Piero Fassino and Francesco Rutelli, leader of the oppositions, were pressuring; while former editor in chief of "Il Corriere della Sera" Paolo Mieli shared his thoughts, writer Raffaele La Capria, professor Ernesto Galli della Loggia, writer Alain Elkan and art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, famous for their TV cultural programs, were waiting for their turn. We were reading Berlusconi's message, and the ones by Walter Veltroni, former chair of the Democratic Party, by the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies Gianfranco Fini and by the speaker of the Senate Renato Schifani were in stand-by to follow immediately after.
The large screen installed in the square repeated the messages by Shimon Peres, Bibi Netnayahu, and the one by the writer Roberto Saviano, the author of bestseller "Gomorrah" on the Italian mafia: his was a message full of that nostalgia typical of those who know Jerusalem. Broadcasters competed to interview us, daily papers sent their correspondent and their surprise seeped through their headlines the day after.
We asked ourselves along the way: is this the right timing? Are people warm enough for this? There is no casus belli, the alleged pacifist flotilla has already gone, we are not at war, fortunately there are few attacks… But instead I was feeling that people we turned to, were responding in the right way, because they felt that about Israel there are not simply crisis events, but a permanent crisis. Israel is threatened every day from the physical and moral point of view by Ahmadinejad, by Hamas, by the Hezbollah, but especially by the lies and defamation that come from our world and turn against our own civilization.
People felt that the lies shrouding Israel in a fog of meaningless words make our culture itself meaningless: calling Israel racist makes the word "racism" unworthy the long struggle the West fought against it. We started perceiving from the huge number and the enthusiastic content of the messages we received on Facebook and on my website, that an overfilled bottle was about to pop open. Clever people were fed up with lies about Israel, abusive comments, charges of racism, with the systematic and obsessive attacks by the U.N. condemning Israel in 80% of its resolutions. Our interlocutor felt that Israel could become a “dead man walking”, unworthy of living because of a delegitimization campaign that can even get to the point of accusing the IDF soldiers to kill Palestinians and harvest their organs. They also felt that Israel's right to defend itself from the rain of missiles or from terrorist attacks risks to be defined as as a war crime, thus condemning this State to succumb.
I thought many times that common sense mostly springs from the way in which the élites deal with an issue: in the case of the Middle East, the aegis of the élites was born from the obsolete cliches of thirdworldism, anticapitalism and antiimperialism. When Arafat visited General Giap in Vietnam, the general suggested that he should transform the Palestinian issue from a local to a universal issue, to try and conquer intellectuals, journalists, politicians. In a word: the élite. This suggestion was enormously valuable for Arafat. The palestinized élite learnt how to use the international media and the most important international organizations, such as the U.N., and to transform them in their main fortresses from which to spread their hatred for Israel. A scandal that is taking place within the U.N. Human Rights Council which cannot stop condemning Israel, while forgetting Iran, China and Sudan.
Now it is time to reconquer those fortresses. We started this journey with great and good friends and we will not stop now. In the meantime, we set up SUMMIT, an institute for international politics, we hope to have all of our European friends joining it. Our work will be especially devoted to help Israel, because it starts from the fundamental consideration that defending the right of Israel to exist means defending freedom for all of us. Thanks to the sponsorship of the RAI (Italian Public Radio-TV service), we are now working on a book, both in Italian and English, that will collect all the messages delivered during the demonstration of October the 7th. It will be probably presented on December in Rome. We also think about exporting our work throughout Europe, with the work of all the people who came to Rome to testify their faith in this battle.
Europe as a whole is our goal, because its bias about Israel are dangerous for Israel and self-destructive at the same time. And, of course, we count on your support.
Fiamma Nirenstein
*translated by Silvia Pallottino