TAmong so much destruction, an image that comforts. An elderly woman, her dressing gown rumpled and her hair disheveled, shakes the hand of her enemy, armed and hooded in a gloomy black balaclava.
It’s time for the Israel-Hamas hostage exchange and the large hand of the soldier-jailer seems, for an instant, the moment of that shalom, salam, peace, to bend – to abandon? – delicately – perhaps a doubt? -, to her determination, Yocheved Lifschitz, 85 years old, Israeli. Pacifist.
The word does not arouse intolerance or derision. The outcome of every war is peace, time is the variable of horror, between the before and after there are often handfuls of earth. Like in the novel Nothing new on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a few meters in border accounting. In between, the end of humanity.
Danda Santini director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
He told it well to I Woman Giovanna Botteri, one of the first sent to the front: «The war was made and told by men. We have begun to focus not on those who wage war, but on those who suffer it: civilians, refugees, victims.”
From that angle everyone is a winner. «You see the disaster coming and, like the Cumaean Sibyl, you want to scream: “Stop, stop, stop!”». And the Cumaean Sibyl, visionary eye, was always right.
It is therefore legitimate to ask ourselves whether having more women in negotiation processes is not a necessary step to bring the point of view of the other half of the world, the full-bodied one of victims who, on every front, lose everything. Children, husbands, relatives, home, work, future.
That of those who have a completely different experience of war from generals and politicians. Carrying elderly people and children on your shoulders. Looking for water, food, shelter.
Continuing life, while others cause death. Save, where armies sow destruction. Escape rapes which have always been a corollary of war, first of all forms of virile violence.
Hence the women’s mobilisations. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine every week a group of women meets, from 6.30pm to 7pm, in front of the Loggia dei Mercanti in Milan, to testify to the desire for peace. In silence, holding signs in all languages.
He invites us to reject the logic of taking sides and to remove our children from wars the petition launched by journalist Marina Terragnialready signed by I Woman“Enough with the wars of men” (su change.org).
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“Dare for peace”, was the headline in the weekly Elle Francequoting Camus, who on 8 August 1945, after the bomb on Hiroshima, wrote: “Faced with the terrifying prospects that are opening up for humanity, we understand even better that peace is the only battle worth fighting. It is not a prayer, but an order that must rise from the people to the governments, the order to definitively choose between hell and reason.”
An order guided by logos, not the naive dream of beautiful souls.
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