-Essay-
TURIN — Each time. Each and every time one of them dies, we are reminded of the immensity of their choice. The humanitarian calling that continues to set some souls on fire. The Samaritans are not, as some might think, lost and astray; they are simply different creatures in a world where the focus is on the payoff, the outcome, the success, the guarantee.
It is hard to comprehend the choice (remorse, doubt, hypocrisy?) made up to the point of the utter self-sacrifice of humanitarian ideology: faces, names, not acronyms or initials. We who stand in front of the television set to see those who have dedicate their lives with determination, to be close to people wherever they are victimized by nature, but especially by other humans.
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They do not demand quid pro quo; they are often excoriated by disappointments and bitterness, by fierce bursts of objections: Why are you even there, you idealist humanist? Under whose direction do you really work? The ideology, that what we want to know. Have you tested those you help to see if they deserve it?
And then for those who have decided to help the victims along the exhausting course of time, to be of service so that they may rise again, behold — death struck by an Israeli drone. On an ordinary day in a century that is already the occasion of vast crimes, in the midst of bare ruins, bombs, no modesty, starvation, evil of all kinds.
Like a pawn?
Gaza. Yet another name for a place where human material is unscrupulously used, where simply feeding people can cost you your life, where even aid parachuted from the sky — because by land is forbidden by the Israeli "necessity" of war — becomes deadly objects that crush those it was intended to save.
This is a place where all military-political explanations and reasons have been exhausted in a 75-year-long tragedy that pits reason against reason with no possibility of dissolution. And each day fades into the long lines of Palestinian men and women and children who walk around with a dull, aimless gaze in a space-nightmare.
Could it be that it is they, the humanitarians, the last representatives of the West, of the Universal, that we have abandoned? Doesn't their death force us — finally! — to look into the eyes of the other dead, more than 30,000, who we have let slide in the weeks and months of the Israeli assault: helpless, indifferent, consenting?
Are the humanitarians inserted cynically into the game of war and its economics?
It is now imperative to ask questions: What has Humanitarianism become? It is the business of saving bodies from agony, in a world increasingly at war? Aren't humanitarians the tools of a great deception, isn't their pity, even in Gaza, a way to cover up the impotence, cowardice or calculation of those, starting in the United States, who don't want to risk anything, and carry on with useless missions of diplomacy to stop the slaughter?
Are the humanitarians not inserted, cynically, like a pawn, into the game of war and its economics? The United States, Europe, even the Arab regimes that are brothers of the Palestinians, are unwilling or unable to put an end to Israel's revenge. So they send forward the NGOs, the UN agencies until they are banned.
So they anesthetize public opinion, and discourage the initiatives of those who have the political and financial means, the strength, and the duty, to do more. But they don't want to.
Examples in Africa
The doubt goes back in time, and we can start on the African Continent. Ethiopia in 1986, where we saw the clamorous debut of the stars of humanitarian aid, We Are The World and Live Aid.
How do you prevent the armed killers themselves from deciding how to choose among the victims?
And then Somalia, another impotence of world politics: the bags of flour serve to save undernourished children but also to reinforce the arrogance of the warlords who decide their distribution. Again to Rwanda: where in Goma in the river of human wrecks fleeing Tutsi vengeance are inextricably mixed together with the victims and the labor and the perpetrators of the third genocide of the 20th century.
How do you make the distinction? How do you prevent the armed killers themselves from deciding how to choose among the victims? The only possible answer: You help.
