Senyor president de la Generalitat de Catalunya Salvador Illa, senyor conseller, Senyora presidenta de la Diputació, autoritats, Princess Rym Ali, president de l’Institut Europeu de la Mediterrània, Gràcies. Moltes gràcies per haver organitzat aquesta trobada. Moltes gràcies al president de la Generalitat de Catalunya, per haver-nos acollit en aquest edifici històric, tan emblemàtic, de Barcelona; de participar activament amb [els] nostres debats... I want to express my appreciation to the European Institute of the Mediterranean –IEMed– for organising this important event. [1]
It looked quite impossible to gather so many people to discuss peacefully –but intensively– what the United Nations describes as the most acute humanitarian crisis since World War II.
This is the first conference of this scope to discuss the effects of the Middle East conflict on our own societies as a driver of polarisation and hate. The discussions showed that it was very timely.
No need to reiterate the difficult context and the gravity of the situation, which everyone recognises by now.
Last week, US Vice-president Kamala Harris said: ‘I don’t know anyone who has seen the images and would not have strong feelings about what is happening’.
Leaders around the world have been sounding the alarm for months on what the UN’s chief humanitarian official Joyce Msuya describes as ‘unspeakable horrors’ in Northern Gaza.
We used this qualification –unspeakable– for the Hamas attacks against Israel, we do not use it as often to explain what is happening in Gaza.
The 7 October attack of Hamas was a horror. What is happening in Gaza is another horror –and one horror cannot justify another–.
Yet, the world seems unable, or unwilling, to stop this man-made catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.
The UN Security Council, the EU, the International Court of Justice and others have been unable to stop the ongoing mass destruction, displacement, and killing of civilians in Gaza, and now in Lebanon. Not because they do not agree that it should stop –on the contrary–. I attended the Lebanon conference, organised by the President of France Emmanuel Macron this week, and there was broad consensus among leaders on the need for an immediate ceasefire.
Yet, there is still no ceasefire because we do not agree on the kind of action that is needed to make it happen. When it comes to taking coercive measures, the divisions appear, also among us Europeans.
These divisions reverberate within our societies, across the Euro-Mediterranean area and around the world.
The polarisation around this issue is greater than ever before, the vitriol of dehumanisation has become common currency on social media.
Meanwhile, in the past year, on average, 50 children were killed in Gaza every day.
I echo the words of Rabbi Lee Weissman: ‘if you see the scenes in Gaza and your heart does not break, you are disconnected from your humanity’.
Maybe the problem is that we do not see it enough. As we say in Spanish, ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente [‘what the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel’].
In the Arab world, they see it every day, every moment. And maybe this explains why the reactions from that part of the world are different. We have to ask ourselves: how did we lose our shared sense of humanity? And how can we reclaim it?
To answer these questions, I will get down to the fundamentals. I will try to trace back where we went off track using five basic concepts, some of the words that have been widely used in your discussions: (1) humanity; (2) identity; (3) truth; (4) accountability; and, finally, (5) peace.
1. Humanity
Simply reaffirming the universality of international law and human rights is not enough anymore. We have been doing it for the past year, and the result is sobering.
We need to dig deeper.
At their core, international law, the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, human rights law etc. are predicated upon a certain human image: that humans everywhere, regardless of group identity, are capable of empathy and compassion, that they prefer living in peace and prosperity over violence and deprivation.
While this is certainly true, we must remember that being human also means being capable of selfishness, of complacency, sometimes of vengefulness, hubris and even brutality.
Yes, we are all –under certain circumstances– capable of committing atrocities against each other, or of condoning them. No group, no nation, no culture is entirely immune to this dark side of humanity.
We have seen the horrors of 7 October 2023 against civilians in southern Israel. The day before, I was in Kyiv visiting the synagogue at the Babi Yar memorials, where 35,000 Jews were slaughtered during World War II. When I went back home, another horror started. And this horror was celebrated on the streets of Gaza as if it were a victory.
We have been seeing the horrors going on in Gaza for over a year –and we have seen extremists on the Gaza border watching, rejoicing, impeding the humanitarian aid, and waiting to resettle–.
We have seen the depraved and shameless display of inhumanity on social media.
Atrocities motivate atrocities, but they can never legitimate them. Nothing that happened before 7 October can justify the slaughter and abduction of innocents, and nothing that happened on 7 October can justify the wanton destruction of Gaza and its people.
Nothing can justify what an Israeli Minister said: ‘We are fighting against human animals, and we will act accordingly’ –a sentence that is already part of the history of this war–.
Nonetheless, there is a silver lining: empathy and compassion instinctively prevent the vast majority of humans from committing atrocities.
Brutality, on the other hand, has to be learnt. There are very few natural entities that feel brutality as part of their being, thankfully.
To overcome our instinctive empathy, we first have to dehumanise the other. We need to be convinced that the other is inherently different from us, that they lack what makes us human: that they have no compassion, no empathy, that they do not love their children like we do, or that they enjoy eternal conflict over living in peace with us.
We cannot let this happen. The others may be different, but we are all human. No one wants eternal conflict. In every culture, parents love their children. At the end of the day, all people also want to live in peace with their neighbours. I will revert to this point.
2. Identity
Unlike human nature, which is universal and immutable, group identities are what the Israeli intellectual Yuval Noah Harari calls an ‘inter-subjective reality’: a reality that only exists because many people believe in it at the same time.
Where humanity is universal, identity is specific. It unites us with those who share it and divides us from those who do not.
But one can be member of several groups at the same time. Identities are not exclusive. The richness of human beings is being able to have several identities, without any contradiction. I am a good example of that: I am Catalan, I am Spanish, I am European. The three identities are part of my identity, they are not contradictory. They can live together, in peace.
Identity provides comfort, a sense of security and group cohesion, but it can also create strife with those who do not belong to it.
In fact, most identities are forged by friction with other groups.
Palestinian identity was forged by the struggle with Zionism.
Zionism was forged by the exclusion of Jews from European nations.
The Dreyfus Affair in France, the situation in Imperial Russia and antisemitism in Germany showed European Jews that despite their willingness to assimilate to be part of the society, they were excluded.
And then they embraced the idea of looking for a homeland for the Jewish people, which we Europeans, eventually, endorsed and helped to create.
The formation of Spanish identity can be traced back to the many civil wars among us and against the others, from the Reconquista to the discovery and conquest of America.
In all these cases and many more, at some point in time, identity was used by agitators to pit one group against another. In his book Les Identités meurtrières, [the Lebanese-French intellectual] Amin Maalouf speaks about people who instigate identity as something that involves killing the other.
All of these identitarian instigators have three things in common:
- (a) A backward-looking approach to bring back ‘the good old days’. These can be 50 years ago, or 1,400, or even 3,500 years ago.
- (b) A binary, Manichean worldview. They consider the world a zero-sum game: it’s either me or you. This land is mine, it is not yours, so I cannot share it with you. They demand unconditional support. If you are not with Israel, then you are with Hamas. And vice-versa.
- (c) A sense of group superiority. Maybe in a subtle manner, but at the end, they feel superior. It is supremacism. Here in Spain there are also some tendencies towards supremacism.
But there is a silver lining here too: since identities are part of ‘inter-subjective reality’, they change constantly –sometimes for better, sometimes for worse–.
Look at my Spanish identity that I grew up with. It was very different from the Spain of today. Once a backward-looking autocracy, it turned into to modern democracy, open to the world and a member of the European Union.
When I went to Israel in 1969 to volunteer in a kibbutz, Israel was a thriving young democracy, the kibbutz was seen as a model, a socialist utopia.
In the five and a half decades since, it seems that Israeli society has changed more than I have. And it can change again –not to go back, but to go forwarsd to a better future–.
At the time, I did not conform to the backward thinking of my government. Today, many Israelis reject the identitarian supremacism propagated by zero-sum irredentists who want all the land ‘from the river to the sea’, and more. We have taken note of the letter signed by more than 3,000 concerned Israeli citizens, and I appreciate the courage it takes to call for international pressure on your own government in the middle of an armed conflict.
This is why it is so important to engage with Israeli civil society.
We have to avoid the ‘Masada complex’, named after the long siege of Jews in the fortress of Masada by the troops of the Roman empire.
Such an engagement naturally requires common ground, shared values and, most importantly, a common basis of facts. This seems elementary but cannot be taken for granted anymore.
3. Truth
To ascertain truth where it is elusive, we have developed sophisticated methods to establish facts to the best of our ability. We are able to measure the acceleration of gravity. It is a fact.
You can deny the law of gravity, but if you jump through the window, you will kill yourself. Science is the best antidote against lies.
But truth is multifaceted. Prosecutors, investigators, journalists, historians, etc, have all developed reliable systems of verification.
That is why propagandists fear them like vampires fear daylight.
When a government, like the Netanyahu government, seeks to prevent independent verification, by imposing the longest media blackout in the history of press freedom and by refusing to cooperate with prosecutors of the International Criminal Court and UN-mandated investigators, in defiance of legally binding orders of the International Court of Justice, this should make us all very suspicious of what is happening there.
There is a complete blackout of what is happening in Gaza. What we know is what Israeli soldiers themselves reveal by posting photographs on social media. But it has been the longest blackout imposed by a democracy in modern times.
This is very worrying. We have to condemn it because it is no trivial offence. In criminal law, a reasonable suspicion of concealing evidence can even be sufficient grounds for preventive detention.
When more journalists, UN staff and humanitarian workers are killed than in any other armed conflict, when judges of the ICC are publicly threatened, this should be a reason to be alarmed.
No less important and concerning is what the broader public believes to be the truth.
When Kamala Harris speaks about ‘anyone who has seen the images’, she is also saying that not everyone has seen the same images. Or not having seen enough of them.
Keep in mind that what the public sees is increasingly filtered by algorithms geared to show us what we want to see to reinforce what we already believe in.
The Declaration that has been agreed by you after two days of discussions and we have just heard, addresses this dangerous trend well.
4. Accountability
Independent verification is the basis of accountability; accountability is the basis of justice.
To be just, accountability has to be comprehensive and impartial, regardless of the identity of the perpetrator or the victim. It must look at the act, not the actor.
The impunity that we have seen in the context of Gaza and now Lebanon has to end.
Why should Netanyahu stop the war in Lebanon? What is the cost of continuing? None. This is called impunity, and it undermines our credibility and the entire order based on international law.
What is the point of international law if there is no ability to enforce it?
Finally, accountability can only be individual. There is no collective guilt. It is the absence of individual accountability that fosters calls for collective punishment.
A sense of historic responsibility felt toward one group should never be an excuse to disregard the rights of another. The sense of historic responsibility that we Europeans may feel about the horrors of the World War II, does not allow us to disregard the rights of the Palestinians today.
5. Peace
Last but not least, the ultimate question of peace. It is linked to the other four concepts.
To achieve peace, we need to appreciate that behind whatever distorted image of the ‘other’ is being projected, there is an intrinsic willingness to live in peace that is part of human nature.
Here I see an important role for civil society to call out the extremist charlatans who project their own mirror image on the other side.
The remarkable peace efforts by Arab countries, based on the Arab Peace Initiative, should be made known to all Israelis.
In turn, Israeli civil society activism for Palestinian rights needs to be spotlighted in the Arab world at every opportunity.
Both sides need to know that in the other camp, there are also people fighting for peace, that this is a common endeavour.
My advice to the Palestine solidarity movement is to also talk about peace. Be critical, protest, but make sure to talk also about solutions.
What exactly the solution looks like is secondary to what it is based on. Let us talk about equal rights, mutual recognition, respect for international law and the requirements for peace.
The more you do, the more difficult you make it for the identitarian spin doctors.
When people say that they do not want the Two-State Solution, they have to say what is their alternative.
Yet, in fact, they are implementing another solution without naming it. They are not naming it, but in practical terms they are implementing it.
When former Israel Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, there were 150,000 settlers in the West Bank; today there are 700,000.
It was in 1995, and at that time Barcelona launched the Mediterranean process to try to make peace survive after the Rabin assassination.
The Two-State Solution, obviously, is more difficult. But let us continue reclaiming our shared humanity.
Reclaiming our shared humanity means recognising that there is nothing inevitable or immutable about Israeli supremacism or Palestinian extremism.
They are circumstantial, and these circumstances need to change. The solution has to come from diplomacy, the end to illegal occupation, the end to the slaughter and starvation of innocents, the end to impunity.
We all have a stake in ending this nightmare as soon as possible. But it will not stop just because we ask for it. It will stop when the international community is ready to take coercive measures that can change the behaviour of the actors: the actors change their behaviour either by persuasion or by coercion. If the international community is not ready to impose restrictive measures upon all actors –and I mean all actors– unfortunately the war will continue.
The only way to end the war and to give security and peace to both peoples is to recognise that they have to share the land. I therefore welcome the ‘Barcelona Declaration for Reclaiming Our Shared Humanity’ and hope that it will only be the first of many milestones on the path that brings us back to our senses and towards peace. This event has given me hope that it is possible if we all do our part.
I will do mine. I have one month left until the end of my mandate and will spare no effort to stop this madness until my very last day in office.
Thank you.
[1] Text of the closing speech by the European Commission’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, at the Euromed Civil Society Conference, held by the IEMed on 26 and 27 October 2024 in Barcelona.
