Put the leaders of two countries at war at a table, and the frost will cut into slices. Place the mothers of two soldiers who died on opposite fronts in that same war in front of each other and they will embrace each other. From there the language of politics continued with other inhuman means, from here the human alphabet of pain. The first contemplates the maximum of violence, destruction, hatred, terror as a possible option, and indeed, given certain conditions, even inevitable, if not desired. The second only knows the fusion of the same tears, the reconciliation within a shared suffering, and asks that everything that generates it stop immediately, without distinction of fronts and uniforms.
Between the anchor and the enough there is all the sidereal distance that passes today between the terrible situations that we see taking shape every day in Ukraine and the Middle East (and in many scenarios that unfortunately we take into account on a daily basis) and the desperate thirst for peace of peoples. Perhaps the Ukrainians and the Russians, the Israelis and the Palestinians are calling for more war? We need to listen under the thunder of the howitzers to the anguished demand of all the people involved in the terrible carnage that is every war, every day: to end it now with the solution of weapons, seeking once and for all the solution of speaking to each other and listening to each other, understanding each other, within the language most elementary that exists, that of common humanity.
Peace, if this is what we want, is born from a meeting: we have remembered this precisely in these days in which an attempt was made in some way to restore a chance to dialogue on the European front and precariously interrupt the hostilities on that of Gaza. But only the people who suffer can tell us what the conditions are for a promising meeting, certainly not today diplomacy or foreign policy which do not seem to be able to nourish that “strategic imagination” now indispensable that Andrea Lavazza wrote about on Sunday. Otherwise there is no way out: more weapons only lead to more war, violence on one side and on the other generates more destruction, in an unstoppable progression. Within this horrendous scenario it is finally clear that the only encounter that is a harbinger of dialogue is between human people restored to what they are, to what unites them, and makes them full of the full, absolute and intangible dignity of every creature, of every life, always . Succeeding in an undertaking of this titanic magnitude today is perhaps only the awareness of a pain that makes us belong to the same family, and which must stop, because no one can desire more if they have experienced it in person, if they see it excavated exactly the same in the face and body of the other, very different and equal, enemy and brother.
In recent days, Rachel, mother of Hersh, who disappeared into the black hole of Hamas, reminded us of the possible path for a human encounter of this magnitude, meeting Cardinal Zuppi, a pilgrim in the Holy Land with the diocese of Bologna – there are Lucia Capuzzi said on Sunday in these columns, picking up the voice of the president of the Italian bishops – «she moved me with her courage and wisdom: “There shouldn’t be a competition between pain. Everyone suffers. I don’t want my affliction to cause any more. I unite my suffering with that of the many killed in the Strip.” How can we not feel that what makes us deepest as women and men, all together, can take on the strength of an army if it finds a voice and is listened to? «Only when two pains become a single love – is the summary of Zuppi, who listened to those tears – do we find the path to peace». It is a true confession of faith in the end of the war, that of mother Rachel (Rachel who mourns her children has spoken to the believing heart for centuries in the pages of Jeremiah), and brings to mind all the gestures and words of reconciliation capable of breaking the circle of war that produces more war. Like the woman taken prisoner in a kibbutz who, as soon as she was freed months ago, shakes hands with the militiaman with her finger on the trigger whispering “shalom”. Or the embrace at the Verona Arena in front of the Pope of Maoz Inon and Aziz Sairah, the first orphan of parents murdered by Hamas in the dawn of the new Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, the second without his brother who ended up under the bombs of Tsahal. Or again the poignant affection between Roselyne Hamel and the mother of Adel Kermiche, the young murderer of Father Jacques Hamel, Roselyne’s brother, in a church in Rouen: everything was born from the encounter between the pain of one and the other , capable of understanding that every logic seemed destined to divide them except that irreparable wound, transformed instead from a potential multiplier of resentment and revenge to a very human place of an unexpected friendship. A revolution impossible for any general, ideologue or charismatic leader. To make peace it takes courage, more than to make war: the Pope repeats this to us, and in the face of these gestures his phrase appears to be the only truth to which we can cling, as if to a certain handhold, within the lie of war.
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