Memory Must Never Become a Permanent Moral Entitlement

The West is one thing. Israel is another. Zionism is something else again. Perhaps one of the problems of our time begins precisely with our inability to distinguish between realities that are constantly conflated in public debate.

Europe bears an enormous historical responsibility. The Holocaust was one of the most terrible expressions of European barbarism in the twentieth century, and its memory cannot be erased, relativized, or turned into a matter of political convenience. The dead do not need to be used to continue fighting the wars of the living.

And this is where my question begins.

What happens when the memory of a crime becomes, generation after generation, a kind of permanent moral capital? What happens when the guilt of children and grandchildren is used to shape the political choices of people who were born decades after the events? What happens when historical responsibility toward the victims becomes a permanent obligation toward a state, a government, or a particular political agenda?

Memory should prevent Auschwitz from ever happening again.

It should not become a blank check for anyone invoking Auschwitz.

This does not mean denying the Holocaust. On the contrary, it means taking its tragedy seriously enough to reject any political exploitation of its memory.

A European can say: what happened to Europe's Jews was a monstrous and unforgivable crime.

And that same European can also say: this does not mean that every decision made by an Israeli government must be regarded as morally beyond criticism.

The two statements are perfectly compatible.

Germany can have a profound historical responsibility toward the Jewish people without that responsibility becoming an eternal obligation dictating its foreign policy. Italy can acknowledge its own historical guilt without turning that memory into a perpetual political promissory note.

Otherwise, something deeply paradoxical happens: the dead become prisoners of the politics of the living.

And this is where the Middle East enters the picture.

Perhaps what we need is a genuine reset.

Not necessarily the disappearance of Israel. Not necessarily the creation of another state. Not necessarily a solution that can already be drawn on a map.

A reset in the deepest sense of the word: the end of a political and psychological system in which every generation inherits the wars, fears, grievances, and guilt of the generation before it.

I do not know what political form should emerge from such a reset.

A Jewish state? Two states? One binational state? A federation? Some other structure that we cannot even imagine today?

I don't know.

And perhaps the problem is precisely that we keep believing we must already know the answer before having the courage to question the system that brought us here.

A reset does not necessarily mean erasing a people.

It means rejecting the idea that history must condemn the people of the present to live forever inside the categories of their ancestors.

Israelis are not Nazis.

Today's Palestinians are not responsible for crimes committed by Arabs of previous generations.

Germans born decades after Auschwitz are not personally guilty of the Holocaust.

Italians of younger generations are not the Fascists of the twentieth century.

History must be remembered, but it cannot become a hereditary prison.

And perhaps this is the hardest thing to accept:

memory can be eternal, but guilt cannot.

Memory belongs to the dead.

Political responsibility belongs to the living.

Confusing the two means turning the past into an instrument for governing the present.

And so the real reset I imagine is not necessarily geographical.

It is first and foremost moral and political.

It is the possibility of reaching a Middle East in which nobody can say:

We are entitled to this because you did that to our ancestors.

A world in which Israelis can live without the fear of annihilation, and Palestinians can live without being condemned to exile, occupation, or permanent war.

A world in which the Holocaust continues to be remembered, studied, and mourned, but can no longer be transformed into a permanent moral entitlement.

Because remembering the dead should help free the living from repeating history.

It should not condemn them to repeat it.

Perhaps the real act of courage is not choosing which people should finally win.

It is imagining an order in which no people needs to achieve a final victory over another.

And if reaching that point requires a radical reset of the present political order in the Middle East, then the question should not be which state must survive or disappear.

The question should be much simpler—and much harder:

How do we finally build something that does not need the guilt of the past to justify the wars of the future?