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?

Israel After Zionism? A Reflection on the Future of the Jewish State

Israel has the right to exist. This principle should not depend on the political orientation of the governments that happen to rule in Jerusalem, nor on one's approval or rejection of Zionism. Like every internationally recognized state, Israel's legitimacy rests on the principle of national self-determination and on the historical and legal reality that emerged after 1948. At the same time, the Palestinian people also have the right to live in security, dignity, and with their own political institutions. The failure to reconcile these two legitimate aspirations lies at the heart of one of the most enduring conflicts of the modern era.

Zionism has never been a monolithic movement. Its origins date back to nineteenth-century Europe, when nationalism was widely regarded as a force for the political emancipation of many peoples. Liberal Zionism coexisted with socialist, religious, and Revisionist currents. During the first decades of the State of Israel, the Labor movement dominated public life, promoting the kibbutzim and a socioeconomic model inspired by democratic socialism.

It is often forgotten that, in 1947 and 1948, the Soviet Union also supported the establishment of Israel at the United Nations, believing that the new state could weaken British influence in the Middle East. For several years, many on the European left viewed Israel sympathetically, largely because of the collective experience of the kibbutzim and the country's strong socialist tradition.

Over the following decades, however, the political landscape changed profoundly. The Arab-Israeli wars, terrorism, the occupation of territories captured in 1967, and broader social transformations contributed to the rise of nationalist conservatism. With Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and later Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel entered a political phase markedly different from that of its founding generation. The growing influence of religious nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties reshaped domestic politics, reinforcing a concept of national security centered primarily on military strength and deterrence.

In his book The End of Israel, Furio Colombo describes this transformation as a gradual departure from the democratic and pluralistic ideals that characterized Israel's early years. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, his analysis raises important questions about the relationship between security, democracy, and national identity.

The militarization of Israeli society did not emerge in a vacuum. It developed in response to repeated wars, terrorist attacks, intifadas, and persistent regional security threats. At the same time, Palestinians have lived for decades under conditions of occupation, territorial fragmentation, political instability, and recurring violence. The result has been a vicious cycle in which each side tends to view its own use of force as a response to that of the other.

Against this backdrop, the internationally endorsed "two peoples, two states" solution appears increasingly difficult to implement. The territorial continuity required for a viable Palestinian state has been severely undermined by the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Jerusalem remains an unresolved issue, as do the future of Palestinian refugees and Israel's legitimate security concerns.

Is there an alternative?

Some scholars have proposed a single federal or confederal state in which Israelis and Palestinians would share common institutions while preserving broad territorial autonomy. Comparisons have been drawn—despite their obvious differences—with countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Lebanon. None of these political systems is free from tensions, yet they demonstrate that communities with profoundly different identities can coexist within the same constitutional framework.

The greatest obstacle, however, is neither constitutional nor institutional. It is the legacy of more than a century of wars, terrorism, occupation, displacement, fear, and mutual distrust. No constitutional model can succeed without at least a minimum degree of reciprocal confidence, and today that confidence appears painfully absent.

There is also a broader geopolitical question. Israel's security has long relied on its strategic partnership with the United States and the wider Western world. If, in the distant future, the international balance of power were to change significantly and that support were to diminish, Israel would face the challenge of ensuring its long-term security through more stable relations with its regional neighbors. Comparisons with the medieval Crusader states occasionally appear in political commentary, but they should be understood as geopolitical metaphors rather than historical predictions.

How, then, can Israel secure its future?

Military superiority may guarantee survival in the short term, but it cannot by itself create lasting peace. Likewise, ignoring Israel's legitimate security needs would be no more realistic than denying the Palestinians their right to freedom, dignity, and political self-determination.

The fundamental challenge is to move beyond the illusion of total victory. As long as Israelis and Palestinians continue to view one another as enemies to be defeated or eliminated, no peace agreement will prove durable. A stable future will not emerge from the disappearance of either people, but from the recognition that both are now an irreversible part of the history of the same land.

Perhaps this is the hardest lesson of all. Yet it may also be the only one capable of preserving hope for the future.