The response of L'Espresso's deputy editor Enrico Bellavia to the Israeli ambassador Peled.
https://x.com/rulajebreal/status/2044325757598548147
Translated from Italian
The response of L'Espresso's deputy editor Enrico Bellavia to the Israeli ambassador Peled.
"Last week's L’Espresso cover on the abuses by settlers in the West Bank, which Ambassador 
Peled improvidently 'condemned,' teaches some lessons. First and foremost, to us, who have much to learn. Even from what we do.
Without the settler’s mocking sneer as he taunts the Palestinian woman, captured by the expert lens of Pietro Masturzo, that story—soaked in uprooting, violence, blood—would not have had the same impact. Because it speaks of an ethnic cleansing aimed at fueling the expansionist drives of Greater Israel.
And it has nothing to do with NATIONAL SECURITY. It does not obey logics, however distorted or functional, of countering terrorist threats.
It is a conquest operation carried out by civilians, freely armed, backed by the army . An annexation neither slow nor silent, in contempt of the law, under the eyes of the world. In that photo that made the rounds of the world lies the synthesis and ground zero of the abuse: the mockery. More than a battered body, it unequivocally establishes wrong and right. It documents an excess of domination in the disproportion between an armed male and a defenseless woman, driven from the soil she has trodden.
The image on paper has the privilege of fixing the instant and delivering it to memory. Lasting and not volatile, however evocable on demand at any moment, like in the digital world. It has the merit of instantly adhering to our imagination, of entering the archive of our collective experience. It requires nothing else to be recalled. It does not presuppose a search, but our intelligence. Natural. The web carries it and takes it where the weekly does not reach. While also preserving it for all.
A stunning photograph is not enough without rigorous work on the context. If the ambassador had taken the trouble to check—from the second page onward, flipping through the weekly in plain sight—he would have spared himself a blunder and a short circuit. The blunder of raising simple 'manipulative' suspicions about the image. The short circuit of dispensing lessons on the use of 'responsibility' and 'fairness' that backfired on him from those who did not stop at the pictures but allowed themselves the now-rare scruple of reading.
The cover is part of a photo-story, accompanied by a series of meticulous details gathered on the ground by those who have been testifying to that West Bank for years. If that were not enough, Alae Al Said has verified every detail, adding his own knowledge of that reality. Partisanship on the facts is never a good starting point for approaching or refuting them. Self-proclaimed experts, in the wake of the ambassador, have gone so far as to claim the image was generated by AI. It would have sufficed to do some research. For skeptics, there exists a video version of that work, and the New York Times has published a report produced in those very same circumstances. In which, moreover, the same settler is captured.
It is not we who promote 'stereotypes and hatred.' Against neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, against antisemites, we are where we have always been. In that same place where TERRORISTS are not an ethnicity, just as CRIMINALS are not a people. GENOCIDE is called by that name. And no discounts are given to those who hide or distort reality. Not even in the name of History."
Peled improvidently 'condemned,' teaches some lessons. First and foremost, to us, who have much to learn. Even from what we do.
Without the settler’s mocking sneer as he taunts the Palestinian woman, captured by the expert lens of Pietro Masturzo, that story—soaked in uprooting, violence, blood—would not have had the same impact. Because it speaks of an ethnic cleansing aimed at fueling the expansionist drives of Greater Israel.
And it has nothing to do with NATIONAL SECURITY. It does not obey logics, however distorted or functional, of countering terrorist threats.
It is a conquest operation carried out by civilians, freely armed, backed by the army . An annexation neither slow nor silent, in contempt of the law, under the eyes of the world. In that photo that made the rounds of the world lies the synthesis and ground zero of the abuse: the mockery. More than a battered body, it unequivocally establishes wrong and right. It documents an excess of domination in the disproportion between an armed male and a defenseless woman, driven from the soil she has trodden.
The image on paper has the privilege of fixing the instant and delivering it to memory. Lasting and not volatile, however evocable on demand at any moment, like in the digital world. It has the merit of instantly adhering to our imagination, of entering the archive of our collective experience. It requires nothing else to be recalled. It does not presuppose a search, but our intelligence. Natural. The web carries it and takes it where the weekly does not reach. While also preserving it for all.
A stunning photograph is not enough without rigorous work on the context. If the ambassador had taken the trouble to check—from the second page onward, flipping through the weekly in plain sight—he would have spared himself a blunder and a short circuit. The blunder of raising simple 'manipulative' suspicions about the image. The short circuit of dispensing lessons on the use of 'responsibility' and 'fairness' that backfired on him from those who did not stop at the pictures but allowed themselves the now-rare scruple of reading.
The cover is part of a photo-story, accompanied by a series of meticulous details gathered on the ground by those who have been testifying to that West Bank for years. If that were not enough, Alae Al Said has verified every detail, adding his own knowledge of that reality. Partisanship on the facts is never a good starting point for approaching or refuting them. Self-proclaimed experts, in the wake of the ambassador, have gone so far as to claim the image was generated by AI. It would have sufficed to do some research. For skeptics, there exists a video version of that work, and the New York Times has published a report produced in those very same circumstances. In which, moreover, the same settler is captured.
It is not we who promote 'stereotypes and hatred.' Against neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, against antisemites, we are where we have always been. In that same place where TERRORISTS are not an ethnicity, just as CRIMINALS are not a people. GENOCIDE is called by that name. And no discounts are given to those who hide or distort reality. Not even in the name of History."Rate this translation:
posted by Satish Sharma at
15:15
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