Yesterday the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, held an important speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Among other things, towards the end he said: “I join the appeal of the Secretary General (of the UN, ed.) to avoid military operations in Rafah due to the dramatic consequences they could have on Palestinian civilians.”
In other times, a sentence of this type would have been on the front page of many newspapers. With type titles Gaza, Mattarella’s warning. Or Mattarella frena Netanyahu. Instead zero. I thought that if the students who demonstrated in universities in the United States, France and Italy, camping with tents in the courtyards, had said the same thing, as they actually did, they would have told him, as they actually did they said they were anti-Semitic. A horrible accusation. Yet those guys on the events in Gaza say what the UN Secretary General says, what the Pope says. They make their own the humanitarian appeals of non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Save The Children and Oxfam, the same ones that become heroic when they save migrants condemned to death by the policies of this government, but if instead they denounce the very serious situation in which two million find themselves of Palestinians are ignored. The young people demonstrating in the universities are not with Hamas, they are not rooting for the terrorists, as one tries to hastily dismiss them.
Sunday the director of the Press, Andrea Malaguti, reported two conversations he had on the topic: the first with Professor Marco Tedesco, who teaches at Columbia University, one of the epicenters of the protest. The professor argues that students are protesting for a simple reason that goes beyond understanding the never-ending conflict in the Middle East: out of a sense of humanity. The second conversation was with the patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who says that the protest is driven by the impossibility of supporting such a high number of victims. An unbearable thing. In short, they will also get something wrong, and they will certainly get some slogans wrong, but I am comforted by the fact that a small part of our students, while we adults seem accustomed to everything, feel compassion for a suffering population. Do you still think that our gesture can help change things. They still have hope for a better future.