Today on the radio, I heard that in Italy, ceremonies to remember the victims of the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 will be held behind closed doors, under protection. The same is happening in Belgium and France; there will be no large public demonstrations, no flags. But there will be a heavy police presence. In some cases, people are advised not to show any signs of belonging to the Jewish community.

This news does not surprise me, but it saddens me deeply, especially after the great enthusiasm, participation and compassion that has been felt on the streets of the world in recent days.

It is worth reiterating this emphatically, even if it seems so obvious to me! The innocent victims of Hamas terrorism deserve our respect and remembrance; the hostages deserve to find their way home.

I too have participated with conviction in demonstrations against what many experts and scholars now call a “genocide” in Gaza, against the violence of a decades-long occupation, against the injustices and thousands of illegal detentions in undignified conditions that some GlobalSumudFlotilla activists have denounced in recent days.

I feel like crying when I see the dignity and immense pain of so many people or when I hear the tragic story of ten, twenty, a hundred people killed every day, waiting for a ceasefire that depends on leaders who decide on the life and death of thousands of people according to their mood and interests.

Like many others, I too have been outraged for years by the sloth, inaction, complicity and the permanent double standards of the so-called “West” towards Israeli governments that are increasingly prey to violent extremists and completely uninterested in finding a way to coexist peacefully with their neighbours, and the indifference of Arab and Muslim governments to the fate of the Palestinian people, beyond their proclamations. This apathy, inaction and indifference have contributed to closing Gaza even further in the clutches of Hamas and have prevented Netanyahu and his ministers from being stopped in the last two years.

And it is because this is unacceptable and cannot continue that so many people have taken to the streets and others have chosen to board sailing boats full of food supplies. But the fact is that we can only help to stop this terrible spiral of violence and death on the other side of our sea if we refuse to participate in further divisions and the criminalisation of entire peoples, whether Palestinian or Israeli, and if we are able to respect, remember and pay tribute to all the victims. On 7 October 2023, Hamas, an organisation controlled by terrorists who have oppressed their people and have no interest in their fate, committed a cruel massacre that provided the pretext for other cruel men to commit horrific acts of violence, which continue to this day and are so devastating that it is difficult to even imagine how they might actually end.

That is why, on this sad day, I would like to pay tribute to those in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, but also in our own countries, who are fighting for a future of peace and coexistence. I am thinking of those who are truly trying to build something different.

Like Maoz Inon, an Israeli who lost his parents on 7 October and chose to speak alongside Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian who lost his brother in a military raid. They meet and talk about their pain. Or that Palestinian gentleman, whose name I was unable to catch, who in the West Bank is trying to respond to the racist violence of the settlers who destroyed his home and fields with the tools of the law and the force of non-violence. And I think of the women of Women Wage Peace who continue to organise marches between Israel and the West Bank, with banners that simply say “Enough”. And to the many men and women peace workers everywhere who are trying to build bridges instead of blowing them up. They are the ones we must support, make visible, and help in every way to break out of this spiral of deep hatred. Because they – and they alone – are the true hope for a shared future.