My friend Borja Hermoso told me that he had to gather his strength and try to calm his nervousness when he went to interview George Steiner at his home in London. He was so impressed by this man who knew everything about a multitude of things and expressed it with admirable writing. And he confirmed that the character was at the level of his work. The last question he asked him was: What does it mean to be Jewish? Steiner responded: “To be Jewish is to read a book underlining with a pencil because you think you can write a better one.” I also read an article by Steiner in which he declared that his people have fundamentally dedicated themselves throughout history to the world of Culture and the Economy. I imagine that as infallible survival measures. I am also aware and grateful that a massive part of the people who have given me happiness in so many moments of my existence through cinema, books, music and other arts are of Jewish origin. Nor can it be a coincidence that three figures who revolutionized history and discovered so many things of universal significance, that is, Messrs. Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, are Jews. As does an overwhelming percentage of Nobel Prize winners in Science.
And no one in possession of a minimum of humanity, of brain and heart, will forget the Holocaust. But they should equally feel horrified at Israel’s unpunished and savage response after the barbarism they suffered a year ago at the hands of Hamas. Israel is multiplying its punishment on multitudes of innocent people. I say that children, the sick and the civilian population are. We are all very sensitive to the murder of childhood, its hunger, its cornering, its exposure. But executioners call it collateral damage. And they use a term that is even more cynical than fanatical against those who cry out about what they are perpetrating. Those who protest against their barbarity do so because they are anti-Semites. That shamelessness sends shivers down the spine of any rational being.
Oh, about the powerful and the pringaos!, the eternal history of the world. And well, nothing happens, the fear takes us very far away. And Ukraine is also somewhere else. Tragedy will affect us if the East becomes a universal bonfire, if oil and other things that we all need begin to destroy our way of life, if we Westerners begin to feel very cold and the shopping basket becomes prohibitive. Does the Apocalypse have an entry date? Well, at worst, yes. And it will screw us all. To those who are pulling, to the poor and the rich.
