By Denko Maleski
The appearance of Hitler’s image in the newsreel that preceded the film screening was always met with thunderous applause from the Arab audience at the cinemas in Place de l’Étoile, in the center of Beirut, in the early 1960s. As the son of a Yugoslav ambassador — a representative of a country that had triumphed in the anti-fascist war against Hitler and his allies — at the age of around eleven, I had no explanation for this phenomenon. Only later, over the years, did I come to understand the reasons behind such hatred — a product of moral indifference among Arabs toward the fate of millions of Jews in Europe who ended up in Nazi gas chambers.
I learned about the tragedy of the 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their land in the first military campaign of “ethnic cleansing” that “made space” for Jewish settlers who founded the state of Israel in 1948. In the postwar years, we knew about and empathized with the Jewish tragedy, but we knew nothing of the Palestinian one.
I remember we were fascinated by the industrious hands of Jewish settlers who built one of the most successful countries in the world — a country we admired. An economically prosperous nation, the only democracy in the Middle East, it enjoyed wholehearted support from Europe and especially the United States. But no one spoke of the suffering of Palestinians living under a system of apartheid.
Today, in the age of digital technology, it is no longer possible to hide anything from the global public. While Palestinians are being bombed with real bombs, we are being “bombarded” with horrifying scenes on our screens — images of men, women, and children being systematically killed on a scale previously unseen. In our homes, we witness scenes of hungry people clutching pots in their hands, crowding around soup kitchens; of the sick in destroyed hospitals; of the dead and wounded; of injured children and their tears… Since the Hamas attack on October 7 until now, over 50,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 wounded. This is genocide.
Of course, we will not applaud the tragedies of nations, as in the cinemas of Beirut in my childhood, but I fear that the images we see daily of the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza will render us morally indifferent to the suffering of other human beings. That is why, in our name, the Macedonian state must clearly and publicly condemn the right-wing, nationalist, and genocidal policy of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and stand in defense of the bare lives of Palestinians.
The policy is clear and supported by nearly all 193 United Nations member states: the creation of a Palestinian state. For decades, we lived under the illusion that it was the Palestinian political representatives who sabotaged the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, only to finally understand that the sabotage was always rooted in the idea of Greater Israel. An idea by which six million Jews deny the right of existence in their own state to six million Palestinians, keeping them repressed under an apartheid system.