Barely a century is enough to form a state; an hour can reduce it to dust, ”Byron wrote. I see on television how the bombs are destroying Gaza, I think of Israel’s military power and I see that it is true: large buildings that have cost a lot to build, properties that have been difficult to obtain, property of people who have nothing else, they become a second in a pile of rubble preceded by a cloud of dust and death that also makes true almost ninety years later the sadness written by León Felipe when he said goodbye to Spain: “My pity is because those black clouds have erased the stars.”
The war, again the war, as during all the millennia of what we have agreed to call humanity. I do not know whose fault it is, the poor or the rich, nor do I know who is more terrorist. I only know that we are seeing and counting corpses that are, of course, poor. And I only know how much man progresses in the sciences of defense and attack. Apparently there are some super-wise gadgets that detect enemy missiles, cut them off, and blow them up in midair – the amount of technology that had to be developed to achieve such perfection! And I only know that I am seeing what I had not seen even in the movies: buildings – naturally of the poor – that collapse without apparently having a bomb dropped on them. They fall as if it were a designed collapse, as if there were an earthquake, as if it were a controlled blast, as if they were made to burst from below, without the black cloud of León Felipe being seen.
In Gaza they will never have those weapons: they have no money to design them, nor to buy them
It is clear that the art of destruction is progressing well. I’d say even cleanly. Also to destroy great houses in this way requires a lot of research, economic resources for a great technological development, to build weapons that one in his ignorance cannot even imagine. The people of Gaza will never have these weapons for a simple reason: because they do not have the money to design them, nor to manufacture them, nor to buy them; perhaps not even to know that they exist, like this writer.
There were times when wars had something born of popular ingenuity, like guerrillas; something mythical, like that of Troy; something religious, like the crusades; something patriotic, like the reconquests and the fight against the invader. Now, although they are not always called wars, although they are called skirmishes, they only have the capacity for destruction. From clean destruction capacity.
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