By Fitim Zekthi
It is surprising but also very low and ugly to see people who say that what is happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza, to the children in Gaza, to the murders of thousands of children in Gaza, should not affect our position. We, some say, should look at our own plight, look at our economic or emotional situation, our state of the rule of law or justice and not deal with Gaza. Others say that we should look at which country has recognized Kosovo and Israel has recognized Kosovo, therefore we should have sympathy and even love for Israel and we should not start from what is happening with the situation in Gaza. Others say that the issue in Gaza is a matter of international relations and we should see it from that angle, we should understand that war brings victims, that war is cruel, etc. Others say that what is happening in Gaza is the responsibility of the Hamas attack and the Palestinians themselves are the cause.
All these attitudes are fundamentally immoral and have nothing to do with human nature. God has endowed man with the capacity for empathy and the capacity for solidarity. Without these qualities we cannot live as human beings and we cannot build human feelings. Empathy is the capacity to understand, recognize, and experience the pain of another, while solidarity is the capacity to unite and help in whatever way you can, even with a prayer, the one who is suffering. Moreover, when it comes to crimes as great as the ruthless murder of thousands of children, the human being is touched to the core. Children, writes James Baldwin in his famous essay "Nothing Personal" in 1964, "are always ours, everywhere on the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that anyone who is incapable of recognizing and accepting this is incapable of morality." So for the human being, even a child who is killed in the Philippines or Bolivia, for a child who was killed by the Nazi genocide in the concentration camps, for a child who died from the Stalinist genocide of hunger in the Ukrainian villages, for an Albanian child who died from the communist genocide in the Tepelena camp, it belongs to everyone. There is no explanation or justification for the human being what is happening in Gaza.
