Israel, 75 years: between war and peace

On May 14, 1948, hours before the expiration of the British mandate on Palestine, David Ben-Guriproclaimed the creation of the State of Israel in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, under the portrait of Theodor Herzl.

In the territory granted by the United Nations plan, British anti-immigration laws that had prevented the legal entry of new Jews into Palestine for years were abolished.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly emigrating and scattering into camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank.

The declaration of independence founded a secular state that guaranteed equal rights and freedoms for all its citizens, while establishing a link with the culture and religion of Jewish ancestors.

There was no attempt by the UN to prevent the armed intervention decided by the Arab League months earlier. And since then, peace in the Middle East has been only a parenthesis between successive wars, conflicts and violent outbreaks.

The dream of the founders of the State of Israel had been fulfilled, still very close to the horror of the Holocaust. But it also brought with it nightmares, alien and own, with which we would have to coexist. Every time the violence, the terrorist attacks, the reprisals and repressions, the protest movements intensify, it will do so with similar sequence, as one more link in a conflict that seemed to have found a beginning of solution with the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreements signed in Oslo in 1993, thirty years ago.

Perhaps you have to go back a century, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and disintegrated, to understand the current conflict in the Middle East in historical perspective. This is what Ezekiel Kopel does, in "The dispute for control of the Middle East, a century of conflicts, from the Ottoman Empire to the present" (Intellectual Capital).

When the maps on which these disputes unfold change, the weight of history acquires fundamental importance. Although the driving force of the conflict is not, in Kopel's opinion, ideology or religion as well as economics and strategic interests.

The dispute for control of the Middle East. Book by Ezequiel Kopel, published by Capital Intelectual

75 years after its creation, the State of Israel continues to enjoy – and suffer – its insular status, as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by territories where the shadows of the inter-imperial disputes of more distant times are projected – Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt – in a region without leaders in a position to control the forces they have unleashed or of which they are part.

An ever-threatened status quo of which their governments have become guarantors and co-responsible. Building an environment of regional stability is an unfinished business that includes the Palestinian Authority, a state that barely manages to survive.

Jerusalem-Florence: a tale of two cities

The news was announced this week: there will be a new mosque and it is the result of an embrace, not just symbolic, between Israel and Palestine. Not in Jerusalem, in this case, but in Florence, Italy. A bridge of peace built by Marco Carrai, consul of Israel for Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Lombardy.

A historic day for Florence and for the Muslim community, writes Ilaria Ulivelli of La Nazione. Only the keys are missing, but all the formalities are underway: the new mosque will be built on the premises of the former branch of the Intesa SanPaolo bank, in Piazza dei Ciompi, near where the current one is, which occupied a rented building and under threat of eviction. And not far from the old Renaissance cathedrals and churches, and the great Jewish Temple.

"We are at a turning point," says Carrai. Since 2004 there have been useless discussions and polemics. What has happened isa good sign of dialogue between worlds that are often described as irreconcilable. Firenze is a city of dialogue", adds Mayor Dario Nardella, who does not hide his satisfaction at announcing, together with the imam of Florence Izzedin Elzir, the solution to the so-called 'question of the mosque'.

Piazza dei Ciompi, where the mosque of Florence will be located.

Not only Muslims celebrate, but all Florentines who respect freedom of worship and the need to be able to profess it. The Archbishop of Firenze, Giuseppe Betori shares the importance of the initiative: "I am very happy that the Islamic community has found the right space for the mosque, the place to exercise its communal religious life and worship. We are united to the Islamic community by a long and sincere friendship, and with the other religious confessions we have always been close..."

The Muslim community, which only in the Florentine region has 30,000 believers, had visited more than 150 buildings in search of the solution, says the journalistic chronicle. Carrai was the factotum of the purchase. Always reluctant to be the center of attention, the consul does not count that he personally participated with a large donation to solve a problem that had run aground. He did it for religious freedom, for his friend Izzedin Elzir, the imam of Florence, whom he knows from his time as a councillor in Greve in Chianti. A bridge of peace, of the many that are also traveled daily, between trenches, crusades and "holy wars".