Recent Memory of Fear: Three books address the political violence of the present

How are the wounds of terror uncovered? Years after an attack, or scrolling through news reports of military commandos attacking civilians, the operation of fear produces direct effects at varying levels of distance. Like a wave that expands in space and also in time, political violence leaves wounds that cross generations and continents , on both sides of the warring factions, and also among those who seem to have inherited a role of victim or victimizer that they decide to question.

In three recently published books , three distinct voices address the personal and collective implications left in the wake of violence. In Oreja madre (Caja Negra), artist, poet, and editor Dani Zelko (Buenos Aires, 1990) revisits his Jewish heritage in the midst of his questions about colonialism in Latin America, just as Hamas attacks Israel and murders part of his family. In Derecho de nacimiento (Rara Avis), economist and journalist Camila Barón (Buenos Aires, 1989) revisits a revealing journey through Israel and Palestine in an inside look at the Zionist state's rooting programs. And in Salir de la noche (Libros del Asteroide), Italian journalist Mario Calabresi narrates, in autobiographical terms, the aftermath of the public scorn and murder of his father Luigi at the hands of the far left in 1972.

The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 , with the subsequent hostage-taking and Israel's response against the civilian population, were the beginning of an escalation of violence that has not yet stopped. The terrorist organization's attack served as a pretext for bombings and ground incursions by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, which has ignored the international community's calls for a ceasefire. Some experts believe that Israel's military actions are the most aggressive since 1967, when it began the process of de facto annexation of territories beyond the borders of the State of Israel.

While large demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people are taking place around the world, Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have sparked a major political and moral debate within the international Jewish community. Is Netanyahu's authoritarian government representative of the interests and feelings of the Jewish people regarding its territory and its neighbors? Are the rest of the world's Jews responsible for what Israel does in their name? What place is there for dissident ideas within a Judaism that raises the banner of victimhood only to become victimizers? Is the only response to terror, in turn, to spread more terror?

These questions prompted Dani Zelko's personal investigation . After working with indigenous communities, he began to question his own roots and why they make him uncomfortable. He thus discovered the story of his great-great-grandfather Yosef, a Jewish intellectual, translator (of Anna Karenina and War and Peace , no less, into Hebrew), and humanist. He also discovered the story of his grandfather David, born in Buenos Aires, who joined the Mossad in 1967 and took part in direct action in Israel's secret wars against the Palestinian liberation movements.

From the discomfort caused by these contradictory discoveries, Zelko wonders what these stories have to do with his own, with his constant need to write and bear witness , with his questioning of war nationalism and its alienation from Zionism.

At the intersection of the legacy of the Desert Campaign, which Zelko captured in Reunion, his publishing project featuring voices from indigenous populations, and the colonialist Zionism that has protected Israeli families settling in Palestinian territory since 1967, Zelko finds his place of discomfort: the place from which to question his belonging and identity, his cultural legacy, and his role as a critical agent within the Jewish people. “Argentina and Israel have in common the narrative that before the State, that place was a desert,” he asserts from the outset, before admitting that he wouldn't delve into his lineage if he hadn't delved into Wichí and Mapuche territory, into the history of those dispossessed peoples.

"My identity is inventing forms that transport me to lives that are not my own," the author defines himself, while writing epistles to his unknown great-great-grandfather and his spy grandfather, while conversing with his conciliatory mother and even rehearsing a letter to Goebbels, convinced that both Nazism and extreme Zionism are products of the same evil: colonialism. "How do I understand my people? With other peoples," he concludes.

But the search for a place for self-criticism within Judaism collides head-on, in October 2023, with Hamas attacks. There, Zelko's cousin and her children, who were living in a devastated kibbutz, are killed . The question looms: Does questioning Israel's actions fuel antisemitism? Are military advances and repression the only solution? In the dark pages of those days, Zelko writes: "It destroys me to feel that I understand those who murdered my cousin. The grief I am going through today, thousands of Palestinians go through every day."

In the dismantling of these binaries, Zelko's quest finds its certainties. Rereading history and keeping one's sensitive skin porous in the face of the suffering of others is the only way to disarm the spiral of dehumanization in which the world has become entangled. And writing about the process, even if it is in the polymorphous and mutating register of "Mother Ear ," where Zelko mixes autobiography and personal diary with historical essay and poetry , proves a shortcut to escaping the silence and stillness provoked by terror. Because in the face of destruction, says the author, the response of the Jewish people has always been the same: to write.

Camila Barón takes on a similar challenge to Zelko in Birthright . Her self-criticism as a Jew is situated, though: it overlaps with the chronicle of a trip to Israel and Palestine, a log filled with astute observations and domestic scenes of life in the disputed territory.

Barón traveled to Israel in 2016 , invited by the BRIA (Birthright Israel Argentina) program, aimed at young people of Jewish descent. Among the program's goals is to foster roots among those who can claim the possibility of becoming Israeli citizens.

During this week-long journey, which intersects religious tourism and sophisticated consumerism, family regressions, and political and military recruitment tactics, Barón explored firsthand the tense stability that preceded the current state of war . Although, according to the author, this apparent peace was nothing more than a sedimented powder keg: throughout the journey, conflict lurks around every corner, in every conversation, and in every photographable location.

“Long before becoming a book, these pages were a travel diary for survival,” Barón writes in the epilogue, signed in 2024. There are twelve chapters in which the author manages to capture the contrasts between the Israeli narrative and the reality experienced on both sides of the border, or even in the same city. Behind the curtain of economic prosperity and technocratic order, a stratified society operates, where Arabs and Muslims lead lives different from those of Jews, in less prosperous neighborhoods, with fewer opportunities and rights that are legally or de facto curtailed.

Barón places special emphasis on those contradictions, which she also allows to permeate her. “I decipher the terror that passed through my body,” she says in the epilogue, thinking of those days when she gazed at landscapes surrounded by the sounds of military training, wandered through cemeteries and temples, and spoke with Israeli soldiers and Palestinian merchants.

What's remarkable is that Barón isn't alone: ​​avoiding the temptation to separate herself from the group, the author finds allies for her critical perspective and her adventures outside the official itinerary . Thus, she peels away the fragile appearance of a story that creaks at every step, in every conversation with local residents or Israeli agents who invariably fall into an inhibiting sentence: "You just don't understand."

For Barón, however, the birthright of future generations is to be able to ask questions and converse, dismantling any supremacy through words.

“Not long after I was born, the newspaper Lotta Continua photographed my father holding me in his arms, teaching me how to behead, using a small toy guillotine.” Thus begins Out of the Night , the book in which journalist Mario Calabresi recounts the long period of mourning following the assassination of his father in an attack .

Originally published in 2007, this work by the former editor of La Stampa and La Repubblica caused a stir in Italy: with it, the author managed to touch a deep nerve in his country, pointing out the unfinished business of the "years of lead," as the period of political violence in the 1970s is known in Italy.

Calabresi, who was barely two years old when a bomb exploded in his father's car one morning in 1972, is a direct victim of those years of crossfire. But he doesn't present himself as such. Instead, he speaks from the position of the collective victim : the Italian society that lived in terror of the settling of scores and political crimes that darkened the ever-unstable unity of the peninsula.

In a fragmented narrative, where personal research, family memories, and privileged access to press archives and actors from the period intersect with family scenes and testimonies from other victims' relatives, Calabresi follows the silhouette of his father, but also attempts to foster the ongoing debate about the memory of that period.

Along the way, Calabresi emphasizes the social and media climate that preceded the attack on his father. Luigi Calabresi was a Milanese police commissioner in charge of the detained anarchist militant Giuseppe Pinelli, accused of participating in the Piazza Fontana massacre in December 1969. In a confusing episode, Pinelli fell from a window in Calabresi's office while being interrogated.

Although the judicial investigations benefited him from the start (Calabresi was in another part of the building when Pinelli fell), a hate campaign against the commissioner expanded to such levels that no one cared who "executed" Luigi Calabresi: it could have been anyone.

This bloodlust spread by public opinion , naturalized to the point of justifying the elimination of political adversaries without giving the slightest leeway for the benefit of the doubt or clemency, is the result of the historical echo that Calabresi made with Out of the Night.