Gaza: From the Übermensch to the Transcendent

Unfathomable images. A Palestinian, whose brother has just been killed, massacred by an Israeli bomb, expresses his unwavering faith in God. He says, he shouts that his brother is now a martyr and in paradise.

Another Palestinian, having lost his children, kisses them one last time. His face is serene, almost smiling. No hatred, no anger, no call for revenge, just the perfect acceptance of God's will.

It's not a religious 'conflict,' but two radically different paradigms clashing. Here, faith is proclaimed in nationalism, racial superiority, and lands. Hatred and the desire to dominate the other are expressed.

Over there, reliance on God, submission to His omnipotence, residing in the abode of His light.

Secularization has reduced faith to a minor, meaningless event, a relic of the past confined to private space. But faith is alive, endowed with the power to move mountains. The genocide of Palestinians symbolizes, in my view, the confrontation between the gods of secularization, a 'god' that is not truly a god, the deification of man, ethnicity, land, nationalism, and the one true God, who strips man of his belongings, placing him in ephemeral temporality. He is nothing and possesses nothing; eternal life begins after death. Faith, of course, can provoke violence. But authentic faith, when it is the expression of profound spirituality, inherently manifests as a pursuit of peace. It is, in a sense, an existential 'conflict' between the advocates of the transcendence of the absent god, the gods of the earth and temporality, and the advocates of the transcendence of the one God and the promises of the afterlife. The violence of the gods of the moment is the violence of their vulnerability, of a project doomed to failure. The brother of the martyr knows this well, the father of the martyr's children knows this well; we stand on the edge of a death that is true life. And he who has ceased to fear death is free. And he who divinizes himself to escape death is a slave.

It is not about achieving the Nietzschean Übermensch ( 'surhomme' ), a will to power and overcoming, but about reaching the transcendence of faith ( 'surhumain' ), a will for complete submission to His light.

In other words, we must choose, be the willing slave of the earth or the slave of God.

And let these images remain in us all the time, these martyrs, the faces of these children, angels, resembling stars in these devastated fields of blood and hatred, shining with all their might and still pointing us towards the path of true faith.

Umar Timol

( Translated from French )