The tour of presentations for "I figli dell'odio," the nonfiction book by Cecilia Sala, a foreign policy journalist and well-known figure in Italian television journalism, a contributor to the daily newspaper "Il Foglio" and the voice of the Chora Media podcast "Stories," begins in the conservatory of the Teatro Doglio in Cagliari.
In a room packed to capacity for the event organized by the Jane Austen Club Sardinia as part of the "Literary December" series, the audience witnessed a heartfelt and engaging conversation about some of the book's themes, starting with the title: who are these children of hate?
The portrait that the Milanese author, in conversation with journalist Laura Cappon, paints of the Middle East is of a region where children have learned to hate more forcefully and vehemently than their parents; young Israelis are the most staunch opponents of an autonomous Palestinian state, and are often more radical in their aversion than their peers in the West Bank and Gaza. "They grew up when the walls had already been erected and the Oslo Accords had failed," Sala says, explaining one of the reasons why this hatred was able to take root and grow like a weed. She recounts her meeting and interview with Israeli investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ronen Bergman, who explained to her how Israeli intelligence services were able to contain the external enemy but not the internal one, represented by armed Kahanism and messianic currents. These forces brought Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to government and to leading roles in the country's politics. On the Palestinian front, the most harrowing account is told by Firas Abu al-Wafa, a sixty-year-old man who had to bury his son Samih at just nineteen. This is the clearest representation of these generations unable to communicate; while his father, after participating in the first intifada and enjoying an amnesty, supports diplomatic action and the pursuit of the Oslo Accords, his son becomes radicalized and dies a martyr, a hero of the Palestinian resistance, the emblem of an irreparable generational divide.
The third part, the journalist explains, is dedicated to Iran, where hatred is generational, but there is disenchantment on the one hand, from a ferocious dictatorship willing to exterminate them rather than give way, and on the other, from the awareness that Israeli and American bombs will not represent a path to freedom.
