A close friend was taken into palliative care, her name was Camille, she was young, radiant, everything smiled on her, and then one day, the crab pinched her. The rest went very quickly. And on October 7, with her husband, a very close friend, and a handful of very close friends, we found ourselves in the hospital, these hideous corridors decorated with children’s drawings which make them even more terrible. We tried to pretend that Camille was not in the anteroom when the first news from Israel arrived.
At that precise moment, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand anything, neither for Camille, nor for the Middle East. It took me some time to understand that it was serious, that it was not an attack of fever but a terrible tragedy, the end of joy or the end of peace. I was thinking about this strange word, “palliative care”, what we used to call “extreme unction”, in other words, the end of the end. Added to the private misfortune was the public misfortune, the fear for my relatives in Israel, many Orthodox Jews who, in any case, would not answer the phone on a Shabbat, an uncle so deaf that he no longer had a telephone. But as the news reached me, a certainty set in: Camille was going to heaven, peace was in palliative care and the Middle East was in hell.
This is exactly what the term “palliative care” means: there is no more hope, this is the term chosen in volapük, in French techno, for the living to mourn, even if, a few days previously , there was already not much hope. For Israel and Palestine, it was the same thing. Every time I went there, I told myself that there was little hope. I saw everyone becoming radicalized, there was no longer any known cure against Smotrich and Hamas. The outcome was fatal even if its nature was unknown. It was enough to be a little lucid to understand: the vital prognosis of the innocent was in jeopardy.
On October 8, Camille left, and with her, peace in the Middle East.
