Between Gaza and Troy

In the darkness of history, tragedies are repeated and catastrophes resemble one another, as if humanity has never learned from blood or ashes. War, no matter how different its faces, carries within it the same flame and the same cry forgotten amidst the rubble. And between ancient Troy and wounded Gaza, there is a hidden thread of similarity, woven with revenge and spun with wounded pride.

In the Trojan War, immortalized in the Iliad, the spark for the war was a woman, Helen, a symbol of beauty and sin. She was either kidnapped or fled—it made no difference—but that event served as a pretext for buried grudges, a sword drawn in the name of honor, while truth was subject to the whims of kings and gods. The Greeks marched on Troy with ten years of blood—the blood of children, knights, and the elderly—in revenge for a squandered dignity and a woman lost among the palaces of kings.

And in Gaza, in the fall of 2023, the fire exploded once again, not because of a woman, but because of a long history of oppression and occupation, and of a resistance that awakens whenever the enemy thinks it has died down. Israel launched its war of revenge after October 7, with a violence that knows no balance, that doesn't differentiate between a stone and a child, a civilian and a fighter, a hospital and a tunnel. It's as if, like the Greeks in Troy, it sees the other not as a human being, but as a specter to be erased.

Both wars, although in different times and places, carried within them the same madness: the mind of the occupation believes that force restores what it considers right, and it is far removed from right by the time difference between the Trojan and Gaza wars.

In Troy, as in Gaza, walls collapsed, cities fell, but man alone, the innocent, was the fuel of the tragedy.

In the end, Troy remained a legend to be told, a city that fell but whose memory endured. And Gaza, though bleeding, still stands, resisting, and writing its narrative with blood and patience. War is never won, even if someone appears victorious, because truth is not measured by the number of victims, but by the humanity that remains after the smoke clears.