This little book by Nadia Geerts is twofold: it first tells us her personal story during the year 2025, that of an awkward tweet (“there are restaurants operating in Gaza”) which provoked an unbelievable outcry (unbelievable in the sense that it was totally unjustified and was interpreted as saying the opposite of what it meant); it also tells us many other things, beyond this undeserved adventure: how our democracies are overwhelmed by the denial of truth, by excess, by the return of the monstrous beast from where it was least expected… The shift from a terrible observation: “the population of Gaza is suffering terribly from this war” (which is undeniable) to an equally terrible corollary: “the State of Israel must be destroyed.”
It is difficult to review this small work! Nadia Geerts has said everything, dissected everything, her sentences are clear, her argument demonstrative; and what she would not have said, Jean-Pierre Sakoun has said in his superb preface.
A few lines, however, one or two ideas that can be emphasized.
I would like to emphasize the power of the imagination at work in this "affair": since we are told that a genocide is underway in Gaza, that famine is deliberately engineered to destroy all the inhabitants, how could there possibly be restaurants open? The reader of the partisan press pictures images of famines in Africa, of Biafran children with bellies swollen from kwashiorkor; they haven't seen such photos taken in Gaza, but they imagine... And consequently, Nadia Geerts can only be mistaken: there cannot be any restaurants open since famine reigns. And the opposite reasoning is impossible in minds hammered by this one-sided truth: if there are restaurants open, it's because a fraction of the population is eating its fill... at the cost of the deprivations this imposes on the majority of the population. Thus, the enemies have changed: they are not those who can gorge themselves while others lack the essentials, but rather those who say so. Nadia Geerts said what she saw: worse, she saw what she saw, what a whole scared pack refuses to see.
It's also important to highlight the mob mentality, the perverse effects of belonging to a group: 10,000 people signed a petition against her, but how many had thought before signing? How many sought to understand the meaning of this unfortunate tweet? How many went to check if there were actually restaurants open in Gaza? It took... fact-checking Later, Flemish, German, and French journalists (but not French-speaking Belgians!) investigated to learn that she had spoken the truth, that this truth had contradicted the pack's perception of life in Gaza… Did they apologize? Did they simply admit they were wrong? Not at all! The sinister response from the Le Soir journalist who had planted the seeds of truth shows that truth only fades if it is not used.
In 120 very personal pages, Nadia Geerts summarizes the appalling situation into which Western democracies have plunged themselves, where reason falters; when she speaks of herself, she speaks of us.
