What is happening in Palestine is an apocalypse that challenges all of us. It is a ‘knot’ in world history that also calls philosophy into question.

Roberta De Monticelli, one of Italy’s best-known philosophers, sees Palestine as the place where one of the paradoxes on which civilisation is based takes on an exemplary tragic form: for as long as law has existed, it has been in constant tension with justice. This is a paradox which is relived in all its tragic depth in the land where three religions coexist. How far can force go? What is the justice to be defended? How can politics intervene to imagine a future of peace? The book questions the very possibility of justice, law, and human coexistence, in a confrontation that brings together a reading of the present and the history of thought, and proposes to break through the wall of indifference: we have all performed an act of removal, ignoring the arbitrariness, the violence, the injustice of a military occupation. In this self-blind present of ours - as is always the case when civilisations seem to fall into the somnambulism that precedes the crash - a massacre is taking place every day, not only of bodies and souls, but also of meaning and truth.