“The siege. The hunger. Innocent children, the first victims of war. […] Why does God allow harm to be done to children? […] It pairs with another insoluble question: how could God allow the Holocaust? Children were the first to be sent to the gas chambers. The only thing that should be clear to everyone is that a Palestinian child is worth exactly the same as a Jewish child.” From the biblical massacres of the innocent to the war in Gaza. This is how Macellerie – Guerre atroci e paci ambigue (“Slaughterhouses – Atrocious wars and ambiguous peace,” by Siegmund Ginzberg begins, a book that profiles a violent humanity through conflicts and atrocities in history, from the Warring States period in China to today’s wars. Ginzberg, a journalist and essayist born in Turkey to a Jewish family, is not alone in taking a stand in recent weeks. Historian Anna Foa, “a Jew of the diaspora,” explores the “same pain for both sides”—the victims of October 7, the Israeli hostages, and the civilians killed in Gaza—in her book, Il Suicidio di Israele.