WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY MILANO News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Milano, FAI: From an endless horror to the end of horror - Massimo Varengo. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Heirs of the First International, we continue to proclaim ourselves
internationalists. In a world where nationalism, identity, particularism
and sovereignism are rampant, unleashing wars and destruction, we
continue to think that only the unity of the entire world proletariat
can pave the way for a world of liberties and equals. ---- And this is
why we are committed and work with all those who mobilize against
militarism, generalized rearmament, the military-industrial complex and
against borders and the states that guarantee them for the relaunch of
the class struggle on global scale.
And while we support the deserters, the dodgers, the imprisoned
opponents who in Russia and Ukraine demonstrate with their bodies all
their rejection of the ongoing war, we do the same with what is
happening in Israel.

In a letter received recently, a representative of the refuseniks
(Israeli objectors to military service) says:

"A friend just wrote to me that two of his teenage cousins are among the
Israeli civilians taken to the Gaza Strip and declared hostages by
Hamas. The same friend spent 21 months in prison with me when we were 18
and we both refused to join the Israeli army as resisters to the
occupation. These are terrible days: hundreds of Israelis and hundreds
of Palestinians have already died. Many of our families and friends are
directly affected, and this is just the beginning as the Israeli
government has already declared war. But this crisis also represents a
huge opportunity: in the coming weeks, Israeli war opponents will be
able to turn this unprecedented war into a turning point. In times like
these, it is our role as Israeli war resisters to do everything we can
to prevent deadly escalation, all-out war and reoccupation of the Gaza
Strip. It is also our role to say loud and clear, in the Middle East and
internationally, that there is no military solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: this crisis in Gaza is proving us right.
The only stable solution to the conflict is a just peace between
Israelis and Palestinians. This is what we at the Refuser Solidarity
Network and the Israeli groups of war resisters and dodgers with whom we
work will be working on in the coming days and weeks. Our Israeli
partners are already posting clear messages on social media and in the
press against violent escalation and to use this crisis as a turning point.

They are supporting those who refuse the call as war reservists. They
are planning and leading protests in the streets. They are taking part
in the creation of civilian direct intervention de-escalation teams to
patrol mixed Arab-Jewish towns, where violence between nationalist gangs
has erupted in similar situations in the past."

In a manifesto distributed by a group of young Palestinians from the
Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the 'Cast Lead' operation - which had
caused 1,400 deaths in the space of three weeks, of which over 300 were
children, and 5,000 injured - we can read:

"Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck United Nations. Fuck Unwra.
Fuck Usa! We, the youth of Gaza, are fed up with Israel, with Hamas,
with the occupation, with human rights violations and with the
indifference of the international community! (...)We are tired of being
victims of this political struggle; fed up with dark nights with planes
circling above our homes; fed up with innocent farmers being killed in
the buffer zone, because they take care of their lands; fed up with
bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating
or jailing young people who demonstrate for what they believe in; fed up
with the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country
and imprisons us in a postage stamp-sized piece of land; tired of being
portrayed as terrorists, fanatics, living at home with explosives in our
pockets and evil in our eyes; fed up with the indifference we encounter
from the international community, the so-called experts ready to express
concerns and write resolutions, but cowardly in enforcing everything
they say they agree on; we are tired of living a shitty life, being held
in prison by Israel, beaten by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest
of the world.

There is a revolution growing within us, an immense feeling of
dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us unless we find a
way to channel this energy into something that can challenge the status
quo and give us some kind of hope. We just survived Operation Cast Lead
in which Israel very effectively bombed the shit out of us, destroying
thousands of homes and even more lives and dreams. During the war we had
the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to wipe us off the face of
the Earth. Over the past few years, Hamas has done everything to control
our thoughts, behaviors and aspirations. Here in Gaza we are afraid of
being imprisoned, interrogated, beaten, tortured, bombed, killed. We
can't move as we want, say what we want, do what we want. We've had
enough! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough controls,
limits, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings,
sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, present
of suffering, cowardly politics, fanatical politicians, religious
bullshit , continuous arrests. LET'S SAY STOP! This is not the future we
want! We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We
want peace. Is that too much to ask?"

Hearing the voices that come from the territory of Palestine and Israel
is important because, beyond all the geopolitical analyses, all the gut
reactions that the terrible events arouse in anyone who still retains a
minimum of humanity, seeing a desire to escape from this situation of
death and destruction gives us more strength to demand the cessation of
fighting and massacres and to outline a future that can build a
relationship between the proletariat of the area, free from ethnic
nationalism and religious affiliations.

Stopping the crimes against humanity, stopping the barbarity that has
been committed in the kibbutzim and that is being carried out, with
bombings and cuts of supplies, before it reaches unimaginable levels I
believe is the imperative of anyone who wants to prevent the spread of a
conflict much larger in size than those already underway.

Having said this, we are very clear about who is responsible for the
situation which has its roots in the trial.

It was an easy prophet Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, who in the aftermath of the founding of Israel in 1948
warned the Zionist movement "A Jewish state means, by definition, that
Jews govern other people inhabiting this state" ,

taking it for granted that this imposition could not be accepted calmly.
And he reinforced his opinion by quoting another Jewish thinker,
Jabotinsky "Have you ever seen a people offer their territory of their
own free will? So even the Palestinian Arabs will not give up their
sovereignty without violence." Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, later
called this settlement operation 'ethnic cleansing'.

 From 1948 to today, following the establishment of the Jewish State,
the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan has been the scene of
numerous wars, which have sent their tragic reverberations throughout
the surrounding area, becoming in fact one of the main points of world
conflict, despite the limited number of its inhabitants - 11 million
Arabs and Jews - the small size of the territory - similar to those of
Lombardy - and the scarce resources of the territory. The fact is that
in its historical development, starting from the defeat of the Ottoman
Empire, this territory has become a fundamental bulwark in the policies
of conquest and colonial control of the area.

In the division of the Middle East between France and Great Britain, the
constant concern of the great Western powers has always been to
guarantee energy supplies and prevent the union between the Arab
populations whose political unity has always been seen as a threat. In
this regard, the responsibilities of the British State in having favored
the Jewish settlement are well known, giving rise to such an explosive
mixture that the tragic events of the Jewish extermination by the Nazis
and the affirmation of a nationalism, extremist and aggressive as all
nationalisms among the Jews then led to dramatic maturation.

In fact, since 1948 two peoples have faced each other on the same
territory, one, the Jewish, to assert their own state, the other, the
Arab, to defend their living space. In this confrontation, the global
and regional imperialist powers have an easy game as they use the
aspirations of the people to assert their strategic interests in an
area, such as the Middle East, rich in energy resources and transforming
Israel into a bulwark in their defense.

75 years of wars and conflicts which considerably increased the
percentage of territory allocated to Israel by the UN in 1948 with the
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967; with the consequent
expulsion of enormous masses of Arabs from their territories, the
creation of refugee camps in the surrounding countries and the backlash
against the host countries, such as Jordan and Lebanon, whose
governments were subsequently responsible for massacres against the
Palestinians to contain them destabilizing action for their regimes.

After 75 years the situation has not substantially changed and we are
still here to count the deaths, the children killed by the bombs of
Israeli planes and by Hamas incursions, the houses destroyed by
bulldozers in Tel Aviv, the quantity of confiscated Arab lands, of the
unstoppable growth of colonies and so on. An unbearable accounting of
which we cannot see the end, just as we cannot see the end of the policy
of marginalization and apartheid practiced by the Israeli government
towards the resident Arab component and the intensive exploitation of
Palestinian labor.

What is certain is that the capacity for resistance demonstrated by the
Arabs of Palestine went beyond any initial prediction on the part of
both the UN strategists of 1948 and the Zionist movement which, at its
dawn at the end of the 1800s, thought of building its own State with the
purchase of the lands of Arab landowners to be populated with the
European exiles of the anti-Jewish persecutions.

A popular resistance that places the leaders of the Israeli state faced
with a problem that is becoming impossible to solve: how to guarantee
and strengthen the original character of the state and at the same time
maintain control of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. The
demographic growth of the Arab population in the territory from the
Mediterranean to the Jordan River it has a higher rate than the Jewish
one, and immigrants, especially Russian ones (now 20% of the population)
are not enough to compensate for the decline. If we exclude, as the
leaders of Tel Aviv do in order not to deny the Zionist foundation at
the origin of the foundation of Israel, the hypothesis of a binational
state where the two components have the same duties and the same rights,
there remains for them no other solution than that of putting further
pressure on the Arabs to 'convince' them to lock themselves up in narrow
spaces restricted by the wall under construction or to go and build
their own state beyond the Jordan, as the ultranationalist and religious
hawks who identify the kingdom of Jordan as the 'place' would like of
the Palestinians. To do this, however, they should not only act globally
on the Palestinians as the settlers in the West Bank are doing by
shooting them or throwing stones at them to expel them from their
villages, but they should convince the Jordanians who have shown great
solidarity both towards the exiles of Palestine and those Iraqis - as
long as they are docile and meek - but who have now paid too high a
price in terms of economic crisis and unemployment to accept another
biblical exodus from the West Bank. The same goes for the Egyptian
government, which is worried about the pressure at the crossing between
Gaza and Sinai from those who are trying to escape the massive Israeli
bombings which are causing thousands of deaths and injuries. It is clear
to everyone that these are not solutions but further elements of
barbarism of a colonialist and oppressive policy, which continues to be
supported internationally by the USA and its allies.

And meanwhile the horror has no end. We don't need a scale to understand
which of the two parties is paying the highest price, in terms of loss
and suffering, despite the rhetoric of a blatantly biased press and
television, which continues to use the horror of the Holocaust to make
us digest his support for unbearable colonial-style policies, a worthy
representation of a country that has never wanted to come to terms with
its colonialist massacres in Libya and Ethiopia, with its policies of
forced Italianization as in Slovenia and Tyrol, with his persecutions

racial, its concentration camps. The hypocrisy and opportunism that ooze
from the pages of newspapers and from television screens are absolutely
unbearable. The hierarchy of pain that they want to impose on us, the
diversity of weight and substance of the dead that they describe to us,
the construction of monsters outside of any context do not surprise us:
the propaganda apparatus is always in action and concentrating on the
particular instead of on the general it is the preferred way not to
solve problems and maintain the status quo. We must continually denounce
the double standard that is applied to substantially similar situations
where the so-called international 'legality' is manipulated to suit the
interests of imperialist powers.

Overcoming the state of war that is bloodied in that region will be
achieved either with the annihilation and destruction of one of the two
parties - and one can easily imagine which one, given the balance of
power and Israeli military power - or with the definitive destruction of
artificial, ethnic, political and religious barriers imposed on peoples
for the construction of a more just and humane society. Unfortunately
today it seems clear that it is the first option that Israel is pursuing.

Surprised and impressed by the action of Hamas which for the first time
managed to break through the siege and temporarily take control of some
Israeli settlements already belonging to the historic district of which
today the Gaza strip represents only a portion; a portion, among other
things, 80% inhabited by refugees and expelled from their territories
during the Nakba.

But Israel's response ('an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'
according to the biblical dictate that has caused so much suffering to
the human race pushed into a spiral of endless hatred): blocking
supplies of water, food, fuel, electricity to the Strip, systematically
destroying civilian structures, hitting hospitals and ambulances is not
a 'right' reaction to the brutal and criminal murders of Hamas as they
want us to digest but the extreme attempt to create scorched earth for
the people of Gaza to permanently expel them from that territory; then
it will be the turn of the West Bank under the iron heel of the
occupation (5200 political prisoners of which 1264 have never undergone
a trial).

Is this how you resolve the Palestinian 'question'? Is this what the
Abrahamic Covenant was for?

Today we must mobilize to prevent this from happening, from Gaza
becoming an open-air cemetery. The resumption of the class struggle in
that area of the world can only occur if the pogrom massacres end, only
if the deleterious effects of social hierarchies, the existence of the
bourgeoisies and religious castes are recognised.

The existence of joint collectives of Palestinians and Israelis who
oppose the erected walls, support Israeli deserters in military service,
mobilize against militarism, defend freedoms and civil rights for all,
proves once more that what we can unite, with solidarity and struggle,
is stronger than what divides us, in the awareness that the proposal of
libertarian federalism, fundamentally egalitarian, is the one that is
best suited to regions such as that of the Middle East, made up of a
mosaic of peoples and cultures, with its practice of free association on
an egalitarian basis between individuals and social groups.

The distribution of wealth and generalized self-management are the
fundamental steps to give strength to the federalist proposal in a
territory where wealth and poverty are intertwined, where the issue of
the distribution of water, oil and fertile lands is of great importance.
nodal.

The proposal for a new Palestinian state, which among other things is
more than small in size, with leopard patches separated from each other,
if apparently it seems like a step forward in the liberation of an
oppressed and exploited people, in reality it is a new cage which will
strengthen nationalist feelings by causing us to lose awareness of class
interests and the importance of the social struggle against dominators
and exploiters of every type and every ethnicity. There is no economic
and social liberation of the proletariat outside of its
self-organization as a class; its crystallization in national interclass
communities is the grave of every project of social revolution. But to
make this approach credible it is necessary to mobilize to put an end to
this war, the attacks on the Israeli and Palestinian civilian
population, the intolerable situation in which the workers, women, men
and children in Gaza and the West Bank find themselves, so that they
silence the weapons, the regime of Israeli military occupation ceases,
the regime of apartheid, of oppression and marginalization of the Arab
population ends, at the same time defeating the anti-Jewish resurgences
that are always dormant and never quelled.

Posted in Antimilitarism, by Umanità Nova.

https://federazione-anarchica-milanese-fai.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/25/da-un-orrore-senza-fine-per-la-fine-dellorrore/
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