Introduction ---- This booklet is the result of a collective discussion
that lasted, in alternating phases, several months. It is divided intothree small essays, which, although written by individual comrades, were
read and reworked collectively. ---- We have chosen to maintain the
peculiar style of each writing. As you will see, the texts, although
conceived from different angles, often intersect: we hope that this
intersecting has in any case avoided redundancy.
We are not historians, sociologists, political scientists or
philosophers and we do not pretend to be.
We are antimilitarists and anarchists and it is by questioning our
positioning, constantly verifying its interpretative validity, that we
have worked individually and collectively.
This booklet was born from the need to imagine and practice a different
political perspective to the fight against the genocide in Gaza. And,
more generally, to all wars and all exclusionary dynamics.
We have had and have enormous difficulty in crossing the movements that
were born to counter the terrible massacre carried out by the Israeli
government in the Gaza Strip.
A black and white scenario, like certain films where the good guys are
absolutely good and the bad guys are absolutely bad.
It's not like that, it's never like that.
And, let's be clear, we are not satisfied with grays: we aspire to a
broad, plural, open palette.
As the months passed, we feared that we would become accustomed to
horror. It is already happening in Ukraine, it is already happening in
many places on the planet, where immense tragedies are being consumed in
the silence of most.
Of one fact we are certain, because it represents an inescapable ethical
horizon. We will never resign ourselves to the inevitability of
massacres, rapes, tortures.
Our commitment has never waned, despite our substantial extraneousness
to demonstrations opened, if not promoted, by religious exponents and
nationalists.
We have built squares, parades and moments of reflection and struggle
against the manufacturing and trade of weapons, the shooting ranges and
military bases, the collusion between school, university and war,
against the militarization of the suburbs, of the borders, of the CPRs...
We have supported deserters and opponents in Russia and Ukraine. We have
supported Sudanese anarchists fighting against the butchers who are
fighting for territory.
We stand alongside those who fight against exploiters and oppressors in
"their" country, we fight against exploiters and oppressors in "our"
country.
We are on the side of the victims. On the side of the girls and boys, of
the men and women killed, massacred, starved, humiliated.
Everywhere. Always.
For easier reading you can also download the PDF of the booklet here
****
The Drowned and the Saved
Movement Anomalies and the Palestinian Question
The prevailing approach of political and social emancipation movements
to the Palestinian question represents such a strong and deep-rooted
anomaly that it is not perceived as such.
The immense massacre of the Gazan population and the movements in
support of the Palestinian "resistance" that developed in our country
after 7 October 2023 have highlighted cracks that have deep roots, all
of which need to be investigated and understood.
We are moved by a strong need, because beyond the peculiarities of the
Palestinian question, issues such as nationalism, the decline of the
class approach, the affirmation of essentialist identity dynamics and a
distorted conception of decolonial processes question us all on the
prospects of a movement of social, individual, political emancipation
capable of transforming the existing in the name of a concrete
affirmation of freedom, equality, solidarity. A concreteness that takes
advantage of the last 150 years of criticism of the abstraction of the
principles that have informed the liberal revolutions: formally
universal but, in fact, excluding. The processes of subjectivation of
those excluded from the universal abstraction that imposes itself with
the revolutionary ruptures between the end of the seventeenth century
and the end of the eighteenth century have triggered transformative
paths, in which the differences and, therefore, the fragmentation of the
bourgeois, male, heterosexual, rich, European-cultured political subject
define an unprecedented horizon of struggle. It has been a long,
unfinished journey, which today risks getting lost in a thousand
self-contained identity streams that negotiate the right to otherness
with the recognition of any other identity path.
A trap with a bitter essentialist flavour. 1
Seemingly paradoxical question
Is Israel the absolute enemy? A cancer that must be eradicated even if
it means killing a good part of those who live there? And chasing away
those who remain?
No one would explicitly admit to advocating the genocide of Israeli
citizens.
Nevertheless.
For months, "radical" movements have been taking to the streets
brandishing Palestinian flags and chanting the slogan "from the river to
the sea Palestine will be free." This slogan has an unmistakable meaning.
Nevertheless.
These movements are also animated by groups and people who, in other
contexts, fight every day for the universality of freedom, equality and
social justice.
A similar slogan "from the river to the sea" is used by right-wing
Israeli nationalists who would like to permanently annex the West Bank
and Gaza.
Whoever says it, Palestinian or Israeli, is calling for the genocide of
all Israelis or all Palestinians.
Whoever pronounces it has an exquisitely essentialist approach, because
he considers all individuals, all social groups, all women, all men and
all children as enemies to be annihilated, invested with a collective
guilt, that of existing and being different. An approach similar to that
of Arnaud Amaury during the crusade against the Cathars, who, to a
soldier who asked him how to distinguish heretics, replied: "Kill them
all. God will recognize his own".
One could easily argue that today it is Israel that is trying to kill
and drive out all the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. And, more slowly
but surely, it is also ethnically cleansing the West Bank.
Without a doubt. It is a horror that continues without respite, since,
on a numerically smaller scale, Palestinian troops have massacred, raped
and tortured over twelve hundred Israelis. The attack by the Israeli
army that began immediately after the massacre of October 7, has caused
tens of thousands of deaths and transformed a large part of the Gazawi
territory into a pile of rubble.
The sectarian fascists in government in Israel, the sectarian fascists
in government in Gaza have the same goal. To kill as many inhabitants as
possible and drive out the rest.
Some have the means to do so. Others do not.
Both enjoy strong support, with one substantial difference. The United
States, although intolerant of Israeli government policies, maintains
its political and military support. The Arab and Muslim countries in the
area, although formally pro-Palestinian, do not lift a finger in favor
of the Gazan population.
Question: Is it legitimate to assume that all Israelis approve of the
policies of "their" government?
Question: Is it legitimate to assume that all Palestinians approve of
the policies of "their" governments?
Are these rhetorical questions? Unfortunately not. Posters, slogans,
documents of the movement that in our country supports the "Palestinian
resistance", identified with those who carried out the massacres of
October 7 in Israel, describe the country as lacking opposition to the
military occupation and the genocide of the Gazans.
Nevertheless.
There are testimonies, appeals for solidarity that testify to a concrete
opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. Not least those of
the refuseniks who refuse the military and the massacres and risk prison.
Even in Gaza and the West Bank there are voices critical of Hamas and
its allies: they are faint voices, but they are there. There is no trace
of them in the documents of the supporters of the "Palestinian resistance".
In the same documents there is no trace of criticism of Hamas, despite
it being a sectarian organization, whose secret police, in addition to
investigating and prosecuting journalists and political opponents, also
has moral disciplinary duties.
Nevertheless.
In December 2023, two months after the start of the Israeli bombing,
protests against Hamas took place in the south of the Strip, accusing it
of hoarding food and medicine to resell them at high prices.
The movements in Israel that contested the justice reform wanted by the
Netanyahu government have received good media coverage from the Italian
media.
The protests against Hamas and its leadership that rocked the Gaza Strip
at the same time had considerably less prominence.
In the summer of 2023, thousands of young people took to the streets,
especially in the south of the Strip, to protest for electricity and
against corruption, calling into question Haniyeh himself, the political
leader of Hamas. 2
It is very convenient for the Israeli government and those who support
it to maintain that the population of Gaza identifies completely with
its government. We think it is legitimate to ask ourselves why most of
the movements fighting to stop Israeli atrocities do not want to give
the importance they deserve to the fact that the consensus around Hamas
and its leadership is anything but unanimous.
Let's look at the context: in a very small, semi-desert area, with very
few water resources, crushed by years of closure and embargo, with a
very high population density and a frightening unemployment rate, the
survival of the population depends on external aid. In addition to that
of the United Nations, that of Qatar, a petro-monarchy that supports the
Muslim Brotherhood in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Maghreb, the
Mashrek and Europe, has been fundamental. It goes without saying that
Qatar's support does not reach the population directly, but is directed
at Hamas. Hamas distributes Islamic charity to those who conform to the
precepts and directives of the organization.
In this way, especially in Gaza, the Palestinian population, the most
secular in the Eastern Mediterranean, has progressively moved towards
Islamic fundamentalist positions.
Israel, with a Machiavellianism worthy of a better cause, initially
favored the growth of Hamas, in the belief that the transition to
Islamic extremism would reduce sympathy for Palestinian nationalism. A
rather serious error of perspective.
In the same period, in Israel too, the alliance between the Likud and
the religious parties shifted the political axis of institutional
politics towards a Jewish fundamentalist perspective.
Hamas aims to annihilate all Israelis, the Israeli religious right aims
to annihilate all Palestinians.
Have we reached a point of no return? We hope not. But, above all, let's
try to investigate the cracks to stretch threads of active solidarity to
those who, everywhere in that area, move in an internationalist and
libertarian perspective. No indulgence must be granted to the Israeli
confessional fascists and, with equal force, it must be denied to the
confessional fascists of Hamas.
The invention of nationalism
The Israeli government aims for a "Greater Israel," which would stretch
from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
The various Palestinian factions want a "return" to "historic
Palestine," from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
Israel and historical Palestine are cultural inventions, which become
true because someone believes them to be so.
The state entities that, in the area we call the Middle East, were born
after the end of the Ottoman, English and French colonial empires are
completely artificial. All states are.
Paradoxically, cultural colonization has caused European nationalisms to
become the model that has also inspired anti-colonial struggles, such as
the Israeli and Palestinian ones.
A necessary parenthesis
Those who aim to build a Nation-State claim to base its legitimacy on
the existence of a homogeneous linguistic and cultural community, which
would aspire to its own common "home". In fact, we know well that
homogeneous linguistic and cultural communities, when they exist, are
the consequence and not the cause of the birth of a state.
Without going far, it is enough to think of how many different languages
were spoken in our country before 1861. Not even the Savoy monarchs who
annexed the peninsula and Sicily to their kingdom spoke Italian.
Linguistic and cultural unification was a process that followed and did
not precede the birth of the Kingdom of Italy. A process imposed by the
force of laws and the violence of the army. A violence that continued
after the annexation of Trento, Trieste, Istria and Dalmatia, places
where there was a strong multiculturalism, which the Savoy monarchy
tried to destroy by force.
The famous phrase "we have made Italy, now we must make Italians" shows
us how cultural subjugation is necessary to strengthen the consensus for
the occupation of the territories, for the very existence of the new
State. The symbolic elements that draw its identity are the pieces
necessary to compose the "unitary" mosaic of the "nation".
The success of these operations, which are similar in different
latitudes, does not depend on being "true", "authentic" but on the
ability to construct a collective imagination.
Everywhere there are cultural devices in which memories (real or
presumed), stories, mythological origins lie: nationalisms draw on them
to build a strong identity. The stronger an identity is, the more it
excludes the "foreigners" who live next to us, those who do not respect
the prevailing gender canons, those who, in any way, risk collapsing the
nationalist house of cards. Those who are not part of the "people" and
the values they embody cannot be part of the nation.
When Umberto Bossi decided to invent Padania, he knew that to create a
nation from his geographical fantasies, a founding imagery was needed, a
series of mythical representations that would give symbolic density to
territories that were contiguous but different in language and
self-perception. The sun of the Alps, the Celts, the ceremonies at the
source of the Po and in Venice were some of the elements that the
founder of the Northern League used to give emotional strength to his
project for Padania.
Without a strong emotional inspiration there is no people as the soul of
nations. The very notion of people is a cultural construct functional to
the legitimation of nation-states.
Bossi and his men failed. But their approach was the same, with
different cultural pieces, which nationalisms at every latitude use.
Padania, given the temporal proximity of the experience, makes it easy
to grasp the artificiality in the foundation of nations.
Uniforming, compacting, making similar or expelling are typical dynamics
of the nationalist approach: whether it is based on a presumed
biological root, or on a cultural identity or on a mix of the two,
nationalism, in order to exist, must exclude, cut out non-conforming
human beings.
There are no good nationalisms. The nationalism of the defeated is no
better than that of the victors.
We have a hard time understanding how groups and people who participate
in movements against borders, wars, and the repression of migrants can
support any nationalism, even the losing one of the Palestinians.
Let's be clear. Our support for the boys and girls, women and men of
Gaza and the West Bank who are victims of genocidal violence is without
ifs and buts. However, we will never wave the Palestinian national flag.
We are too busy trampling and burning "our own".
Palestinian Nationalism and the Kingdom of Jordan 3
In the Eastern Mediterranean, the policy of Great Britain, which pushed
the accelerator of Arab and Jewish nationalisms during the First World
War - from Lawrence of Arabia to the Balfour Declaration - became a
boomerang for English rule, which found itself having to deal with
several opposing nationalisms, which had in common only the desire to
free themselves from the colonial yoke.
What happened after May 1948, when the British left the occupied
territories in what became the borders of the State of Israel until
1967, was the direct consequence of the rise of opposing nationalist
demands.
After the 1948 civil war, a large part of the Palestinians living in the
territories controlled by Israel were forced to take the path of exile.
Those who remained, about 20%, became second-class citizens of the
Jewish state.
The West Bank and Transjordan, where today as then the population was
predominantly Palestinian, were annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control.
About twenty years later, in 1967, the Arab coalition (Syria, Egypt,
Jordan, Iraq) was defeated in the Six Day War and Israel occupied the
West Bank, the Golan Heights in Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza
Strip.
Three years later, Jordan saw a bloody civil war between Palestinian
armed organizations and the Jordanian army, which ended in July 1971
with the expulsion of Palestinian political-military organizations.
Today, approximately 70% of Jordan's population is of Palestinian
origin: partly Palestinians who lived in Transjordan after the end of
the British Mandate and the birth of the Kingdom of Jordan in 1946,
partly refugees from 1948 and the Six-Day War.
In 2014, when the civil war in Syria forced Palestinians to flee under
pressure from ISIS, Jordan, which had welcomed thousands of Syrians,
both Arab and otherwise, closed its doors to those fleeing the
Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk, even shooting those who managed to
cross the border.
Not only that, the Kingdom of Jordan denies nationality to Palestinians
who request it and, in some cases, takes it away from those who have
acquired it.
Nevertheless.
The policies of the Kingdom of Jordan towards the Palestinians under its
jurisdiction have been and continue to be inclusive towards those who
recognize the legitimacy of the Hashemite state, and exclusive towards
Palestinian nationalists.
This is an element that in our opinion requires careful reflection: why
has the role of a dynasty that comes from the Arabian Peninsula, with
significant historical collusions with British colonialism, been and is
so underestimated by the movements that support Palestinian nationalism?
A hypothesis that we believe to be appropriate is the failure to
recognize the colonial nature of the Kingdom of Jordan, the only piece
of territory remaining in the hands of the Hashemite dynasty, after the
compensation that was offered to it for its support of the English
during the First World War.
A distorted approach to decoloniality
The concept of decoloniality has long since left academic spaces to
explode within the reflection and practice of the most radical political
and social emancipation movements. Unfortunately, its subversive charge
has often been ignored, ending up slipping into paradoxically
essentialist dynamics 4
In the movements supporting Palestinian nationalism, this dynamic is all
too evident. The notion of people is its linchpin. To assume it within a
perspective that claims to be decolonial is an incredible aporia, since
every constitutively exclusive concept is foreign to this approach.
There is no "one" point of view of the colonized, but many different
points of view and different positions, often divergent, that cannot be
boxed in the concept of people.
Recognizing the importance of liberation arising from the will of the
subjects directly involved does not imply an "automatic" and uncritical
adherence to any initiative of subjects historically and culturally
invested by colonial oppression.
Likewise, the assumption of collective guilt, the effect of being born
and living in state environments that have implemented ferocious
colonial and post-colonial policies, is a mirror dynamic pregnant with
terrible consequences. Those who implement it deny the freedom to
criticize any approach or initiative that comes from colonized
subjectivities (or racialized or excluded for reasons of gender and
identity).
We are not colonialists because Italy has waged wars to conquer and
exploit Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Slovenia,
Croatia, Albania, the Dodecanese... and today it continues its action in
military missions abroad to defend the interests of the arms and energy
industries.
We are not colonialists because the government of the country where we
live is colonialist.
Memory in its informing of our present is a complex and variable
mechanism. We all have a cultural toolbox at our disposal that we draw
upon to understand and try to change the intolerable world in which we
are forced to live.
In the box, which obviously is not the same for everyone, there are many
memories, which come from different sources. Some remain buried for
decades but then resurface. Others have dissolved, because no one has
made them their own, keeping them alive. There are cases in which there
is no memory because there are no longer those who could have passed it on.
In each of these devices there is everything: it is up to us to choose.
Ours is also, always, a choice of field.
In our camp there is Augusto Masetti, who in 1911 showed his refusal to
leave for the conquest of Libya, shooting his colonel and facing the
consequences. There are the deserters and mutineers of the Great War of
colonial expansion to the East. There are those who left to fight in
support of the anarchist revolution against fascists, nationalists and
clerics in Spain. There are those who refused to be soldiers and ended
up in the military prisons of the Italian Republic. There are the women
and men who have opposed and continue to oppose class oppression,
identity breaks, wars, the denial of women's paths to autonomy and
non-conforming identities.
The decolonial approach offers us the opportunity to close the parable
of excluding universals to arrive at a plural universal that is
experienced in the multiplicity of paths, relationships, and
possibilities that the practice of freedom in equality and solidarity
opens up to everyone, everywhere. 5
Unfortunately today the decolonial perspective "lacks an elaboration of
this idea that separates it from nationalisms, communitarianisms and
approaches based on a single perspective (rather than on intersections)
that risk making it an exclusive conception when it is not.
As originally developed by the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD)
collective and later enriched by contributions from indigenous feminism,
pluriverse studies, and Southern epistemologies to name but a few of the
main areas of discussion, decoloniality 6 aims to overcome the
limitations of previous approaches.
This is particularly the culturalism of Postcolonial Studies, which has
often limited itself to critiques of coloniality that remained limited
to discourse analysis and confined to academic fields, and the economism
of theories such as uneven development or the world system, incapable of
including what decolonial approaches call "epistemic decolonization". In
this sense, the qualifying points of decoloniality are the need to go
beyond pure theory to connect to real struggles and situations, to
rediscover ways of thinking outside of European intellectual traditions
and to build bridges of militant solidarity across different cultures
and axes of intervention." 7
Bridges of solidarity. This is the crux of the matter. Building links,
intersections, common paths, trying to understand and be understood
offers social emancipation movements the precious opportunity to broaden
their interpretative horizon and struggle.
Memory is a collective mechanism that must be constantly cared for and fed.
The classist and internationalist gaze
From our political and cultural itinerary we draw the tools to shatter
the notion of people, starting also from the class divide. In the
nineteenth century, the rejection of wage servitude, the awareness that
the social pyramid was the result of a social relationship based on the
right to private property, on work as a cheap negotiable commodity, gave
rise to struggles that led to a transnational alliance of the oppressed
and exploited, the First International. The terrain of class struggle
contributed to weakening the idea, constitutively interclassist, of
people. The awareness that exploited and exploiters were the same beyond
any national border made it possible to build bridges of solidarity
between workers of every country. With the breakup of the First
International and the birth of the anti-authoritarian International in
Saint Imier in 1872, the struggle against capitalist exploitation merged
with that against state oppression.
In colonial or post-colonial environments, the colonized become cheap
labor. For a long time, Palestinians were cheap workers in various
sectors of the Israeli economy. Today, they have been partly replaced by
immigrants with Jewish citizenship from Russia. The class divide also
exists in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. Creating relationships of
solidarity between workers, precarious workers, and unemployed workers
who live in a common condition of exploitation is a concrete and
symbolically powerful way of undermining the legitimacy of any national
entity.
Nevertheless.
Many movements continue to consider the national question as a priority,
as if the class struggle needed a brand new nation-state. A certain
"left" has been anchored to this option since the time of the division
of the world into blocs.
Nevertheless.
Faced with the slow slide towards colonization and the transformation of
the West Bank into a set of Bantustans disconnected from each other, we
need strong bridges between the exploited that can support the
demolition of walls, barriers, borders. Outside of a nationalist logic,
space could emerge for alliances that eradicate the conflict that has
bloodied the Eastern Mediterranean for 76 years.
To stop the terrible massacre taking place in the Strip, a generalized
insurrection would be needed in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. An
insurrection against their own governments, their own rulers, their own
religious institutions. Difficult? Certainly. But certainly also the
only possibility for hundreds of thousands of men, women, girls and boys.
Antimilitarism, Universities and the Palestinian Question
The movements that have developed in universities have the merit of
having grasped the fundamental connection between academic research and
the war industry, in an intertwining of interests that place the logic
of domination and that of profit at the center, outside and against any
supposed neutrality of a scientific investigation that moves following
the directions of the clients of the moment. However, they have a strong
limit both in the definition of the objectives and in the methods of
pursuing them.
The enormous emotion that accompanies the genocidal massacres of the
Gazan population ends up placing only criticism and boycott of the State
of Israel in the foreground, forgetting that our country (and its
universities) are on the front lines in numerous theaters of war, which
remain in the background, wrapped in a dangerous oblivion, which risks
making us accomplices to infinite horrors.
Some might argue that the tragedy unfolding in Gaza is a priority,
forgetting that in these same months in forgotten wars around the world
horrendous massacres are being perpetrated. Think of Sudan, Congo,
Eritrea, the Kurdish-speaking regions in northern Iraq.
For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to Sudan.
In the two years preceding the outbreak of the civil war that reduced
Sudan to rubble, killed or forced hundreds of thousands of people from
their homes, Italy supplied weapons to the RSF, the Rapid Support Force
of Dagalo, former commander of the Janjaweed, the "devils on horseback".
In this war Dagalo and his men returned to their favorite sport, the one
they had been known for for decades, that is, burning villages, raping
women, killing men and enlisting children.
Italy was counting on Dagalo to block the departures of migrants from
that area. Dagalo reciprocates the support in his own way, in the
silence of the media and, unfortunately, of many of the movements.
Unfortunately, in the student camps, the emergence of an antimilitarist
attitude has not been combined with a significant criticism of
nationalism, although present in the student components that support the
experience of subtraction from the dynamics of the nation-state in Rojava.
If the fight against all wars, and in particular those where our country
has a direct role, could materialize in a fight against agreements
between the arms industry and universities, involving all agreements on
military cooperation and not only those with Israel, the movements born
this spring would have the necessary posture to throw sand in the
well-oiled mechanisms of schools and universities colluding with war.
Including the war against the poor that is fought on the streets of our
cities.
A radical critique, in addition to denouncing and fighting the
increasingly close relationship between universities and war research,
questions the role of universities and the need for permanent
expropriation of areas of study and research in the service of
imperialism and capitalist logic.
The Drowned and the Saved
In the Nazi concentration camps, only those who made themselves useful
in some way to the functioning of the city-factory of death survived a
few more months. Those who became accomplices, degrading the last grain
of dignity that was left to them, had a chance to make it. But the price
was enormous.
The Nazi concentration camp horror, like the Stalinist gulags, does not
represent an anomaly, a crack in the world order, but an ever-open
possibility.
Gaza today is a sort of open-air concentration camp: those who are not
gutted by Israeli bombs and missiles survive only if they manage to get
a few extra rations to avoid succumbing to hunger. A chance that is
offered above all to those close to the regime. Those who have money and
connections pay and flee.
0We who live far from the bombs and the blackmail of a dead-end trap
must have the clarity and strength to help open the doors of Gaza and
shatter its walls, so that there may be life, dignity, and freedom for all.
But a straight look is needed.
The toll of people massacred by Hamas militias on October 7 weighs as
heavily as that of the ferocious Israeli attacks on Gaza.
The Israeli government will not stop unless the people in that country
kick it out. The Gaza government will not stop until the Gazans get rid
of it.
In our latitudes there are those who evoke the ghosts of global Zionism
that puppets us all. Equally insidious are the Zionist right that
considers all Gazans part of the global jihad.
No one can be branded for a collective guilt.
In this sea of racist shit, those who disappear, victims twice over, are
precisely the men, women, and boys of Gaza. Destined for martyrdom and,
therefore, expendable for Hamas, excess bodies for the supporters of
Greater Israel.
****
The century that doesn't want to end
The roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict are deeply rooted in the history
of the twentieth century. The Arab-nationalist project and the Zionist
project develop within the dynamics of nationalism that characterizes
the beginning of the twentieth century first and the clash between
blocks later.
Zionism was initially regarded, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, with suspicion by a significant part of the European Jewish
communities who aspired to assimilation, whether through the means of
liberal democracies or through revolutionary movements, within European
societies.
The almost fully accomplished genocidal project of German fascism, which
also exploited the historical anti-Semitic feelings of the populations
of Eastern Europe, as well as the collaboration of Italian and French
fascism, entailed the complete destruction of the Jewish communities in
Eastern Europe within the guidelines of the General Plan Ost. 8
The failure of liberal democracies to block genocidal plans even by
providing refuge to those fleeing Germany and then Europe, such as the
1939 blockade of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine by the
British authorities or the case of the SS St. Louis refugees rejected by
the US and sent back to die in Germany, as well as the abominable
opportunist approach of the USSR marked the end of opposition to Zionism
within what remained of that Yiddish world that survived the Shoah.
Survivors who tried to return to their shtetls of origin were chased
away, if not killed outright, by the Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and
Russians who had occupied the depopulated villages. The winds of
anti-Semitism that were blowing in Stalinist Russia - just think of the
construction of the so-called Medici Plot 9 - certainly did not reassure
the survivors, even those most closely linked to the workers' movement,
a movement in which the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe had also
expressed a large number of militants.
If the Italian and French Jewish communities, although deeply affected
by the Shoah and by local collaborationism, were still able to find a
home upon their return from the extermination camps, the same was not
true for what remained of the Jewish populations in the East.
This situation laid the foundation for mass emigration to the nascent
state of Israel.
The Twenties and Thirties
During the 1920s and 1930s, conflict began to escalate in the former
Ottoman region known as Palestine, which had been under British rule
since the end of the First World War.
There are several factors that contributed to this. The approach of
revisionist Zionism, which would later give rise to the Irgun and Lehi
10 , was fully inscribed within the mystique of blood and soil that
permeated European political discourse in those years. At the same time,
socialist Zionism suffered the weight of its own contradictions: the
forcing of a project that was simultaneously classist and nationalist
increasingly fell back towards forms of nationalism with proletarian
hues, well exemplified by the "Jewish Work" directive desired by the
leadership of the Histadrut 11 .
This is not happening because of some arcane colonizing plot but because
of a corrosion of the principles of revolutionary classism that occurred
in the years of reaction that followed the revolutionary momentum after
the First World War. At the same time, Arab nationalism takes shape and
here too we see that mysticism of blood and soil at work, on the other
hand the elites of the colonized peoples went to study in the
universities of the elites of the colonizers. It is wrong to say that
the erosion of relations between the Arab population and the Jewish
population of the Old Yishuv is simply the daughter of the emergence of
the New Zionist Yishuv 12. The Hebron pogrom of 1929 ferociously struck
the members of the Jewish community that had always lived there, a
Jewish community of the Old Yishuv, anti-Zionist for religious reasons.
Jewish immigration to the former Ottoman province of Syria challenged
the idea of Arab supremacy in a land steeped in strong religious
significance given the presence of Al-Aqsa / Temple Mount 13 . The clash
between two nationalist projects in the same land was inevitable.
The Ambiguous British Colonialism
The ambiguity of the colonial rule of the United Kingdom exacerbated the
conflict. If in a first phase it favored Jewish immigration with the
Balfour Declaration, following the rationale of settling a population
seen as similar and functional to economic development and the
maintenance of colonial rule, it subsequently made an about-face by
limiting Jewish emigration and, in several cases, letting the contenders
slaughter each other. There are several explanations, not mutually
exclusive, for this behavior of the government of London. First of all
there was the use of the classic instrument of divide and conquer: as
long as Arabs and Jews killed each other they did not take it too
seriously with colonial rule. Secondly, Zionism proved to be a political
project that was difficult to control and exploit: the child of the
feeling of revenge of a population that had been subjected to
discrimination on European soil for centuries and that saw anti-Semitic
sentiments growing even in countries that had until then been considered
relatively safe - Germany, Italy and Austria - it had little desire to
be an instrument of Her Majesty's imperialism.
What was supposed to be a marriage of mutual interest, peppered with
mystical Anglican fantasies about Jerusalem, celebrated by Lord Balfour
became a clash between the colonial policies of the United Kingdom and
the attempt to create a safe space for the Jewish masses who felt
increasingly caught in the grip of European nationalisms.
The Expulsion of Jewish Communities from Arab Countries
At the same time, the process of expulsion of Jewish communities from
Arab countries began. In Iraq, the fascist government of Rashid Ali
al-Gaylani unleashed the pogroms - known as Farhud - of 1941. If until
then Zionism had had little influence in a Jewish community, the Iraqi
one, which aimed at assimilation, after the Farhud, emigration to the
Jewish national home became an obligatory choice for many.
In Morocco, under French colonial rule and the control of the Vichy
regime, local Jewish communities suffered growing hostility that pushed
them towards an almost total emigration to the nascent state of Israel.
Similar situations occurred in Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.
This process of expulsion began in the 1920s and was caused by several
factors: the traditional forms of anti-Semitism present in those
countries were exacerbated by the attempts at social engineering by
European colonialism, especially French, which in Algeria granted
citizenship to members of the local Jewish community, a citizenship from
which Arabs were excluded, and by the emergence of an Arab nationalism
that emphasized the supremacy of an Arab and Islamic identity over other
local populations.
1948: The Great Palestinian Exodus
The events of 1948 that led to the convulsive birth of the State of
Israel, supported by the leaders of both blocs but opposed by the
decadent British Empire, caused the exodus of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian Arabs. While the Arab landowners and merchant classes simply
moved their interests to Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, the landless and
dispossessed peasants took the road to refugee camps.
To understand the behavior of the USA and the USSR, we must take into
account how both powers needed to scale down the British Empire. The
USA, in the name of opening up new commercial and political spaces to
which they could access without the cumbersome mediation of London and
in ideological continuity with the project of self-determination of
peoples in a bourgeois framework dear to Wilson, the USSR was well aware
that the ruling class of the nascent Israeli state, belonging to
socialist Zionism, was pro-Soviet and planned to draw Israel into its
sphere of influence. The end of the pro-British monarchy in Egypt caused
the USSR to change its front, which went from supplying weapons to the
Israelis to supplying them to the Egyptians, judging Cairo a more
interesting partner. The United Kingdom, in an attempt to maintain
control of Suez, allied itself with Tel Aviv in the disastrous operation
of 1956.
The change of sides of the Israeli state, from a non-aligned state with
relations with both blocs, to a state included in the Atlantic bloc took
place starting from this episode.
The Six-Day War and the Conquest of Jerusalem
The 1950s and 1960s were marked by a continuous state of tension between
the various neighboring countries. The Nasserist attempt to unify the
Arab political space in the United Arab Republic 14 would have as its
fulcrum the opposition to the Israeli state. Beyond the heavy internal
contradictions of the project, which would fail within a few years, one
of the final blows was the failure of the military confrontation with
Israel. The attempted combined attack by the Arab forces in June 1967
ended with a very violent preventive attack carried out by the IDF that
led to the complete destruction of the Egyptian air force, the
occupation of the entire Sinai, of Gaza, until then under Egyptian
control, and of a good part of the Golan and, above all, to the conquest
of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, until then under Jordanian control.
The conquest of Jerusalem must be considered an important turning point
from a cultural point of view, given the role played by this city for
all three so-called Religions of the Book as a fulfilled prophecy.
For religious Zionism, the conquest of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount
provided the ideological fuel for its expansion, transforming it from a
relatively marginal movement into a major mass movement. At the same
time, dispensational Christianity 15 saw the reconquest of Jerusalem as
the fulfillment of prophetic visions of the end times and the approach
of the Millennium.
For part of the Islamic world it was always a prophecy of the end times.
Israel/Jordan: An Ambiguous Relationship
From the period following the Six-Day War, an increasingly ambiguous
relationship will be created between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,
the only monarchy in the area not swept away by the social-national
revolutions of the 1950s, and Israel. There are several factors to take
into account: Jordan had maintained strong relations with the United
Kingdom and, through it, had linked itself to the Atlantic bloc; the
Jordanian elite was growing concerned about the presence of large masses
of Palestinian refugees who were organizing themselves in parallel with
the Jordanian state within its borders; the kingdom was interested in
maintaining control, a source of prestige, of Al-Aqsa, of which,
however, it maintains, and already maintained at the time, custody even
if it is territorially incorporated into Israel.
The issue of the uncomfortable presence of the PLO will be resolved by
military means by the monarchy with Black September in 1970. At the same
time, contacts will be created at the highest levels between the
Jordanian monarchy and the Israeli government. Jordan distanced itself
so much from other Arab countries that King Hussein, on the eve of the
Yom Kippur War of '73, went personally and secretly to meet with Israeli
Prime Minister Golda Meir to inform her of Egyptian and Syrian
intentions, in an attempt to avert the war.
The Yom Kippur War itself would see the definitive end of Arab hopes for
military victory over Israel. A war that had begun in an advantageous
position, with a surprise attack on two fronts and the use of innovative
tactics and weapons that allowed infantry to hold their own against
armored forces and to mitigate Israel's superior air capabilities, was
completely overturned in less than two weeks: the Syrian armored
divisions that had almost broken through on the Golan were forced into
an undignified rout; the Israeli army was a few dozen kilometers from
Damascus; the Egyptian third army was surrounded by the Israelis'
crossing of the canal, which reached within a hundred kilometers of an
undefended Cairo.
An armed peace
If the Egyptian and Syrian hypotheses of victory against Israel faded,
so did the Israeli idea, which had dominated since the lightning victory
of '67, of being able to keep its neighbors in check indefinitely. The
peace process between states was thus unblocked. These were the events
that led to the normalization of relations between Israel, Egypt and
Jordan, sponsored by the USA which attracted Sadat's Egypt, and even
more so Mubarak's after the assassination of Sadat by the Islamists,
into its sphere of influence.
The PLO's nationalist, yet secular and socialist, project adopts the
Third Worldist rhetoric typical of the elite of subordinate nations that
were trying to carve out their space under the aegis of the USSR, and
takes shape after the complete failure of the Arab states to provide a
solution through war to the Palestinian question. But the PLO's project
will also fail.
The substantial failure of the PLO is marked by its expulsion from
Jordan in September 1970, by the recourse to a demented - and infamous -
strategy of attacks against the civilian population - not only in Israel
but also in third countries - and by the inability to sustain a military
confrontation, even in asymmetric terms, with the Israeli army. The
normalization of relations with Jordan and Egypt under the aegis of the
United States left the Likud governments, which came to power in Israel
in the late 1970s, free to attack the PLO in depth in Lebanon,
nullifying its military capacity.
Turn right
Since the end of the 70s we can see the shift to the right of Israeli
politics, these are the years of close relations with the South African
supremacist regime and the birth of the settler movement, of the
collaboration with the fascist groups of the Maronites in Lebanon.
During the 80s the emergence of the evangelical millenarian movements in
the United States acted as a driving force for Jewish messianicism. If
initially ultra-nationalist and religious Zionism was relegated to a
corner of Israeli politics, in the following twenty years we will
witness the growing legitimacy of the political sons of Rabbi Kahane 16 .
In these years the question of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank
arose. We are faced with a peculiar phenomenon. If initially the
settlements in the occupied territories, implemented by religious
Zionist organizations, were managed ambiguously by the Labour
governments, who saw them as a possible commodity for territorial
exchanges with neighboring countries and an answer to the perennial
question of strategic depth 17 , the settler organizations managed to
carve out an ever greater political space. When at the end of the 1970s
the Likud, heir of Revisionist Zionism, came to power it did so thanks
to the votes and mobilization of the settlers. During the 1980s and
1990s the most extremist branches of these were however kept on the
margins and a further round of repression took place after the
assassination of Rabin in 1994, an assassination committed by a
Kahanist. The attacker of the Tomb of the Patriarchs came from the same
ranks.
Rabin's assassination will in fact mark the end of the peace process,
which was highly contested in the Palestinian camp because it was too
unbalanced towards Israel, and the window of diplomatic solution that
had opened following the First Intifada will close within a few years.
Conversely, in the Palestinian field we are witnessing the progressive
loss of power of the PLO in favor of entities such as Hamas and the JIP
or Hezbollah in Lebanon. The end of the third-world narrative has given
way to militant Islamism inspired by the Komeynist counter-revolution in
Iran.
This process is due to several factors: the PLO has staked everything on
the peace process, but this, in addition to being contested for its
general approach, has been interrupted; the PLO is increasingly assuming
the role of internal police in the areas under the authority of the PNA
(Palestinian National Authority); the PLO is, ultimately, a corrupt and
clientelist party, more interested in cashing in on international aid
money and placing cousins and nephews of leaders in public positions and
in the "shacks of power" than in carrying forward the political demands
for which it was born.
During the 1990s and 2000s, we will witness the Israeli disengagement in
Lebanon first and then in the Gaza Strip. In the case of the withdrawal,
by unilateral decision, from the Gaza Strip implemented by the Sharon
government in the mid-2000s, several settlements of the settlers will be
demolished, causing an initial fracture between a Likud government,
otherwise led by a hawk, and the movement of the settlers itself.
At the same time, the Palestinian Islamist camp will repeatedly target
Israeli civilians, with a series of suicide attacks against mass
transportation and public places.
Sharon's strategy of disengaging from Gaza, leaving it to the PA
government, to focus on strengthening the settlements in the West Bank
and containing Hezbollah will fail: the PLO will lose the elections
against Hamas, opening a phase of civil war in the Palestinian camp, and
Sharon will end up out of the game, due to a stroke that will make him
spend the rest of his "life" in a vegetative state.
The successive Israeli government coalitions, increasingly shifted to
the right, will have as their main objective the containment of Iran and
Hezbollah - the Lebanese Party of God which cannot be considered a
simple Iranian proxy - and to ensure that no entity emerges in the
Palestinian camp capable of opposing what has now consolidated as an
apartheid system.
It is impossible to address here the complex situation of the Eastern
Mediterranean over the last 20 years, from the US intervention in Iraq
to the Arab Spring, from the Arab Spring to the Islamist
counter-revolution, from Turkish interventionism in the Levant to the
Shiite crescent, in these pages: we will not do so.
Israeli Strategy in the Twenty-First Century
As regards the Israeli strategy that emerged in the 2010s, suffice it to
say that the events of October 7 marked its failure, causing - among
other things - a deep rift with the USA.
It is worth trying, however, to frame the evolution of the Israeli and
Palestinian political framework in the context of the global trends of
the last forty years.
First of all, the emergence of religiously inspired political movements,
Hamas and JIP in Palestine, Kach and its derivatives in Israel, is not a
peculiarity of that geographical area.
Toran-nationalist Zionism, or Hardal, not to be confused with other
historical religious Zionist currents, was born and strengthened in the
same years in which the United States witnessed the imposition in the
Republican political field of right-wing evangelical movements, that
group of evangelical charismatic churches that would provide the votes
for the Reagan and Bush presidencies, and to a lesser extent for the
Trump one, and that would shift US politics extremely to the right. The
pro-Zionism of the American evangelical right has a religious basis and
is intertwined with the economic interests of the US war sector. For
further information on the topic, see the text by Gorenberg cited in the
note.
These movements, which in both cases have an interclassist composition,
emerge with force in the same years in which Neoliberalism imposes
itself and there is a significant retreat from the social conquests of
the previous decades. In Israel this means the dismantling of the strong
welfare state, the crisis of Kibbutz and Moshav, the loss of votes for
the parties of the left, which have embraced neoliberalism and have not
brought home a peace process worthy of the name. The emergence of a
religious dimension gives answers in terms of salvation in the face of a
world that in the space of a few years has completely restructured itself.
On the Arab-Palestinian side, the inability of socialist and nationalist
parties to actually bring home a decent result, the adoption of
neoliberal policies to access the funds of the International Monetary
Fund, will cause the same dynamics. The emergence of entities such as
Hamas and the JIP are the children of the failure of the PLO. The
adoption of a millenarian perspective, common to both the Hardal parties
and the Islamist parties, the atmosphere of constant end times in which
the rationale of decisions taken by the national bourgeoisies are
intertwined with religious visions of an apocalyptic nature, as the
importance assumed by the Temple Mount / Al-Aqsa clearly demonstrates,
are the hallmark of these years.
At the same time, in the Israeli camp, the Netanyahu government, in
order to survive the scandals and the subsequent judicial investigations
caused by the huge bribes received by the prime minister and his direct
political and family entourage, have led the Likud to rely more and more
on the Hardalim-inspired parties. Netanyahu's need to survive
politically and judicially has been joined by the will of the fascist
Hardalim parties to achieve the evergreen, for fascism, mystical union
between people and government. In this perspective, one can frame the
attempt at judicial reform, or rather the attempt to cancel the
independence of the judiciary, one of the cornerstones of the liberal state.
It is a dynamic similar to that of the criticism from the Bannonian
right of the federal bureaucracy in the USA that characterized the first
period of the Trump presidency.
It is, above all, a dynamic that mirrors that of the creation of
religiously inspired party states that has marked the last thirty years
in the Islamic world in the Levant.
Any possibility of emancipation will depend on the need to do away with
these political-religious forces and with the economic system that
evoked and fueled them.
It will not be the uncritical flattening towards religious nationalism,
any religious or secular nationalism, even when it presents itself as
the banner of the oppressed, that will provide a way out.
****
A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of essentialism 18
Very first steps of phenomenological investigation
We believe it is particularly useful for the purposes of the discussion
to note the predominance of some red-brown and communitarian slogans in
the contemporary political debate. Leitmotifs such as the overcoming of
the age-old distinction between the right and the left category, or the
return of the popular spirit in place of the class struggle, with the
related legitimation and strengthening of the state power that should be
the bearer of such "spirit", we often find them in the democratic
political arena, in public opinion and in the main media.
It follows the perception of an identity threatened by neoliberal
policies, by the homologation of mass society, by the global domination
of the commodity that empties the form of its content and tries to
penetrate consciences to shape them. The evident sense of bewilderment,
together with the progressive impoverishment of the middle class that
feels its rights wavering, has ended up triggering a powerful
sovereignist resurgence almost everywhere, materialized in the retreat
into a model of closed community that is constituted in the denial, in
the exclusion of the other, following the desperate attempt to restore
order to the systemic chaos characterized by the advance of the Moloch
of globalized capitalism. The recipe for a strong identity rides the
mounting fear of those who feel robbed of their own tomorrow, providing
them with the illusion of an easy escape route to salvation. Finally, we
find the paradigm shift that marks the passage from the now obsolete
"scientific" racism (the tendency to attribute criteria of superiority
or inferiority to the genetic heritage of a certain human group in
contrast to another) to the more modern differentialist racism, from
which derives a convinced opposition to immigration on the basis of
safeguarding independence, authenticity, cultural integrity, waving the
spectre of mixing, which would risk contaminating a presumed "purity of
tradition".
The undeniable success of the key concepts just highlighted - gradually
grafted and rooted in traditions that are also distant from each other,
with significant conceptual and social shifts that can be found in the
production of ideas from below - can be both framed as a reactive
phenomenon to triumphant capitalism, structural precariousness and the
uncertainty of the future, and encouraged by a fundamental ambiguity
that decisively and unequivocally distinguishes this theoretical
framework, which fits well with the general climate of postmodernity: an
eternal anomic present, characterized by a disposable production of meaning.
The colonization of the imagination, partially achieved by a
fundamentally reactionary way of thinking that ends up forcefully
denying the right to internal dissent, has roots that go back a long way
in time, from National Bolshevism born in the context of the Weimar
Republic in Germany, to the extra-parliamentary right inspired by the
Nouvelle Droite of Alain De Benoist in France, up to the revisionism of
Marxism in a campist and anti-Atlanticist key, carried out by Costanzo
Preve in Italy.
One of the pernicious effects is the identification of the enemy
exclusively in the "foreigner", a subject immediately attributable to an
unalterable national block, considered territorially, culturally and
mentally homogeneous.
Often we have the enemy at home, he speaks our language, has the same
habits and customs. As Brecht said, the enemy - the master who exploits
or the government that sends us to war - always marches at our head.
It is therefore more important than ever to wage a cultural battle to
put a stop to a trend that has undergone a clear acceleration in recent
years and that in the long run can only cause further damage to the
development of analyses and tools of struggle within social movements.
Culture elevated to Essence
Let us focus our attention on the plague of cultural differentialism,
the result of a process of essentialization and mythologization of
culture. Culture is conceived as an absolutized nature, as an
a-historical category, well-defined and immutable, and as such exempt
from evaluations and criticisms.
The latter soon takes on the appearance of a monolithic entity that
cannot be mixed, cannot be contaminated, is sclerotized in time and
space, and finally perfectly superimposable on an interclassist
conception of the people, which thus ceases to preserve within itself
any difference of class, social discrimination or gender. Following this
logical line, it follows that it is exclusively the "culture" of a given
"people" that acquires ontological dignity, thought and perceived as an
imposing homogeneous construction that pursues unanimity, or aims to
assimilate and extinguish in itself all its parts, even the most
conflictual and antithetical of the social body, engulfed, deprived of
their own specificity and their own potential for disruption.
The lack of a semantic loophole with respect to an authoritarian
operation of subsumption leads to short circuits and poses difficulties
in problematization. Concrete examples of this deforming conception can
be identified in the clumsy justification of female genital mutilation
carried out in childhood in countries such as Somalia, rather than the
Republic of Guinea or Saudi Arabia, or even the obligation to wear the
hijab in the theocracy led by the ayatollah.
The wall of incommunicability erected by some exponents of the radical
left who infantilize individuals by judging them totally at the mercy of
the cultural and social environment in which they are inserted, sees as
a dramatic consequence the invisibilization of the paths of struggle and
emancipation that develop in those same territories. This is the case of
the Guinean and Somali women who daily oppose the horror of mutilations,
the result of a misogynistic and patriarchal setting of society, or of
the women in Iran who claim at their own risk and peril the right not to
hide their bodies, rebelling against the impositions of a religious
fundamentalism that by its very nature is an enemy of freedom.
Expressing concrete solidarity with those who do not accept the
established order and its laws by deciding to take charge of their own
future, whatever the context of reference, is the first step towards
building a world of free and equal women.
Which universal?
The Western universal, constitutively excluding and marginalizing
towards all those who are not considered full citizens (the poor,
migrants, women, subjects not conforming to the hetero-cispatriarchal
norm, etc.), and absolute relativism, substantially uncritical towards
potentially harmful or oppressive customs and practices, are two sides
of the same coin. Both systems are placed in an equidistant position
with respect to an idea of a universal plural in the process of
construction, which can only arise from the paths of struggle undertaken
by the movements, traversed first of all by those who subjectify
themselves starting from the awareness of their own condition.
It is not a mere abstraction, but the concrete perspective of the
pluriverse, a world in which multiple worlds coexist, in which it is
possible to maximize diversity in equality. It is necessary to throw
away cultural ballast to experience a plurality of libertarian
approaches that favor the arrival at the individual, rather than
consolidate it as a starting point boxed in roles imposed by the logic
of domination.
The other is different from us, but not for this reason more or less
worthy, more or less valid.
The other is in reality the space of encounter, of equal comparison, of
enriching exchange, of contamination, of criticism, of collective growth
through the search for points of contact and commonality of intent.
An opportunity to weave alliances by arriving at similar conclusions,
following paths that are not identical but not incompatible. Fertile
ground for practicing egalitarian and inclusive social relations from
below. The dimension of the particular is in this perspective a
potential added value, never an obstacle a priori. What unites us, we
affirm with conviction, is stronger than what divides us.
A critical look within the walls of home
The movements of the new millennium have made some of the tools of
decoloniality their own to broaden their gaze.
The idea of dismantling a prejudicial and flattening vision of the
world, derived from the standardization of interpretative keys produced
within cultures of European origin - concepts of civilization, progress,
linear time, domestic living, infinite development... - has often ended
up getting stuck in the meshes of essentialist determinism.
The consideration of the binomial "colonized-colonizer", not so much as
a contingent reality defined by specific actors in play, but as an
a-historical, invariable fact, like a metaphysical assumption outside of
time, leads to conclusions that are at the very least questionable.
It follows that whoever the case has given birth to in the West is
constitutively invested with an original sin with which he is forced to
live and deal, carrying it on his back until the end of his days. It
matters little what his political-cultural points of reference are or
the nature of his relationship with the authoritarian institutions truly
responsible for the predation of natural resources and genocidal
enterprises around the globe. His fate is sealed, indelibly written in
nature. The assumption of guilt is configured as a collective
condemnation with important repercussions on individual self-determination.
Not only that. As regards movements that move on specific issues, an
increasingly marked difficulty of encounter and interpenetration between
different political cultures emerges, often experienced as unwanted
interferences.
The prevailing posture is that of the presumptuous ascent to the pulpit,
of sectarianism, of entrenchment in an ivory tower. Diversity is thus
charged with a hierarchical sign, mutating into a singular form of
inequality that finds its legitimacy in the excluding assumption of
categories that trace the multiple caesuras imposed by patriarchy and
colonization, claiming to confine in an identity given a priori, not
only the capacity to understand oppression, but even the very faculty to
oppose it. If you are not subject to a particular form of oppression you
cannot grasp its "essence", you cannot criticize the choices, practices
and organizational methods of those who rebel against it.
The situation that is created presents groups and social spheres in
watertight compartments, willing only to accept a supine external
solidarity, because they are substantially dominated by distrust and the
paralysis of criticism.
Mala tempora currunt. In some cases we have reached the point of denying
speech or severely limiting freedom of expression based on identity
premises that do not take into account the positions chosen and assumed
by subjects outside of the processes of racialization, sexualization, etc.
In short, the only identity that would seem to really count starting
from these assumptions, is the one imposed from above, assigned from the
outside. An innate, fixed, rigid, frozen identity, in which the
individual ends up exhausting himself.
Contradictory positions and disastrous consequences
It goes without saying that we are faced with a colossal contradiction.
The same streams of the queer transfeminist movement that since the end
of the twentieth century have fought in various capacities to get rid
once and for all of the heavy biological sentence that weighs on the
bodies of those who do not recognize themselves in the sex assigned to
them at birth, which is claimed to correspond to precise characteristics
and gender roles; the same ones who have made the feminism of difference
obsolete, firm on hierarchical and trans-exclusionary positions; the
same ones who have elbowed their way to finally leave behind binary
logic in favor of the self-determination of lgbtqia+ subjectivities, now
seem incapable of making the most of this approach of thought and
carrying its revolutionary premises to the end, fully grasping the scope
of the epochal challenge that lies before us.
Breaking the essentialist order that founds and supports the patriarchal
order should be accompanied by a clear rejection of the essentialization
of culture, which, like gender binarism, considers identities as natural
and immutable "substances", nailed to a pre-written script.
Demonstrating oneself to be up to a radical and necessary relativization
of the nature/culture dichotomy, placing it at the service of an
autonomous production of meaning and organization of conflict from
below: this is the challenge of our time. A time marked by a multipolar
imperialistic scenario, between consolidated power blocks and emerging
nationalisms, small homelands and identities prefiguring excluding
communities. It requires an imperative commitment that puts us
collectively to the test, under penalty of the inexorable capitulation
of any real ambition to broaden the margins of autonomy and freedom at
any latitude.
The Israeli-Palestinian question in particular has revealed a
short-sightedness that leaves no room for excuses.
In recent months, not only have we expressed solidarity with the
Palestinian population, victims of the military occupation and criminal
attacks by the State of Israel in the territories of Gaza and the West
Bank, we have also tacitly identified it entirely with Hamas. We have
chosen to close our eyes so as not to see what it truly represents: an
Islamist political and paramilitary organization that perfectly embodies
the interests of the local bourgeoisie and that has kept the Palestinian
proletariat in a condition of ferocious subjugation for years. As a
result, Israeli civilians have all been repeatedly and indiscriminately
singled out as settlers or active supporters of the Netanyahu government
and of the war directives that are decreeing the terrible massacre of
the civilian population. There is great confusion under the sky. The
implicit connivance of a significant part of the radical queer networks
with the main proponents of Islamic fascism, as well as the
accreditation of the vulgate that would like the Israeli and Palestinian
subaltern classes to be perpetually crystallized in a national
community, risks undermining the credibility of the movements that
develop at the local level and the practicability of revolutionary
paths. To tell the truth, despite the prohibitive political conditions,
on both sides of the war front in the Eastern Mediterranean, there are
those who have not been enchanted by the nationalist and religious
sirens, those who demonstrate, those who object, those who desert. They
are the Israeli refuseniks who refuse the war. They are the inhabitants
of Gaza who took to the streets shouting "we want to live", protesting
against the denied freedoms and the climate of internal repression, well
before the escalation of tension post-pogrom of 7 October 2023.
Unfortunately, this is knowingly ignored, insisting on privileging a
black and white narrative, without shades of gray, where there is
brotherhood according to the motto "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
The imposition of Shari'a in Gaza does not seem to constitute a problem
to be addressed.
While it can be said that the recognition of an obscurantist and
liberticidal coalition in the State, Church, anti-abortion associations
and Catholic-fascists was right on the mark, the same was not true for
the danger of establishing a theocratic regime.
The precepts of the Koran see marriage and motherhood as a "natural
destiny", they offend the dignity of women by relegating them to the
sexual object of Muslim men and to a machine that guarantees procreation
and lineage. The indisputable Law of Allah provides that people
suspected of being against nature and/or going against the Islamic moral
order are persecuted, tortured or killed. Hamas itself, in order to
better govern the Gaza Strip, uses the SSG - General Security Service,
an intelligence network, which, among other things, carries out the task
of moral police on the Iranian model. Among its tasks, that of
investigating the integrity of women, enforcing norms of "decorum" and
presentability. Homosexuality is obviously banned.
The indiscriminate approval of all the pushes coming from the pro-Pal
front has led to the minimization, or worse, the defense of the October
7 attack as an act of popular resistance.
A "resistance" that not only caused the death of more than twelve
hundred people, including over eight hundred civilians, not only
targeted far-left kibbutzim and an electronic music festival, Nova, but
was characterized by numerous rapes and horrific sexual violence,
repeated even on hostages, and used as a weapon of war by Hamas militias.
Honestly, we do not know how to describe such a positioning of the
movements, capable even of feeling sympathy for those who
constitutionally deny their identity and paths.
Defining one's own objectives and choosing the means that are coherently
suited to achieving them is a gamble of no small importance for
contemporary movements. Support for the establishment of a nation-state,
with its own employers and an army deployed to protect the sacred
borders that cement hatred between peoples, is very different from
support for the revolutionary militias that defend the experience of
democratic confederalism in Rojava, where on the contrary there has been
a real attempt to overcome ethnic, religious, cultural, gender
divisions, etc. in an internationalist and pluralist dimension, not at
all nationalist and exclusive.
We believe it is more urgent than ever to renew the call to develop
antibodies against simplistic reasoning patterns that lock everyone's
freedom behind the invisible bars of essentialism and deliver struggles
for liberation and redemption into the hands of executioners who have
only slavery and tyranny to offer.
Passing on the fire
Is there any hope of escaping this frightening picture? First of all, it
may be crucial to highlight the fact that we are all cultural mutagens,
that is, potentially transformative agents. We are certainly affected by
the cultural and social environment in which we live, we are influenced
by it, but we are never passively and completely determined by it. Even
if we were forced to live in the worst of totalitarian dystopias, a gap
would always persist, and it is precisely by working from this gap that
everyone can be an active part of the process, capable of escaping the
fascination of the established, voluntarily and consciously influencing
material and symbolic reality, giving shape to utopian imaginaries that
can be realized thanks to self-organized conflict and contributing to
bringing about a radical transformation of the existing.
In every historical moment, dissidences have arisen. In every moment of
our existence we can act as revolutionaries, counterposing every form of
domination with instances of freedom and social justice. Culture is
dynamic, fluid, changeable, in continuous becoming, because it emerges
from the permanent interaction of human beings.
Clearly it is of fundamental importance to be able to make a long and
inexhaustible effort to deconstruct the self, to recognize privilege and
to be able to divest ourselves of it when invested, siding with those
who experience oppression and exploitation first-hand, refusing the role
in which they would like to nail us in order to reproduce dynamics of
command-obedience. At the same time, however, it is important to feel
free to proudly speak out in the wake of a non-dogmatic tradition of
thought of an anarchist nature. Anarchism is a political proposal whose
cornerstones can be considered universally valid and consubstantial with
any project that represents an alternative to the current state of
affairs, even if declinable in different ways based on the subjects who
promote it and the context in which the proposal finds space and takes hold.
The pride of feeling part of an active minority that persists in
operating in history but against history. That history marked by the
reproduction of hierarchies of power and injustices to which we decide
not to bow, because ours is first and foremost an ethical drive. It is
an urgency for social change arising from the evidence of the miserable
material and moral conditions in which the vast majority of humanity
finds itself; an aspiration whose engine is not a presumed "natural"
necessity but human free will.
Paraphrasing the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler: "tradition is not
watching over the ashes, but passing on the fire"; and here the torch of
anarchy reveals itself to be today more than ever a beacon of hope that
can illuminate the path of the oppressed.
1 For a deeper understanding of the concept of essentialism in movements
also in reference to the Palestinian question see, in this same essay,
"A Spectre Is Haunting Europe: The Spectre of Essentialism"
2 See the article of 8 August 2023 by Paola Caridi on Lettera 22 "Gaza,
protests (not only) for electricity"
ttps://www.lettera22.it/gaza-proteste-per-lelettricita-e-non-solo/
3 For a more in-depth reading see, in this same essay, the text "The
century that does not want to end"
4 See note 1
5 See note 1
6 Cfr. "Anarchy and Decoloniality", video of the meeting of March 22,
2024 https://www.anarresinfo.org/video-anarchia-e-decolonialita/
7 Cf. from the introduction to the meeting on "Anarchy and decoloniality".
8 General Plan Ost: the Nazi strategy for the settlement and management
of Eastern Europe, considered as a living space for the German people.
This strategy included the numerical reduction of the Slavic population,
the enslavement of the survivors, and the total extermination of the
Jewish and Roma populations.
9 The so-called Doctors' Plot is a conspiracy theory invented by members
of the Stalinist security apparatus which targeted a series of important
doctors of Jewish origin in the USSR.
10 Paramilitary groups affiliated with Revisionist Zionism. Particular
emphasis was placed on the fight against British domination, so much so
that it defined itself as an anti-imperialist force. Some of the Lehi
members in the 1950s joined Semitic Action, a group that proposed the
union of all the Semitic populations of the region, creating an
Arab-Jewish confederation, with an anti-Western function.
11 Histadrut, or The General Federation of Workers in the Land of
Israel, the main Israeli trade union, of left-wing Zionist orientation.
The so-called "Jewish Labor" directive indicated to those sectors of the
cooperative economy, mainly agricultural, which referred to the union,
to prefer the work of members of the Jewish community to Arab work.
12 Old and New Yishuv, or the Jewish population in Israel. The Old
Yishuv refers to the Jewish population that lived there before Zionist
immigration.
13 Al-Aqsa / Temple Mount, the area on which the ancient Temple of
Jerusalem stood and on which, in the following centuries, the Al-Aqsa
mosque was built. For a comprehensive study of the meaning of this
place, see the book "The end of days: fundamentalism and the struggle
for the Temple Mount", by Gorenberg, Gershom, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2002.
14 The name "United Arab Republic" represented a state entity consisting
of Syria and Egypt, later joined by North Yemen.
15 Dispensationalism, a theological doctrine typical of some branches of
evangelicalism which places emphasis on a division of human history into
different historical periods of different theological significance which
are dispensed by the divinity.
16 Meir David Kahane, American Israeli rabbi, founder of Kach, an
Israeli far-right party from whose milieu both the attacker of the Tomb
of the Patriarchs and the murderer of Rabin came. The Otzma Yehudit
party, present in the Netanyahu government, descends directly from Kach.
17 The question of strategic depth, or the distance between possible
front lines and the vital geographic centers of a country, has been the
bane of Israeli policy until the territorial conquests of the Six-Day
War. The Sinai was returned to the Egyptians in exchange for the US-led
peace process; the Golan remains under Israeli control to this day.
18 Idea according to which there exist ultimate explanations beyond
which there is no further possible knowledge. Definitive truths, given
once and for all, capable of decreeing the objective impossibility of
change.
Anarchist Federation Tprinese
Antimilitarist Assembly - Turin
The Notebooks of Anarres
July 2024
https://www.anarresinfo.org/tramandare-il-fuoco-per-un-approccio-libertario-alla-questione-palestinese-una-critica-a-essenzialismo-e-nazionalismo/
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