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 piece of 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 claim 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.
https://www.anarresinfo.org/27-09-tramandare-il-fuoco-presentazione-e-dibattito/
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