I am often asked to tell my experience of Palestine; comrades ask me to
write, and I... buy time. I am not a journalist, and I have alwayswritten out of anger and to remind myself who I am and what my values
are. I must say, it was much simpler to speak about Palestine, about
Gaza and yet another genocide - this time at nazi-Zionist hands - when I
was far away, when I was in Italy; but from here, from the inside,
everything is more complex. When that lump in your throat doesn't just
choke your breath but your whole body, the only true and natural
expression that comes out are eyes so full of sadness and rage that they
cloud your sight. Besides, there is nothing more you need to see: you
feel, in your stomach and your bones, the echo of the little ones and of
women and men turned into ghosts. You feel their cries for help and
their despair in your heart; and amid all this you try to give an
anarchist meaning to your life within a one-way world made of violence,
domination, racism, abuse, and corruption. We anarchists know this; we
are used to going against oppression, but that does not make us any less
vulnerable to bondage and despair. Seeing and recognizing the codes of
violence does not make you immune - perhaps only a little freer to
understand from within a system of mental, economic, moral, spiritual,
and physical imprisonment.
Today I read in the papers that "great Italy" continues to receive
wounded, amputee children from Gaza and boasts of having already treated
more than 180 minors (to whom we have destroyed homes, communities,
families, and lives). Yet while our court jesters pose for photos at
airports, hugging these families, we continue to support - with money,
fuel, weapons, contracts, and investments - all those mechanisms that
reinforce nazi-Zionist violence and make these very children orphans,
mutilated, and refugees. In the Israeli business daily Globes in August,
we read that on July 31 the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), the "public
arm of Italian innovation," began investing - via the Artificial
Intelligence fund - in Classiq Technologies Ltd, an Israeli company
leading in quantum-software platforms. Thanks to CDP's contribution, the
company plans to expand its business in Italy through a local
subsidiary, with the aim of strengthening the national quantum-tech
ecosystem. So we hand over Italian public money to support the genocidal
nazi-Zionist system. A "strategic decision," we read. After all, kissing
the Zionists' ass is also a strategy for the fascist government of the
day. Nor do movements stop on the military front: Leonardo S.p.A.,
Italy's largest defense company, with the Ministry of Economy and
Finance holding the majority stake (about 30%), continues to support
Israel's armed forces by supplying advanced weapons systems. In 2024
alone, "great Italy," which welcomes wounded, malnourished, dying Gazan
children, issued 42 new import licenses for armaments from Israel worth
EUR155 million, while exports to Israel were about EUR5.2 million (so
says ISTAT). All this while revolting figures like Tajani kept repeating
that since October 7, 2023, we have blocked all contracts with the
nazi-Zionists (of Israel).
But today I am tired. I no longer want to produce any political analysis
of the genocide in Gaza, of ongoing Zionist violence and injustice in
the West Bank, of the continual attacks on Lebanon, on battered Syria,
on the courageous Yemenis, or on Iran. I don't even want to talk about
the oppressive and dangerous presence of the Zionist state in the Levant
and West Asia. I don't want to talk about the political squalor of
disgusting figures like Salvini, Meloni, and all those fascist puppets
tagging along with the caravan of lackeys of Zionist and American racist
entities, together with the ugly masks of Europe's fake left. Today I
have decided not to look the oppressor in the face anymore: I'm tired;
he disgusts me; he is not mine; I don't care; I don't recognize him.
Today I want to look at human emancipation; I want to urge everyone to a
summons to themselves, because as long as we cry "Free Palestine" from
our Western cells made of consumerism, pornography, fixed-term
contracts, attempts to survive and - worse - to enrich ourselves on
others' backs, not a single piece of this damned Earth will be free. No
Gaza, no Palestine, no Sudan, or Congo, or Sicily will be free.
Palestinian women and men liberate themselves by shouting and by
demolishing with all possible means the mafias, the MUOS sites of
Niscemi, military bases of every kind, arms factories, state armies, and
old and new capitalisms. Palestinians liberate themselves by shouting "I
am a free woman; I am a free human being." Sudanese, Eritreans,
Ukrainians, and Russians liberate themselves by supporting those who
refuse to join all state armies - all armies of death and domination.
So, if I am truly free, I refuse to support a death system with my
taxes; I refuse to work one more hour inside an apparatus of constant
exploitation whose sole aim is to stuff the bank accounts of the 1% of
this unjust world with useless scraps of paper (that sometimes don't
even exist).
And as I write, I know well my frustration at working within an NGO
that, without a doubt, often colludes and dialogues with oppressors,
perpetuating systems of exploitation both as an employer and as a
humanitarian actor. Merely bringing a perspective of Islamic psychology,
ethnopsychology, anti-psychiatry, or the ideas of Frantz Fanon and
anti-colonial psychology into humanitarian mental-health projects -
where I work - is an act of resistance. The mere attempt to change the
narrative - to keep doing projects to "improve the endless resilience"
of Palestinians under continual violence - and instead trying to use
words like Sumud (a Palestinian Arabic word that encompasses both
resilience and resistance) has been perceived as too political, risky,
and biased. All this constantly reminds you that the path of liberation
is continuous, endless - a process that begins from within, from the
words and thoughts that colonized you while you were distracted, while
you grew up at school, while you watched an American Captain America
film, while you slept, while you dreamed of your perfect house by the
sea or your stress-free vacation in Thailand.
The intention of those few idiots who see in human beings and in this
beautiful planet only means to make money will be countered only by a
true love of life - the true and genuine love of desiring my freedom as
part of my Congolese sister's and my Palestinian brother's freedom.
Oppression is opposed not by killing, but by feelings and behaviors of
true empathy and solidarity toward life - by creating, for example,
millions of resistance movements against all racist policies toward
"immigrants": an absurd, debasing, national-fascist and bureaucratizing
concept of what a human being is. All oppressions are countered by
placing the collective before any flag, before fictitious borders drawn
at desks by a few of the world's bureaucrats in uniform or tie, and
retraced with weapons by enslaved brothers and sisters anesthetized by
propaganda, by their own ignorance and cruelty.
But the Earth is rebelling; youth, the employed and the unemployed,
students and retirees are rebelling; and all that is needed now is for
us to see and recognize one another - to see all our struggles as common
struggles rather than as North and South, Hindus and Muslims, whites,
blacks, men and women. These are nothing but constructed differences
designed to divide a single humanity and a single planet.
To be free is exhausting, and it takes practice and courage to step out
of habit and fear if we want to make this process solid. What matters is
to admit that servitude is not simply imposed; in the long run, we all
become complicit. "A tyrant exists only if the people decide to submit,"
said Étienne de La Boétie. These days, in Marseille, in Morocco, in
Livorno, they looked in the right direction; they decided not to submit
and not to let ships dock in their ports that carry weapons used, always
and only, to commit atrocities, perpetuate violence, establish power,
and enrich the same four ignoramuses as ever.
We anarchists will never surrender; we will not stop loving our dream
made of free and genuine people rather than regimented machines; made of
embraces rather than guns; of kindness rather than hatred. Weeping
before scenes of mutilated children in Gaza as in Sudan, or houses
demolished and executions in broad daylight in the West Bank, does not
make me fragile - it makes me anarchist; it makes me free to feel, down
to my blood, my rage at the indecency and shame of the human beings
responsible for horrors in which only our animal species stands out.
Freedom to be human is not won by shouting "Death to the IDF": only by
acknowledging our pain to the last tear will we one day have the courage
to say "Enough!" One day we will merit turning to the right side of
humanity, no longer pandering to the oppressor; one day we will look
only toward that beautiful part of humanity suppressed over the years in
blood by kings, queens, governments, political parties, dictators, and
wars. One day we will look in the right direction and understand that
the emptiness we have carried inside since we were born was called
solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood. Now look at yourselves.
Gabriele Cammarata (a simple anarchist)
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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