Augusta is not Gaza. And yet, for one evening, the distance between the Mediterranean's largest industrial harbor, made of lights, poisons, and money, and the rubble of Palestine seemed to shrink almost to the point of disappearing, in a worrying yet terribly real way. A dark thread ties Augusta to Gaza, places colonized in different ways. But the violence of capitalism and its puppets is creative in its oppression and unscrupulous extraction. This thread is not invisible, nor is it an ideological position; it is a thread made of oil tankers, refineries, military infrastructure, economic interests, contracts between powerful people, and decisions made far from the communities who suffer the consequences, tamed by bribes and often starvation wages. This was the topic addressed on Saturday, May 30, at the Piano Terra association in the Piana district, during the debate "Benzina sul Fuoco," which featured Report journalist Manuele Bonaccorsi and journalist Luisa Santangelo.
The initiative was inspired by the eponymous investigation aired on Report, a journalistic work that helped raise disturbing questions about the role of Italian refineries, and Sicilian ones in particular, in supplying fuel to parties involved in the conflict in Palestine. This issue isn't just about international trade or geopolitics, but directly affects the relationship between territories and war.For those living in eastern Sicily, this topic is far from abstract. For decades, Augusta, Priolo, and Melilli have represented one of the Mediterranean's main energy hubs. A territory devastated by industrial pollution and mafia-run contracts, transformed into a sacrifice zone in the name of development and profit (always the same ones). Today, another dimension of that same reality is emerging with ever greater clarity: the possible involvement of Sicilian oil infrastructure in the logistics chains that fuel armed conflicts and genocides. Reports in collaboration with Greenpeace have documented how, since 2024, shipments of fuel and petroleum products have departed from Italy, including to companies collaborating with the Israeli military during the Palestinian genocide. Among the cases that have emerged is that of ISAB, the petrochemical complex in Priolo, Sicily, from which at least five shipments of fuel are said to have departed between 2024 and 2026, destined for ORL Bazan, an Israeli energy giant involved in supplying the Israeli armed forces.
Faced with a conflict that continues to severely impact the civilian population, the question concerns not only the responsibilities of the Israeli government, but also those of the countries and companies that indirectly support its operations. If international law (which, according to Tajani, applies up to a certain point) requires states not to encourage or contribute to human rights violations and wars against civilians, how was it possible that these supplies continued to flow unhindered? Who authorized, tolerated, or chose to ignore this trafficking? The anarchist movement has always denounced the structural nature of war within the capitalist and state system.
Wars are not born from hatred between peoples but from the interests of states, industries, and economic elites that transform territories and people into expendable tools. But every modern conflict is supported by a gigantic civil and industrial infrastructure: fuel, transportation, ports, telecommunications, finance. The bombs that fall on civilian populations do not appear out of nowhere. Behind them exists a global network of complicity that spans continents and borders-your children, our sisters, and ourselves.
When a territory (Sicily, for example) is integrated into the production chains of war, political responsibility also falls to those who live and travel through that territory. This is not to assign collective blame, but to affirm the need to know, understand, and oppose. The petrochemical plants of Augusta, let's be clear, don't just produce capitalist poisons, but military oil that kills. We've known this for some time; there's a line connecting Augusta to Sigonella. For example, between 2017 and 2019, there were several thefts of military fuel along the military pipeline (known as "GP5"). Investigations have uncovered specialized gangs who operated by drilling into the underground pipeline.
It makes one think that someone probably went astray, some corrupt dealings between powerful people, and they took responsibility. From this perspective, Sicily has a long tradition of antimilitarist struggles that today take on an extraordinary relevance once again. Our thoughts inevitably turn to the experience of the No MUOS movement, one of the most important popular mobilizations of recent decades. Thousands of people, in Niscemi and across the island, challenged governments, militaries, and international strategic interests to denounce Sicily's role as a military platform in the Mediterranean. In that struggle, a simple truth was affirmed: the militarization of territories does not produce security, but war; it protects not populations, but the geopolitical interests of powers.
The same motivations that inspired the struggle against MUOS speak today to the mobilizations against the war in Palestine. Because the problem isn't just about military bases. It's about the entire system that makes wars possible. It's about the ports used for the trafficking of strategic materials, the industries that fuel the war industry, the energy infrastructure that supports the military. It's about an economic model that continues to present itself as inevitable while unloading its social and human costs onto the most vulnerable communities. During the Augusta debate, the importance of independent information as a tool of counter-power emerged forcefully. Journalistic investigations have the merit of piercing the veil of invisibility that often protects economic and military interests. But information alone is not enough. We need a society capable of organizing itself, of building relationships of solidarity, of developing practices of grassroots resistance.
This is the terrain on which anarchism continues to offer a radical and necessary perspective. Faced with the barbarity of war, anarchists do not choose one state front over another.
They do not side with armies, governments, or nationalisms. They choose peoples over states. They choose communities over military apparatuses. They choose international solidarity over the logic of borders and competition. From Augusta to Gaza, from Niscemi to the Mediterranean ports, the stakes remain the same: to steal territories, resources, and human lives from the war machine. In an era where rearmament is presented as a necessity and militarization as a solution, meetings like "Benzina sul Fuoco" represent something more than a simple moment of reflection. They are spaces of collective awareness. Places where we try to rebuild the connection between what happens in the world and what happens on our doorstep.
Let's be clear: war doesn't start when the bombs fall; war begins long before: in boardrooms, ministries, ports, refineries, military bases. And yes, even in voting for the lesser evil, a political party that will never represent the people but simply the usual elites that allow power exchanges to the detriment of humanity, solidarity, and empathy between peoples. Peace will never be the result of government decisions; it will arise, as always, from the ability of communities to organize from the bottom up, oppose the logic of domination, and build relationships based on freedom, equality, and mutual support.
Gabriel Cammarata
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/giugno2026_compressed-1.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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