A - I n f o s

a multi-lingual news service by, for, and about anarchists **
News in all languages
Last 30 posts (Homepage) Last two weeks' posts Our archives of old posts

The last 100 posts, according to language
Greek_ 中文 Chinese_ Castellano_ Catalan_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Francais_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkurkish_ The.Supplement

The First Few Lines of The Last 10 posts in:
Castellano_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Français_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkçe_
First few lines of all posts of last 24 hours

Links to indexes of first few lines of all posts of past 30 days | of 2002 | of 2003 | of 2004 | of 2005 | of 2006 | of 2007 | of 2008 | of 2009 | of 2010 | of 2011 | of 2012 | of 2013 | of 2014 | of 2015 | of 2016 | of 2017 | of 2018 | of 2019 | of 2020 | of 2021 | of 2022 | of 2023 | of 2024

Syndication Of A-Infos - including RDF - How to Syndicate A-Infos
Subscribe to the a-infos newsgroups

(en) Italy, Federazione Anarchica Torinese: Passing the Fire: Towards a Libertarian Approach to the Palestinian Question. A Critique of Essentialism and Nationalism I. (1/4) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:45:19 +0300


Introduction ---- This booklet is the result of a collective discussion that lasted, in alternating phases, several months. It is divided into three 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/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en
A-Infos Information Center