Dennis Fox’s Weblog

From Apio comes links to two Italian anarchist assessments of Israel/Palestine.

1. Palestine, mon amour offers a decade of short pieces by Alfred M. Bonanno. Here are excerpts from the introduction, written in 2003, with some apparently awkward translation:

…
The ‘official’ terms of the controversy are well known. The Israelis chased the Palestinians off their land, but this happened so long ago that some of the people born in huts in the camps are now fifty years old. Ridiculous arguments between States have resulted in pieces of land being returned to people who had been driven away, but it is impossible to live on them. In Israel if you don’t work you go hungry. The colons [colonists] of the second Zionist wave got rich through the exploitation of a cheap Palestinian work force and the free use of fields in territories that should now constitute the new State of Palestine. But not only does all this fail to grasp the essence of the problem, it does not even begin to describe it. Perhaps it made sense at the time of the first popular insurrection of the people of the ‘territories’, that of the stones. Now things are moving towards an increasingly ferocious ‘Lebanisation’.
…
And so they continue to attack each other in a never-ending cycle. Each side uses the weapons they have at their disposal: the Palestinians blow themselves up with their own bombs, the Israelis bomb houses in the territories from planes. There are the pacification maps, the internal agreements, the UN guarantees and Bush’s empty rhetoric.

The problem is developing at its own pace, one that can only be grasped by someone who is familiar with such situations, and it is becoming chronic. Hatred becomes acute when one lives in conditions like the Palestinians’, with prospects like theirs, i.e., none at all. There is no hope for their children or for the future of the place where they were born…. They realize that there is nothing for them but a prospect of hatred of an enemy that imprisons, bombs and tortures. On the other side, everyone lives in fear of being blown up as they go to work, dance in a disco, lie asleep in their beds. Here again, blind hatred that sees no alternative is pushing people to demand that the government apply stronger measures. …

There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people, that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect with the Palestinian people directly, without intermediaries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.

2. I’m less clear about the author of Fawda (Anarchy). It begins with a quote from Martin Buber from 1929:

“Let’s remember the way other people have treated us and how they still treat us everywhere, as foreigners, as inferiors. Let’s guard against considering what is foreign and insufficiently known as inferior! Let’s guard against doing ourselves that which was done to us.”

It ends with this:

As the supreme representative of the victims of the supreme anti-democratic horror – nazism – Israel could thus administer a symbolic capital all the more powerful because the neighboring lands are in the hands of dictatorial regimes that don’t hesitate in resorting to violence against their own populations (particularly Palestinians) when necessary. And since the state of Israel cultivated a form of democracy that would like to resemble that of ancient Greece – where the “freedom” of the citizens was based on the slavery of the helots – it was consecrated as the local representative of democracy and western reason, bulwark against the shadow of Islamism. The state of Israel can therefore cause terror to reign all around itself, firm in its super-right, proud of its super-good conscience. This does not prevent it from being condemned to practice a politics of separation at its interior and aggression at its exterior in order to survive. Meanwhile the constant reminders of the misfortunes suffered in the past by the Jews only serve as moral justifications for covering up the horrors carried out in the present. 

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Anarchism, Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.