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Almost one year after October 7th, the need to build an anti-war movement is becoming more and more urgent. The discussions, confrontations, and even clashes within social movements about what is at stake are all the more urgent at a time when Minister Piantedosi is prohibiting the national demonstration planned for October 5th because, in his words, the celebration of a “massacre” would not be compatible with public order. However, the topics and conditions of our debate cannot be determined by a Minister of the Interior.
Reopening the debate is essential because it is becoming more and more necessary to oppose en masse Israel’s terrorist and genocidal violence in Gaza, knowing that the Palestinians’ struggle is part of a world war against which it is equally necessary to mobilize. The way and the contents of the demonstration’s call have been indigestible for many and for us as well. This is why we want to discuss again about October 7th and about what it meant for our movement.
WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON, AND HOW
Valerio Renzi did so recently, with an article published in the newsletter “Tempolinea”, which we shared on our website because it had the merit of raising questions that have been stuck in the throats of many over the past year. To face the question “Do you condemn Hamas?” – as Renzi does – seems to be a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and, as such, has caused a defensive reaction that shut down the possibility of figuring out not only which side to take but also how to do so. We are on the side of Palestinian women and men, without having the arrogance to believe that they correspond completely with Hamas or that for them, fighting alongside Hamas, means sharing its political project.
Instead, in the wake of the genocide perpetrated by the State of Israel in Gaza and the outbreak of a war in Lebanon that is spreading beyond the Strip and the West Bank, it seems to us necessary to discuss precisely what political project lies behind the positions that equate liberation with martyrdom. This need cannot remain in our throats or be stifled by repeated accusations of being white and privileged, hereditary accomplices of all colonization, false intersectional bourgeois feminists, and even atheist suprematists. This does not mean lecturing on resistance, but figuring out what we can and should do from here. And if we disagree on this, we should at least be able to discuss it without being accused of being on the side of the enemy.
This is all the more necessary in view of the events that have been announced, not only in Italy, for the anniversary of October 7th. In retrospect, that day meant many things, or rather it had different meanings for different subjects. On October 7th, Palestinian bulldozers demolished the fence around Gaza. On October 7th, there was violence against civilians, and Israeli women were raped. For sure, less violence and fewer rapes than those Israel has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate against Palestinian civilians, men, and women: fewer deaths, fewer hostages, and less torture, but quantity does not change the quality of what was done.
Fanon reminds us that the struggle for liberation passes through violence. Yet, the point is not violence as such but the ability to make distinctions while practicing it and the possibility to discuss its results later. Violence is a political act, not an act of faith: it does not suspend judgment, it demands it. It requires that we understand, here and now, who we can fight with to end genocide and the endless violence it legitimizes and imposes.
It is not true that every Israeli is a settler, as the Young Palestinians claim in the name of a natural right to a land that belongs to Palestinians and empowers them to expel anyone who usurps it. Some Israeli men and women do not identify with Netanyahu’s plans, and others protest and strike or defect, flee, and seek asylum so as not to support the Zionist occupation with arms. Does being born in Israel make them enemies? Does anyone believe that turning millions of Israelis into refugees is the solution to the millions of Palestinian refugees? For sure, the migrants killed and kidnapped by Hamas’ militias on October 7th were not settlers, but workers employed by Israel through bilateral pacts with very non-Western countries like Thailand. We do not accept to treat them as “collateral damage”.
WHAT REVOLUTION? FOR PALESTINE, WITHOUT GUARANTEES
October 7th was then the expectation, if not the hope, that a breach could finally open. Still, it was also the return of terror and a cynical calculation in a regional power conflict. However, it is impossible to make a one-sided judgment on October 7th; at this point, it would be redundant. What we see is that it did not bring the promised liberation to Palestinian women and men, it did not stop the counting of thousands of Palestinian victims that preceded it, and that – after October 7th and the genocide that followed – we do not know when we will stop. The question is not the past, but whether overthrowing terror against those who had practiced it for decades is liberation.
Making sloppy references to the October Revolution, the Baku Conference and the Bolsheviks does not establish that October 7 was a “revolutionary act of decolonization”. One can practice political atheism without denying that the seeds of rebellion have been and can be sown in religion. We have seen it in the banlieues, and we have seen it when Sicilian peasants – whom many recognize as our “original” subalterns – pursued class struggle by carrying the statue of the Madonna in procession alongside the effigy of Marx. But this does not change the fact that those peasants wanted to get rid not only of their masters, but also of the priests who ate at the masters’ tables, and that, for the same reasons, women deserted the church and stopped baptizing their children.
The accusation of “Orientalism” – of belittling the practices of Palestinian resistance in the name of a supreme Western model – should be directed at those who claim that only by rediscovering the tools that “draw on their history and culture” can Palestinians resist a broader colonial prison, that of Western thought, of which Israel would be the material executor. For the sake of Fanon, who claimed not to be a slave to any past and who did not believe that liberation ended with national independence, these are the Orientalists who turn Palestinian resistance into a myth that leaves no room not so much for criticism from outside but for voices from within.
The apology of resistance creates its people and turns them into a community of martyrs for their land, without asking whether Palestinian women and men only need the land or whether they would aspire to something more or different from the political Islam that the State of Israel has gone to great lengths to make the only viable way to struggle, only to legitimize, as it is already doing in Lebanon, an extension of its war of annihilation and its messianic delusions.
If revolution means a return to a mythical time when Palestine belonged to the Palestinians by natural right, then it is already lost. It is clear that Israel’s attack on Gaza and the violence in the West Bank must end immediately. This is the first thing we must fight for, and Palestinian women and men must have a place to live, not just to survive. Precisely because we have the privilege of not risking our lives under the blows of an Israeli fighter jet, we can demand more than survival when we stand on their side.
LIBERATION AND POLITICAL PROJECT
Those who say that for Palestinian women and lgbtq people, the struggle against patriarchy comes after the struggle against colonialism are right. Indeed, Israel’s bombs leave them no choice. But this truth ends up being an admission of defeat: the defeat of women and legbtq people who had to abandon their struggle against patriarchy – both Israeli and native patriarchy – because Israel wiped out that struggle with bombs. Thus, there should be an end to the brazen anti-feminism of those who say that white feminists cannot speak out because they are healthy carriers of colonialism, or because they would be giving “lessons” to Palestinian women, something which, by the way, none of them have the power to do and many, though not all, do not even intend to.
“White feminist” has become an insult aimed at any woman who refuses that the male leadership of Hamas should be the only one to decide what Palestinian women and lgbtq people should or should not do, or even just at those who do not think that women and lgbtq people are all in agreement when it comes to prioritizing struggles or how they relate to each other. Those who wield the accusation of “white feminism” guiltily forget that it was Palestinian women during the first intifada who said that “there can be no national liberation without women’s liberation from patriarchy”. It was Iranian and Kurdish women who were the first to say that the liberation of Palestine must be accompanied by the cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” because revolution is not just about having land but about overthrowing the power relations that are grounded on it.
Thus, there is a problem with the political project and the idea of society that the struggle for self-determination alone does not solve. Nor it can be solved by appealing to the undeniable right of Palestinians to choose the regime they prefer. About what kind of self-determination are we talking about? That of the mythical people who are resisting, or that of the men and women, girls and boys who are now fleeing from bombs, hunger and disease, and who, when the bombs stop falling, will have to face the devastating poverty left by the war, the male violence intensified by despair, the unbearable theft of a future so closed as to be unimaginable? And what kind of self-determination do proletarians of all sexes and colors practice in the West, which is certainly not under colonial occupation, but is ravaged by militarism, which, as a result of Israel’s war against Gaza and the war in Ukraine, is running rampant like a suffocating gas that takes away our present and future air?
TEARING DOWN WALLS, BREAKING DOWN FRONTS
All of this concerns us because we have the problem of asking ourselves what we can and must do to play our part in ending this nightmare that haunts Gaza’s past, present and future, as well as our own. After October 7th, the uprising against the Israeli genocide offered a glimpse of the possibility of an anti-war movement that had remained lukewarm – and no less divided along geopolitical and ideological lines – in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite the fact that it not only left hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, but also radically altered the transnational political scenario in which we all now live.
The Israeli government’s genocidal project and practice established a clear line between the oppressed and the oppressor, and on this line a process of political mobilization was activated. Massive demonstrations followed, the mass involvement of old diasporas and new migrant generations, and even the awakening of the students’ movement in encampments around half the world. In the United States itself, labor organizations stood up for a cease-fire, responding to the pressure from below for Israel to stop its assault on Gaza. But in the process, in Italy as elsewhere, something went broke.
It is not only the terrible habituation of the spectators to the horror of the war in Gaza. Something went broke also because this line, clear and therefore capable of mobilization, has become a wall. A wall that prevents the breaking of fronts to connect Israelis who flee or refuse to serve the Zionist project with Palestinians who do not accept that martyrdom is their only destiny. A wall that has turned the struggle in Palestine into a clash of civilizations between the West and its seething “rest,” without taking into account that the West itself is internally divided by its “rest” and that this “rest” is itself governed by the transnational logic of capital.
Israel recruits asylum seekers, promising them citizenship if they do not die while conquering a strip of land for the Zionist project. Are these asylum seekers from former African colonies victims or agents of Western colonization? And is that the question we need to ask, or should we instead ask how to fight a war that disrupts identities, and a racism that does not only run along colonial lines but follows you every time you practice your freedom of movement?
OPPOSING THE THIRD WORLD WAR
Palestine has a long history of horrors that no one can or should forget, but the struggle for Palestine cannot be limited to the specialists who know this history inside out, and the meaning of this struggle cannot be limited to those with an authentic Palestinian identity. Not so much because Palestine is global, but because its dimension as territorial or regional confrontation is swept away by the world war inaugurated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The connection between the two wars is another taboo that needs to be broken. There is a difference between the invasion of a state by another state, which has its own recognized sovereignty and official army, and the aggression by a state against a stateless population, without sovereignty and without an army, which has been living under occupation for more than 75 years. But is it really the obsession with sovereignty that makes the difference? What strength does it give to the struggle against genocide or to the struggle for liberation, whatever liberation may mean? Given the immense disparity of military power between the state of Israel and the multiple forms of resistance in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon, what does this resistance gain from the affirmation of its uniqueness? We are well aware of the differences, but we also see how this world war now claims to normalize and legitimize all destruction and killing, whether mass or specific, of civilians or soldiers, in Gaza or in Donbass.
While protecting the myth of resistance from the voices of disagreement, the exceptional nature of the Palestinian question also compresses its expansive momentum. We believe that disagreement must be voiced in order to expand the struggle: mobilizing for Palestine cannot be an issue addressed only by experts. One does not need a specialization or a certified identity to oppose genocide in the struggle against the Third World War, which unfolds its material effects not only in Ukraine or the Middle East but also in the lives of those who live, work, and struggle in every part of the world. This is even more important if we cultivate the project of making the opposition to war and massacres a mass and partisan politics capable of forming a united front against the repressive logic that we will have to face while looking beyond it.
The idea of monopolizing the meaning of our struggle alongside Palestinian men and women does not go in this direction, nor does it contribute to widening the front of those who reject the genocide that is being carried out against them. If we want to talk about revolution, we think that the answer to the questions “how, why, and with whom” must be confronted, that it cannot only be sought in the past to be revived and that working out a common opposition to the current world war is crucial today. A great demonstration is needed in Italy, as well as in every part of the world. A demonstration like those of the planetary movement against the war in Iraq of 2003, but more than those and unlike those, it has to be capable of accumulating and maintaining the strength we need to oppose the genocide in Palestine, patriarchal violence, the dominant racism and the endless exploitation that war promises and imposes.
