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PALESTINE,
MON AMOUR



Contents


Introduction - 4

Still Now, With No Title at All - 6
The Crux of a Problem That Cannot Be Solved -11
A Strange Idea -19

The Insurrectional Struggle in Palestine - 21
The Palestinians Continue to Die - 24
Against the Israeli Colonisers - 26
The Horror of Growing Accustomed to Horror - 27
No to the Palestinian State! - 28
After the Horror, Disgust - 31
Let's Boycott Israeli Products - 34
A Molotov in Turin - 35
New Palestinian Initiatives - 38
How to Become Like Those of the Past - 39
Not Just Buttons - 40
The Palestinian Police - 42
From Marx to Uri - 43

The Obvious Aspect of the Unthinkable - 44
The Miracle of the Worse - 46
The Reasons for Fundamentalism - 48
Behind the Ghost of Carpentras - 51
Who is the Jew? - 53
The Kibbutz Movement - 59
Communes, From Experimentation to Survival - 62
Untitled - 65
Postface - 67


No need to comment on the mistake of thinking that things would be
any different if in place of a right wing government in Israel there
was a left. It would be the same, perhaps in a less rigid way more
fitting to the weak position of this anomalous State on the
chessboard of international equilibrium.

That clears the chatter of those who consider possible an alternative
to the Israeli situation while leaving the unshakeable theocentric
characteristics of this State standing. Either the theocentric Israeli
State must disappear, giving life to a federalist kind of formation that
is open to the possibility of a communitarian cohabitation with Arab
Palestinians and eventually with other peoples, or the Jews will be
moving towards a catastrophe once again.

But perhaps the Shoah is precisely what they are waiting for,
according to the forecasts of their profits. How can you disavow
them?


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Postface


Introduction


The two latest decisions of Netanyahu's Israeli government were to
extend the Jews' settlement from the East to places west of the city of
Jerusalem occupied by the Arab Palestinians, and to continue to
favour new settlers in the occupied territories.

On the purely political level of international politics, these two
decisions were resolved in clear violation of the Oslo agreements,
which does not surprises us in the least. There is not one agreement
with the United States and the European Union, that Israel has not
failed to comply with in its strategy of its own reinforcement and the
destruction of the Palestinian people, and we make no particular
note of that here.

But these two decisions, at a time when world political signals
seemed to be advising Netanyahu to soften his falcon politics, lead us
to understand, better than any theoretical discourse, what this
government is about, what price the Israeli State is disposed to pay
to stay true to its own military and religious programmes.

The only move that the powerful United States have managed to
make (the Jewish lobby in that country remains strong and continues
to condition this kind of decision] was that of bland dissent from this
war politic, declaring themselves extraneous to it (at least in words]
and suggesting to the European Union to do something to dissuade
the Israelis from going ahead, without however taking extreme
measures such as an embargo similar that applied to Libya and Iraq.

In fact, at this moment the West Bank and Gaza are under a statute of
dependence on Israel and, from the economic point of view, they
have transformed themselves into an a bottomless pit that costs far
more that what the collaborating European States, and Israel itself,
should be disposed to paying at the financial level.

But Israel cannot budge a centimetre. Its whole politic, especially
over the past few years, seems to the eyes of the so-called objective
observer, to be suicide, and in fact it is, but it is not so for an Israeli.


No one can understand what is happening in the land of Palestine,
not even those who have followed the bloody course of events
involving the people who have lived there for so long. They face each
other with hatred and suspicion, not just men and women, children
and old people, but the very dust of the roads and the mud that
covers them on rainy days, the asphyxiating heat and the stench of
the sultriness.

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 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'.

Neither party wants to retreat as this would lead to internal conflict,
a destructive civil war that would almost certainly give the
adversary victory on a military level.

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


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VII Backs to the wall, surrounded on all sides at the bend in the road
after the bridge, not a chance, and they are happy.


at all. There is no hope for their children or for the future of the place
where they were born. And it is not true that this hatred, so ferocious
and incomprehensible to us, is nourished by fundamentalist
extremism. How is it that most of the young people who blow
themselves up with their own bombs have completed their studies,
have a degree or diploma - sometimes obtained abroad - are family
people, have children. What they do not have is hope. 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. Even the most illuminated of the Israeli labour party
formed in Mapai in 1968, (one of the Zionist forces to support the
first settlements] have kept quiet for fear of losing their electoral
base. Many see the Likud (right wing party which literally means
'consolidation'] as the only force capable of leading the country
against the Palestinians.

To talk of peace in such conditions is just another way to wriggle out
of things with clean hands and a dirty conscience. Organised
massacres of Palestinians such as those by the Christian-Maronites
at Sabra and Chatila in September 1982, or (Black] September 1970
organised by King Hussein of Jordan which lasted until April 1971
resulting in 4,600 dead and 10,000 wounded, are still possible.
However, if carried out by Israel or one of its armed intermediaries
they would lead to a complete destabilisation of the area. As I write,
Israel has attacked some presumed Palestinian posting in Syria; the
present time is one of the worst.

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.


Alfredo M. Bonanno
Trieste, 8 October 2003


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Untitled

I Too much light that night. We needed the darkness of accomplice
short-cuts, solitary paths, to lift one's hand, to find the courage to lift
one's hand and make darkness in one's heart.

II How quell the hatred if that is all there is, along with the forgotten
lies and weaknesses? Wondrously spellbound, I edge forward with
trembling lantern, full of curiosity, learning, knowing. But it is the
song of the frogs that takes me back into the mud, from where I have
not moved for a long time, waiting, like the snake.

III Recurring rituals dilate time in the ceremonial, awaiting the
miracle that transforms steel into love. An idea of beauty, from the
single drops of nitroglycerine. Silence. I put the pieces carefully back
into the sheaths, it will be for another time.

IV The black wing of the crow has glittered enough. Now that the
light is coming I see the far off window clearly, a breach in the almost
totally destroyed building. A shadow mourns the death of his friend,
then he gets up and looks at the sun low on the horizon before dying
in turn.

V Too slow, she ended up sitting on the ground, adjusting the little
dress over her infirm legs. Immobile amongst the fallen leaves of the
high branches, she didn't seem to be breathing. The shador hid the
inexorable tears.

VI In the end we remained alone, waiting. We had to telephone,
before it was too late. The other was silent, looking at the lighthouse
not far away, the lighthouse of dreams, closed from all sides. High
sunlit walls underlined the jarring lack of light. Life was dying in
there; if life is hope there was none left in there. Only the logic of the
torturers.

VII Good causes are not recognised. If you stare them in the face,
they are no longer good. They suffocate with undesired justification,
beg to stay on the surface not push the knife in, or cry.


Still Now, With No Title at All

There is one thing about the struggle of the Palestinian people that
has touched and fascinated all those who have approached it: on the
other side of the barricade are the Jews, the persecuted of all times.

There is nothing strange about this, the persecuted have often
become persecutors. Just think of what happened to the early
Christians in the space of three centuries after they gained power
and systematically began to repress all dissonant voices. There have
been many such cases of about turns throughout history. Today's
prisons are built on the temples of the past. No political force in
recent times has been able to resist throwing itself into ruthless
repression as soon as it has reached power, no matter how travailed
its history. But the voice of reason is not enough for us to gain an
understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Jews have always been at the centre of attention and given rise to
either suspicion or sympathy, usually the former. Thrown out from
wherever they happened to be as a consequence of insinuation and
dreadful accusations, they always gained the sympathy of anyone
with any feelings - anyone, that is, who is against pogroms, mass
murder, the massacre of innocents and summary judgements based
on impressions and hearsay. The mental rigidity of the Jews, their
vision of life based on religious righteousness that sees the rest of
the world as impure or sinful, has often put such sympathies to the
test. But the enormity of the historical debt owed them, which in the
second world war grew to the point of becoming a methodical
procedure that surpassed anything that had ever been dreamed of
till then, revived these sympathies and constituted a new force of
international cohesion capable of supporting the case for Jewish
settlements in Palestine.

Israel became a focus of international support for many reasons. The
massacre in the Nazi concentration camps, the socialist and
libertarian character of the early settlements, the theories of the first
kibbutzim based on libertarian communism, the original peaceful
cohabitation with the Arabs in response to the latter's traditional
hospitality. Then interests emerged, particularly at the end of the
Second World War. They were based on the world's division into


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two opposing blocks, with American interests on one side and Soviet
ones on the other. It was a question of economic concerns in a
geographical area that was rich in oil fields, thus attracting the
attention of the great imperialist States.

The Israelis accepted their role as gendarme of the western project
of world dominion, and started to keep an eye on the movements of
the surrounding Arab States. The latter often fought each other
about the management of the immense revenue from oil and became
players on the international chessboard, sometimes supporting,
sometimes contrasting the opposition of the great States. It was the
Zionist movement along with the great Jewish-American and
international, but mainly American, lobbies that pushed the Jewish
people along this road in the land of Israel. This lead to an extremism
hitherto unequalled in the whole of political-religious history. The
lobbies, which were capable of conditioning American politics,
particularly during the long years of Republican power, forced the
United States to push the small but fierce Israel into the role of
policeman of the Middle East.

All this rekindled anti-Semitism at world level, leading to an
indigestible collection of anti-Jewish theories. In this concentrate of
stupidity we find such historical revisionism as the theory that the
Holocaust never existed, or that Arab nationalists are incapable of
considering Israeli people as possible brothers and peaceful
cohabitants of the same territory. For their part, the latter have
survived a thousand years of persecution and massacres, yet have
not benefited from past experience. They have become hostages in
the hands of a theocratic State, one of the worst kinds of organisation
to emerge from the mind of man. Fear of being cast into the sea to
take up the path of exile yet again has thrown them into the arms of
internal and external meddlers: Zionist schemes at local and
international level, and the strategies of US world dominion.

An evil crescendo has been set in motion that nothing less than a
revolutionary process will be able to halt. No discussion is possible
and anyone who has experienced the concrete and theoretical reality
of the Jews, even for short spells, can confirm this. No theoretical
proposal will ever be able to undo the mechanism of encirclement
and fear. This situation has remained unchanged, even since the fall
of the Berlin wall and the thaw that came about after the dissolution

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militarised, super-industrialised and imperialist society pacifically.'
(A. R. Buenfil, 7 tempi delle comuni' in Volonta no. 3/1989, p. 108-
109.] There, this passage being ideological and superficial,
philosophically dictated and dimly mechanistic, amounts to the most
limited and insignificant stuff that can be said on the subject at the
present time. All that not being possible, there being nothing to
peacefully put in place of society or the State that defends itself
militarily like an old woman holding on to her chair. We are left with
the question: what should the diversity of communitarian life be,
given that it cannot be simply the commune alone, which is not
diversity at all? The communes of the last century and their
supporters were aware of this problem and addressed all their
efforts in that direction. For example, free love became a problem
within the problem, a Utopia within the technical problem of keeping
the community going.

[1989]


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its mere existence as a commune separate from the rest of the social
system. What we are saying might seem banal but it actually touches
on the most important aspect of the problem. The question today is
not so much whether to live in a commune or not - something that
also has its difficult side - and going against the prevailing model of
normality. It means living in a different way, living one's life
differently. It does not mean that one simply lives the same life as the
slaves of capital at a different, often worse, pace, making individual
efforts that often amount to super-exploitation under other names
and ideologies.

I think that the problem of communes needs to be gone into in depth.
For example, the next step could be to look at the problem from the
outside. The commune is all very well, but for what? Now we are
reaching the crux of the matter. A productive, agricultural or city
commune, could become a survivalist community. By working at it
this objective it could more or less be achieved. But what is that
objective exactly? The reproduction of oneself as a working animal; a
producer, that's all, only the other side of the ghetto. There must be
some ideal in our motivation, something more than a mere call to
struggle against the State and society. It is vital that this pulsion, this
utopian thrust, be inherent in the communitarian dimension if we
are to choose such an instrument. We must have chosen this
instrument because through it we want to come out from society and
upset others with our diversity - all others, even those who know
nothing about communitarian organisation. But our diversity cannot
simply be summed up as belonging to a commune because such an
existence is nearly always so miserable as to incite pity rather than
to set an example. It must therefore be something else.

The following passage by Buenfil shows how far one is from the
problem raised here: 'The ecological society will necessarily be
egalitarian and decentralised, not hierarchical. It is in this context
that the project of new kinds of social groups, communes and
communities, civil voluntary associations and networks of
cooperatives exist. Up until now it was thought that it is best to carry
out such experiments in the country. Instead we must start to
conceive them in the cities, as collectives, consumers' and artisans'
cooperatives, new tribes, bands, area associations, workers' councils,
holistic schools and clinics. In this way it will be possible to build a
parallel society that replaces the competitive nuclear, ecocide,

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of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the twentieth century. Arab
nationalist claims in general and those of the Palestinians in
particular cause too much fear, and there is no lack of those who
support the facile but treacherous idea of 'let's throw them all into
the sea' on both sides.

The experience of the Palestinian State, or of the 'Palestinian
authorities' as some prefer to refer to it, also demonstrates this
impossibility. They failed to propose cohabitation based on
reciprocal respect along the lines of the libertarian communes, a
sentiment that has not completely disappeared in a certain Israeli
left. This corresponds in a slightly different way to the tradition of
hospitality and freedom of Arab peoples - in the first place the
Palestinians. Instead they have taken the road mapped out by the
politicians of the PLO, in particular Arafat, true killer of the
Palestinian people's real desire for freedom and artificer of a
phantom State fit only to guarantee the personal power of a little
man afflicted with delusions of grandeur.

The dice has been thrown, based on the fear that has intensified in
the Israeli field. An extension of the civil war in course right to the
centres of Israeli power could push things beyond the present level
of conflict. Each side is afraid of the other. The Israelis fear
Palestinian demands that would threaten their privileges (cheap
labour, houses expropriated from Arabs who were forced to leave,
State benefits, etc.]. The Palestinians fear the Israelis, who want to
get rid of them, want to throw them off their land (and in large part
already have done] and force them into exile in the concentration
camps of the Lebanon and Jordan. Fear is exacerbating the
conditions of the conflict. Palestinian suicide bombers packed with
dynamite blow themselves up in Israeli markets, buses and schools.
The exalted Israeli religious Right Wing in power have shown that
the weapons with which they intend to face 'cohabitation' with the
Arab world - exploitation, control, repression, - are just as bad.

It is impossible to turn the clock back. Too many dead in each family,
in each family group, in every sector of social life. Too much blood,
too much pain. All that cannot be eliminated with a handshake, or
some Camp David. In spite of the existence of the Israeli Left,
yesterday in power, today in opposition, the most emarginated class
of Israelis, the Sephardim (Jews originally from Africa therefore with

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a darker skin colour but still of Jewish religion], are taking refuge in
extreme Right Wing positions rather than favouring talks and
agreements based on equal rights with the Palestinians. They are
afraid they will lose the right to stay in Israel and be forced back to
the countries they came from, where most of them would meet
certain death. So it is not difficult to understand why the most
extreme members of the Jewish religious organisations are of
Sephardic origin and constitute the most ferocious henchmen of the
army and police employed in the repression.

On the other hand, there are the new Palestinian police - the
politicians of the PLO. These ill-omened offshoots of the new State
have taken up positions in the government of a people tormented by
forty years of exile and persecution, and are putting power in all its
forms into effect. They torture, kill, judge and sentence their own
people without hesitation. Comrades in struggle who participated in
extremely risky actions up until a few years ago have become judges,
prison guards, policemen, army commanders, bodyguards, secret
services agents. In the territories liberated by concession of the
Israeli government, the PLO has become the repressive force of a
State that has not yet reached the maximum of its governing
capacity, but which has already embarked on the road of all States.
The roles are reversing, power is renewing itself but the methods
remain the same. But for the millions of Palestinians still in the
camps, the permanent exiles who have had their land and identity
taken from them, this way of doing things is called betrayal. Hence
their fear of seeing themselves imprisoned in concentration camps
for another half century, betrayed by their own representatives
(something that is very painful], as well as being under the attack of
Israeli raids and drawn into a political game which they do not
understand and whose possible outcome they fail to see.

Once again the future is being conditioned by fear on both sides,
pushing them blindly forward in a clash that is getting worse. The
insurrection of the Palestinian people scares the politicians of Gaza
and the West Bank. More than anything it scares Arafat, as he is
unable to control it. It scares the Israeli government, but also scares
the Israeli people, and this is the important thing. Seeing themselves
under attack in their own homes where anyone likes to feel safe,
they are appealing to their governors and asking for stricter controls
and more systematic repression. The circle is closing in.

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Communes, From Experimentation

to Survival

Here, at the end of the eighties, there has been a move towards
communes as an alternative lifestyle running parallel to the
increasing difficulties of the social struggle. The road to revolution
seems to be blocked, with no sight of victory for the progressive and
revolutionary forces over the reactionary conservative State. So
these communes are not just considered in abstract, they are
claiming to satisfy fundamental personal and collective needs, or are
ethnically and culturally motivated. In a word, they have become a
point of reference for many people, far from the traditional division
between the personal and political.

It cannot be denied that there was a growing need for diversity
behind these alternative desires. As hopes for a radical change in the
social structure disappeared, there was concern not to let oneself be
submerged by rampant restructuring and spreading desistance.
Consequently there has been a tendency to carry on the struggle by
respecting one's own essential needs.

Talking of the Comunidad del Sur, Ruben Prieto says, 'These new
societal formations organise social action to selfmanage funds,
production and consumption, as well as various services, or come
together on the basis of particular needs. Through all this, in a way
marginal (but at the same time opposed to dominant values and the
power apparatus] ferment, one can see the emergence of a new
credible and verifiable utopian discourse. In their most radical
realisation, communes aim to promote individual identity and free
organisational forms, a re-evaluation of autonomy, participation and
creativity, and lack of faith in any project of development based on
the technologies of capitalist development, with a strong accent on
the culture of daily life, action from the base to the vertex and the
particular to the general'. R. Prieto, 'La Comunidad del Sur' in
'Volonta' n. 3,1989, p.56]

It is possible to draw very general principles from this passage that
anyone could agree with, precisely because they are not specific.
Basically, what should characterise a commune that is beyond State
interference should be its diversity, i.e. the diversity of its aims, not

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individualistic structure. This is not in order to establish a deeper
agreement and federate with other similar forms, but on the
contrary so as to establish a direct relationship with, and therefore a
direct subsidy from, the Israeli State.

Of everything that went before, only the ashes remain.

[1986]


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It is not possible to make forecasts and anyway they could always be
refuted by unforeseen events.

To abandon a people's dreams of freedom while they are being
attacked and destroyed by a theocratic State leaves a bitter taste in
one's mouth. Can so much blood, so much sacrifice, so many dead, all
have been in vain? Were we fooled into choosing which side to
support in our more or less radical intervention more or less in first
person, once upon a time, and are we still deluding ourselves today?
Can it be that the problem in finding the courage to attack the
mechanism of the Israeli war (the Jews again, or a poor persecuted
people subjected to the expansionist and military aims of a group of
criminals in power?] is that it has been faced the wrong way? Have
the efforts of the past just led to the shiny buttons of the new
Palestinian police or the ferocious sneer of a Sephardic Jew
screaming 'throw them all into the sea!'? I don't know.

This booklet does not attempt to give any answers. I thought it
would be more interesting to simply take up the problem once again.

I have aired these doubts in my heart over the ten years in which
many of the following pieces were written, sometimes looking up at
the night sky and singling out stars of times gone by one by one.
Their light continues to shine unperturbed upon the woes of men.

Alfredo M. Bonanno
Catania, 17 December 1997


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The Crux of a Problem That
Cannot Be Solved

Justifications of a theocratic State

When Great Britain began to address the Jews towards Palestine in
1917, you could already see in the declarations contained in a
memorandum by Lord Balfour how the interests of international
Zionism were far more important than the fate of'70,000 Arabs with
all their desires and prejudices'.

That moment marked the beginning of the ongoing occupation of
Palestinian land and the constitution of a 'national Jewish homeland',
built on historic and religious traces. By 1935 the Jews were already
400,000 compared to 900,000 Arabs. When Israel as such was
constituted in 1948, the clashes, persecution and mass exodus of the
Arabs began. All Jewish immigrants were promised not only
nationality, but also one of the houses abandoned by the Arabs in
their flight.

The new repressive politic imposed by the State of Israel came to
take the place of the preceding one of Havlagah (limitation) and this
needed moral justification, also in order to convince many of the
Jews who still felt the Nazi repression on their skins.

This justification was found in the concept of Shoah (catastrophe).
Not only that suffered at the hands of the Nazis but also that which
traverses the whole history of the Jewish people. In this way, the
most recent catastrophe, the extermination by the Third Reich, was
linked to the birth of the Israeli State: Shoah Vetekumah
(catastrophe and rebirth).

Another myth was also put into circulation again, that of heroism
(Vagevurah) whose symbol was the insurrection of the Warsaw
ghetto. It was used to justify rebellion against a new possible
catastrophe (the return of the Arabs to their homes), and the concept
of Shoah Vagevurah, catastrophe and heroism, emerged.

These elements came to be combined within the Zionist movement
in many ways. Fed by extreme right wing propaganda and religious


The Kwuza, village communities, were thus destined to be absorbed
by the State and to follow the tragic destiny of the Spanish
collectives, albeit in a different way. Kropotkin's theories on the
Russian mir and artel, the reading of Marx and his attempts to
explain the functioning and destiny of the agricultural communities
(important are the replies to the questions of Vera Zasulic), were not
sufficient to resolve the problems posed by the new reality. State
absorbtion became inevitable when the Kwuza stopped creating new
interests and producing a real communitarian life rich in problems
but also capable of finding solutions. By adapting to simply carrying
out daily tasks the initial impulse gradually burnt itself out. As soon
as the Chaluziut began to be self-satisfied, i.e. a little elite that
claimed to be the original colonisers, defeat was not long in arriving.

This broke out with the increment of the crisis in the whole
settlement in the land of Palestine. The country of the alija the
ascent, became the country of the enrichment of little groups with no
ideals. Alongside the original Chaluziut, who still had a clear vision of
their own socialist motivation, another incomplete Chaluziut
gradually emerged that simply wanted a better standard of living in
the land considered to be 'of their fathers'. The racist division
between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews became more and more
evident and important as the arrival of black Jews increased. As the
communities grew and differentiated themselves, they became more
and more detached from their original ideals.

Not that these new arrivals did not fulfil their obligation to work. On
the contrary, the Sephardim were often the most radical in their
commitment (also when they become policemen they are among the
most rigid and stick closely to the rules). But their main interest was
their own survival, here and now, in the best possible way. They also
had to avoid the risk of failure, which would have forced them to
return to their land of origin where certain death awaited them. At
first there were the ideals of communitarian federalist socialism in
many of these productive structures, let's say of a new kind. They
were coordinated nationally, saw the participation of the Palestinian
Arabs did not have a State, but they were soon to disappear.

We must not think that this condition only applies to the Kibbutzim;
the Moshavim industrial working colonies, found themselves in a
similar situation. Many of them have abandoned their original,


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The Kibbutz Movement


The kibbutz movement spread like wildfire with the growth in the
advent of Jews in the land of Palestine following the end of the
second world war. What had begun as an experiment became a
serious attempt to restructure society on the basis of new
organisational models. These models applied theoretical and
practical experiences of the past, but found themselves faced with
quite a new problem, if nothing other than due to the considerable
dimensions things were taking.

In this way the communitarian village, productive communities that
propose an integration of agriculture, industry and crafts, emerged.
These communes united in a confederation, thereby overcoming the
problem of isolation, one of the points considered by Kropotkin to be
one of the reasons why communes didn't work.

A number of theoretical and practical experiences precede this
communitarian village, but much was improvised by the settlers
who, at least in the beginning, also tried to make the Palestinian Arab
people fully participate in their initiatives. Dreams abounded in this
early stage. Utopian fantasy also: a new society seemed to be
dawning, based on new family and personal relationships. A new
human being, a new world perhaps, were the more or less declared
objectives.

The first pioneers, the Chalutzim, had something of the sort in mind
both in theory and in practice. But right from the start there was a
contradiction in this network of free communities that wanted to
spread over the whole territory. Already it was possible to perceive
the emergence of the national idea, a reconstitution of the Jewish
State on a territorial and national basis, sowing the seeds of all the
evil to come.

The fact that many of these Chalutzim had socialist aspirations is not
as important as has often been maintained. The theories of Owen
and King were also present, along with those of Proudhon, Kropotkin
and Landauer, who were far more important for this specific
question. But that is not the point.


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fanaticism, they resulted in the homicidal mixture that was to sweep
away the egalitarian enthusiasm of a considerable part of the early
immigrants in the land of Israel.

The Arab refusal

Once freed from the Turks, the Palestinian Arabs did not want to be
dominated either by the English or the Zionist newcomers. But this
refusal concerned (and still concerns] the management of their lives
by a State, be it British or Israeli. They wanted to form a Palestinian
community composed of the various Arab realities in the region. But
they had nothing against the insertion of communities different to
their own, as happened in 1920 with the Armenians had escaping
Turkish persecution. What they did not want, and do not want, was
an Israeli (or British] State to dominate them.

For this reason the Palestinians were not opposed to the settlement
of the Jews, at least not until the latter took the form of a Zionist
political movement aimed at establishing an Israeli State. And the
greater Arab opposition became, the more the Jewish State project
became obvious as it emerged from behind the egalitarian theories
of free federated agricultural communities.

Internal opposition

There has always been opposition within the Zionist movement,
including a tendency that wants to constitute a kind of libertarian
socialism in the Middle East, particularly in Israel, and this still exists
today in some form or another. This tendency was against the
constitution of the Jewish State. It originated from the idea of a
possible collaboration between Arabs and Israelis, suggesting a clash
that was more real than the abstract one based on nationalist
opposition (and producer of such dire consequences]. It was a
question of making a distinction between the model of a
collectivised, free society (at least in perspective] based on the
productive structure of the kibbutzim, and the oppressive model of
society based on State capitalism of the Soviet kind. In fact a free,
selfmanaged, anti-State producers' federation is still the only way
that a solution to the problem in the Middle East could be reached.

Insufficient knowledge of the problem

12



Little is known about the Palestinian problem in Europe, or the
Israeli one for that matter. Little is known of the many aspects of all
the sectors involved in the political and social clash in course, from
Iran to the Lebanon, from Syria to Egypt; just as little is known about
the two peoples facing each other in Palestine and Israel.

News about the Palestinians is always tainted with ideological
prejudice. What we know has been supplied by official Palestinian
representatives who talk and act like a State government, so are not
very reliable.

The arrival of the Jews was undoubtedly a diplomatic and military
operation, but it should also be pointed out that before the war the
Palestinians were under Turkish dominion so they were not totally
against this arrival. At first it seemed it might help resist the
domination led by the party of young Turks. Of course, that does not
justify the behaviour of the Israeli State and its need for military
expansion and violent occupation. But it does help us to understand
the desire of the Palestinians to free themselves from all dominion,
whatever that might be, yesterday the Turks, today Israel.

Today the common 'Semitic' element has been emphasized a great
deal, but we must understand that this means little beyond the fact
that these peoples are related linguistically. That is also negligible
today, as modern Hebrew is pronounced with attenuated guttural
sounds, therefore has become Westernised. Those who pronounce it
with the classical guttural forms (close to Arab], for example the
Jews from the Yemen, are considered 'peasants' and backward.

Our knowledge of the Jews is also superficial. In Italy we know very
little about Jewish culture. More attention is paid to Hebraism, but
this is narrow and cultural more than anything, almost exclusively
the work of great Jewish authors such as Heine, Roth, etc. or Freud,
who have recently been rediscovered in this sense. The rest is
hidden. The Hebrew religion has been repressed and locked up in
sacred places. Now, as far as Jewishness is concerned, religion being
inseparable from culture, it derives that the latter has also been
repressed. We know very little about the relationship between
religion and political power, the function of the rabbi, the core of
Hebrew religion that claims so much space in the consciousness of


which has never been fully examined by the so-called lay writers of
the movement of the national rebirth, has now become absolutely
prevalent.

It seems to me that it is more exact to say that the Jew is he who
considers himself Jewish and therefore acts and behaves on the basis
of his Jewish consciousness. In this the religious motive has an
essential, if not dominant, place. What also reinforces his conviction
of being Jewish, and this is of no small significance, is the behaviour
of others who, in considering him thus, adopt certain attitudes
towards him that transform the original aspects into an actual social
status.

To subtract the Jewish condition from the Jew, his life in that
tradition, his feeling of belonging to an ideal and religious
community rather than a national one even when he does not
physically find himself in the State of Israel, would be to alienate him.
And to do that could be just as disastrous an operation as that which
attempts to reduce differences between people in the name of a
badly defined egalitarianism.

Equality is an idea based on justice, freedom and truth. Like all ideas
that really are such and not just the fruit of opinions put into
circulation by the media, we must continually make it our own.
There is no absolute definition, position to be taken up, or general
policy statement to be made. In a word, there is nothing that can
absolutely close it up in a formula that is valid once and for all.
Nothing can make the Jew equal to me. I am not Jewish, I lack that
strong experience, that intimate connection with something that is
other than the possible religious experiences that I have in my non
Jewish world. And I cannot substitute this lack with a simple decision
to read the texts of the Hasidim or the myths of the Kabbalah. The
exceptional fact, and I think that every Jew would agree with me, is
that I am not Jewish.


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58



the events of everyday life. They also took their critique to within the
walls of the ghettos, at times with a crude but effective realism. The
thrust towards a better, more just, spiritually enriched world
contrasted dramatically with crude descriptions of the grey reality of
the ghetto composed of humiliation and religious tradition. We can
understand this contrast better through the satire of Jehudah Loeb
Gordon, Joseph Pel and Ischq Ertel, who attack the superstitious and
ridiculous aspects of the cult. The review by Perez Smolenskin, 'Ha-
Shahar', 'The Morning', sketches the panorama of the Russian Jewish
ghettoes and not only does he attack the modalities of religious
fanaticism, but also the disturbing aspects of their model of daily life.
Yet this satire did not reach the crux of the question, it did not touch
the presumed 'revelation' of the absolute God that leads Israel to
victory. No critic ever dared push himself so far. Even the atheist
writings of Roger Martin du Gard prefer to attack Christianity,
particularly Catholicism, but he never touched the Talmud. In the
numerous anticlerical writings of the Jews the Rabbi is never taken
into consideration.

Already, with the intensification of the pogroms at the end of the last
century, especially in Russia, this critical literary vein began to
dampen its style. A re-evaluation of the traditional values of
Hebraism began to take over, and it is easy to understand why: in the
face of repression and catastrophe the Jews find themselves united
yet again, precisely in the Holocaust.

The heirs of the Haskalah were thus the initiators of the Hibbat Zion,
Love of Zion, movement which was to adopt an increasingly
nationalistic outlook. One of the main ideologists of Zionism is the
Ukrainian Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg], who in his book A1 Parashat
Derakim (At the Crossroads], founded Zionism in its spiritual and
theoretical aspect. Being a continuation of critical rationalism this
nationalist vein also includes a critique of Jewish daily life, even
using a certain humour concerning the average Jew's way of
thinking, underlining the tics and many of the paradoxical aspects
that I mentioned earlier.

Unity continued to grow from strength to strength in the land of
Palestine. Not just political unity, which perhaps did not correspond
to the hopes of the early settlers, the only ones worthy of the name,
but also community-based, social and religious. This last point,

57


the Israeli people. It is not by chance, for example, that the Mishnah
and the Two Talmuds have never been published in Italy.

The idea that we have of the Jew is therefore often that which has
been provided by anti-Semitic iconography.

The equivocalness of the occupation

One of the first and most successful Israeli military operations was
called 'fait accompli' and, considering it in the light of what
happened afterwards, it shows the mentality of the early pioneers
clearly: these were men, women and children who had little to lose
and much to gain. They felt (and some still feel], proud of the fact
that they were willing to let themselves be massacred, yet, in reality
they have now become the slaughterers. The horror of the passage
from one side of this terrible barricade to the other doesn't even
touch them.

It should be pointed out that the Israeli people have acquired a
natural right to live undisturbed in their territory, no matter what
their origins as a people or of the territory itself. This is one of the
main points of the present analysis and, I think, of anyone struggling
alongside the Palestinian people without for this becoming an enemy
of the Israeli people. It is from the consolidation of such a natural
right that we can consider an occupation that took place, en masse,
around 1947, and distinguish it from that which took place later in
the territories of West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli State propaganda tends to unite these two occupations, thus
allowing the heirs of Zionism to adopt an attitude of founder fathers
and continue to spread the equivocation of Eretz Yisrael. Present-day
Zionists, who had considered history had relegated them to
nostalgia, now find themselves colonisers. What is the difference
between the occupation of Jaffa and that of Hebron according to
these people?

Apart from the Zionist intention (one part of official Zionism], to
build the centralised State immediately, it seems to me that there is
one fundamental difference. The original occupations were
determined more than anything by the arrival of the Luftmensch,
wandering men forced during exile to do marginal work or take up

14



badly paid professions, who had reached their 'promised land'. They
could, in fact, have limited themselves to living alongside the Arabs,
cultivating the land in communities and in libertarian socialist
collectives. In spite of all the problems related to the influx of a great
mass of foreigners, this was nevertheless an occupation of workers
who dedicated themselves to working the land, then extended
production to other sectors of human activity.

The occupation of Gaza the West Bank is quite different. The new
occupiers do not have the excuse of their fathers' ideals, no matter
how disputable that might have been. They were attracted by the
prosaic seduction of big apartments at low prices only twenty
minutes from Jerusalem or one hour from Tel Aviv, unlimited cheap
labour (the inhabitants of the Arab ghettoes] and the chance not to
work or be Chalutzim (pioneers] any more but to become colonisers,
exploiters of other people's work, that of poor people with no
resources and no future.

The justification

All this is justified through recall to the situation of necessity. Ein
Brera: we have no choice! This ideology is now supported by the
Israeli government. It is also shared by the left of that political
formation, along with the ideology of pessimism, a fundamental
aspect of Jewish culture that we do not understand because we are
not familiar with it. It is a question of historical pessimism, of being
convinced that a primordial curse weighs upon the people of Israel,
so no matter what they do they will suffer hostility on all sides and
be left in complete isolation.

Of course, this ideology derives from the millenarian isolation of the
Jews and the persecution they have suffered. But in fact it makes the
politics of the Israeli State extremist and irresponsible, and makes
the Israeli State itself even more dangerous than any other.

The economic situation

The State of Israel has sustained the highest military expenditure pro
capita in the world for decades. This means a lot. Prices rise
vertiginously every year, the balance of payments is billions of
dollars in debt and in 1994 this was more than half the gross


political groupings to flourish alongside it, stamping them with its
surly fundamentalist totalitarianism.

These analyses are mainly mistaken. They are mistaken in that in the
various Diaspora, from Babylonian captivity to Persian domination,
up to the Roman conquest, then throughout history in various local
historical situations, the Jews have always maintained a separate
identity. This identity has been saved almost exclusively thanks to
the religious filter. According to some western analyses with a strong
political emphasis such as that of the perspicacious Machievelli,
instead of weakening the various communities it strengthened them,
but in their own way. The original Christian movement had already
made a radical distinction between Jewish migratory groups and
those in Judea and the prevalence of an extremely intimistic religious
form, considered weak by the usual political analysts. This was so
weak that it turns out to have been capable of going through the
whole of the Middle Ages and conveying a great wealth of ideas, art,
experience of life, theological and mystic reflections, a heritage that
permeates the whole of Hebraism in spite of migratory repartition.

Gradually tradition takes the place of national heritage as such. The
German Jew felt German and was shocked by his radical enucleation
from the social body at the hands of the Nazis. But this feeling
German belonged to a kind of separate, public sphere, and in more
intimate, far stronger sphere he felt Jewish.

In fact, right from the initial phase of the constitution of the Israeli
State most Jews never felt that an effective historical foundation was
lacking. On the contrary, they experienced an immediate,
uninterrupted link with the places of the promised land. They only
grasped the sign of the return and the prophecy fulfilled, the great
confirmation of how this was an inevitable sign from God in the same
way as the catastrophes of the Diaspora and the Holocaust were also
signs of the particular relationship of God with his chosen people.

Here it is interesting to say something about the rationalist revolt
that lasted from the middle of the last century to the beginning of
this one. This is the Haskalah (culture] movement. The clash
between this movement of poets, musicians, mathematicians,
scientists and historians and the supporters of the Jewish tradition
was a hard one and led to publishing aimed at rationally examining


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this is unimportant, for others it is a gross mistake, and Jews
themselves are among the latter. In a word, the Jew does not
consider himself to be like other people. First of all, before being a
human being he is always a Jew: he is a Jewish human being.

This fact is linked to the Jewish religion and, in particular, to the
particular importance of tradition in this religion. One deeply comic
theory of anti-Semitism is that a German Jew will never understand
Goethe because he will never be able to understand the Germanic
spirit, or for the same reason, a French Jew will never understand
Racine. Yet exactly the opposite argument seems to me to be more
valid, that which says, here for the first time as far as I know, that
anyone who is not Jewish will never be able to understand the spirit
of Hebraism.

Just bec
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