A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI: LET'S STOP THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA: Motions approved at the FAI Extraordinary Congress and Conference. Carrara 10-11 February 2024 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

FOR A LIBERTARIAN, FEDERALIST AND INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE - The 
massacre taking place in Gaza and the West Bank has its causes in a much 
longer and more complex history than the criminal attack by Hamas on 7 
October. This situation fits fully into the framework of the wars that 
are redefining the international scene, of which the so-called Middle 
East has always been a crucial node. Since its establishment, the state 
of Israel has tried to grab the resources of the region, in particular 
water through the subsequent occupation of the Golan Heights and the 
Jordan Valley. In recent years, the discovery of rich gas deposits off 
the coast of Gaza has played a strategic role.

Since 2020, the Abraham Accords have been signed between Israel, the 
Emirates and Bahrain. These agreements were subsequently extended to 
Sudan and Morocco and were also about to be signed by Saudi Arabia, 
sanctioning a further stage in the marginalization of the Palestinian 
issue which privileged the economic interests of the elites of the area 
functional to Western imperialism.

Violence in Palestine

The Israeli state is primarily responsible for the continuous violence 
that continues unabated in Palestine, which with its decades-long 
colonial and racist policy practices a ferocious apartheid against the 
Palestinian populations. This state has built a wall of iron, concrete 
and barbed wire hundreds of kilometers long in the West Bank to defend 
the fruit of the robbery of land and water sources and transformed the 
territory of Gaza into a huge ghetto that bombs cyclically, massacring 
defenseless civilians in the silence of the rest of the world. This 
colonial and racist policy is supported and legitimized by the United 
States and Europe, which use Israel as the pivot of their hegemonic aims 
in that region. This virtually unconditional support makes it possible 
for the state of Israel to act in ways that would otherwise be condemned 
and denounced as criminal. It is also to further the aims of the "West" 
that every day the Palestinian population, in Gaza as in the West Bank, 
is subjected to arbitrary actions, murders, violence, expropriations of 
land, harassment of all kinds by the Israeli government and the settlers 
, incited and armed by the same government that uses them for the 
dirtiest jobs of ethnic cleansing.

We must not forget the increasingly confessional nature of the State of 
Israel: as always, any person of Jewish origin, born anywhere in the 
world, has the right to move to Israel and assume its citizenship. In 
recent years, the exclusionary nature of the Israeli state has been 
reinforced by the Knesset's decision to declare Israel "the nation-state 
of the Jews." In recent decades, many people of Jewish descent from the 
former Soviet Union have taken advantage of this opportunity and 
provided the contingents of settlers necessary to fuel Israel's 
expansionist policy. Just as it is no coincidence that in recent years 
the Zionist religious right, whose religious fanaticism is no less than 
that of Islamic fundamentalists, has assumed ever greater political 
weight in Israel.

Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism, part of the problem, not the solution

Let it be clear that for us it is absolutely unacceptable to define, as 
unfortunately some do, an "act of resistance" the criminal attack by 
Hamas on 7 October, which massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians also 
using rape as a weapon and conduct of war. We consider Hamas for what it 
is: a reactionary force of religious fanatics who in their statutes 
define the French and Russian revolutions as Jewish conspiracies. A 
force that has behind it some of the most obscurantist states in the 
world: from the Qatari monarchy to Erdogan's Turkey, which massacres the 
Kurdish populations and tries to suffocate the revolutionary experience 
of Rojava. On the other hand, the Netanyahu government uses Hamas as a 
bogeyman to fuel its colonization plans after, many years ago, other 
Israeli governments financed Hamas to oppose it to the PA by dividing 
the Palestinian front.

The incessant bombings that have been going on on the territory of Gaza 
for four months now with unprecedented violence, reinforced by the 
army's invasion, are transforming a territory where two million two 
hundred thousand human beings live into an enormous one. The dead cannot 
be counted, and after all it makes no sense to count them. It is not 
because of the number of deaths, but because of the quality and ultimate 
objectives of Israel, that we can speak of genocide. The state of Israel 
is taking away any hope of a future from the people living in Gaza. It 
is not possible for them to imagine or plan a future for their lives, 
not at a collective, community, city or territory level, but not even at 
an individual or family level. The people who survive in Gaza do so in 
an eternal present of violence, war, hunger, disease and death. All the 
energy is dedicated and squeezed to the bone to get to the evening, to 
put something in the stomach and try not to end up killed. Warning: this 
does not happen by chance. It is not an "escalation" or "exacerbation" 
of a war or military operation, special or otherwise. There's something 
different here. There is a very specific plan of ethnic cleansing, there 
is the will, theorized both orally and in writing, and later coldly put 
into practice by Israel, to erase a specific population from a specific 
territory. Israeli Defense Minister Gallant stated on October 9, when 
ordering the total siege of Gaza, "Everything is closed. We are fighting 
human animals and we will behave accordingly." We know from sad examples 
of the past that dehumanizing the enemy is the first necessary step to 
make his physical elimination acceptable.

We would like to highlight a passage written by the Minister for 
Intelligence of the State of Israel, Gila Gamliel, in the Jerusalem Post 
of November 19th. This official, at the highest levels of government, 
proposes to "promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians from 
Gaza outside the Strip." Resettlement. Since the Second World War, when 
it was used to mask the horrendous Nazi crimes, the term has had a 
precise meaning, and we can state one thing with certainty: beyond the 
repugnant euphemisms in political jargon, translated into human 
language, resettlement always means deportation. Yet another for the 
Palestinian populations, towards other refugee camps, towards other 
foreign territories, towards other lives made of nothing.
Two peoples, two states? No two classes one social revolution

Considering the Palestinian question solely in terms of people and 
national liberation leads very far from a possible solution. We consider 
the concept of "oppressed peoples" ineffective for understanding the 
dynamics of exploitation. The definition of "people" hides within it 
class contradictions and any type of social or gender discrimination (in 
some cases even religious or ethnic) that can occur within a "people". 
All the liberation movements born and grown in the name of nationalism, 
even when they achieved the objective of the expulsion of the colonial 
regime, have created states in which new rich people exploit the working 
classes, new powers oppress them, new police forces control them. From 
Ireland to Mozambique, from India to South America, the conditions of 
the exploited classes after the liberation struggles have remained the 
same, only the nationality of the masters has changed. It is 
understandable that ordinary people, who must fight with all their 
strength to survive, experiencing violence and exploitation by the 
"foreigner" every day, only see him as the enemy to fight. But 
understandable does not mean right or acceptable. If a liberation 
struggle is expressed in terms of the people, an interclass term that 
includes both elites and subaltern classes, if it is not accompanied by 
a social revolution, it will be a struggle that will only lead to the 
creation of new regimes of oppression, bureaucracies, armies, rhetoric , 
exploitation. Therefore we do not recognize ourselves in the concept of 
people, but in the need for an intersectional fight against all forms of 
oppression that puts the class struggle back at the center.

In the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian proletariat brings wealth to 
both Israeli capitalism and the Palestinian elites, who subsist on the 
poverty of others as all elites have always done. The exploitation of a 
very low-cost workforce brings money to capitalists of all origins. Let 
us not forget that Gaza is administered by Hamas, and the PA administers 
the fragmented territories of the West Bank. Over the years, these 
organizations have drained enormous resources into economic and 
humanitarian aid, in theory intended for the poorest people, using them 
to reproduce themselves or enrich their leaders. The Palestinian 
proletariat must deal with both class oppression from within and double 
oppression, national and class, from Israel. And if those who are part 
of the upper classes often manage to save their skin and their wealth, 
it is the Palestinian proletariat who is hit hard by the ongoing genocide.

We recognize ourselves even less in the logic of the two states. Not 
only has the two-state option already failed historically in the 
Israeli-Palestinian case since the 1990s, when it was attempted with the 
Oslo agreements. It is the state as such that has failed as a 
geopolitical entity given the increasingly widely recognized inability 
of national states (and their supranational associations) to manage 
global problems such as climate and migration. Even more striking is the 
failure to guarantee the so-called "peace" of which the State, with its 
armed bodies and economic potentates, is the very negation. From Ukraine 
to Palestine we are increasingly seeing the criminal drama of the idea 
of territorial sovereignty associated with nationalism, whereby one must 
massacre or be massacred for the control of a few square meters of 
"territory". For this reason, the solution that social and organizing 
anarchism has always proposed is the federation organized from below, 
which abolishes national borders as well as any ethnic, religious or 
nationalist fanaticism. It is only by making our idea of universal 
sisterhood and brotherhood and internationalist solidarity convey to 
everyone's sensitivity that solutions to this drama will be found.

This is why, even in this scenario, we support those people who, despite 
everything, are not there. Who reject the logic of hate. Who refuse to 
be drafted. Who fight against the governments of Israel, PA and Hamas. 
Who fight Zionist and Islamic fanaticism, and have been doing so for 
years, and sometimes together. Refuseniks, anarchists, simple people. 
Israeli citizens* who oppose their government, almost always in the 
silence of the media. Palestinian citizens* who reject the fanaticism 
and corruption of those who claim to act for them. These people 
understood which side the enemy is on. He finds himself on the side of 
those in command, of those who incite hatred, of those who perpetuate 
massacres to perpetuate themselves, of those who use this terrible 
tragedy for their own geopolitical aims. They know that the enemy is not 
the Palestinian, it is not the Jew. Everyone's enemies are Israel, 
Hamas, the PA, the United States, Russia, the European Union, Turkey, 
Qatar, China, Arabia, and anyone who caused the shedding of a single 
drop of blood to gain a paltry advantage. States only serve to reproduce 
logics of power and oppression, of war and exploitation.

Therefore, in this as in all wars, we actively support, in addition to 
the civilian victims of all sides, those who object, who desert, who 
disobey the orders of their respective governments, who reject the 
militarist and nationalist logic and evade it. If one day things change 
it will be because these people, after having denounced and silenced 
those who committed horrible crimes in their name, will build a 
different society together. What is needed is a stateless society, 
without the need for the corrupt governments of the PA or the murderous 
governments of Israel and Hamas. Federations of free communities 
organized on class, non-religious and non-ethnic bases. And for this it 
is necessary to fight, in Palestine as in the rest of the world, with a 
libertarian, internationalist and federalist perspective.

For our part, we contrast from an anti-militarist point of view those in 
Italy who support the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli army on the 
Gazawi population, starting from the Italian government which arms the 
Israeli army and at the same time maintains commercial ties with other 
partners such as Qatar , and even cuts UNRWA funds for food and health 
aid to the civilian population. In the same way we oppose the new 
Italian military mission in the Red Sea, the one in Lebanon and all 
Italian military missions abroad.

Approved by the FAI Conference in Carrara on 10-11 February 2024 with 
the "Bakunin" group of Rome voting against

https://federazioneanarchica.org/archivio/archivio_2024/2024021011carrara.html
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