A-Infos (en) Italy, Federazione Anarchica Torinese: Passing on the Fire: Towards a Libertarian Approach to the Palestinian Question. A Critique of Essentialism and Nationalism II. (2/4) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Palestinian nationalism and the Kingdom of Jordan[3] ---- In the Eastern 
Mediterranean, the policy of Great Britain, which pushed the accelerator 
of Arab and Jewish nationalisms during the First World War - from 
Lawrence of Arabia to the Balfour Declaration - became a boomerang for 
English rule, which found itself having to deal with several opposing 
nationalisms, which had in common only the desire to free themselves 
from the colonial yoke ---- What happened after May 1948, when the 
British left the occupied territories in what became the borders of the 
State of Israel until 1967, is the direct consequence of the affirmation 
of opposing nationalist demands.

After the 1948 civil war, a large part of the Palestinians living in the 
territories controlled by Israel were forced to take the path of exile. 
Those who remained, about 20%, became second-class citizens of the 
Jewish state.

The West Bank and Transjordan, where today as then the population was 
predominantly Palestinian, were annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom of 
Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control.

About twenty years later, in 1967, the Arab coalition (Syria, Egypt, 
Jordan, Iraq) was defeated in the Six Day War and Israel occupied the 
West Bank, the Golan Heights in Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza 
Strip.

Three years later, Jordan saw a bloody civil war between Palestinian 
armed organizations and the Jordanian army, which ended in July 1971 
with the expulsion of Palestinian political-military organizations.

Today, approximately 70% of Jordan's population is of Palestinian 
origin: partly Palestinians who lived in Transjordan after the end of 
the British Mandate and the birth of the Kingdom of Jordan in 1946, 
partly refugees from 1948 and the Six-Day War.

In 2014, when the civil war in Syria forced Palestinians to flee under 
pressure from ISIS, Jordan, which had welcomed thousands of Syrians, 
both Arab and otherwise, closed its doors to those fleeing the 
Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk, even shooting those who managed to 
cross the border.

Not only that, the Kingdom of Jordan denies nationality to Palestinians 
who request it and, in some cases, takes it away from those who have 
acquired it.

Nevertheless.

The policies of the Kingdom of Jordan towards the Palestinians under its 
jurisdiction have been and continue to be inclusive towards those who 
recognize the legitimacy of the Hashemite state, and exclusive towards 
Palestinian nationalists.

This is an element that in our opinion requires careful reflection: why 
has the role of a dynasty that comes from the Arabian Peninsula, with 
significant historical collusions with British colonialism, been and is 
so underestimated by the movements that support Palestinian nationalism?

A hypothesis that we believe to be appropriate is the failure to 
recognize the colonial nature of the Kingdom of Jordan, the only piece 
of territory remaining in the hands of the Hashemite dynasty, after the 
compensation that was offered to it for its support of the English 
during the First World War.

A distorted approach to decoloniality
The concept of decoloniality has long since left academic spaces to 
explode within the reflection and practice of the most radical political 
and social emancipation movements. Unfortunately, its subversive charge 
has often been ignored, ending up slipping into paradoxically 
essentialist dynamics 4

In the movements supporting Palestinian nationalism, this dynamic is all 
too evident. The notion of people is its linchpin. To assume it within a 
perspective that claims to be decolonial is an incredible aporia, since 
every constitutively exclusive concept is foreign to this approach. 
There is no "one" point of view of the colonized, but many different 
points of view and different positions, often divergent, that cannot be 
boxed in the concept of people.

Recognizing the importance of liberation arising from the will of the 
subjects directly involved does not imply an "automatic" and uncritical 
adherence to any initiative of subjects historically and culturally 
invested by colonial oppression.

Likewise, the assumption of collective guilt, the effect of being born 
and living in state environments that have implemented ferocious 
colonial and post-colonial policies, is a mirror dynamic pregnant with 
terrible consequences. Those who implement it deny the freedom to 
criticize any approach or initiative that comes from colonized 
subjectivities (or racialized or excluded for reasons of gender and 
identity).

We are not colonialists because Italy has waged wars to conquer and 
exploit Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Slovenia, 
Croatia, Albania, the Dodecanese... and today it continues its action in 
military missions abroad to defend the interests of the arms and energy 
industries.

We are not colonialists because the government of the country where we 
live is colonialist.

Memory in its informing of our present is a complex and variable 
mechanism. We all have a cultural toolbox at our disposal that we draw 
upon to understand and try to change the intolerable world in which we 
are forced to live.

In the box, which obviously is not the same for everyone, there are many 
memories, which come from different sources. Some remain buried for 
decades but then resurface. Others have dissolved, because no one has 
made them their own, keeping them alive. There are cases in which there 
is no memory because there are no longer those who could have passed it on.

In each of these devices there is everything: it is up to us to choose. 
Ours is also, always, a choice of field.

In our camp there is Augusto Masetti, who in 1911 showed his refusal to 
leave for the conquest of Libya, shooting his colonel and facing the 
consequences. There are the deserters and mutineers of the Great War of 
colonial expansion to the East. There are those who left to fight in 
support of the anarchist revolution against fascists, nationalists and 
clerics in Spain. There are those who refused to be soldiers and ended 
up in the military prisons of the Italian Republic. There are the women 
and men who have opposed and continue to oppose class oppression, 
identity breaks, wars, the denial of women's paths to autonomy and 
non-conforming identities.

The decolonial approach offers us the opportunity to close the parable 
of excluding universals to arrive at a plural universal that is 
experienced in the multiplicity of paths, relationships, and 
possibilities that the practice of freedom in equality and solidarity 
opens up to everyone, everywhere. 5

Unfortunately today the decolonial perspective "lacks an elaboration of 
this idea that separates it from nationalisms, communitarianisms and 
approaches based on a single perspective (rather than on intersections) 
that risk making it an exclusive conception when it is not.

As originally developed by the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD) 
collective and later enriched by the contributions of indigenous 
feminism, pluriverse studies, and epistemologies of the South to name 
but a few of the main areas of discussion, decoloniality 6 aims to 
overcome the limitations of previous approaches.

This is particularly the culturalism of Postcolonial Studies, which has 
often limited itself to critiques of coloniality that remained limited 
to discourse analysis and confined to academic fields, and the economism 
of theories such as uneven development or the world system, incapable of 
including what decolonial approaches call "epistemic decolonization". In 
this sense, the qualifying points of decoloniality are the need to go 
beyond pure theory to connect to real struggles and situations, to 
rediscover ways of thinking outside of European intellectual traditions 
and to build bridges of militant solidarity across different cultures 
and axes of intervention." 7

Bridges of solidarity. This is the crux of the matter. Building links, 
intersections, common paths, trying to understand and be understood 
offers social emancipation movements the precious opportunity to broaden 
their interpretative horizon and struggle.

Memory is a collective mechanism that must be constantly cared for and fed.

The classist and internationalist gaze
From our political and cultural itinerary we draw the tools to shatter 
the notion of people, starting also from the class divide. In the 
nineteenth century, the rejection of wage servitude, the awareness that 
the social pyramid was the result of a social relationship based on the 
right to private property, on work as a cheap negotiable commodity, gave 
rise to struggles that led to a transnational alliance of the oppressed 
and exploited, the First International. The terrain of class struggle 
contributed to weakening the idea, constitutively interclassist, of 
people. The awareness that exploited and exploiters were the same beyond 
any national border made it possible to build bridges of solidarity 
between workers of every country. With the breakup of the First 
International and the birth of the anti-authoritarian International in 
Saint Imier in 1872, the struggle against capitalist exploitation merged 
with that against state oppression.

In colonial or post-colonial environments, the colonized become cheap 
labor. For a long time, Palestinians were cheap workers in various 
sectors of the Israeli economy. Today, they have been partly replaced by 
immigrants with Jewish citizenship from Russia. The class divide also 
exists in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. Creating relationships of 
solidarity between workers, precarious workers, and unemployed workers 
who live in a common condition of exploitation is a concrete and 
symbolically powerful way of undermining the legitimacy of any national 
entity.

Nevertheless.

Many movements continue to consider the national question as a priority, 
as if the class struggle needed a brand new nation-state. A certain 
"left" has been anchored to this option since the time of the division 
of the world into blocs.

Nevertheless.

Faced with the slow slide towards colonization and the transformation of 
the West Bank into a set of Bantustans disconnected from each other, we 
need strong bridges between the exploited that can support the 
demolition of walls, barriers, borders. Outside of a nationalist logic, 
space could emerge for alliances that eradicate the conflict that has 
bloodied the Eastern Mediterranean for 76 years.

To stop the terrible massacre taking place in the Strip, a generalized 
insurrection would be needed in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. An 
insurrection against their own governments, their own rulers, their own 
religious institutions. Difficult? Certainly. But certainly also the 
only possibility for hundreds of thousands of men, women, girls and boys.

Antimilitarism, Universities and the Palestinian Question
The movements that have developed in universities have the merit of 
having grasped the fundamental connection between academic research and 
the war industry, in an intertwining of interests that place the logic 
of domination and that of profit at the center, outside and against any 
supposed neutrality of a scientific investigation that moves following 
the directions of the clients of the moment. However, they have a strong 
limit both in the definition of the objectives and in the methods of 
pursuing them.

The enormous emotion that accompanies the genocidal massacres of the 
Gazan population ends up placing only criticism and boycott of the State 
of Israel in the foreground, forgetting that our country (and its 
universities) are on the front lines in numerous theaters of war, which 
remain in the background, wrapped in a dangerous oblivion, which risks 
making us accomplices to infinite horrors.

Some might argue that the tragedy unfolding in Gaza is a priority, 
forgetting that in these same months in forgotten wars around the world 
horrendous massacres are being perpetrated. Think of Sudan, Congo, 
Eritrea, the Kurdish-speaking regions in northern Iraq.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to Sudan.

In the two years preceding the outbreak of the civil war that reduced 
Sudan to rubble, killed or forced hundreds of thousands of people from 
their homes, Italy supplied weapons to the RSF, the Rapid Support Force 
of Dagalo, former commander of the Janjaweed, the "devils on horseback". 
In this war Dagalo and his men returned to their favorite sport, the one 
they had been known for for decades, that is, burning villages, raping 
women, killing men and enlisting children.

Italy was counting on Dagalo to block the departures of migrants from 
that area. Dagalo reciprocates the support in his own way, in the 
silence of the media and, unfortunately, of many of the movements.

Unfortunately, in the student camps, the emergence of an antimilitarist 
attitude has not been combined with a significant criticism of 
nationalism, although present in the student components that support the 
experience of subtraction from the dynamics of the nation-state in Rojava.

If the fight against all wars, and in particular those where our country 
has a direct role, could materialize in a fight against agreements 
between the arms industry and universities, involving all agreements on 
military cooperation and not only those with Israel, the movements born 
this spring would have the necessary posture to throw sand in the 
well-oiled mechanisms of schools and universities colluding with war. 
Including the war against the poor that is fought on the streets of our 
cities.

A radical critique, in addition to denouncing and fighting the 
increasingly close relationship between universities and war research, 
questions the role of universities and the need for permanent 
expropriation of areas of study and research in the service of 
imperialism and capitalist logic.

The Drowned and the Saved
In the Nazi concentration camps, only those who made themselves useful 
in some way to the functioning of the city-factory of death survived a 
few more months. Those who became accomplices, degrading the last grain 
of dignity that was left to them, had a chance to make it. But the price 
was enormous.

The Nazi concentration camp horror, like the Stalinist gulags, does not 
represent an anomaly, a crack in the world order, but an ever-open 
possibility.

Gaza today is a sort of open-air concentration camp: those who are not 
gutted by Israeli bombs and missiles survive only if they manage to get 
a few extra rations to avoid succumbing to hunger. A chance that is 
offered above all to those close to the regime. Those who have money and 
connections pay and flee.

0We who live far from the bombs and the blackmail of a dead-end trap 
must have the clarity and strength to help open the doors of Gaza and 
shatter its walls, so that there may be life, dignity, and freedom for all.

But a straight look is needed.

The toll of people massacred by Hamas militias on October 7 weighs as 
heavily as that of the ferocious Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The Israeli government will not stop unless the people in that country 
kick it out. The Gaza government will not stop until the Gazans get rid 
of it.

In our latitudes there are those who evoke the ghosts of global Zionism 
that puppets us all. Equally insidious are the Zionist right that 
considers all Gazans part of the global jihad.

No one can be branded for a collective guilt.

In this sea of racist shit, those who disappear, victims twice over, are 
precisely the men, women, and boys of Gaza. Destined for martyrdom and, 
therefore, expendable for Hamas, excess bodies for the supporters of 
Greater Israel.

https://www.anarresinfo.org/27-09-tramandare-il-fuoco-presentazione-e-dibattito/
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