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 IV. (4/4) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of essentialism 18 ---- Very 
first steps of phenomenological investigation ---- We believe it is 
particularly useful for the purposes of the discussion to note the 
predominance of some red-brown and communitarian slogans in the 
contemporary political debate. Leitmotifs such as the overcoming of the 
age-old distinction between the right and the left category, or the 
return of the popular spirit in place of the class struggle, with the 
related legitimation and strengthening of the state power that should be 
the bearer of such "spirit", we often find them in the democratic 
political arena, in public opinion and in the main media.

It follows the perception of an identity threatened by neoliberal 
policies, by the homologation of mass society, by the global domination 
of the commodity that empties the form of its content and tries to 
penetrate consciences to shape them. The evident sense of bewilderment, 
together with the progressive impoverishment of the middle class that 
feels its rights wavering, has ended up triggering a powerful 
sovereignist resurgence almost everywhere, materialized in the retreat 
into a model of closed community that is constituted in the denial, in 
the exclusion of the other, following the desperate attempt to restore 
order to the systemic chaos characterized by the advance of the Moloch 
of globalized capitalism. The recipe for a strong identity rides the 
mounting fear of those who feel robbed of their own tomorrow, providing 
them with the illusion of an easy escape route to salvation. Finally, we 
find the paradigm shift that marks the passage from the now obsolete 
"scientific" racism (the tendency to attribute criteria of superiority 
or inferiority to the genetic heritage of a certain human group in 
contrast to another) to the more modern differentialist racism, from 
which derives a convinced opposition to immigration on the basis of 
safeguarding independence, authenticity, cultural integrity, waving the 
spectre of mixing, which would risk contaminating a presumed "purity of 
tradition".

The undeniable success of the key concepts just highlighted - gradually 
grafted and rooted in traditions that are also distant from each other, 
with significant conceptual and social shifts that can be found in the 
production of ideas from below - can be both framed as a reactive 
phenomenon to triumphant capitalism, structural precariousness and the 
uncertainty of the future, and encouraged by a fundamental ambiguity 
that decisively and unequivocally distinguishes this theoretical 
framework, which fits well with the general climate of postmodernity: an 
eternal anomic present, characterized by a disposable production of meaning.

The colonization of the imagination, partially achieved by a 
fundamentally reactionary way of thinking that ends up forcefully 
denying the right to internal dissent, has roots that go back a long way 
in time, from National Bolshevism born in the context of the Weimar 
Republic in Germany, to the extra-parliamentary right inspired by the 
Nouvelle Droite of Alain De Benoist in France, up to the revisionism of 
Marxism in a campist and anti-Atlanticist key, carried out by Costanzo 
Preve in Italy.

One of the pernicious effects is the identification of the enemy 
exclusively in the "foreigner", a subject immediately attributable to an 
unalterable national block, considered territorially, culturally and 
mentally homogeneous.

Often we have the enemy at home, he speaks our language, has the same 
habits and customs. As Brecht said, the enemy - the master who exploits 
or the government that sends us to war - always marches at our head.

It is therefore more important than ever to wage a cultural battle to 
put a stop to a trend that has undergone a clear acceleration in recent 
years and that in the long run can only cause further damage to the 
development of analyses and tools of struggle within social movements.

Culture elevated to Essence
Let us focus our attention on the plague of cultural differentialism, 
the result of a process of essentialization and mythologization of 
culture. Culture is conceived as an absolutized nature, as an 
a-historical category, well-defined and immutable, and as such exempt 
from evaluations and criticisms.

The latter soon takes on the appearance of a monolithic entity that 
cannot be mixed, cannot be contaminated, is sclerotized in time and 
space, and finally perfectly superimposable on an interclassist 
conception of the people, which thus ceases to preserve within itself 
any difference of class, social discrimination or gender. Following this 
logical line, it follows that it is exclusively the "culture" of a given 
"people" that acquires ontological dignity, thought and perceived as an 
imposing homogeneous construction that pursues unanimity, or aims to 
assimilate and extinguish in itself all its parts, even the most 
conflictual and antithetical of the social body, engulfed, deprived of 
their own specificity and their own potential for disruption.

The lack of a semantic loophole with respect to an authoritarian 
operation of subsumption leads to short circuits and poses difficulties 
in problematization. Concrete examples of this deforming conception can 
be identified in the clumsy justification of female genital mutilation 
carried out in childhood in countries such as Somalia, rather than the 
Republic of Guinea or Saudi Arabia, or even the obligation to wear the 
hijab in the theocracy led by the ayatollah.

The wall of incommunicability erected by some exponents of the radical 
left who infantilize individuals by judging them totally at the mercy of 
the cultural and social environment in which they are inserted, sees as 
a dramatic consequence the invisibilization of the paths of struggle and 
emancipation that develop in those same territories. This is the case of 
the Guinean and Somali women who daily oppose the horror of mutilations, 
the result of a misogynistic and patriarchal setting of society, or of 
the women in Iran who claim at their own risk and peril the right not to 
hide their bodies, rebelling against the impositions of a religious 
fundamentalism that by its very nature is an enemy of freedom.

Expressing concrete solidarity with those who do not accept the 
established order and its laws by deciding to take charge of their own 
future, whatever the context of reference, is the first step towards 
building a world of free and equal women.

Which universal?
The Western universal, constitutively excluding and marginalizing 
towards all those who are not considered full citizens (the poor, 
migrants, women, subjects not conforming to the hetero-cispatriarchal 
norm, etc.), and absolute relativism, substantially uncritical towards 
potentially harmful or oppressive customs and practices, are two sides 
of the same coin. Both systems are placed in an equidistant position 
with respect to an idea of a universal plural in the process of 
construction, which can only arise from the paths of struggle undertaken 
by the movements, traversed first of all by those who subjectify 
themselves starting from the awareness of their own condition.

It is not a mere abstraction, but the concrete perspective of the 
pluriverse, a world in which multiple worlds coexist, in which it is 
possible to maximize diversity in equality. It is necessary to throw 
away cultural ballast to experience a plurality of libertarian 
approaches that favor the arrival at the individual, rather than 
consolidate it as a starting point boxed in roles imposed by the logic 
of domination.

The other is different from us, but not for this reason more or less 
worthy, more or less valid.

The other is in reality the space of encounter, of equal comparison, of 
enriching exchange, of contamination, of criticism, of collective growth 
through the search for points of contact and commonality of intent.

An opportunity to weave alliances by arriving at similar conclusions, 
following paths that are not identical but not incompatible. Fertile 
ground for practicing egalitarian and inclusive social relations from 
below. The dimension of the particular is in this perspective a 
potential added value, never an obstacle a priori. What unites us, we 
affirm with conviction, is stronger than what divides us.

A critical look within the walls of home
The movements of the new millennium have made some of the tools of 
decoloniality their own to broaden their gaze.

The idea of dismantling a prejudicial and flattening vision of the 
world, derived from the standardization of interpretative keys produced 
within cultures of European origin - concepts of civilization, progress, 
linear time, domestic living, infinite development... - has often ended 
up getting stuck in the meshes of essentialist determinism.

The consideration of the binomial "colonized-colonizer", not so much as 
a contingent reality defined by specific actors in play, but as an 
a-historical, invariable fact, like a metaphysical assumption outside of 
time, leads to conclusions that are at the very least questionable.

It follows that whoever the case has given birth to in the West is 
constitutively invested with an original sin with which he is forced to 
live and deal, carrying it on his back until the end of his days. It 
matters little what his political-cultural points of reference are or 
the nature of his relationship with the authoritarian institutions truly 
responsible for the predation of natural resources and genocidal 
enterprises around the globe. His fate is sealed, indelibly written in 
nature. The assumption of guilt is configured as a collective 
condemnation with important repercussions on individual self-determination.

Not only that. As regards movements that move on specific issues, an 
increasingly marked difficulty of encounter and interpenetration between 
different political cultures emerges, often experienced as unwanted 
interferences.

The prevailing posture is that of the presumptuous ascent to the pulpit, 
of sectarianism, of entrenchment in an ivory tower. Diversity is thus 
charged with a hierarchical sign, mutating into a singular form of 
inequality that finds its legitimacy in the excluding assumption of 
categories that trace the multiple caesuras imposed by patriarchy and 
colonization, claiming to confine in an identity given a priori, not 
only the capacity to understand oppression, but even the very faculty to 
oppose it. If you are not subject to a particular form of oppression you 
cannot grasp its "essence", you cannot criticize the choices, practices 
and organizational methods of those who rebel against it.

The situation that is created presents groups and social spheres in 
watertight compartments, willing only to accept a supine external 
solidarity, because they are substantially dominated by distrust and the 
paralysis of criticism.

Mala tempora currunt. In some cases we have reached the point of denying 
speech or severely limiting freedom of expression based on identity 
premises that do not take into account the positions chosen and assumed 
by subjects outside of the processes of racialization, sexualization, etc.

In short, the only identity that would seem to really count starting 
from these assumptions, is the one imposed from above, assigned from the 
outside. An innate, fixed, rigid, frozen identity, in which the 
individual ends up exhausting himself.
Contradictory positions and disastrous consequences
It goes without saying that we are faced with a colossal contradiction.

The same streams of the queer transfeminist movement that since the end 
of the twentieth century have fought in various capacities to get rid 
once and for all of the heavy biological sentence that weighs on the 
bodies of those who do not recognize themselves in the sex assigned to 
them at birth, which is claimed to correspond to precise characteristics 
and gender roles; the same ones who have made the feminism of difference 
obsolete, firm on hierarchical and trans-exclusionary positions; the 
same ones who have elbowed their way to finally leave behind binary 
logic in favor of the self-determination of lgbtqia+ subjectivities, now 
seem incapable of making the most of this approach of thought and 
carrying its revolutionary premises to the end, fully grasping the scope 
of the epochal challenge that lies before us.

Breaking the essentialist order that founds and supports the patriarchal 
order should be accompanied by a clear rejection of the essentialization 
of culture, which, like gender binarism, considers identities as natural 
and immutable "substances", nailed to a pre-written script.

Demonstrating oneself to be up to a radical and necessary relativization 
of the nature/culture dichotomy, placing it at the service of an 
autonomous production of meaning and organization of conflict from 
below: this is the challenge of our time. A time marked by a multipolar 
imperialistic scenario, between consolidated power blocks and emerging 
nationalisms, small homelands and identities prefiguring excluding 
communities. It requires an imperative commitment that puts us 
collectively to the test, under penalty of the inexorable capitulation 
of any real ambition to broaden the margins of autonomy and freedom at 
any latitude.

The Israeli-Palestinian question in particular has revealed a 
short-sightedness that leaves no room for excuses.

In recent months, not only have we expressed solidarity with the 
Palestinian population, victims of the military occupation and criminal 
attacks by the State of Israel in the territories of Gaza and the West 
Bank, we have also tacitly identified it entirely with Hamas. We have 
chosen to close our eyes so as not to see what it truly represents: an 
Islamist political and paramilitary organization that perfectly embodies 
the interests of the local bourgeoisie and that has kept the Palestinian 
proletariat in a condition of ferocious subjugation for years. As a 
result, Israeli civilians have all been repeatedly and indiscriminately 
singled out as settlers or active supporters of the Netanyahu government 
and of the war directives that are decreeing the terrible massacre of 
the civilian population. There is great confusion under the sky. The 
implicit connivance of a significant part of the radical queer networks 
with the main proponents of Islamic fascism, as well as the 
accreditation of the vulgate that would like the Israeli and Palestinian 
subaltern classes to be perpetually crystallized in a national 
community, risks undermining the credibility of the movements that 
develop at the local level and the practicability of revolutionary 
paths. To tell the truth, despite the prohibitive political conditions, 
on both sides of the war front in the Eastern Mediterranean, there are 
those who have not been enchanted by the nationalist and religious 
sirens, those who demonstrate, those who object, those who desert. They 
are the Israeli refuseniks who refuse the war. They are the inhabitants 
of Gaza who took to the streets shouting "we want to live", protesting 
against the denied freedoms and the climate of internal repression, well 
before the escalation of tension post-pogrom of 7 October 2023. 
Unfortunately, this is knowingly ignored, insisting on privileging a 
black and white narrative, without shades of gray, where there is 
brotherhood according to the motto "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". 
The imposition of Sharia in Gaza does not seem to constitute a problem 
to be addressed.

While it can be said that the recognition of an obscurantist and 
liberticidal coalition in the State, Church, anti-abortion associations 
and Catholic-fascists was right on the mark, the same was not true for 
the danger of establishing a theocratic regime.

The precepts of the Koran see marriage and motherhood as a "natural 
destiny", they offend the dignity of women by relegating them to the 
sexual object of Muslim men and to a machine that guarantees procreation 
and lineage. The indisputable Law of Allah provides that people 
suspected of being against nature and/or going against the Islamic moral 
order are persecuted, tortured or killed. Hamas itself, in order to 
better govern the Gaza Strip, uses the SSG - General Security Service, 
an intelligence network, which, among other things, carries out the task 
of moral police on the Iranian model. Among its tasks, that of 
investigating the integrity of women, enforcing the rules of "decorum" 
and presentability. Homosexuality is obviously banned.

The indiscriminate approval of all the pushes coming from the pro-Pal 
front has led to the minimization, or worse, the defense of the October 
7 attack as an act of popular resistance.

A "resistance" that not only caused the death of more than twelve 
hundred people, including over eight hundred civilians, not only 
targeted far-left kibbutzim and an electronic music festival, Nova, but 
was characterized by numerous rapes and horrific sexual violence, 
repeated even on hostages, and used as a weapon of war by Hamas militias.

Honestly, we do not know how to describe such a positioning of the 
movements, capable even of feeling sympathy for those who 
constitutionally deny their identity and paths.

Defining one's own objectives and choosing the means that are coherently 
suited to achieving them is a gamble of no small importance for 
contemporary movements. Support for the establishment of a nation-state, 
with its own employers and an army deployed to protect the sacred 
borders that cement hatred between peoples, is very different from 
support for the revolutionary militias that defend the experience of 
democratic confederalism in Rojava, where on the contrary there has been 
a real attempt to overcome ethnic, religious, cultural, gender 
divisions, etc. in an internationalist and pluralist dimension, not at 
all nationalist and exclusive.

We believe it is more urgent than ever to renew the call to develop 
antibodies against simplistic reasoning patterns that lock everyone's 
freedom behind the invisible bars of essentialism and deliver struggles 
for liberation and redemption into the hands of executioners who have 
only slavery and tyranny to offer.
Passing on the fire
Is there any hope of escaping this frightening picture? First of all, it 
may be crucial to highlight the fact that we are all cultural mutagens, 
that is, potentially transformative agents. We are certainly affected by 
the cultural and social environment in which we live, we are influenced 
by it, but we are never passively and completely determined by it. Even 
if we were forced to live in the worst of totalitarian dystopias, a gap 
would always persist, and it is precisely by working from this gap that 
everyone can be an active part of the process, capable of escaping the 
fascination of the established, voluntarily and consciously influencing 
material and symbolic reality, giving shape to utopian imaginaries that 
can be realized thanks to self-organized conflict and contributing to 
bringing about a radical transformation of the existing.

In every historical moment, dissidences have arisen. In every moment of 
our existence we can act as revolutionaries, counterposing every form of 
domination with instances of freedom and social justice. Culture is 
dynamic, fluid, changeable, in continuous becoming, because it emerges 
from the permanent interaction of human beings.

Clearly it is of fundamental importance to be able to make a long and 
inexhaustible effort to deconstruct the self, to recognize privilege and 
to be able to divest ourselves of it when invested, siding with those 
who experience oppression and exploitation first-hand, refusing the role 
in which they would like to nail us in order to reproduce dynamics of 
command-obedience. At the same time, however, it is important to feel 
free to proudly speak out in the wake of a non-dogmatic tradition of 
thought of an anarchist nature. Anarchism is a political proposal whose 
cornerstones can be considered universally valid and consubstantial with 
any project that represents an alternative to the current state of 
affairs, even if declinable in different ways based on the subjects who 
promote it and the context in which the proposal finds space and takes hold.

The pride of feeling part of an active minority that persists in 
operating in history but against history. That history marked by the 
reproduction of hierarchies of power and injustices to which we decide 
not to bow, because ours is first and foremost an ethical drive. It is 
an urgency for social change arising from the evidence of the miserable 
material and moral conditions in which the vast majority of humanity 
finds itself; an aspiration whose engine is not a presumed "natural" 
necessity but human free will.

Paraphrasing the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler: "tradition is not 
watching over the ashes, but passing on the fire"; and here the torch of 
anarchy reveals itself to be today more than ever a beacon of hope that 
can illuminate the path of the oppressed.

1 For a deeper understanding of the concept of essentialism in movements 
also in reference to the Palestinian question see, in this same essay, 
"A Spectre Is Haunting Europe: The Spectre of Essentialism"

2 See the article of 8 August 2023 by Paola Caridi on Lettera 22 "Gaza, 
protests (not only) for electricity" 
ttps://www.lettera22.it/gaza-proteste-per-lelettricita-e-non-solo/

3 For a more in-depth reading see, in this same essay, the text "The 
century that does not want to end"

4 See note 1

5 See note 1

6 Cfr. "Anarchy and Decoloniality", video of the meeting of March 22, 
2024 https://www.anarresinfo.org/video-anarchia-e-decolonialita/

7 Cf. from the introduction to the meeting on "Anarchy and decoloniality".

8 General Plan Ost: the Nazi strategy for the settlement and management 
of Eastern Europe, considered as a living space for the German people. 
This strategy included the numerical reduction of the Slavic population, 
the enslavement of the survivors, and the total extermination of the 
Jewish and Roma populations.

9 The so-called Doctors' Plot is a conspiracy theory invented by members 
of the Stalinist security apparatus which targeted a series of important 
doctors of Jewish origin in the USSR.

10 Paramilitary groups affiliated with Revisionist Zionism. Particular 
emphasis was placed on the fight against British domination, so much so 
that it defined itself as an anti-imperialist force. Some of the Lehi 
members in the 1950s joined Semitic Action, a group that proposed the 
union of all the Semitic populations of the region, creating an 
Arab-Jewish confederation, with an anti-Western function.

11 Histadrut, or The General Federation of Workers in the Land of 
Israel, the main Israeli trade union, of left-wing Zionist orientation. 
The so-called "Jewish Labor" directive indicated to those sectors of the 
cooperative economy, mainly agricultural, which referred to the union, 
to prefer the work of members of the Jewish community to Arab work.

12 Old and New Yishuv, or the Jewish population in Israel. The Old 
Yishuv refers to the Jewish population that lived there before Zionist 
immigration.

13 Al-Aqsa / Temple Mount, the area on which the ancient Temple of 
Jerusalem stood and on which, in the following centuries, the Al-Aqsa 
mosque was built. For a comprehensive study of the meaning of this 
place, see the book "The end of days: fundamentalism and the struggle 
for the Temple Mount", by Gorenberg, Gershom, Oxford University Press, 
New York, 2002.

14 The name "United Arab Republic" represented a state entity consisting 
of Syria and Egypt, later joined by North Yemen.

15 Dispensationalism, a theological doctrine typical of some branches of 
evangelicalism that emphasizes a division of human history into 
different historical periods of different theological significance that 
are dispensed by the divinity.

16 Meir David Kahane, American Israeli rabbi, founder of Kach, an 
Israeli far-right party from whose milieu both the attacker of the Tomb 
of the Patriarchs and the murderer of Rabin came. The Otzma Yehudit 
party, present in the Netanyahu government, descends directly from Kach.

17 The question of strategic depth, or the distance between possible 
front lines and the vital geographic centers of a country, has been the 
bane of Israeli policy until the territorial conquests of the Six-Day 
War. The Sinai was returned to the Egyptians in exchange for the US-led 
peace process; the Golan remains under Israeli control to this day.

18 Idea according to which there exist ultimate explanations beyond 
which there is no further possible knowledge. Definitive truths, given 
once and for all, capable of decreeing the objective impossibility of 
change.

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