They killed Gaza, where were you?

Gaza is dying. It is dying every day, every day, every hour of the day, spied on, chased and hit by drones, shot by tanks, bombed from the skies above. Gaza is dying: don't you see it? Don't you feel it? Do you really not know the testimonies, the independent investigations, the photos, the videos of the carnage? Do you really pretend nothing is happening? Gaza is dying burned, thirsty, hungry.

Executed by snipers aiming at the heads of children, strangled and deprived of humanitarian aid that remains to rot in trucks blocked at border crossings, deprived of health facilities and medicines, besieged by the randomness of a permanent horror, poisoned by infected sewage, by diseases, by the putrefaction of corpses, sequestered within its own ruins, with the survivors forced to flee from one side to the other like trapped rats, razed to the ground by the most fanatical "horsemen of the apocalypse" of our time. Gaza is being torn apart with artificial intelligence applied to the entire spectrum of cruelty, a mix of prehistory and post-modernity, without even a shred of humanity and legality surviving: there, in that livid and upside-down world, it is normal to systematically eliminate journalists, doctors, nurses, it is normal to reduce schools, hospitals, refugee camps to rubble. The fire of Israel's nationalist, racist and fascist messianism burns everything , in the name of a suprematism that, in its ideological crudeness and brutality, recalls the persecution of the Jews in the Europe of the swastika.

And while Gaza dies , the West Bank is being emptied of its people and its identity , becoming the scene of a systematic ethnic cleansing, practiced as an institutionally protected and legitimized crime, with settlers stealing Palestinian homes and lands, burning olive groves, invoking the god of marauders escorted by soldiers who hunt, shoot, kill. Israel, the criminal gang that governs it, the army that carries out its genocidal orders, today represent not the only democracy in the Middle East – as they continue to repeat without shame and contempt for ridicule – but rather the main antagonist of law and civilization in the world. Also because in addition to breaking the bones of a people, they have spat in the face of the institutions that were born to protect peace, human rights and international law. With the intimidating technique of accusing anyone who does not conform to their rhetoric and their lies of being “anti-Semitic” .

But barbarism is not only in those who are trying to erase the life and memory of what we call Palestine, it is not only in those who carry out a genocide and try to hide it with the murder of witnesses and with the propaganda of army communiqués (even if they then plan, invoke and claim that genocide, as the two serial killers disguised as ministers, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, do ). Barbarism is also here, in Italy, in Europe, in the United States ( Trump 's as well as Biden 's), in this world of ours that has armed and arms Israel, that has been and is an accomplice to its crimes, that has minimized and sometimes removed news of the massacres, that has allowed the UN to be mocked and delegitimized, that has tried in every way to ignore the indictments of the International Criminal Court.

The barbarism is in Strasbourg and Brussels, in places that no longer have any kinship with the magnificent vision of the Ventotene Manifesto , in the shameful silences of a European ruling class eager for rearmament and business. And it is in Palazzo Chigi, in the manifest ideological and political solidarity with Netanyahu, in the painful reticence of Giorgia Meloni, in the inability to feel the pain of others especially if others, by skin color and faith, seem not only different but inferior, to the point of being able to dehumanize them. The barbarism hides in the polished ways of the good liberal bourgeoisie that pretends nothing is happening, masks itself in the ideological boasts of the apologists of the primacy of the West, and lets itself be gently lulled by the hypocrisy and double standards of our elites.

We who grew up reading Anne Frank and Primo Levi, who recited “If This Is a Man” by heart, who felt an immeasurable debt to the victims of the Shoah, we who on October 7 cried for the boys slaughtered by the cutthroats of Hamas, we will not remain silent. We know how crucial and foundational that promise is that says “ Never again!” : which was and is valid for the Jews, and which is always valid for everyone. If today we were silent in the face of the martyrdom of Gaza we would lose the credibility of our secular faith in humanity. And together we would lose our own decency. And if we wave the flag of Palestine, we will not do so out of hatred for anyone, but out of love: for a people, for all the peoples of the earth.

FROM

Nichi Vendola