AIC Social Movements Coordinator, Lubna Masarwa, speaking in May in Turin, Italy, at a counter demonstration against the decision to celebrate 60 years since the founding of Israel at the Turin Book Fair (photo from the AIC archive, 2008).
The Turin Book Fair is over, luckily
without any “victims” on the field of battle. Maybe the term “victims” is
overdone, perhaps even tasteless considering that there are real victims—men
and women—every day in Palestine/Israel. Still, maybe not too far off the mark
if one thinks of the ruckus raised by the newspapers and politicians on the Right,
Left, and Center in the days leading up to the demonstration protesting the book
fair and its honoring of Israel, something that bore a certain resemblance to
the days before the anti-G8 protests in Genoa: once again there was talk of a
“red zone,” the danger of violence, and it was in just those days that the new
Berlusconi government was born.
A victim there was though, at least metaphorically
speaking: the sense of proportion. Clearly the one who most widely overshot the
mark was the newly named President of the Chamber of Deputies, Gianfranco Fini,
who went so far as to consider the protest demonstrations and the burning of a
couple of Israeli flags to be worse than the killing of Nicola in Verona by a
pack of Neo-Nazis.
However, albeit on quite a different level,
we found the headline in the Communist Refoundation Party newspaper Liberazione of 8 May inappropriate with
its reference to “the risk of opposite extremisms,” harking back to the
Christian-Democrat theory from the 1970s, which already then was wrong-headed
and provocateur.
The series of demonstrations during the fair
marked an interesting and important moment: if we, at least, can just get
beyond the aesthetics—futile even if given too much importance by protagonists
and onlookers alike—of the flag burning and the generic ringing in of the resistance,
we may realize that the 10 May march, and especially the meetings during the previous
days, allowed for a fruitful encounter among different and differing positions
and points of view held by Italians, Palestinians, and Israelis.
To be in the demonstration was especially important
for Palestinians who live in Italy, as it was a unique moment to show their
solidarity and their struggle for their land.
To have chosen which side we were on—not prejudiciously, but in the specific context of the
permanent occupation and colonizing of the Palestinian territories by Israel—was
necessary to be able to forcibly denounce what is going on in Palestine, how
the fair has sought to misrepresent reality, and to stand shoulder to shoulder
with those who struggle for a different prospect, both Palestinians and
Israelis (a far cry from the hypocritical, complicit “equi-closeness policy” called
for by Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Massimo D’Alema).
The Book Fair was not and was not intended
to be a neutral place, nor a place of reflection, but the
celebration of an event. The organizers of the fair and the Israeli guests (especially
the Israeli Minister of Culture, who made sure it was an invitation to a
celebration) saw to it that it was a celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of
the birth of Israel, with the a priori
exclusion of the voice of any Palestinian or truly critical Israeli
intellectual (because the much celebrated Amos Oz and A.B. Yeoshua could not be
thought of as such—they, who accused the Palestinians of having destroyed any
chance for peace by demanding “justice”; they who have justified the Wall in
the name of a necessary “separation”—as if Palestinians did not live in Israel,
albeit as second-rate citizens).
What was planned in Turin was not an encounter of cultures but a definitive normalization of relations with the
Israeli state as it is. This must move us to reflect more deeply on the whole
affair and what it has represented. During those days, I happened to discuss at
length with a “1948 Palestinian” comrade, and she asked me why even (or indeed
above all) leftist journalists and political figures were so favorable to
Israel’s “reasons.” I believe that Yitzhak Laor gave the best answer to this in
his open letter published in Il Manifesto
on 9 May, in which he wrote that “it is not the occupation that has changed its
nature. It is Western Europe that has changed, turning back to its old way of
looking at non-Europeans with hatred and contempt. In the imagination of the Italian Left, the
Palestinians have lost the symbolic “status” they once enjoyed (for instance,
thousands of young Italians used to sport a kefiah) and have passed into the
European hinterland, where the Americans can do whatever they want, and, as
usual, Europe avidly sides with the strongest. Europe is expanding so far as to
include Israel, seen as an “island of democracy and human rights.” We must not
forget that the Italian Left has never gone through a post-colonial process. It
mouthed anti-colonialist rhetoric from the 1970s all the way down to the
present colonial anguishing over the plight of “our Jewish brothers down there
in the jungle, in the midst of savages.” “Mamma, the Turks are coming!”
This is what Michael
Warshawski meant when he maintained that what is being built inside Palestine is just part of a “global
apartheid wall.” So the question which
side are we on takes on a more precise focus: we today find ourselves
living in the part of the world that builds these walls, on the side of
governments and exponents of Western “culture” who promote and justify walls, exclusion,
war. Our task—of course: Work daily to
denounce the Israeli occupation and European complicity with it—is similar
to what Warshawski described in his important book On the Border,
in which he tells of the experiences of his group of militant Israeli anti-Zionists:
“The acknowledgment of the other, the non-Jew, as a possible victim represents
the first break with the Zionist narrative; another may be the admission that
he might be our victim. On that
condition, there can then be achieved a distancing from the tribe, the national
collectivity, and an approach to the frontier that separates our tribe from the
rest of mankind. The acknowledgment takes the name of solidarity when it becomes
willing to sustain the other in the conflict with one’s own national
collectivity. […] Solidarity is, by definition, a ‘frontier’ attitude.”
This is the side to be on, this is where to place oneself, today in Europe and
in Italy, in the face of global apartheid
(and its wars).
However one may feel about the boycott
campaign, it has opened a space for discourse, although that space was rejected
by the choice of how to organize the celebration of the Fair: many different
points of view have taken position in this space, joining in the search for
something more than a generic dialogue, a possible on the frontier relationship.
Piero Maestri is a member
of the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left) Italian political movement and a writer
for the magazine Guerre&Pace.
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