Fresh insights about energy, politics, travels, sports, music…
Glasgow, UK
Cease-fire! After a couple of weeks of bombings from the sky, clouded by the full-fledged military operation “Pillar of Defense” of the Israeli government on Gaza, the intervention of Egyptian president Morsi seemed to have brought the much awaited cease-fire. The death toll, is as always tilted to the detriment of Palestinian civilians, hundreds of whom fell under the indiscriminate explosions. In the following days, Morsi issued a decree that reinforces his position in the balance of institutional power in Egypt, showing that he is no liberator, looking rather Napoleonic or Pharaonic. Tahrir square is full again and the chants from the people are clear: “Morsi is Mubarak”. People in the West are happy, because this contingency put a stop to the Israeli bombings and scrapped the option of a ground attack. People in Gaza are a little relieved: they now can count the victims, cure the wounded, and assess the immense damage (both visible and invisible) caused by the bombings. They can do so, not fearing for a hard rain to fall. Hostilities are over, peace is restored, let’s go back to our Christmas season of shopping!
If the world was as “realists” à la Kenneth Waltz, then there would be a binary relationship between war and peace. On/off, like a switch, peace is the absence of war and conversely war is the absence of peace. This depiction of the world has simplified the life of violent and oppressive states in the modern era: in lands that are far from us, once hostilities cease, then rainbows, peace, and happiness appear. And we, who collected money to be sent to war-zones, who wrote articles, who started political quarrels, we can stay at ease. Nobody is getting killed anymore. Unfortunately, the world is not so simple. There are ways of waging war without shooting a single bullet and Palestine has been the battlefield of such wars.
The continuous colonization of the Palestinian soil has seen no “peace” since the Roman times at the turn of the calendar from BC to AD. During the past century, however, the Zionist acceleration for the repossession of the Holy Land and the British blind eye have allowed for the creation of an eternal conflict between cuddled colonizers and hated colonized. Israel received the recognition as a sovereign state before its boundaries were even defined. Open war was waged on Palestinian soil by both enraged Arabs and greedy Israelis, who sought to take advantage of any war situation to ask for more aid and to justify the occupation of more and more area of land. The result is in the picture below, that shows how much of the Arab soil has been grabbed by Israeli colonizers.
Land Grabbing in Palestine
Isreal is a Jewish state, the democracy of which is based on ethnicity and foreign aid. However, the conflict has nothing to do with Jews. They suffered the Holocaust during the Second World War and were wrongly paid back by the guilty Western world with a strip of land, ripped from under the feet of other people whose backwardness allowed the White Man to kick them out. There’s never enough space in one sentence to describe what went on in those horrible years around 1945. But this is not the point. Was it Auschwitz survivors who bombed Gaza? No. They know what it’s like to suffer ethnic cleansing in a systematic and cruel manner. It’s the racist and supremacist Israelis (who just so happen to be Jews, but this is a common characteristic among humans, unfortunately) that caused the bloodshed. Only a racist and supremacist group, such as the Zionist of the late 19th century, could think of sweeping clean the promised land from the “barbarians” who had inhabited it for more than nineteen centuries.
Not all Germans were Nazis, just like not all Jews are Zionists. But what has been happening in Palestine since the end of the Second World War is a genocide, carried out through the means of ethnic cleansing. One must never forget that what goes on every day in Palestine is much more horrific than a week of bombings. It has no solution, it entails no freedom, it provides no security. Every day that the Israeli government stands on the Palestinian soil threatening to forcibly or peacefully steal some more Arab land, the terror endures.
It is a question of oppressor and oppressed. In this case, I have been standing with the oppressed ever since I was acquainted with the situation. Not with Fatah or with Hamas, who keep missing the point of the struggle and use their power position to gain personal wealth. With the people. With them I took the streets several times. I protested against the business-as-usual attitude of Western governments towards Israeli diplomats, who are nothing more than expression of a racist government and a killing machine. I don’t think that the handful of rockets launched by the armed Palestinian resistance are useful for their cause. However, I remain apalled by the lack of indignation towards such a deliberately disproportionate reaction on the part of Netanyahu. Who perhaps thought that the West would have even tolerated a ground invasion. The end of hostilities can be seen more as a Western rejection of such a strategy, than the effort of a corrupt Egyptian president who is nothing more than a newcomer in the Middle Eastern arena.
Viva viva, Palestina!
Glasgow, UK
Da troppo tempo non utilizzo il blog. Continuo a ricevere visite, il che è piacevole, ma ogni tanto sento il bisogno di scrivere, ma purtroppo il tempo manca. Ecco un post in italiano su una questione insignificante: le primarie del centrosinistra.
Le primarie del centrosinistra sono un evento insignificante perché nessuno dei candidati rappresenta un’idea, ma solo un volto (ci stiamo avvicinando all’America e alla sua depoliticizzazione). Un evento insignificante perché avvengono in un momento storico che ci ricorda che esistono cose più importanti a cui pensare: la stretta di Monti & co. sulla gola degli italiani e la guerra in Palestina. Chiunque sarà “eletto” non si preoccuperà minimamente di contrastare le politiche neoliberiste della Bocconi e di Bruxelles o le politiche razziste e neoimperialiste di Israele e NATO. Dunque perché preoccuparsene?
Io ho dedicato due ore della mia vita a guardare con attenzione il dibattito su Sky (su youtube, che è più facile). L’ho fatto perché da fuori, a più di 2.000 km da casa, è importante capire cosa succede. Allo stesso modo, ho seguito le elezioni siciliane, sulle quali non ho scritto, ma ho pensato molto.
Nel merito, sui candidati alle primarie del centrosinistra ho alcune idee:
Non so perché Tabacci sia nel centrosinistra. Capisco il motivo per il quale egli sia per il centrosinistra (in modo da attrarre i più aperti tra i democristiani, azione in cui compete con Nichi).
Bersani mi è sembrato stanco, superbo e senza idee; è l’unico che è espressione di un partito (Nichi è il demiurgo del suo) e fa trasparire molto bene tutte le contraddizioni di un partito morto nell’Ottobre 2007.
Renzi è un rottamatore sia di vecchiume, sia di ideologia, sia di politica. Votare Renzi significa spegnere il cervello, tradurre tutto in inglese e tedesco e uniformarci a Bruxelles e Washington.
La Puppato è quella che mi ha convinto più di tutti. Pragmatica, amministratrice, senza peli sulla lingua.
Purtroppo, le primarie sono l’elezione di un leader, di una faccia per i poster, non un dibattito sulle politiche e sulle idee. Non voterò, perché non voto in condizioni di democrazia limitata (accesso alla scheda, regole) o in condizioni di ideologia limitata (se quello “più a sinistra” è un catto-comunista, non posso scegliere il mio rappresentante!).
Tuttavia consiglio un voto “inutile” alla Puppato oppure un voto “utile” a Vendola (e mannaggia a Veltroni che ha inventato questi termini).
bottleneck analysis 