THAT WE WILL NOT BE ASHAMED IN FRONT OF OUR GRANDCHILDREN
MARKO MARINČIČ
Under the pouring rain on a cold February afternoon, Guy and Hammoudi made their way from the station in Piazza de Europe to the middle of the square, stuck on the Vecchiet mosaic. “Is that really the limit with you?” they asked incredulously. Yes, it is true. It wasn’t always like that, there used to be a wall with a net here. There were other times, harder for us too, but never as hard as they were down there with them. In Palestine.
There, an eight-meter-high and 730-kilometer-long wall stands between the occupied territories of the West Bank and Israel. It is equipped with control towers, cameras and electronic sensors, and border crossings are something in between underground labyrinths and livestock barriers. They are used by the Palestinians, whom they treat just like cattle. Jewish settlers do not, they have secure fenced highways on which they move freely between Israel and the settlements that divide Palestinian territory into an archipelago of separate islands.
In fact, that wall is not a boundary wall. It is encroaching on the interior of territory that is believed to be Palestinian according to dozens of United Nations resolutions, but is still occupied by the Israeli army and is increasingly being populated by columns, mostly racist Jewish extremists. That wall is a means of conquest and humiliation, domination of one nation over another.
Guy and Hammoudi are peacemakers. They don’t want walls, they reject separation, and they transcend it with their daily activism. The first is Jewish, the second is Palestinian. Guy is an activist with the Jewish peace organization Ta’ayush (Living Together), and Hammoudi is among the founders of the Palestinian Youth of Sumud, which is pushing for the existence of Palestinian living in 25 smaller settlements in a rural area south of Hebron under pressure from the violence of the colonizers and the military.
Only a few days after their visit to Gorizia and Nova Gorica, the film “No Other Land” was awarded as the best documentary at this year’s Oscars. The film depicts the Jewish colonization of this very area, featuring Hammoudi’s brother, among others.
Guy and Hammoudi came to Gorizia at the invitation of the Forum for Gorizia and other organizations. A few days earlier, they had received the Alex Langer Foundation Award for Harmony and Nonviolent Resistance in Bocno. Alex Langer was a South Tyrolean fighter for coexistence, a bridge builder and a jumper over walls that separate members of different communities in ethnically mixed areas and push coexistence into ethnic cages. His Decalogue Experiment for Harmony is still an invaluable manual and a source of inspiration for all of us who live on the periphery of countries where ethnic boundaries do not coincide with national ones. Likewise, his intuitions offer us useful instruments to cope with migration.
On July 3 of this year, it will be 30 years since Alex Langer decided to leave this world. Just a few days later, on 11 July, it will also be 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide began. One can ask how Langer would experience and what he would try to do to prevent the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank today. As a Green MEP, he worked to stop the violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Only a few weeks before his death, he made an overheard appeal to the European Union: Europe will be reborn or it will die in Sarajevo. It is difficult to speculate on the motives that lead a person to suicide, but his former friends know how to say that they were no strangers to despair at Europe’s indifference to the massacre in Bosnia.
We are watching with equal indifference today what is happening in Palestine, where Israel’s renewed aggression has unilaterally torn down the fragile truce in Gaza, while ethnic cleansing is accelerating in the West Bank. The Israeli government is in a hurry. With the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, it was given the opportunity and pretext to complete what it had begun in 1948: expelling the Palestinians from their territory and stretching the borders of the Jewish confessional state “from the river to the sea.” Zionists get upset when pro-Pal demonstrators chant this slogan, claiming that it is a denial of the right to exist of the State of Israel. However, in the face of the unattainable military superiority of a nuclear-armed Israel and the unconditional support offered to it not only by the United States but also by most EU members, despite all the war crimes and more than half a century of illegal occupation, the threat to Israel is only theoretical. Far more real is the danger that “between the river and the sea” there will be ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Just in the days when Guy and Hammoudi were in Italy, Donald Trump sent a chilling video of Gaza Beach to the world, and the deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, Nissim Vaturi, shamelessly declared that the Palestinians are scum, subhuman beings. “No one in the world wants them, women and children must be separated, men killed, right down to the last.”
Has anyone in the world been horrified by this statement? It was largely ignored by the media, and politicians did not give up their unconditional support for Zionism for a moment. German Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz has not yet sat down in the chancellor’s chair, but he has already announced that he will welcome Benjamin Netanyahu, the boss of the bloodthirsty Vaturi, on a visit to Berlin and has not yet thought of having him arrested for war crimes on the orders of the International Criminal Court.
Under these conditions, Guy and Hammoudi’s quest for equal coexistence and peace in Palestine is akin to the torments of Sisyphus. And yet they persist because they can’t do otherwise. Guy from the ethical conviction that this is the only right and just, Hammoudi from the need to survive. As he said at a press conference in the Maks bookstore and then at a meeting in Podturno, he lives in an area besieged and attacked daily by Jewish settlers with the support of the Israeli occupation army. “We must not move more than 20 meters from the houses, otherwise we risk being shot,” he said. Nevertheless, they insist that their land not be taken from them, as it was taken from their grandfathers in what is now Israel in 1948. During the Nakba disaster, the family had to go into exile. They landed in a barren, barren area south of Hebron. Hard land is all they have and they are not willing to leave it to the colonizers, even though many farmers have already fallen in clashes in the defense of olive groves or in the burning of houses.
Hammoudi is only in his early 20s, but has been in prison eight times so far. The first time was when he was ten years old and was caught on his way to school. He was born and has always lived under occupation, “two countries for two nations” is a hollow motto for him, he does not see a better future, he only stubbornly and non-violently insists on the piece of land that is still left to his family.
Guy is in his early 50s and is one of some hundred Jewish peacekeepers who are using their own bodies to prevent even worse violence against Palestinians. Despite the military’s ban, activists are going to Palestinian settlements and orchards, using their presence to protect locals and document violence. He showed horrific videos about the brutality of settlers and the military. In one, a group of masked highlander beetles beat up farmers while picking olives. The women cause several breakdowns, another farmer is wounded, and the soldiers, who saw everything up close, let the attackers go and arrest two Palestinians. Another scene: three armored vehicles rush through the village, one deliberately drives into a fruit and vegetable vendor’s stall on the side of the road and destroys everything. Third: An excavator sweeps a parked truck for no reason. Fourth: A sniper shoots a donkey pulling a cart with a family’s poor belongings. Pure sadism. The scene moves the viewer. It makes him even more sad to think that people were shot at like that in Gaza.
Hell from Gaza is moving to the West Bank, Guy says. It started well before October 7, 2023, earlier that year, when the far-right government was in place. “Netanyahu used the Hamas attack as a window of opportunity for a final showdown with the Palestinians,” he says. He wants to expel as many as possible, take away their land, and lock up the rest in reservations like in Gaza. The “gasification” of all of Palestine is taking place. After the ceasefire in Gaza, tanks stormed Jenin, Tulkarem and other settlements. They demolished the homes of some 40-50 thousand Palestinians, killed hundreds, and expelled others.
As a Jew, Guy dedicated his life to fighting for harmony and justice. He knows that he is risking a lot for this, but he cannot do otherwise because it is his ethical duty. But he himself had lost hope. “Israel is permeated by racist and supremacist ideology. We consider ourselves to be the chosen people, after the Holocaust we think that everything is allowed to us. We treat the Palestinians as if they are not people.” He despaired that Israel would be able to overcome apartheid, achieve a just coexistence of two peoples and peace.
Intervention from outside would be needed, as in South Africa, where a racist regime collapsed when the US and Britain withheld support from it. But what about when Trump is moving towards ethnic cleansing and Europe is silent. “It’s up to you to put pressure on your governments,” Guy urged listeners, “so you don’t have to lie to your grandchildren when they ask you: You knew what was going on. But what did you do not to get married?”
Really. What have we done, what more can we do to end the genocide? After the Holocaust, we swore an oath: Never again! Now it’s happening again. No one will be able to say that they didn’t know, even if the media is hiding a lot from us. Media manipulation is Israel’s most important weapon in the face of military superiority, and any criticism is at least an accusation of anti-Semitism. European governments are bowing to this pressure. Because of dealings, arms and others with Israel, because of the bad conscience of the past, because of political calculations and opportunism, because of the rise of the extreme European right, which is marked by pronounced Islamophobia, while Zionism has been absorbed by former anti-Semitism. Jews are disliked in Europe, but they support Israel, which is a champion of the fight against Islam by oppressing the Palestinians.
Gorizia is on the outskirts, and yet this year they are in the spotlight of the European Capital of Culture. We like to take pride in the fact that we knew how to go beyond the limit, that we have built an exemplary coexistence in our country. Let’s give this over-the-top self-praise some real content. Let us be actors in active policies of peace and coexistence. Let us send a loud message to Rome, Ljubljana and Brussels that we have had enough of trampling on international justice. I know that, at the moment, an armaments and militaristic paranoia-obsessed Europe is deaf to such calls. But if Guy and Hammoudi persevere, in the face of everything that’s going on down there, maybe we too can raise our voices. If it’s strong enough, someone will hear it. And even if we don’t, at least we won’t have to look up at our grandchildren when they ask us why we didn’t do anything when we still could. for Palestine. But also for Europe.