Poster seen on the walls of Paris (France) and Brussels (Belgium), November 2023.
Once again, war ignites the Palestine-Israel region. A wave of coordinated attacks by Hamas has unleashed a full-scale military operation by the Israeli army. Cold-blooded murder and hostage-taking have been followed by the bombing of entire cities, famine and the deportation of millions of people.
Hamas and Israel. Two regimes with bloodstained hands, which is undeniable. Two military powers that strike indiscriminately. Two authorities who use terror to try to conquer or preserve power – rather like all States, including our own, which do not hesitate to lock up and crush rebels with their laws.
After all, it makes little difference whether they commit their massacres with a knife or the push of a button, whether their soldiers wear black or green uniforms, whether their butcheries are legal or illegal. They all put themselves on the same level at the moment when they take away the individual’s ability to live as they see fit.
That’s why we refuse the summons to “choose sides”. We have no desire to choose between any aspiring State with its throat-cutting soldiers and any colonial State with its murderous military – in other words, between different forms of domination.
Once again, the ideologies used by power – nationalism and religion – are the pillars of this murderous logic. While borders artificially divide humankind into enemy groups, nationalisms lead to forced unity within each group, under an assemblage of myths and false utopias fabricated out of thin air. The concept of “people” itself is nothing more than the product of an imaginary, the consequences of which are herd mentality, the cult of leaders, the spirit of martyrdom, mass graves and genocides. As witnessed by the long list of carnage that accompanies the history of States.
Simone Weil rightly observed that “war is above all a fact of domestic politics – and the most atrocious of all”. What could be better than militarization, in fact, to crush all divergence and impose unanimous support behind the flag of the nation?
In this world, in this social order where a handful of individuals decide on the lives of all the others who obey, it goes without saying that war is only ever a way in which those in power intervene to settle their conflicts and, in general, to increase the power they exert over their constituents.
Once again, those who make decisions in wars are not the ones who die in them. Under the missiles falling today in Palestine and Ukraine, the bombed civilians are used by governments and politicians as pawns in an relentless game of Risk. Thus, the Hamas offensive comes at a time when Saudi Arabia – a regime hated by Iran – was negotiating with Israel to establish official relations. As in the Ukraine, NATO’s expansionist strategy is at play, in other words, a broader rivalry between blocs of countries for the control of markets and zones of influence.
We therefore reject the idea that Hamas is engaged in a “liberation struggle”. Hard as it may be for Hamas defenders to believe, the appalling massacres they lead in reality belong to the praxis of any army, trained to kill and be decimated without question, for the greater profit of a privileged minority. – In other words, quite the opposite of the struggle of free individuals who can self-organize without leaders or followers.
Faced with war between States, we want to oppose our anti-militarism: a revolt that is not based on any kind of national unity, but rather fractures it through insubordination, fraternization of the exploited, attacks on war profiteers, and revolutionary defeatism. In today’s tragedy, we continue to proclaim that “there is only one war of liberation: that which, in all countries, is waged by the oppressed against the oppressors, those without a homeland against their own States”.
anarchists
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