Original subtitles

"To play the dog of Sinai", saying of the nomads

who once wandered the desert plateau

of El Tih, to the north of Mount Sinai.

Its meaning fluctuates between: to run to the aid of the winner,

to be on the side of the bosses,

to exhibit noble sentiments.

On Sinai there are no dogs.

People don't like changing their minds.

When they have to, they'll do so in secret.

The certitude of deceit will change into cynicism.

Gain for the cause of conservatism.

"My name must not count, I am information,

service to the public, I represent

democracy, fair play, civilization, the good."

The Israeli war unleashed

in the recent Italian petty bourgeois

the will to be on the good side,

tasted briefly at the time of Kennedy and John XXIII,

to liberate themselves from fascist guilt - the only one which,

and only in the form of German Nazism,

that stratum is ready to recognize -

to discharge onto the Arab the hatred

accumulated against the generation of the fathers,

misery, the peasant mother, exuberance, rags,

military haughtiness, illiteracy...

Thirty years before, one month of July:

before the same sea, in a boarding-house,

my father’s "Corriere della Sera". Something

had begun where the sun was setting, in Spain.

When was it that they killed those Negroes in America?

Memory serves to level out everything.

On the asphalt of the streets fresh blood

returns to clot where it spurted in past years.

Nothing must change.

"There exists no perspective, no scale of precedence.

You must now participate of this fictive passion

as you have already done with other apparent passions.

You must prepare to forget everything and quickly. You must get ready

to be and to want nothing."

- what to say of the bourgeois-radical press?

Of Benedetti in the Espresso?

And the initiatives of solidarity,

the blood donors bitterly surprised that their blood should go to run

in the veins of bloodless Arabs,

the volunteers;

all this air of flood, of earthquake, of India to be fed,

with the imbroglio underneath, the stench of Italy,

the air fouled by the excreta of consent.

"Let’s leave off talking of imperialism", revolts an intellectual

who, perhaps, fears the accusation of political fickleness,

while he doesn't know that he has always been

a coherent defender of the interests of his class.

"Everyone has his own, the Americans have Vietnam, the Arabs have Israel".

"That Nasser, I'd strangle him with my own hands",

a school teacher, mother of two children, tells me: and she makes the gesture.

From day to day, the news of A. or of B. or of C.,

Jews and non-Jews, who join in the chorus.

I understand, you are right.

But it's stronger than me. When the Jews are menaced...

But it's my other fatherland.

But antisemitism exists.

I encounter M.

He is Israeli, grown up in a kibbutz,

works in Milan. He evaluates the situation,

explains, reasons. Not one single word

of that anti-Arab racism which soils our newspapers.

Jewish relatives make known their amazement

at my public silence and deplore it.

One of my nieces is near the Syrian border.

I telephone for news. The first words

are to ask me if what's being said is true:

that "I would have pronounced myself against Israel".

I reply that I have made no pronunciation of any sort

and my response is little appreciated.

Ten days later I come to know of a manifesto signed

by one of those apparently mysterious associations

which flourish in electoral or emotional periods.

It celebrates the defense of the values of civilization,

accomplished by the Israelis,

and then lists about thirty names, among them mine.

People who would have refused to sign this standpoint,

because souls sold out to the Italian Communist Party.

If it isn't true that I adhere

to the anti-Israeli theses of the I.C.P.,

then I must declare my solidarity with Israel.

They want to "file" me? These pages are my file.

The communal councils of the Apuan Alps

where 23 years before Reder and his men

murdered hundreds of people

pronounced themselves against the request for mercy,

after the commune of Marzabotto.

Vinca, may the flame which burned destructively

through German barbarism

remind you, enclosed in the marble of your mountains,

the martyrdom of your people.

There was a very real way of forgetting those killed:

the way followed by the Italian ruling classes

in the first ten years of the post-war period.

Today they prefer to speak of the Nazi slaughters

in order not to look at the truth

of Indonesia, Vietnam, Latin America, the Congo.

In the end there is only one harsh, ferocious piece of news:

"You are not where that which is deciding your destiny is occurring.

You do not have a destiny, you do not have and are not.

In exchange for reality you have been given

a perfect appearance, a well-imitated life.

Well distracted from your death

to enjoy a sort of immortality."

Of the motives which between my 17th and 20th years

were to make of me an antifascist,

my condition as son of a Jew had been little determinative.

I wouldn't then have known to say in what measure

a lot typical enough of small people of Leghorn

- come, I think, via Montpellier from Spain -

in tradings and marriages with other Mediterranean Sephardim

(the grandmother was from Tunisia)

had led my father to choose

a variety of ideology close to Freemasonry,

of most evident moralism and Jacobin ascendancy

in the forms of Hugo and Carducci.

Still today I don't know

if the cause of the present Italian bourgeois evolution

was served more

by people like my father with his principles of 1789;

or by the rich Jewish bourgeoisie,

people in banking, in the university, in commerce,

then oriented towards Anglo-Saxon models,

and thereafter ever more decisively American ones,

conservative of tradition,

promoting of the "Jewish home" in Palestine;

or by the fascists,

instruments of industrial development,

with their two wings,

of subversive populism and of state capitalism,

up until the victory of this latter,

preparation of the Italy of today.

In the boy there was no conflict

between the paternal tradition and the maternal one.

That of Judaism which could touch his imagination

was not in the incomprehensible rites

of the synagogue where his father sometimes accompanied him.

He understands that disaffection and lack of curiosity

came to him from the certitude that his father did not believe

in those gestures of piety.

While in the relatives of his father and acquaintances

- with the taled on their shoulders

they appeared to him like people disguised for a secret ceremony -

more than faith he noticed a reproach

for a diversity which he did not yet decipher.

This diversity, he would understand later,

was political, of his father.

The boy was 8, 10, 12 years old between 1925 and 1929,

the years which consolidated fascism;

in 1925 they had sought his father, to kill him,

and since then he had become the black sheep of the family.

At 10, at 11

there had been the liberating clash with the Scriptures,

the Psalms, Job, Isahiah.

But nothing in these pages brought him back to the faith of the fathers.

Not even that little of Christian tradition

family would have served him

to move outside the terms of his situation,

Catholicism was something confused with the State,

with the fascists and the school professors.

I must have been 14 or 15.

With some young Jews of an age greater than mine

I had gone, 2 or 3 times, to certain Zionist reunions,

in Piazza Donatello, in Florence, a dark room.

I seem to remember having heard a lecture

on Theodore Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement.

One evening there was a group of youths from Central Europe,

headed for Israel. They began to sing

and dance in a ring some traditional dance.

I had felt at it a sense of shame,

as of an exhibition.

I fled together with my acquaintances

and walked in the darkness of the avenues listening to them

agitated against Zionist nationalism, disgusted, angry.

The antipathy of the assimilated towards tradition!

The enlightened confidence

in a liberty decorated with the old colors of France!

Hitler was taking power.

What could I have known of it?

I would have had to travel a long road

to understand the sense of those popular dances

up to Milan, in the courtyards of the summer of 1945; and to Peking,

on Tien an men Square, in autumn 1955.

"But not one of the groups who have some power over opinion

do you want to keep as friend?"

O ingenuous idea, idea coarsely flattering,

to think me enemy of the age, wrathful preacher in the desert.

Isn’t this the most common and most subtle calumny,

because masked as praise.

Bernard Levin, journalist of the "Daily Mail":

"I will not tolerate being called anti-Semitic

only because on certain points

I do not agree with Israel

and I will not permit being put with racists

because I deny Israel

a racial solidarity in which I do not believe".

But for him who elects as discriminating principle

the class conflict on a world scale,

it is ridiculous to speak of "I will not tolerate"!

He who knows that the class conflict

is the last of the visible conflict

because it is the first in importance,

is outside of every natural "right",

is one of the "ignoble things of the world",

of the "despised things", of the "things which are not";

and must, in a certain sense, "tolerate" and

"permit" false accusations.

Against him who has without disgust tolerated listening to and reading

said or written for the Arabs

a good part of the arguments which 30 years earlier

the press of Hitler formulated against the Jude,

rendered, if possible, still more repugnant

with a pedagogical- democratic veneer:

because for the Nazi the Jew was irrecuperable,

while the Arab, ragged, gesticulating, illiterate,

incapable of using a modern weapon etc.

Can "progress"

if instructed in respect of Western values;

against such as those one will never be

"anti-Semitic" and "racist" enough:

if these adjectives are synonyms of "enemy".

I do not yet know and find it very difficult

to know what has been in the last fifty years

the history of the European and Italian petty bourgeoisie;

and of myself in it, if you will permit.

It is well to know something more about this immediate past.

If we want to change reality,

If to qualify with the same adjective

the hostility of the Roumanian peasants

to the stratum of the merchants (which in that country

(was originally composed solely of Jews)

and that of the little Frenchman anti-Dreyfusite or Pétainist

is only an error, to call anti-Semitic

the disapproval of Israeli politics

is pure affrontery.

The anti-Semitism of which I speak

is "a passionate effort to realize a national union

against the division of society into classes",

is "a mythical and bourgeois representation

of the class struggle".

The more I look on the course of the last quarter century,

the more I am confirmed in the idea that

"historical" anti-Semitism

has entered a phase of decay, indeed of agony,

precisely because its structure is reproduced

and prodigiously repeated in the bosom of the new society.

The anti-Semitism of the Russians

which did not have the democratic-bourgeois interruption

of the 1800's in the West and which indeed

increased in ferocity all through the 19th century,

was either a survival

of a past continued beyond the civil war

by the frequent peasant identification

of Jew and Bolshevik,

then re-ignited and exploited by the chauvinism

and nationalism of the Stalinist period,

or was, and probably continues to be,

a neoformation resembling

already well-worn Western forms,

grown out of traditions and ramified within

the petty-bourgeois aspects of the bureaucratic strata,

mythical "owners" of the "Soviet fatherland"

(and of the Great-Russian primacy in it) all through the so-called

"construction of socialism in a single country".

The most recent forms of "hatred for difference"

were instead born in the U.S.A.

The multiplication of intermediate bodies

- so exalted by Catholic ideologists

as guarantee against totalitarianism

when it is actuated under the pressure of the

objective totalitarianism of the industrial system

creates in substitution for the struggle of the classes

the struggle of each sub-group against each other,

the hatred of all against all.

The racist or anti-Semitic ideologies of the Nazi type

disappear because they only serve outmoded nationalisms,

and the spirit of anti-somebody irrationalism

is the answer to the total dispossession of individuals,

is the present-day form

of that irrationalism and nationalism

which burst into flames with Hitler's Europe.

Inasmuch as the traditional petty-bourgeoisie has become

identified with those employed in the tertiary sector

and has included a large part of the working class,

One Dimensional Man has of necessity had to create for himself

fictive passions, nations, devotions, loyalties.

Anti-Semitism disappears through multiplying itself.

The phrase "you are always someone’s Jew"

becomes true to the letter.

I would have understood nothing had I not lived amidst

the fugitives of Europe, in the Hitlerian winters,

hosing or peeling potatoes or washing dishes,

among the languages of Jews old and young

from Galicia and Hungary, from Poland and Dobruja, from Holland and Slovakia.

I listened to them, in those two Swiss winters:

from the ritual chants

- and there were the days of Kippur, October 1943,

to the frenzied cries when, on 21st July 1944, there arrived

the false news of Hitler's death through Stauffenberg's assassination attempt.

I sang with them the day of the liberation of Paris,

I went through with them in silence

the lists, too short, of those saved from Theresienstadt.

The dead are so many, I cannot recall them now.

But at least the name of Gianni Pavia

who wanted to return from Switzerland to fight against the Germans

and finished up immediately killed;

and at least one summer night of 1946

when I was giving aid to hundreds of survivors from Central Europe

to flee from our coasts,

in the attempt to force the English blockade

and disembark in Israel.

When in 1939

fascist legislation had begun to express itself,

my father had tried to have himself "discriminated".

He had gone as a volunteer in the First World War?

Yes, and so he should know that fascist law allowed one

to continue to practice the profession of lawyer.

He had feigned not to recall

how many times he had spoken out

in the political trials of 1922-1925,

the cudgellings undergone,

his arrest for supposed collaboration

on the small opposition paper "Don't give in".

Before the victors, he had drawn aside.

He had not asked for a membership card.

He had hoped that they would forget him.

For years his "legal studio"

was announced on a green marble plate

on the same street as the "House of the Fasces",

the Florentine federation of the party.

He had registered his son with the "avantguardists".

And how he had seemed happy when

they had sent him, his son,

to the "Lictors’ Congress of Culture and Art",

as they called certain annual competitions

which the fascist authorities

promoted among the university students

of the whole country.

Very moved, he had gone to see him off at the station,

as if he were leaving for who knows what war.

Or hadn't the two sons of the lawyer Consolo, who lived

with their mother on the floor below ours,

And yet those two boys

had killed their father

when the Black Shirts

had invaded the house and in their presence

had killed their father

with pistol shots; that lawyer Consolo,

who had been colleague of study of my father.

But I did not frequent those boys,

nor my family their house.

Out of prudence, it is understood.

All this had served nothing.

The past was not too distant,

since 1925 only 13 years had gone by,

and uselessly during the winter of 1938-1939 my father

compiled memorials for His Excellency Bocchini, Chief of Police,

in which he exalted his own respect for the regime.

Nothing for it, he had always been a "bigio",

as they said in Florence,

an antifascist; and, what more, he was Jewish.

In Rome he was filed as a "dangerous Jew";

which earned him an arrest,

as soon as the Duce had declared war, in June 1940.

Then his son had to be saved.

The horizon was closed off. But it would have been a passing storm.

A little shrewdness would suffice.

Son of a Jewish father and an "Aryan" mother:

"He is not considered of Jewish race who, born of a mixed marriage,

professes a religion other than Jewish

by the date 1/IX/1938-XVI".

Had I had the tranquil opportunism, the salubrious cynicism

which would have been necessary

to respond to such provisions.

Had I at least known the history

of the conversions enforced or out of opportunity, in the past centuries.

But no. All the terms of my culture exalted

the "seriousness" of the Spirit, morality.

And for years by then

my relations with the Protestants of Florence

- and, along theme, with the Waldensian denomination -

were, without my realizing it,

the way by which I was attempting an exit from

the petty bourgeois world of my province

to look towards the great European bourgeoisie,

more of the past than of the present, and of which

I was reading the fathers, Calvin and Cromwell.

I remember with what painful seriousness

I received in May 1939 the Baptism

which, backdated 10 or 12 months,

should have saved me.

With what shame as well:

not of apostasy but of hypocrisy.

In those months, to trouble oneself

to ask for an audience from the authorities of the Fascist University Groups,

to sit interminably in waiting-rooms

with the heart throbs and the useless dignity,

to solicit the intervention of notables

or the declarations of friends

which attested my loyalty to the regime.

But those of the Fasces were not no stupid,

nobody was renewing a card for me any more.

For two years, until, liberating, the call to arms,

to be seen with me in the streets of Florence,

to come to call for me,

could discredit, indicate.

"Dirty antifascist Jew!"

accompanied by a punch

and the taste of blood on the teeth;

and the punch was that of a senior of the Militia,

brother of one whom I had supposedly

led astray with my Judaism;

and mine the teeth;

a street in the centre of Florence,

in the crowd, November 1939, Italy not yet at war;

these words should have fixed me, identified me.

Seven months later, the war declared,

my father in the prison of the Murate,

the foolish pride of sitting for the graduation ceremony

before the professors of the Faculty of Letters,

in a dark jacket, white shirt and tie.

Now I understand that these years

should have bound me

to one of the units among which I lived,

and above all, because the hardest hit,

to that of the Jews;

at least to the face of my father

who lived only to hear the drums of Radio London,

distorted in the speakers of the clandestine headphones.

And instead I withdrew from everything.

Not pride: desolation, stubborn calculation, giving up.

I withdrew from the faces, from the eyes of the Jews

- those meek and silent of Attilio Momigliano,

driven from the chair of Italian Literature,

those of Cesarino Cammeo, dilated and questioning,

and he killed himself in the months of the German victories.

Of what at that time - autumn 1939 to July 1941 -

was being consummated in central Europe, I knew nothing.

It was late spring.

Lying in the bed of my parents, exhausted by fever,

I saw under the sheet the form of my swollen belly.

The doctor left the room to speak with my parents.

I would have had to have been operated upon within an hour.

The probabilities of saving me, very few.

So I asked that they call Pastor V.

He arrived, I heard him engage the padlock

on his bicycle left beneath our house.

He asked for a cup with some water and baptized me.

A little later, there came in to carry me away with the stretcher

those from the Misericordia, hot under their black gowns.

I read in a document of a group of Christian theologians

a stand taken against the inadmissible pretension

of identifying the Jews with the State of Israel,

accused of racism, and against the short memory

of the Christians of Europe and America

who in aiding the birth and development of the State of Israel

think to wash themselves of the guilt of persecution

and of that of indifference.

And the political proposal of the document is that

of a pluralist state which reabsorbs the refugees,

gives to all the minorities

equal civil rights and economic powers.

The stands taken and the political proposals are

of relative interest to me.

The religious interpretation maintains instead

that the creation of an exclusively Jewish State

is just as contrary to the Scriptures

as an exclusively Christian State.

It would be a regression to the medieval mentality

which identifies State and Church.

The document does not omit to point out

that to aim at a solely temporal human destiny

is proper also to Marxist messianism.

It seems to me that in order to affirm the universalist vocation

of the Hebrew people, it is not necessary

to have recourse to the authority of the Scriptures.

The Jews have been

the "figure" of that universalism,

the "witnesses of God among the nations".

And if then to be Jews means a certain synthesis

of behaviours, of movements and of situation,

a certain destiny

in a certain measure undergone and chosen,

then other human communities can be so,

the quality of "Jew" is acquired and lost.

As for "Marxist messianism" I know well that

its identification-overcoming

of the State and the Church (that is the Party)

is its most tragic weakness.

When all its force and most profound truth

are in showing, like a fist or a stump,

its very partiality.

There remain the political and military questions

of the State of Israel and the Arab countries.

This state was born with force and war,

force and war can sustain it or destroy it.

I am persuaded that the whole world has

to expect great advantages from the existence

and from the development of the State of Israel.

The greatest is probably

that of a possible function of revolutionary mediation

between the West of Christian-liberal and socialist heritage

and the Third World: a function missed until today.

Revolutionary mediation; or, expressed in a struggle

for the end of national States, of private profit,

of exploitation,

in particular neocolonialist.

I see no other rights to national survival;

or at least none different

from those of any other national or ethnic group.

Add that for many countries such as Belgium,

Italy, Greece, Spain and so forth,

national independence

is little more than a juridical fiction.

I know well that we are living

a resumption of nationalisms favoured by the struggles

of ex-colonial and underdeveloped countries

which for half a century has conjoined

the struggle for nationalism and the struggle for socialism;

and that nothing seems today more absurd than the

proletarian internationalism of the Marxist tradition.

Indeed, who preach the Internationale

of Western, or Christian,

or social-democratic, or syncretistic civilization,

are exactly

the apologists of the United States of America as superpower.

But the unique possibility of an initial victory

of communism on a world scale

remains still today subordinated to the capacity

to co-ordinate internationally

those who are united by social antagonism

to the general mechanism of exploitation.

The complexity of the real

does not free anyone from an objective simplification,

from the inscription of every life in an order of behaviours

which are class behaviours;

and the simplification, subjective and expressed

in ideological terms,

of which I, as everyone, make use,

does not pretend to be an instrument of scientific account,

but provocation, reagent

that induces others to take account of their own class identity.

As long as the June war was not fought and won,

the degree of class commitment,

of fidelity to imperialistic service,

of the Israeli political leaderships

could remain incertain. I mean, to those

who may have forgotten the war of 1956

and then the violence of the reprisals

which on average for every Israeli killed four Arabs.

Evoking the Nazi butcheries equals

asking for a key to them, an interpretation.

This sense was:

To have summarized in an incredible concentration

of time and ferocity,

all the forms of domination and violence of man on man

proper to the modern age;

to have reproduced for the use of a single human generation

that which diluted in time, in space,

in habit and in insensibility,

the European subaltern classes

and the colonized populations had undergone

as denial of existence and history,

as alienation reification annihilation.

To extract this sense and a lesson

of struggle against the conditions

which render possible the destruction of man,

of which the Jewish massacre is only an example,

has been done by few.

Many spokesmen of the so-called Western "culture" sought

interpretations extra-historical and metapolitical

and arrived at situating the Nazi massacres

in the order of the "sacred",

considering them a work of Evil itself,

in substance at accepting, by reversing the contents,

one of the central myths of the Nazi mystique:

purity and purification through the holocaust.

An operation analogous

to that accomplished for interpreting fascism.

The Soviet - and Communist - position

in the measure in which it tended towards coexistence,

or towards U.N. democratism,

tended also to perpetuate

- in accord with the Western ideological spokesmen -

the pathetic-propagandist version

of Horror and Bestiality.

To make the Nazi massacre recover

its character of bloody "normality",

it has been necessary that there should enter the struggle

the countries in which European colonialism

had installed far vaster Lagers than the Nazi ones

and had destroyed far more numerous millions of lives

than the SS had dissolved.

And finally it must be said that in the action of those

who with major coherence and heroism

fought against Nazism and of whom we read the thoughts

and the last letters;

and, also, indeed more, perhaps in those who were

in no way exceptional

and have left no trace,

there was something which went beyond the struggle against Nazism,

which, they knew it or not, contributed

to the "dream of a thing"

which men have had "for so long",

to the enormous dream of men.

Men, groups, people are not equal;

but they are not different only

because their past is different.

They are not, they must not, they cannot be equal,

indeed, they are constrained to be different,

because here and now they act differently,

because differently they are placed

in the complex of historical forces,

in the simultaneity of the world.

And they are different with respect to you

because they involve, with their activity in the present,

your difference, your activity.

My nearness to you, your distance from me

are measured by what we two are doing,

by how and where, in the context of a confrontation,

of an immediate and universal struggle.

There is nothing in the remembrance of my father

I might try to identify as disagreeable, displeasing, embarrassing

- anxiety, vivacity and fickleness,

improvisation,

the absence of interior pauses and hence the biological desperation -

which is not to me disagreeable.

Displeasing, embarrassing in myself,

and which a mirror does not illumine, a snapshot not fix.

I think he must have undergone at about 20, something of a halt,

when the bankruptcy and the suicide of a wealthy relative

took away from him the possibility to continue his activity, as a journalist.

Then, half way in his life,

in 1925, with the fears,

the cudgellings, the fascist trial,

I think he had another halt of his capacities, breaking

the modest hope of professional successes

and of some well-being.

Childish gladness,

with an ingenuous joy when he could be with important people:

at a banquet, in a good hotel, at a show, as someone who

only has behind himself seeming and not being;

so many years of shabby furnished apartments,

small summer holidays, demands from the landlord,

periodic visits of the functionaries of distraint

to appraise the dining room

and the bedroom furniture, drafts.

Transferred onto me,

the ambition for social ascent

transmitted to him by the family together with

the values of the poor Jew

who has been able to leave his cloth-shop

and enter into the professions,

the values which in all of Europe

the grandsons and sons of those gone out of the ghetto

defended: intelligence as logical acuteness,

progress as rationality,

equality.

It must have been my father

who made me stop in front of that monument along the Arno.

And later I noticed

the trace left by a masonic triangle

which the fascists had torn off it.

Once, preparing a trial against a group of fascists

who had contributed to the deportation of 341 Florentine Jews

of whom only 7 returned from the German camps,

he told me that to the request that the surviving relatives give testimony,

many, too many had not responded.

"There is a poor woman, a worker, non-Jewish,

who had cohabitated with M., killed in Germany.

This woman who had withal nothing to hope for from the trial

had presented herself spontaneously

to testify in remembrance of the dead man and out of affection.

But how many of our Jews from here

who have had fathers and brothers deported,

don't want to give a sign of life.

It may be the old superstitious habit of

not naming the persecution in order not to reawaken it.

But with the fascist chiefs and authorities,

with the fascist bourgeoisie,

these people before 1938 were on the best of terms.

And whether or not they were fascists in opinions or membership,

they got on well with them, frequenting the same circles,

sharing the same tastes and the same life

because of the same class.

Now some have begun to frequent each other again,

and how many others

- and not even 10 years have passed -

try to forget, because to remember too much

can have a political nuance

displeasing to those who command today."

Up to here and not further, I think, arrived his conscience.

The plea of one of these trials he had closed with:

"Hear, O Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is One".

But he had no other gesture of worship or of faith.

Recollecting how anxiety strangled his voice calling

if in a crowd he had lost me as a boy,

an anxiety of bewilderment and anguish, a voice

for which I blushed

in the attempt of a lordly calm which I would never have known how to have,

I seem to understand that

in this invoking a name out of fright,

for help and almost out of madness,

something was bound in him and in me

to long, age-old wires of nervous cells

consumed through generations of humiliation and fear.

To discipline the mimicry,

to exhibit the mark of the ancient subjection,

to imitate at the same time the violence

and the lament of the violence suffered.

This, I think, I have tried to do with my verses,

and this has something to do with Judaism.

It had to happen that, notwithstanding everything,

between the clumsinesses and insignificancies of l'Unità,

it was in that paper that - notwithstanding the permanent defense

of the politics of coexistence,

of Nasser and his generals,

of Paul VI and his encyclicles -

there were to be read a few words more true, more "just"

- also because more desperate -

than those of all the rest of the Italian press.

But in Paris two days ago

even wanting to make abstraction

of what is today at stake in the world,

even wanting to attribute to the waving of the flag with the 6-pointed star

an nth cry of sorrow or of anguish, it would have been

in no way possible to find in this cry

the ancient accents of invocation of the just cause.

Enraged, exasperated, threatening:

they were not cries in favor of the Jewish people,

they were cries against the Arab people.

And the only slogan chanted or given over

as in the most lurid times of the Algerian war

to the car horns, was: "Algérie française, Algérie française!"

A macabre slogan, issued forth irresistible

from the very guts of French racism and imperialism

rekindled

by identification of the moral reparations

which the Jewish people still await from Europe

with the "right of the State of Israel".

They found themselves Arabs because the whole history

of imperialism of the last 50 years

has denied them as such, has denied them as people,

making and unmaking frontiers,

dismembering or reuniting states,

knocking down or building up different regimes,

according to how the game of rivalries and interests

proceeded between the different imperialist powers.

And because when they asked for freedom and independence

all that was known was to shoot and kill.

And if at times a primitive nationalism

has been the sole mainspring of this struggle,

we would recall to him who wrinkles his nose before an "elementary" consciousness

that this is the daughter of an endless oppression,

made of illiteracy, misery and hunger,

of piles of corpses and rows of burnt villages,

which lined the modern pipelines or the cotton mills

of a very civilized Western capitalist bourgeoisie.

If at times an element of religious fanaticism emerges,

we would recall that the only

"holy wars" of the Arabs against the Jews of Palestine

were paid for, wanted, imposed by

democratic England which lit up religious hatred,

deflecting towards Palestine the wave of nationalism,

to the sole end of maintaining its balance of power in the Middle East.

Having the Jewish communities of Palestine attacked in 1921

by its vassal Ahmed Bey,

in 1934-1936 by Fawzi el Kawukij,

on the direct orders of Glubb Pacha.

All that leaves a trace.

The true story of the American penetration in the Middle East,

of its relations with Israel and with the Arab world

against the background of its struggle to replace the English,

is still all to be written.

In front of the overwhelming character of

the Israeli victory over the vassal regimes of the English,

and the jolt given to the imperialist balance,

the American "good offices", applied to save it,

became a meeting point for all,

including the Israeli bourgeoisie.

On the backs of the Arab people, and above all of the Jewish people,

and at the price of a permanent tension.

The American solution, founded on an equivocal armistice which

avoided a stable peace

gave the Americans the official role of power in the Middle East,

the possibility of setting themselves up as arbitrators of the tension

and as tutors of Israel, but also of the feudal regimes.

England accepted it

because basically it was useful to some of her vassals.

The feudal regimes blessed it because,

holding open a tension with Israel,

they had a diversion for the growing internal ferments.

Finally the Israeli bourgeoisie saw in it the instrument

for putting a stop to the anticolonialist component

which emerged from the struggle against the English

and for reinforcing the Zionist character of the State.

The declaration of 1950 - USA, France, England -

symbolizes the coincidence of diverse interests.

This was centered on the principle that

"the Arab States and the State of Israel all need to

maintain a certain level of armed forces to guarantee

their security and their legitimate self-defense."

Since then the situation of Israel is characterized by

the defense of the precarious imperialist balance in the Middle East,

hence by the clear opposition to every rupture effected

by the Arab liberation movements.

This line was not simply to play the game of the Americans and the English,

but it found a reason of its own

in the internal development of Israeli society.

During the course of this process a social problem is outlined in Israel,

with the first class confrontations.

The continued and willed tension with the Arab world

no longer succeeded

in containing the real problems which were emerging.

The bourgeoisie responded to these problems with the idea of a "strong State",

in which military men began

to occupy key posts in the administration and economy,

and where "exceptional" security laws were launched,

up to the law for the limitation of the right to strike.

The notion of "armed ghetto"

became evermore the line of the bourgeoisie.

Only Israel was no longer a ghetto. Quite the contrary.

The crisis has reached its most acute moment in the last months.

Production has fallen from an annual increase of 10% to 1.6%.

40% of construction has stopped.

Bankruptcies have multiplied.

Salaries have been blocked while prices have gone sky high.

The unemployed have risen from 35,060 to 100,000.

The bourgeoisie and the government responded

as capitalist bourgeoisies normally responds

dismantling of the hardest hit factories

and monopolistic concentration;

state aid for the export industry

and compression of consumption by the people.

And for a year Israel had been seeing the new fact

of the extension of strikes and social struggles,

independently and against the will of the Histadrut.

If the word revolution

weren't almost ridiculous through abuse,

it would have to be said that today revolutionary activity

has to be more reformist than the reformist,

apparently myopic,

dedicated to small and sure works,

to making artificial and deadly

diamonds or flints,

to sabotaging minutely,

to destroying with patience, but down to the grounds.

To draw upon oneself some bark or some bite

is really a thing without merit or demerit. One must

want quite another thing; and above all believe,

as Lenin said, that for every situation

there exists one way out and the possibility to find it.

And that is that the truth exists, absolute

in its relativity.

Translation: Gregory Woods, Misha Donat

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