The attempted march toward Gaza

Bodies. How much effort we are making to reclaim this power that, as humanity, we still have. The first time I seriously reflected on this, from a political perspective, was when I saw the first roadblocks by Ultima Generazione three or four years ago. Decades spent organizing mass demonstrations on ecology, and then just five kids sitting in the middle of a highway were enough to trigger panic and media debate, with drastic swings in public opinion between the finger and the moon.

I had started to put my own body on the line precisely in the squares for Gaza over these last devastating two years. Bodies lying down, bodies pretending to be dead, bodies occupying public spaces to silently shout: "Not in our name." With some associations, I staged the "dying nativity scene," a slow laying down of white bundles stained with blood, occupying the main square of Genoa during the Christmas markets. We visually created the utmost contrast, disgust; we made visible hundreds of bodies of children shattered by bombs, as if they were our sons and daughters. Beyond political positions, beyond ideologies and propaganda, we placed everything on the ABC of humanity: no supposed justification is enough for this.

And so in May, the Global March to Gaza — publicly proposed worldwide through the official website and coordinated by European activists — appeared to me as an idea both obvious and utopian: to use our privilege of a powerful passport to go toward a conflict zone, create diplomatic embarrassment, and jam the machinery of war and inhumanity. Taking risks, of course. Isn’t a genocide being broadcast worldwide a sufficient reason to take them?

So my partner Margherita Goretti, a Caritas operator in Genoa, and I decided to delve deeper: the type of proposal, the program, the organizational climate, the reliability of the contacts, the security and legal context… A first concrete effort: suddenly adding to an already busy daily life another series of research, readings, calls, and training for this initiative that was as disruptive as it was uncertain.

Program: arrival in Cairo, Egypt, negotiation with the government to obtain authorizations, first bus transfer to Sinai, then the actual days of marching in the desert, up to Rafah.
Faced with uncertainties, public criticism of the initiative, and the real level of risk, we continuously answered ourselves: yes, it’s risky and full of gaps. But if we who can don’t try, faced with this genocide, who else should? What equally powerful alternatives do we have at the moment?

On June 12, we showed up at the airport (us 8 Ligurians, among 200 Italians participating) with only one certainty: in Cairo, they would stop us, interrogate us, maybe arrest us, maybe deport us. The repression had already begun when the Italian Foreign Ministry published a strongly manipulative note accusing the March to Gaza of wanting to illegally cross the border and threatening not to provide consular assistance to the Italian participants. Israel echoed this by warning Egypt that if it didn’t stop the initiative at birth, its army would take care of it. And so in Cairo, Egypt acted like Egypt, stopping hundreds of people on arrival, with detentions, sometimes violent, interrogations, arrests, deportations. People taken from hotels at night, gatherings of even just 30 people interrupted by police. And naturally, a firm "no" to any authorization — even partial — to proceed toward Rafah. Not even part of the journey. Not even a delegation.

So what happened then, if the March to Gaza never took place? Were those who criticized it beforehand right? Those who chose resignation? Did the international coordination completely fail? We (who miraculously suffered no arrests) carry with us, in body and heart, the anguish we endured, the frustration of total repression, and the awareness that 6,000 people from over 60 countries worldwide mobilized all the way to Cairo, at their own expense, at their own risk, trying to concentrate unprecedented diplomatic, media, and political pressure on the humanitarian crisis of the Palestinian people. Where governments fail, where international law fails, humanity still tries, with the ancestral power of nonviolence. And the system reacts violently, from every side. This shows how frightening a people of peoples remains today when trying to organize in an unarmed but physically committed way.

It is worth continuing to seek an unstoppable way to truly stop the wars of the few on the backs of the many.