Fortini/Cani (1976) - full transcript

"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