Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Living Together Without a State

Written by Guido Viale for Comune-Info.

In its eighty years of existence, the State of Israel has transformed a multitude of migrants and refugees in search of a “hearth” into a phalanx of criminals. Israel is the Sparta of the third millennium: all its citizens, male and female, are involved directly or indirectly in military activities.

Despite the admirable commitment of some organizations, mostly Israeli-Palestinian ones that oppose the current reality, after the resumption of the war against Iran and Lebanon (the one against Gaza never ceased), polls say that between 78 and 92 percent of its citizens approve of Netanyahu’s actions, agrees with the wars he has unleashed, and believes it is necessary to “finish the job.” Finishing the job means eliminating the Palestinians from the occupied territories and from Gaza: exterminating them, terrorizing them, deporting them, or forcing them to flee elsewhere; approaches that, alternated or combined over the years, were inscribed from the beginning in the words that presided over the constitution into a State of the Jewish communities that emigrated or took refuge in Palestine: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Palestine had to be or must become a land without a people. In the last two and a half years, the massacre has prevailed: of people and of the territory.

But in the coming years, whatever the outcome of this war against a defenseless population, its consequences will leap to the foreground: on that land “without a people,” a population must survive that is largely disabled, terrified, debilitated by malnutrition and the lack of care, especially an entire generation of children that are doomed to a life without health, without basic education, without a home, without reference institutions, without buildings that hand down memory.

But there will be no victory for those who made themselves responsible for this havoc. In wars, no one ever wins. In the Jewish diaspora—which for years had Israel as a point of reference, often “overlooking” the evidence of a path with an outcome and premises that were increasingly clear—an unbridgeable fracture has now opened that will soon reappear among the population of Israel as the economic, social, moral, and material consequences of this state of permanent war make themselves felt.

Especially when it becomes clear to everyone that the “job” to be finished as soon as possible, whatever the cost, will never end; that the road taken never finishes; that a state of increasingly intense and generalized war is not sustainable for long, whatever the international support one may enjoy. It is what has been called “the suicide of Israel,” its dissolution: which can translate into a clash between factions that strikes it from within, putting its existence at risk in a context devoid of many of the friends it was accustomed to counting on; or, alternatively, in the experiment of a return to the origins, those of a people without a State, in a territory not to be dominated, but to be shared peacefully with the population that has inhabited it for centuries, a confederation of communities and networks that are partly mixed (where possible), partly established on ethnic bases, but in any case open and willing to coexist peacefully.

Certainly, it is difficult to even think of such an outcome; but, reflecting on it, it nevertheless appears to be a more sensible and realistic prospect than that of “two peoples and two States”: one wealthy, armed to the teeth, well-integrated into the international context; the other poor, devastated, overcrowded by the return of many exiles, lacking territorial continuity, disarmed and plundered of its most important resources.

But it is also more realistic than the utopia of a single State: and not only because of the problems, common also to the stateless solution, of coexistence between communities that have so many reasons to detest each other and so few to love each other (even if the work of a few in this field is extraordinary and if women will be able to play a decisive role in the future to overturn the situation); but above all because State means many indivisible things: a name (which one?), bureaucratic structures, weapons (in this case also atomic), an army, exclusive knowledge, a currency, and many other things. It is difficult to think that those who control them today could accept sharing them on equal terms. It is better, therefore, to dissolve them, where possible, or neutralize them under the control of an international entity (a new mandatory) which can only be the UN, if it survives the siege that is destroying it.

If the first model of coexistence of modern stateless communities to appear on the international scene was the Democratic Confederation of Rojava, born under conditions of very serious difficulty, the prospect of a democratic confederation of the peoples of Palestine, which would certainly have to face much greater difficulties, could however, for this very reason, chart the path toward overcoming an organization of the world based on States.

A path difficult even to conceive, but unavoidable for those who intend to work toward a real alternative to the current social order, in which States, despite a globalization today in crisis, remain the incubators or the carapace of both the most ferocious systems of dominance, from patriarchy to racism and capitalism, and the most devastating forms of violence: from wars between States to the war against the environment and the Earth.