Shrouds: those cocoons that finally show the bodies

Journalist Omar El Akkad, who was born in Cairo and grew up in Doha, like her makes it a categorical imperative not to forget a single name... 

Yes, not only in the beautiful book One Day Everyone Will Say They Were Against, but also in an earlier, dystopian short story, published in a Bompiani anthology (How We Will Come Out), which is entitled The Shadow Commission: it claims the act of naming, after the end of the genocide, as fundamental. Naming means living with these names. We cannot live without the names of those killed.

'Of Gaza, of the multi-millennial Gaza, nothing or almost nothing has been told', you write....

It is a mea culpa, it is to say that we have failed to reknit the threads of a knowledge that was there before, of a bond that was there before, and instead we have put it aside. And this also happened when, conceptually speaking, we enclosed Gaza in the Strip. We think of Gaza as the Strip, but this is a minimal, very brief history, dating back to 1948, compared to a multi-thousand-year history. Gaza was something else, it was the port at the end of the incense route and the spice route, it was the theological school of Gaza, it was Samson. Samson who then also flooded our artistic iconography. We put all this history aside because Gaza became part of the Israeli-Palestinian question. If you reconstruct the historical dimension, you can no longer objectify people.

Polls released in recent days state that 67%, even 80% of Israelis want an end to the conflict and an agreement with Hamas. And yet we go ahead.

Yes because there are also other polls that say instead that Israelis support Netanyahu's line. It depends on what kind of questions you ask, which Israelis you interview and what you mean by the end of the conflict. That it is not a conflict: using words for what they mean is crucial to coming to terms with it. It is a question. If it is called an issue, then 7 October is a fault, it is a fracture, which must be inserted into a sequence of over 100 years. It is a genocide, it is a war on Gaza, not on Hamas: we forget the West Bank, where in recent days they destroyed a minaret near Hebron, where there are tens of thousands of displaced people. What does ending the conflict mean? Does it mean bringing the hostages home and then expelling 2 million Palestinians from Gaza? I believe there is a profound process of removal in Israeli society: the removal of genocide, despite the fact that scholars of genocide, writers like David Grossman, journalists like Gideon Levy, speak openly of genocide.

The Global Sumud Flotilla prepares to reach Gaza...

They are doing the right thing. There is a now very clear disconnect between the decision-makers and what we can call public opinion, society as a whole, both politically and in terms of the professions, a distance between the decision-makers and the powerless, echoing Václav Havel, which comes back powerfully in this time of genocide. The powerless are not powerless, they do what they can do, but above all they do what is right to do. What is the only goal now, to break the siege, to bring food, to open Gaza, to end the genocide. It sounds crazy, something completely unachievable, but it is not true. In recent months, the presence of the powerless has posed a political and consensus problem for the decision-makers. When I speak of the decision-makers, I am not just talking about the national government. There has been a disconnect between the local authorities and the national government, between the grassroots Church and the leadership of the Catholic Church, there is a disconnect between the workers and the national trade union: we see that the powerless would like to do something else and do not feel represented by those who would like to represent them. There is a sidereal distance, what happened in Genoa is the confirmation of this distance: when the Global Sumud Flotilla was preparing to leave, people brought 200 tons of aid, 50 thousand people took to the streets and went to the port. This happened because we have been educated, over the past half century, to stop genocide, to make sure it never happened again. And that is what the powerless are saying. What's more, we must never forget that Genoa was a gold medal city for resistance, one of the most important. For me it was decisive to go to the march from Marzabotto Montesole, in mid-June, made by 10,000 people at the sites of the Nazi-Fascist massacres to say 'enough, never again genocide!' They did it on the margins of this town, on the hills of Bologna. It is the margins that say enough, that realise what is happening. Gaza is also on the margins.

The Israeli government has said that Global Sumud Flotilla activists will be treated as terrorists...

There is no definition of terrorism from an international point of view. No one can say who is a terrorist and who is not, but one can say who commits crimes and who does not commit crimes. What crime are the peaceful people who bring food to Gaza committing? Coming not to Israel, but to Gaza, which is Palestinian territory, part of the state of Palestine that 140 countries in the world have already recognised? Then if we think that this word was said by one who an international arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international court...