This text was published by the author on Substack – VERSIONE IN ITALIANO
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened, but recently, one day, Gaza ceased to be the name of a land and became the definition of a limit: the red line many of us believe must not be crossed. Since that day, fighting on Gaza’s side is no longer a political choice to be legitimised or discussed.
It has became a mental shift where one kind of humanity distances itself from another, asserting its own idea of History and reclaiming the world from those who are stealing it from them.
Nothing matters anymore—one’s beliefs about the Hamas-Israel conflict, or prejudices about Jews or terrorism: they disappeared like the fire of a candle in a burning house when Gaza became much more than a geopolitical situation to take a position on: today it represents a way of being in the world.
It seems to me the first to understand it were young people between fifteen and twenty-five years of age. It was strange to see them waving Palestinian flags, suddenly awakened from their political hibernation. I mean, these are kids with whom it was hard to talk about Salvini, Meloni, even Trump. They didn’t appear interested. Climate change and gender identity—that’s what they were passionate about. Then, one day, you see them in the streets, just a few of them, holding a flag of a distant land they know almost nothing about. And now, when hundreds of thousands of people, across the world, are out in the streets with that flag, one has to admit those young people were a little ahead of everyone: now it’s really very important to understand in what way they anticipated the rest, and what conceptual leap they made with a speed no one else has been capable of.
