ONE WORLD – ONE WAR

Today marks the last day of the ‘World’s First Festival for Dignified Rage‘ hosted by the Zapatistas. During the gathering Marcos said  “Not too far from here, in a place called Gaza, a forcefully armed and trained military, from the government of Israel, continues in its advances to kill and destroy.” This, he said, is a “classic” conquest war “a professional military murdering a defenseless population”.

He described that “the iron control over what is heard and seen in the world” continues. According to the images from news agencies, the so-called “neurological centers destroyed by the Israeli air force are peoples’ homes, huts, and civilian buildings.” Therefore, “we think that those [Israeli] artillery people either have very bad aim or there do not exist such centers. We don’t have the honor of knowing Palestine, but we are assuming that these homes, these huts, these buildings house–or used to house–people, men, women, children and the elderly, and not soldiers.”

Maybe, he suggested, “for the Israeli government, these men, women, children and the elderly are the enemy soldiers, and the huts, houses, and buildings where these people live, are the quarters that must be destroyed.” Marcos then continued noting that the group “Israel wants to debilitate is none other than the Palestinian population that lives there, [which] this assault seeks to annihilate.”

As his voice broke as he exclaimed, “Do our shouts halt any bomb? Does our word save one Palestinian child’s life? We think so. Maybe we won’t halt a bomb, and maybe our word will not be transformed into a armor-plated shield. But possibly, it might succeed in uniting with others, transforming into a murmur, then into a loud voice, and later into a shout they can hear in Gaza. We, Zapatistas of the EZLN, know how important it is, in the middle of destruction and death, to hear words of strength.”

There is no war for the just but the war of dignity against death!