Akashma Online News

Posted On April 17, 2011 Marivel Guzman

‘Stay human’ is the motto with which I sign off my pieces
for II Manifesto and for the entries on my blog. It’s an
Invitation, or, better still, a prompt, to desist for the
commission of criminal acts and to reaffirm and take
possession of the original purposes of humankind instead.
Once boundaries, flags, barriers, latitudes and ethono-
religious differences have been abolished, what breaks
onto the scenario stripped of the impulse
to preserve one’s own kin at the expense of others. Mine
is an invitation to remember our belong to a sole
community of living beings: the human family.
Gaza: Stay Human is now also a book. Please find
within the three-week story of a massacre, written to the
best of my ability, more often than not in very precarious
conditions, often scribbling about the inferno all around
me in a tattered notebook while crouched in an ambulance
screaming down the street. Or frantically tapping away
at the keyboard of any available computer I could find,
often inside a building shaking like a crazed pendulum
as explosions went off all around. I must warn you that
leafing through this book could prove dangerous. These
are harmful pages, blood-stained, imbued with white
phosphorous, and as sharp as bomb shrapnel. If read within
the quiet of a bedroom, your walls will shake from our
cries of terror. I feel concerned for the walls of your hearts,
which I recognize have not become soundproofed to
pain.
Please store this volume somewhere safe, within the
reach of the young, so that they may immediately learn of
a world not so far away from them, where indifference and
racism tears their peers to little bits as if they were mere
rag dolls. This way they may be inoculated against racism
from an early age, against any epidemic of violence towards
whoever is different, or against neutrality when faced with
injustice. Gaza; Stay human aims to float beyond other
books written about, in and around Palestine thanks to
the creative fire that has begotten it: the keen will of this
author to involve, enlighten and heighten the reader’s
awareness of what atrocious inhumanities unfolded during
those 22 days of a massacre. This is my small contribution
towards preventing similar massacres from ever taking
place in future. Giving the dead some justice and
safeguarding tomorrow’s mortally wounded.

Please help yourself to a ticket for a tour of hell that
even the poet Dante Alighieri could not have conceived
of when waking up from his pillow, full of nightmares. I
entertain the hope of having been a good guide throughout
to this hell, like Dante’s Charon, the ferryman of Hades,
of having been as faithful and as humane as possible in
my narration. Standing in the rubble of a freshly-bombed
building or in the ward of a Gaza hospital, I’m aware that
it was sometimes difficult to recognize human features
in what was once a face, now mutated, reduced to a
pulp by devastating weaponry that is mostly banned by
all international conventions. My account strives for the
greatest possible objectivity. As it happens, I was myself an
object, or target, of the Israel army and also received death
threats from a group of neo-Nazis connected with some
settler groups. For whomsoever is still in doubt, months
after the massacre, my account and the details recorded
underneath a storm of bombs have been backed up by
all the most reliable human rights organizations, whether
governmental or otherwise, as well as by Israeli soldier
themselves, who have recently started to confess the
crimes they have committed. In time, Gaza: Stay human
will become increasingly more like an historic document
rather than being a plain narrative from hell.
If truth is the first victim of war, it is then Israel’s absolute
priority to assassinate it, before, during and after the
conflict. Our duty as activists, and more generally as human
beings, is to document and tell the truth for the sake of
freedom and justice, and then bring it to the table of world
public opinion, and then serve it as a meal, the
difficult to digest the better.

For tomorrow, so as to stay human

The port (or its rubble), Vittorio Arrigoni
Gaza City
15th July 2009