[In the April 1967 issue of New Topics Pier Paolo Pasolini publishes the poems on Israel that he had not included in the collection three years earlier and a very controversial note against the left that had taken a clear stance against Israel.
It is a text to be reread].
---
I swear on the Koran that I love Arabs almost as I love my mother.
I am in talks to buy a house in Morocco and move there.
None of my communist friends would do it, for an old, now traditional, and non admited as open, hatred of underclass and poor populations.
Furthermore, perhaps all Italian writers can be accused of little intellectual interest in the Third World: not me.
Finally, in these verses, written in '63, as it is all too easy to see, all the reasons for criticizing Israel that are now full in the Communist press are concentrated.
Therefore, in 1963, I experienced the Jewish and Jordanian situation on both sides of the border. In the Sea of Galilee and on the shores of the Dead Sea I spent hours similar only to those of '43, '44: I understood, by mimesis, what the terror of being massacred is.
So that I had to push back the tears in the depths of my too tender heart at the sight of so many young people, whose fate seemed to be just genocide.
But I also understood, after a few days that I was there, that the Israelis had by no means surrendered to this fate.
(And so, in addition to my old verses, I now also call Carlo Levi as a witness, to whom the night following the start of hostilities, I said that there was no fear for Israel, and that the Israelis within fifteen to twenty days would have been in Cairo).
It is therefore from a mixture of pity and disapproval, of identification and doubt, that those lines of my Israeli diary were born.
Now, these days, while reading the Unit, I felt the same pain that one feels when reading the most liar bourgeois newspaper.
Could it be that the Communists could have made such a clear choice? Wasn't this finally the right opportunity for them to "choose with doubt" that she is the only human of all choices? Wouldn't the Unity reader grow from it? He wouldn't have finally thought - and is it the least he could do that nothing in the world can be divided in two? And that he himself is called to decide on his own opinion? And why instead did the Unity conduct a real campaign to "create" an opinion? Could it be because Israel was a badly born state? But which state, now free and sovereign, was not born badly? And who among us, moreover, could guarantee the Jews that there will be no Hitler in the West or that in America there will be no new concentration camps for drug addicts, homosexuals and Jews? Or that Jews will be able to continue to live in peace in Arab countries? Perhaps the director of the Unit, or Antonello Trombadori or any other communist intellectual can guarantee this?
And it is not logical that, who cannot guarantee this, accept, at least in his heart, the experiment of the State of Israel, recognizing its sovereignty and freedom !?
And what help is being given to the Arab world by pretending to ignore its will to destroy Israel?
That is, pretending to ignore its reality?
Doesn't everyone know that the reality of the Arab world, like the reality of most of the developing countries - including Italy- has ruling classes, police, judiciary, unworthy?
And does not everyone know that, as we must distinguish the Israeli nation from the stupidity of Zionism, so we must distinguish the Arab peoples from the irresponsibility of their fanatical nationalism?
The only way to truly be friends with the Arab peoples at this moment, is not to help them understand Nasser's crazy politics, which I do not tell the story, but the most elementary common sense, has already judged and condemned?
Or is that of the Communists an insatiable thirst for self-harm?
An invincible need to get lost, always taking the most obvious and most desperate path? So that the void that divides the Marxist intellectuals from the Communist Party must become ever more unbridgeable? "
