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Letter to a distant friend

Letter to a distant friend

Dear friend, 

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I see you there in Israel and I don’t know how you feel. 

I thought of your people who throughout history have scattered throughout the world and thought they could live together alongside other peoples without having to give up themselves and have been disappointed, raped and persecuted. I thought of the Palestinian people who lived on earth without believing that they had to own it or set up a state. I thought that the idea that moved us both was the certainty that we exist without having to obey stupid rules, institutions, Western thinking that we only exist if we have something. 

For a few weeks the world has been poorer and I feel poorer too. Two victims are killing each other. 

Dear friend, it’s not the Palestinians who hurt you. I did.  I broke your heart by making you believe that you shouldn’t exist as you are, you’re wrong, inadmissible, you go down, you have to disappear. You must have a state, possibly away from me, you must be with your fellow men because the different are dangerous, you must always defend yourself, you must have money to buy things and if you do not have wealth you must take them to someone else. 

I’m the one who infected you with these thoughts, I hurt you, and I made you look like me, and now you attack someone who might remind you of something you lost. You didn’t think I was wrong? 

But now I need you to stop. My grandparents, your grandparents, the victims, the executioners, the accomplices, they all died long ago. It’s you and me. I have MY house, MY car, MY family, MY friends. I have everything and I am nothing. I own things and people instead of being and being with others.

If we can get rid of your anger, my stupidity, our fear, maybe we can change. Together we can say that peoples exist and should not run the risk of disappearing because they are different, because they do not have a State, because they did not think they had to defend themselves from others. That shooting, dropping bombs, killing is always inhuman, atrocious, unacceptable.
It’s always the Nomads, the naive ones who pay for Western bullying. But it doesn’t have to be that way.


Dear friend, if it is the West that has made you this way then the West has a responsibility to stop you. To tell you you have to scream your pain in our faces.
Don’t turn into what we did to you. Don’t, don’t have, but be yourself.

Gioia Piazzi

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Letter to a distant friend