I left the first time with a good dose of unconsciousness mixed with carelessness. I left probably not fully comprehending the intensity of emotions I would have felt once arrived in At-Tuwani. I didn’t understand that it couldn’t just be three months, a relatively small chapter in my life. I didn’t know that that departure, so unaware and naive, would have led me to today. After, nothing has ever been done ingenuously and nothing has ever been easy.
It hasn’t been easy to see my parents’ reaction to the “mum, dad, I’m going back and I will stay for two years”, I was aware that I has hurt them and gave them pain. I will forever remember that moment in which I clearly felt that I was torned in two: on one side them, and on the other simply the foggy image in my eyes of Aboud and Meriam, my neighbours’ toddlers in this village. They won, I’m here in At-Tuwani.
The choice was very easy, I can’t stay blind to this injustice, even with all the contradiction of me being an Italian citizen and a part of this system that creates oppression on others. Only here I profoundly understood the sense of words like love, nonviolence, peace, justice, sharing and also rage. I know rage. I have learnt to look and observe it during the months here.
I have a problem, I can’t feel rage
How many times I have felt it looking at a checkpoint, houses and endeavours of a lifetime destroyed in two minutes, children forced to wait for hours for a military escort. But today I have a problem, I can’t feel rage. Today we were attacked by settlers, they insulted us, they threw stones at us and they threw me on the ground, but I can’t feel rage or hatred.
At the beginning I thought it was just a matter of adrenalin and that as time went by rage would have come out, fear would have overcome me and I would freeze. But it wasn’t like that, I was surprised by myself and by how, with a little love, everything can change.
I can’t feel hatred or rage against you. I have seen so much of it in your eyes and in your screams that I don’t want it for myself. I have never witnessed so much hatred in one single moment. An hatred so powerful and so profound that I can only feel sorrow and pain for you.
It hurts me to see you in chain, forced in a system that is not human, that only points towards violence. I wish I could see you freed from hatred as I wish I could see the people with whom I live, freed from oppression and injustice.
I have come back home through that street where you attacked us, certainly shaken but at the same time stronger and more aware.
I have to thank you
I don’t know how I can say this but I have to thank you. You made me understand that I’m not as weak as I thought and that the choice of being here today is the best choice I could ever take…and now I am conscious and convinced until the end.
You have allowed me to feel what it means to be part of a big family, to see the affection of an entire village and a web of people who support the nonviolent resistance and that are my friends.
I can’t but thank you because since you started to attack us, to me it was clear that you could have beaten and wounded us but really you couldn’t do anything to us.
You can’t do anything about it.
OPERAZIONE COLOMBA
