Fulvio Grimaldi, Byoblu correspondent in Rafah (for those who missed it and care)
To get away from the mud that smears you and blocks you in Italian politics, all of it, of government, of opposition, of antagonism, of fake anti-system, there is only Gaza, Palestine and, in the absence of Rafah, the gate of hell. Do you know why? Because there you look each other in the face, executioners and victims, oppressors and resisters, Nazis and partisans. The mystifications that, in our area, deceive us, handcuff us, gag us, make us get lost in a labyrinth of hypocrisies, deceptions, false appearances, holograms that pretend to be bodies, Jesuitism, simulations and dissimulations, chameleonism (see the recent combination Rizzo – convicted fascist thug, instrument of the Strategy of Tension, Alemanno).
In Rafah, when the survivors come towards you, when you hear the nearby crashes of the massacres on Khan Yunis and merge those sounds with what the survivors, in front of you, speechless or frantically verbose, have left behind in terms of rubble and death, you find yourself in the truth. Everything is authentic, terribly authentic, very clear. The foggy, greasy, dusty indolences that plague us at home fall like shavings.
Gaza, Rafah, the hundreds of Egyptian ambulances arriving from the most distant and small villages, with exhausted and never tired drivers, venturing into hell to collect looted bodies. The drivers of thousands and thousands of trucks that line the 345 km from Cairo to Rafah, waiting for nights and days dictated by the exterminators, and are almost all Egyptians, with goods offered by a people who do not live in abundance.
Hospitals from El Arish, a stone’s throw from Rafah, for maximum emergencies, to Suez, to Ismailia, to Cairo, which guard, protect and care for the angels that the demons were unable to tear apart and make fly away, as in the image . And doctors in structures and conditions that we dream of, where every patient in the world is treated for free (just as every student here is educated for free), doctors who treat, fix, whatever is broken up by demons that can be repaired and brought back to life and to the humanity of the just.
Friends, if I left Rome with the weight of a personal, political, human story, fully inserted in the burden of our collective story between the tragic, the grotesque, the depraved and, in any case, the impure, at the gates of Rafah , at the beds of Palestinian children, who only asked to return to Gaza, even without legs or eyes, next to doctors, also with wings on their hearts, I found myself free and light, in a world that bleeds, but is clean .
Now that I’m back, I know you better.