GAZA, BEYOND WORDS

A Chronicle of Inner Surrender 

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Placing your hand on the front door, feeling it heavier than usual after a day that has drained every ounce of you, yet knowing that inside there waits a dinner, a little wine, a warm bed. That, truly, is a beautiful sensation. Last night, on a Tuesday, you let yourself be swept into an evening that refused to end—so much so that it closed with the police on Via del Panico at four in the morning. Wine and work, in the end, are not so different: both wear you down. But none of that matters now. Because the body, at this moment, demands truce, bread, silence. It wants the domestic rite that gathers your bones back together after the city has shattered them into a thousand fragments. The dim kitchen light, the knife sliding through a tomato, the sauce murmuring on the stove—small things, yet they rise as shields. 

Inside, you'll find the egg fettuccine with tomato, the Pinot Noir, the mozzarella sent up from Naples, the cicoria, and the homemade babà. Everything seems arranged just for you. You feel happy—or at least persuade yourself you do. True, you still need to talk to your partner: those ten days of misunderstandings buzz around you like flies. But nothing that cannot be set right. 

"Love, I'm exhausted," you admit, with nothing to hide. "I haven't slept in days." 

"Why?" she asks, her voice still edged with irritation. 

"Since we argued, I just haven't managed to sleep." It's the truth—though you leave out the fights, the drinking, the laughter with those idiot friends of yours. 

She looks you in the eye and understands. She's no fool. But tonight, she's willing to let it be: to keep the problems outside for a while, along with the sirens and the broken glass. Dinner unfolds slowly, between a mouthful, a touch, and the silent walls of a flat in Rome's most beautiful quarter. A suspended moment, fragile almost, as if everything were balanced on a thread. Then the memory blurs—perhaps a friend's message, the television left on in the other room. No matter. The news finds you all the same, like a cold wind knocking at the door of your conscience. 

The boats of the Sumud Flotilla have been intercepted just a few miles off the Israeli coast. Within hours, they say, the navy will board every vessel, forcing the activists to halt their operations. Many will be arrested, taken to detention centres, then—at least in theory—sent back where they came from. Civil society is already outraged: across Italy, they announce, spontaneous demonstrations will erupt, marches, banners, anger in the streets. 

"At this hour of the night?" you wonder, frozen, your fork suspended in mid-air as the tomato slides off slowly. She looks at you; you look at her. 

"Pass me some mozzarella," she says. 

"Here," you reply. 

You take the wine and pour for you both, without thinking. 

Dinner over, she asks to talk. You push it back: say your head is aching, that tomorrow, with more calm, you can face it. You explain that these last ten days have been hard, and now all you want is rest. She, perhaps worn down by the same reasons, agrees to postpone. You declare a truce—sealed in the name of fatigue and quiet, at least for tonight. 

And yet, as you drift into small talk, the serenity of a moment ago no longer has the same glow. You feel drained, and still there's a weight pressing on you, one that has nothing to do with wine or the laughter of the evening. Deep down, despite everything, you can't shake from your mind that cursed Flotilla. 

You move to the bedroom, switch on the television, and put on the usual series on Netflix. Everything required to be happy. The body is calm, sedated; the mind, restless. The thoughts refuse to stop, and, among them, one keeps pushing: get up, go to the protest. But something holds you back—the warmth of the flat, the woman you love, the exhaustion, and the promise of sleep, at last. 

Inside you, as the murmur of the television lulls you and the flicker of the screen trembles across the walls, a slow dialectic begins to burn. "It would be right to go," you tell yourself. 

And yet, the Flotilla would have been intercepted anyway; everyone knew it was a mission doomed to fail. The aim was visibility, scandal. They could have given the supplies to the Church, which had offered to mediate. They were right to do it, of course. But your presence there, tonight—would it really change anything? 

"Yes, but Christ," you mutter, "the only right thing is to go. What else should you do? Sit here like an idiot in front of a series you're not even watching?" The voices pound through your body and your head. Outside, the night sounds and the cool October air seem to sap your will to get up, almost confirming that staying home is the more natural choice. 

You switch off the bedside lamp, pull the covers around you. Stare at the television without grasping what's on, while your partner's breathing grows heavier. It's true: you're a fervent supporter of the Palestinian cause. On the fourth of October, you'll be in the square, and if there are clashes, you won't back away. You tell yourself you can make your stand in a few days, that in life, after all, you have to choose the battles worth fighting. 

Sleep seems almost convinced by your justifications: it brushes against you, strokes you. And just as it's about to take you completely, something knocks again at the door of your conscience. 

This time it's a question that jolts you: where's the consistency between what you proclaim and what you actually do? 

At home, you've hung a Palestinian flag. You never back down in arguments, you share articles and posts online, and you change your profile picture when it's expected. A year before October 7th, you even went to Palestine to see it with your own eyes. You repeat it to everyone: it was a journey that changed your life, and the Palestinian people—beyond all the geopolitical calculations—must be defended for their very existential condition. 

"For fuck's sake," you tell yourself, "what the hell are you doing now?" 

You reach for your phone, that ritual gesture made the moment consciousness is regained. You open Instagram and scroll through the stories: Milan, people pushing against the police; Naples, the stations blocked; Rome, demonstrators trying to break the line. You watch, but soon realise none of these images are from the scene itself. They're all reposts, reels, other people's videos. 

You tell yourself you could do the same: a story, a lie, and there's your support. Show your activism, ease your conscience. The middle path is always the wisest, Aristotle used to say. At last, you know what to do: you spend ten minutes picking the right story, the one charged with the most tension, the video that shows the anger you feel too. Then you tap that bloody screen and share your outrage. 

"Ah, now I can finally rest," you tell yourself. 

You get up, head to the bathroom, take a sip of water, and piss. You stare at yourself in the mirror for a few seconds, then turn away sharply and go back to the bedroom. The covers are warmer than ever now. You close your eyes and sleep like a child, pleased with yourself. 

But as you sleep, something stirs again: a faint collective conscience begins to breathe inside you. The dream is no longer just a dream—it's a memory, sharp and merciless. From the depths it rises suddenly: one of those recent nights, that moment when you were about to head out with your friends. You were already drunk, you had just finished drafting the posts to be published in the coming days, when someone mentioned Palestine. In that instant of euphoria, a pang had hit you—disappointment, an unexpected sadness that coursed through your whole body. It wasn't that you hadn't known before what was happening, but the contrast struck you straight in the stomach and in your sense of integrity. 

You can't explain it any better: it wasn't morality working on you, but the condition of other bodies pressed into your own flesh.

A weight that grew heavier with every step, reminding you that some are exhausted not because they partied the night before, but because they cannot sleep at all. Because they live under bombs. Because they dig through rubble to find their children. Because they queue for hours for a single litre of water. Because they gather the shredded remains of their loved ones, blown apart in the street. 

And yet even then, you excused yourself like a coward, surrendering to apathy and passivity. Yes—you remember clearly now what you told yourself in silence, as you clattered down the stairs laughing like lunatics: 

"Edoardo, stay calm. The human psyche isn't built to carry all the suffering of others. If it were, you wouldn't be able to live. Don't think about it: it's a legitimate mechanism, necessary for survival." 

COWARD, RAT, WRETCH! That's what echoes in your head as you sleep. You see clearly the lies a twenty-six-year-old will tell himself to hide the cowardice lodged in his heart. In your sleep, the disgust at yourself—at the Instagram story, at those petty bourgeois excuses—swells like a fever. You feel yourself rotting from within; sweat, restless tossing, and then, suddenly, you wake. 

This time, you don't reach for your phone. With your heart pounding, you grope for your trousers and hurry down the stairs. 

You think only of the wreckage unfolding in the world. The sheer weight of human suffering that now clings to you like a skin not your own—yet one you can no longer shed. You cry, rightly, as you unfasten the chain from your scooter. You pull on the helmet, the jacket. 

"Anyone unwilling to put their body at risk, anyone who won't get out of bed to protest every day, is complicit," you tell yourself. Complicit in this genocide. 

Genocide—you repeat the word again and again. Only now do you grasp its weight, the distance you once gave it, the way you linked it to something past, something that did not concern you. Now you see its real effects, its meaning, its consequences. It is no longer a linguistic term, but torn and ruined flesh. 

You ask yourself why so much pain exists, and feel no hatred for a people, but for a God you never believed in. You run as though there were no tomorrow—for many, indeed, there won't be—and with every stride you see with a clarity that finally feels true. 

Before us, the greatest tragedy of our century is unfolding. If we cannot unite and mobilise—if we cannot spit on our comforts even now—then I fear humanity faces a dark destiny. You find yourself thinking that perhaps this tragedy is also a threshold. At once, you sense the danger in that thought, the streak of cynicism running through it. And yet you press on. 

In this time when truth and goodness lie dead, when every discourse dissolves into mere opinion or interpretation, here remains a truth that brushes against the absolute. This is the battle we needed. 

Borges once wrote that truth dwells in labyrinths, in mirrors, in inventions folding back upon themselves. Perhaps so. But tonight Borges's labyrinths are of no use to you, for before your eyes lies something impossible to ignore. What is repressed always returns: what consciousness refuses to know will still find a way to surface, distorted, hallucinatory, in dreams and in symptoms. Today, truth exists—and it is terrible. What is happening, what Israel is doing, is Evil. There are no justifications, no history that can absorb it, no sleep that can soften it. It is an absoluteness that questions us, burns us, tears apart our ability to remain inert. 

You reach Piazza Barberini and glance at your watch. Half past three in the morning. The square lies deserted. On the ground, only abandoned flags, dead flares, scraps of paper. Further on, around the curve, a faint reflection of blue lights still lingers. Beyond that, nothing. You are too late. Far too late. 

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GAZA, BEYOND WORDS