The creation, development and expansion of Israel caused ripples of violence in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. Israel and its Western allies hold it against Palestinians and Arabs that they immediately tried to fight and destroy Israel. Ask anybody in the US: would you fight for the independence of your country if it was invaded? The honest answer is obvious. Yet Palestinians are punished for doing exactly this: they just fought against the invasion of a colonizer in their country.

Zionism is a form of religious fanaticism: interpreting holy scriptures literally and attempting to implement some kind of heaven on Earth. It’s a delusion, it’s confusing the world of the soul with the real world. It’s not so different from children who don’t distinguish clearly between fairytales and reality: ‘we would say that there would be a magic land that God promised to us, and we would say that nobody else can have it’…

Palestine is the enduring symbol of the failure of humankind to abandon violence as a (false) solution to every problem. The deafening hatred, the urge to hurt the other side as much as possible, the senseless pain inflicted on powerless victims… These emotions feel like they have been brought from a distant past, from when humans were behaving horribly to each other by ignorance and prejudice; it feels like humankind is a depressing failure. It actually makes me feel angry, powerless and depressed.[^1] I’ve read quite a lot about it for so many years; plenty of thoughtful people have said in many different ways what needs to happen, and they were not listened to. There was the start of a dialogue before Netanyahu’s Israel decided to simply ignore calls for peace in the 2000s, instead relying on military superiority to impose their domination. This is not an intractable conflict, but there are people who don’t want the conflict to be solved, most of them on the Israeli side.

I grew up in the 1980s. I remember some of the many degrading synonyms of ‘gay man’ that boys used to throw at each other in order to provoke the other guy. Most of us didn’t even know what the words meant, we just knew that they were terrible insults. Actually we had a vague understanding that they were an attack on somebody’s manhood, that it would be a horrible shame for a guy to be ’like this’.

The world still works on the obsolete assumption of the nation-state: most countries are supposed to correspond more or less to a common ethnicity, the so-called ’nation’, and this nation is politically organized as a state. On paper, this looks great: a group of people who share a common background, usually also a language, and supposedly have values in common, are more likely to agree together about the way their society should be organized

I saw recently that François Hadji-Lazaro passed away in February 2023. He was and still is one of the ‘heroes’ of my personal culture, one of those people who helped me grow through their art, ideas and passion. I have a very intimate relationship with this part of my culture because I never had anybody to share it with, although this is a deep part of who I am.

Fuck people who pretend that there’s always something to do, that it’s a matter of motivation, looking at the bright side or whatever.

Well-groomed people gather in the trendy spots of the city on a sunny Friday night. They have the right look, the right hairdo, the right sunglasses. They look exactly like they’re supposed to look, cool and sexy, sleek and chill, they look comfortable in their skin as the rightful princes and princesses of this little society.

Suicide is a human privilege. As far as I know, no other being, animal or plant or anything, can freely decide to end their own life.

It is kind of funny and sad in that it took millions of years to humankind to realize that a man should not have sex with a woman unless she consents to it.