Canta, Palestina! The Unconscious Facing the Massacre of a People

This land is mine, with its multiple cultures. Canaanite, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Arab, Ottoman, English, and French. I want to live all these cultures. It is my right to identify with all these voices that have resonated on this land. For I am neither an intruder nor a passerby.

–Mahmoud Darwish

Shame, shame

–Gilles Deleuze

The first time I heard psychoanalysts speak publicly about the gravity of the situation in Gaza, since 7 October 2023, was in Brooklyn, at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, on 22 February 2025, at a symposium titled “Psychoanalysis <> Politics” (the second and only other time I heard the word “Palestine” in my milieu, it was I myself who had uttered it, on the question of shame, at my seminar “Clinics and Critiques” on 4 November 2025).

I was enthusiastic about the invitation to the “Psychoanalysis <> Politics” symposium, and not only because I could return to New York, but because of the themes proposed, which confronted contemporary social and political issues of great interest to me. I also appreciated the format of the symposium: one was not required to prepare presentations and perform them before the audience, but we were asked, after preliminary meetings with colleagues, to discuss spontaneously in a round table on a theme chosen in advance (mine was on “Founding Myths”). During the symposium, there were comic interludes that had literally fascinated me. And I had also been invited to give an authentic “Keynote Interview” on the concept of sorority in psychoanalysis (the interviewer was Christopher Chamberlin), and this, I must admit, had given me a genuine “small” narcissistic jouissance.

Apart from the narcissistic jouissance, this Brooklyn encounter remained engraved in my heart, for the freedom of expression of the participants (I refer both to the speakers and to the audience), and above all for the effect of stupefaction that the panel of Safia Albaiti, Jordan Dunn, and Roula Hajjar had had on me: “Psychoanalysis’ Palestine Problem”. It was while listening to my colleagues speaking about Gaza that I understood Palestine to be a central psychoanalytic question, and that one could not flee Palestine, as many intellectuals in France and throughout the world still do today.

The text you will read here is not about founding myths, nor about sorority, but about Palestine. It also exists thanks to the panel “Psychoanalysis’ Palestine Problem” that I heard in Brooklyn in 2025. I would therefore like to thank the organizers of “Psychoanalysis <> Politics”, and in particular Safia Albaiti, Jordan Dunn, and Roula Hajjar, for the audacity and reach of their words. Never stop talking about Palestine, never.

* * *

Since 7 October 2023, the day of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, images of the ongoing genocide in Gaza have circulated in the media and social networks throughout the world: gutted buildings, adults and children who, like zombies, drag themselves through rubble and debris in the company of bombs, drones, and armored tanks of the Israeli army. Demolished houses, makeshift shacks and tents, remain the only shelters for a population partly exterminated. This is surely a first in history: we are witnessing live the massacre of a people. How is it possible that, after the universal declaration of human rights and the convention on the prevention and suppression of the crime of genocide of 1948, the Western world watches and tolerates a genocide in progress, without even daring to name it? Why do the governments of the great powers not intervene to stop it? Or more concretely, for what strange reasons do they not take measures against the State of Israel, as they had done, for example, with Russia, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine? Better still, why do they continue to supply arms, at least defensive but in truth offensive, why do they maintain their support, their alliance, with a State whose government is in the process of committing such acts? It would suffice to abstain, simply to abstain. Can we truly believe the justifications one hears from political figures, journalists, artists, and intellectuals? Must we suppose that it is necessary to exterminate a people in order to support Israel’s right to exist, defend the principles of democracy, and fight terrorism? Finally, must we violate all the laws and general principles established by our societies, notably in the face of the horrors to which antisemitism led Europe, in order to fight antisemitism?

I shall seek to analyze, with the instruments of my discipline, psychoanalysis, the reactions that the genocide in Palestine has produced in our lives, singularly and collectively. I shall start from my personal experience and try to analyze the conscious and unconscious effects that Gaza has produced in my life and in public life.

This text has for me the value of a coming out: yes, the Palestinian cause matters to me; yes, I must write about the violence and injustice that this people suffers at the hands of the State of Israel, but also at the hands of the states of the world, notably the “Western” states, which watch this genocide with an air of desolate helplessness whose bad faith is plain to see. As often happens, the act of saying opens new perspectives of thought and existence, unlike repression and other defense mechanisms, which, as Freud showed well, tend to destroy the individual and the collective.

“Don’t stop talking about Palestine,” let us not stop talking about Palestine, this is what carries me along, like a kind of Es muss sein that imposes itself on me, notwithstanding the difficulty I feel in concretizing my project. What does it mean to write about Gaza, and for Gaza? Is there not an unbridgeable distance between us and them?

I am neither a philosopher, nor a political scientist, and still less an expert on the Middle East. This text has no ambition whatsoever to explain what has been happening for more than two years in Palestine: the horror lived by the inhabitants of Gaza certainly does not need to be interpreted by a psychoanalyst. I nevertheless feel called upon, since the psychoanalytic world has not yet truly expressed itself on this sad page of our history. It is not that psychoanalysts do not take positions on current affairs or public debate. Several psychoanalysts had immediately mobilized after the “unprecedented traumatic shock” they had felt on the occasion of the terrorist attack of 7 October: they had denounced “the odious acts perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists” (Wolpe, Wolpe, & Dorban, 2023). French psychoanalytic associations received several communiqués from psychoanalysts throughout the world who described the barbarity of Hamas, which had killed 1,200 people, wounded 4,000 others, including 800 civilians and at least 36 children, and finally captured 251 hostages (Amnesty International, 2023). By contrast, the massacre in Gaza did not attract the attention of psychoanalysts, who seem rather indifferent to the 73,000 Palestinians killed, including at least 21,500 children; more than 183,000 injured, including more than 46,500 children (Mraffko, 2026).

This silence is all the more disturbing since, for several years, genocide has been a psychoanalytic question as such: there exist numerous psychoanalytic writings on the Shoah, on the genocide in Rwanda, and on the exterminations of indigenous populations in America. The problem of antisemitism and the question of Zionism have interested psychoanalysts across several generations, and one finds in contemporary psychoanalytic literature theories on race and racism in relation to the unconscious. Despite this, virtually no one, with a few exceptions, has expressed themselves on the Palestinian cause and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

If the silence of psychoanalysts on Palestine and the ongoing genocide strikes me as a psychoanalyst, one must note that this indifference does not concern them exclusively. Philosophers, sociologists, journalists, public figures in entertainment and politics, particularly in France, immediately denied its significance, and moreover, many media networks have even instrumentalized the genocide of the Gazans for ideological and economic ends. But is it possible to scotomise a genocide? What are the consequences, at the psychic and political level, of this defensive process?

Psychoanalysis teaches us that when one does not want to see, one does not see: “To undo what has been done,” Freud (1926, p. 35) wrote concerning obsession. But this mode of defense does not concern obsessional neurosis exclusively: it is called in psychoanalysis “repression”.

The subject represses a situation they do not want to see and of which they want to know nothing, because it is too traumatic to be integrated by thought. To repress, not to see, not to know, suits us. Or at least we believe so, for the traumatic Thing always returns, in another form, but always there: the real always returns to the same place, Lacan affirms (1973, p. 49). But if we continue not wanting to see and know what is happening, what will the consequences be? What do we absolutely not want to see or know about the genocide in Gaza? And what will be the aftermath of this resistance, conscious or unconscious, for history and for us?

“Shame, shame,” Deleuze wrote in 1983, on the uncomfortable position of the Western world with respect to Palestine (p. 221). Today, the situation has worsened, it has gone beyond all possible imagination. After two years of massacre, the ceasefire of 9 October 2025, which permitted the liberation of the Israeli hostages, did not stop the occupation of Palestinian territories by the Israeli army, nor the violence against the persons living there. Palestinian prisoners have not been liberated, and since the ceasefire, Israeli attacks have killed nearly 500 Palestinians and left more than 1,200 injured, without counting those who died of cold and famine in Palestinian camps. 2.4 million Palestinians live today in inhumane conditions due to Israeli restrictions on the entry of food, medical supplies, and shelter materials to protect against the cold. The governments of countries throughout the world watch and, with a few exceptions, do nothing, or at least nothing capable of having concrete effects, preferring grandiose symbolic gestures (such as the recognition of Palestine) to concrete decisions that would be far more constraining for the Israeli government (such as the suspension of all military cooperation, economic sanctions or judicial procedures in accordance with international law).

How can one not die of shame observing the immobilism and bad faith of Europe, the United States, and other countries as well? How can one not die of shame before the instrumentalization of the struggle against terrorism, of the struggle against antisemitism, in order to justify the genocide in Palestine?

Shame compels us to look at what is happening in Gaza. If our rulers have no shame for what they do or do not do for Gaza, the people of the world have reacted: the great rallies of autumn 2025 showed the protest of thousands of people against countries complicit in genocide, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. Gaza has shaken our lives, awakened them, and the Palestinian cause has, for several months, become, and I hope will remain for a long time, our cause.

We have indeed seen what is happening in Gaza, we know, and we are ashamed. Shame compels us to react, but what does reacting mean, for Gaza, and for us, starting from shame? And how can shame become a motor of struggle and resistance?

The Mirrors of Shame

This text also exists thanks to a slip, a slip I committed at the time of conceiving an intervention programmed by Les Temps qui restent at the Palais de Tokyo, on 27 November 2025, in the context of the exhibition “Echo Delay Reverb, American Art, Francophone Thought”. I had initially chosen to comment on the work of feminist artist Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, present in the retrospective. As it was a video projected on a small television in a corridor, viewing promised to be complicated for the public. For this reason, Arto Charpentier, one of the organizers of the event, had asked if I could comment on another piece in the exhibition. Not being an expert in American contemporary art, the choice was not simple: I looked at the list of names and exhibited works without being able to envisage anything that might orient my lecture. Suddenly, I found what I needed: Replacement by Cameron Rowland, which “represented” the Palestinian flag, would have allowed me to present certain of the reflections I shall set out here.

The choice had brutally imposed itself on me because of what was happening in Gaza at the time of the exhibition; the hypothesis of a genocide was beginning to be no longer in doubt, the bombings were at their peak, and protests were breaking out everywhere: the peoples of the world had finally decided to react and to oppose their governments judged complicit in a genocide. My country, Italy, had distinguished itself particularly: in several cities, the participation in rallies for Gaza had been without precedent among the large recent movements of popular mobilization. I was moved. I wanted to associate myself with the cries of “Free Palestine” from Italy and throughout the world. Moreover, I could do so in the company of Etienne Balibar, one of the rare French philosophers who had expressed himself on several occasions in favor of Gaza in an eloquent and moving manner. I decided to communicate my decision to the organizers, who were a little slow to respond. What? Were they displeased with my choice? Did they want to silence me? Did they also want to try to hide what is happening today in Gaza? In sum, had the massacre of the Palestinian people become taboo even in the art world?

But I had gone a little too far with my projection, and I had to quickly bring down my paranoia: Arto Charpentier announced to me that I had made an error in “interpreting” Cameron Rowland’s work: it was not the flag of Palestine, as I had believed, but the flag of Martinique.

Had I then confused the two flags? How could I have made such an error? I had no excuse: it was evident I did not know the Martinican flag, I had never seen it, and I had not even considered Martinique as an independent nation from France.

What shame. I had been caught in a trap by my unconscious: I could tell myself I was viscerally against colonization, imperialism, racism, white supremacy, blah blah blah—the fact is that I had scotomized Martinique. My slip spoke more loudly than my good conscience.

For psychoanalysis, the slip, like the dream, the witticism, the parapraxis, and the symptom, are formations of the unconscious. Through the linguistic, visual, or auditory equivocation, the slip expresses the modified return of the repressed, always of traumatic origin. This is why the meaning of a slip remains opaque: the slip expresses itself obliquely, partially, imprecisely, and enigmatically, but its obscure meaning is always susceptible to interpretation.

What meaning did my slip then reveal? Of what repressed was it the return? What did I not want to see when I did not see the flag of Martinique? More precisely, what was the slip making me see, with the addition of the color white to the flag of Martinique? Not only had the white transformed the Martinican flag into the Palestinian flag, but the signifier “white” opened onto a large number of associations. First of all, I am a white woman, raised in a white society, with white bourgeois privileges. Was I then feeling guilty for being white? No, that was not the feeling resurfacing in me; it was not in the name of humanism and humanitarianism that shame was invading my body and my being. It is rightly, I believe, that Carlo Ginzburg wrote, “Shame is not a choice: it falls upon us like a sudden illness, it invades our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts” (Ginzburg, 2025, p. 17).

I realized that the “blindness” I had projected onto the Other was now striking my own person: the shame of the West was also my shame. The shame of colonialism in Martinique reflected the shame of colonialism in Palestine, and vice versa. The two shames bounced off each other, crossed, and exceeded my image, until they enveloped my whole being. My horror reflected itself in the two mirror-flags, that of Martinique and that of Palestine. I could no longer look in only one direction, each mirror projected shame beyond itself; I was imprisoned in the mirrors of shame: from colonialism to the genocide in Gaza, passing through the Shoah, and through all the crimes committed by our civilization. I could no longer avert my gaze anywhere; everything I saw only intensified my shame. I was not guilty, but responsible: I could no longer scotomise the horrors of the West, for these horrors were also mine, and I was ashamed of them … What unbearable shame. I had to react, but how?

But I was not the only one who had to feel shame (because of my slip and its effects): Cameron Rowland’s flag continued to reflect horror and scatter it everywhere. After the opening of the exhibition, it was the management of the Palais de Tokyo that was, itself, in the process of becoming atrociously ashamed before the artist’s work.

The black, red and green flag has officially represented Martinique since 2023. It has been brandished as a symbol, since the 1960s, by various independence movements. It is for this reason, I imagine, that the artist had the idea of flying the Martinican flag on the facade of the building while inside the museum, the exhibition was taking place. But the museum management, after 12 hours of display on the facade, had decided to remove it. And for what reason? Were they afraid it would be judged illegal? Or was it not rather the proximity of its colors to the colors of the Palestinian flag that had caused them problems? In any case, since the removal of the flag, it was no longer to be seen anywhere; the flag was certainly present inside the museum, but hidden: it had been covered. It was through this presence-absence of the work in the exhibition that the management had legitimized the removal of the flag from the facade, that is to say, as a performative gesture. But this dubious justification did not prevent Cameron Rowland from filing a complaint against the Palais de Tokyo: it is at minimum bizarre to present a performative act in an exhibition without the artist’s agreement. In truth, the removal of the flag resembles more an act of censorship than an artistic gesture (Lamant, 2025). But why did the management of the Palais de Tokyo fear the Martinican flag so much? What did they want to conceal, or worse, scotomise? What had they seen in the flag that they did not want to see, to the point of covering it, rendering the Thing simultaneously present and invisible?

I shall never know, just as I shall never know if shame had contaminated, or not, the management of the Palais de Tokyo. But I know well that I, for my part, was dying of shame. And it was not only my image that had taken a blow, but shame crossed my body and pierced my whole being: “hontology,” Lacan rightly said, to mark the confluence between shame and being (Lacan, 1991, p. 209). Being here is not to be understood as an essence or as a substance, nor as the “I” of the subject, that is to say, the fictitious or ideal self-image; being indicates here the verb, that is to say, the fact of existing, of living, in company with shame: for what we do with our life, we are always responsible. “To be” means here “to act”, and faced with shame, one must act, or better react, in order to confront this painful, unbearable affect. This is precisely what the peoples of the world have done in support of Gaza, through collective demonstrations, the taking of the floor, participation in and support for the Global Sumud Flotilla: they reacted because they were dying of shame. And I had to do the same, faced with my slip and all the shameful meanings it had engendered: I had to act because I was responsible for my being, and for my shame. Now, acting meant for me writing. Writing was certainly not for me a heroic act, but an act of survival: if thinking the genocide was impossible for me, I could always write my shame, starting from my shame, so as not to die of it.

Guilty, But Without Shame

The President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, Giorgia Meloni, the Federal Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, the President of Argentina, Javier Milei, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, and all those who directly or indirectly support the criminal actions of Benjamin Netanyahu in Palestine, and justify them, are certainly not dying of shame: Lacan was right when he affirmed that “it is unusual to die of shame” (Lacan, 2007, p. 180). They are not ashamed because they refuse to see that the Israeli army is in the process of exterminating a people, and that they are the accomplices of the ongoing genocide. All the justifications one has been hearing for more than two years (we must defend democracy and the values of the West, we must fight antisemitism, Islamism, terrorism …) serve to entrench the repression of a genocide and to scotomise the existence of a people and a land, Palestine.

This blindness does not date from today. Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar were already writing in 1982:

The Zionist movement mobilized the Jewish community in Palestine not with the idea that the Palestinians would one day leave, but with the idea that the country was “empty.” There were other Jews, of course, who, having arrived, saw how untrue it was and wrote about it! But the majority of the Jewish community acted like the people with whom they came face to face every day, living and working, were not there. This blindness, however, was not physical. No one was fooled to that degree. But everyone understood that the people living in their midst were “in the process of disappearing.” And they realized that if this disappearance was going to succeed, from the outset they had to act as though it had already happened, by “never seeing” the existence of the Other, who was nonetheless unmistakably present. Emptying the territory, if it were to succeed, had to begin by emptying “the Other” from the head of the colonizer (Deleuze, 2006/1982, pp. 197-8).

But refusing to look at what one does not want to see and wanting to know nothing of it does not make the object of our repression disappear: the Palestinian people are still there, alone, abandoned by Europe, the United States, the Arab states of the region, and many other nations.

For the philosopher Judith Butler, the abandonment of the Palestinian people passes also through the negation of their right to mourn their dead. Unlike our own, the lives of Gazans would not merit being mourned, but this forced indignity before death only reinforces the will of the Palestinian people to fight in order to continue to exist. Butler writes:

[The inhabitants of Gaza] claim their grievability even while knowing that they are not, in the eyes of those who bomb them, considered as potentially grievable beings. Or perhaps the Israeli air forces that bomb the inhabitants of Gaza know perfectly well that the relatives who survive will grieve those lives, and thus seek to plunge these communities into a grief so unbearable that they will never again be able to rise up against the occupying forces. I do not know what they think. But History suggests that the destruction of lives on such a scale only reinforces the determination of those who survive to resist, as well as that of future generations who will continue the struggle for the right to exist. (Butler, 2025)

The process of scotomization is endless. The invisibilization of Palestinians passes through the negation of their lives and goes as far as the negation of their dead. This first repression is covered by the hypocritical recognition of a State of Palestine. But no one worries about its people: carnage and death persist in Palestine, and soon the recognized State will have no more inhabitants to populate it. It was in 1978 that Deleuze, again, wrote:

For a “final solution” to the Palestinian question, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other States (with various nuances and restrictions). A people without land, and without a State, the Palestinians are the spoilers of peace for everyone involved. If they have received economic and military aid from certain countries, it has been in vain. The Palestinians know what they are talking about when they say they are alone (Deleuze, 1978/2006, p. 161-2).

The scotomization of the Palestinian people has a psychic function, and of course a political one: Europe had believed that by supporting the creation of the State of Israel, it would have paid for its crimes against the Jewish people, exterminated during the Second World War. But such a debt is not so easily paid, and, above all, as Deleuze simply notes, “A debt cannot be paid with one, two, three, seven, ten murders a day” (Deleuze, 1988/2006, p. 334). The greatest genocide in history, the Shoah, became absolute evil; this “religious and mystical vision” did not stop evil, on the contrary, it propagated it, causing it to be visited upon the Palestinian people.

Freud had become aware of the problem: notwithstanding his attachment to the culture of his ancestors, he had never looked favorably upon the project of founding a Jewish State in Palestine. The inventor of psychoanalysis did not oppose the founding of a State of Israel, but it seemed to him unreasonable to do so in Palestine. Given everything that has happened on those lands since 14 May 1948, his intuition did not prove unreasonable. He wrote in a letter on 26 February 1930:

It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically burdened land … I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of an Herodian wall into a national relic, thus offending the feelings of the natives. (Freud, cited in Yerushalmi, 1991, p. 13).

Guilt is not an effective psychic condition for repairing the evil we have dispensed, all the more so when it is others who pay for our faults. I put forward the hypothesis that the feeling of guilt, conscious or unconscious, was at work and justified the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 in Palestine. I do not contest the feeling of the necessary existence of a “Jewish State” after the Shoah; I would simply like to question here the psychic modalities that are at the origin of this founding, as well as their concrete effects in the world.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that guilt is, from the point of view of the unconscious, a defense which, through infinite rumination, perpetuates the enjoyment of one’s own unpaid fault, with respect to oneself or to others. It often happens that our patients chew over their guilt throughout sessions. They are not good enough, not lovable enough: they are guilty. They do not leave their partner: they are guilty. They cheat on their partner: they are guilty. But at the same time, they do nothing to pay their debt and exit from their fault.

The equation is simple: if I am guilty, I have necessarily transgressed the law, I therefore occupy (unconsciously) a position of omnipotence and have no desire to detach myself from it. The Other no longer determines my desire and my acts, or at least so I believe. Recognizing one’s own guilt can even become a trick for continuing to “sin”. It rarely happens that the oral exercise of a mea culpa is effectively followed by an act that allows the subject to concretely evacuate their fault: it is no coincidence that the act of confession in the Catholic religion consists essentially in the avowal of one’s own sins, sins from which the subject is swiftly acquitted through the simple avowal, thus free to sin again. This also happens in the cure, particularly when the patient takes the analyst for a priest, or rather when the analyst assumes this position of holy man (or holy woman).

It certainly happens that the person guilty of something genuinely seeks to make amends, but only when the price to pay is not too high, or else because it is others who pay on their behalf.

In any case, guilt is an imaginary psychic itinerary that only entrenches the repression of what we do not want to see, and it is for this reason that often we do not feel shame. Our body remains unharmed—mental guilt suffices—and with the body, our being too. It is quite otherwise with shame: the feeling of shame can genuinely push us to react when faced with our shameful position, because it is unbearable. Guilt, on the other hand, transforms into a projective movement, and finally it is the others who become guilty: my parents who want me to be the best, my husband who does not permit me to leave him, my wife or my mistress who loves me too much! It is therefore my parents, my husband, my wife and my mistress who are guilty; it is they who must pay: I, finally, am innocent. We know in psychoanalysis this projective mechanism proper to paranoia—which is not necessarily a characteristic of psychosis—and which can go very far, at the individual level but also at the level of the collective.

Antisemitism is probably an example of this turning of fault towards paranoia. If Europe feels guilty because it at least permitted the extermination of Jews, in the end, it is the Jews who are guilty of Europe’s guilt, which is, itself, innocent, since it has recognized its crimes—why then unceasingly remind it of them? Or else the fault is displaced onto a third element, as is the case in Palestine: the governments of European countries “protect” Israel from the Palestinians, who, themselves, are guilty (Palestine is responsible for antisemitism, terrorism, religious wars, etc.). Finally, the ultimate benefit, the Jews are guilty since they harm the Palestinians: Europe is innocent, it is only manipulated by Jews or more or less hidden Israeli powers—the loop of antisemitism is closed, the feeling of guilt brings the subject (Europe) back to its starting point.

Europe, to pay for its crimes against the Jewish people, supported the founding of the State of Israel, certainly not in Europe—too expensive to pay!—but in a land that was not on its continent: Palestine. And the crimes so characteristic of European history began again, but this time through other torturers and against the Palestinians: colonization of lands first, opening of camps, forced exiles of populations, military supervision of an entire population, finally, genocide. The reparation of evil quickly transformed into the propagation of evil: Deleuze, once again, was not wrong.

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, an odious gesture like any blind terrorist act, and all the more so as it reaches a rare level of violence, became the perfect pretext to implement Netanyahu’s genocidal program in Palestine, with the complicity of Europe and the United States. It is evident that without their support, Israel would have much more difficulty succeeding in its project. But Europe and the United States are guilty, so … one must support Israel! If, for once, we do not make the Jewish people pay for having put us in an uncomfortable position (because of our crimes against them), this time it is the Palestinians who must reimburse the debt … for us, and again for us! It is easy to anticipate what follows: that the Jews are made to pay for the fault of having made us guilty for having supported them—a consequence so probable in the logic of the feeling of guilt that it perhaps explains the terror of European governments complicit in genocide before the virulent resurgence of antisemitism. Locked as they are in guilt, nothing remains for them but to raise the stakes in repression, through censorship and the suppression of movements of sympathy towards the Palestinian cause. But this attitude resolves nothing; it only worsens the deadly dynamic at work: more guilt, more fault, more repression, more guilt, more fault, etc. Europe is fucked up.

The unwavering support for the State of Israel for more than 70 years has certainly not allowed European States to repay their debt to the Jewish people. Caught between the feeling of guilt for its old faults and the economic, political, and symbolic advantages of its agreements with Israel, Europe has well integrated Israel’s colonial invasion of Palestine: it insists today on scotomizing, thus repressing and justifying, the extermination of its people. And all this without the slightest feeling of shame—at least in the people who identify culprits (even if those are themselves).

Hontology of Palestine

This closed circuit of guilt that goes from the Shoah to the current genocide in Gaza is at the heart of the malaise in contemporary culture. This malaise rests on the attempt to scotomise the real. Let us understand “real” in the Lacanian sense of the term, that is to say, as a traumatic and unconfessable event: the real is impossible to say. But its being so does not mean one cannot catch some fragments of it, when one is ready to look a little more closely at the unconfessable event.

Any scotomization, the effect of the repression of the trauma, also expresses itself through silence: if one does not see (or does not want to see), then one does not speak of it. Silence separates us from the feeling of shame. Lacan explains it in this passage from his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, in his particular language:

People have been quiet about this for a long time. Speaking about it, in effect, is to open this redoubt, which is not the last, the only one that what can be said honestly of the honest partakes in, “honest,” which stems from the honor- that is all shame and companion – of making no mention of shame. Precisely, of the fact that it is impossible for the honest to die of shame. You know from me that this means the real. (Lacan, 2007, p. 180)

Lacan evokes silence with respect to a saying that would speak of being, a saying that necessarily implies and compromises the subject. Nothing has been said, he maintains, about the real, that is to say about something of which one wants to know nothing, but which always returns to the same place, as we have already recalled: one does not escape the real, notably, in the experience of shame, a shame of which one could die. Shame compels us to speak. Inversely, to be silent means not saying one’s own shame, and not being able to die of it. For dying of shame is, for the honest-man-who-values-his-honour, says Lacan, impossible, an impossible that Lacanian psychoanalysis attributes to the real, that with which no one wants in any way to be confronted. This real is “troumatic” [troumatique], Lacan (1974) also proposes, for it creates a hole: it creates a hole in history—in the history of the subject, but also in the history of humanity. The real that creates a hole in discourse returns in shame, and it is only through this embarrassing, uncomfortable, unbearable affect that the subject finds themselves in the necessity of confronting it.

Lacan implies, in this passage, an opposition between (supposedly) honest persons and shameful persons. The former are those who value their honor, that is to say their self, who try to defend their image through the repression of what they do not want to see and, above all, say. If they speak, it is necessarily to say nothing, for their speech covers the traumatic real, at the risk of course of making it explode (as in any exercise in compression). We know the consequences of this mass repression according to Freud: fascism and war extended to the most extreme limits of the world (Freud, 1921/1981). We, too, today, after decades of “civilization” (understand: unbridled post-colonial capitalist globalization), ask ourselves: but where does all this violence come from? Invasion of Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, persistent military attacks in the West Bank, Trump attacking Venezuela and threatening to invade Greenland, savage repression in Iran, the seemingly irresistible rise of authoritarian passions, and now a new very high-intensity war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran … As when Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents, we have the feeling that something that passed for having been set aside by civilization returns with a violence multiplied precisely because it was “set aside”, in other words, repressed. And the more we accuse (and above all, the more we accuse the other: the enemy, the Russian, the Palestinian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Latino, etc.) of being guilty of this violence, the more we liberate that violence.

It is not the same for shameful persons, those who can die of shame: they have seen where they should not have seen, and they are ashamed of it. But they do not fall silent; they are capable of saying they are ashamed and why. The being of the subject is implicated in the return of the real in question, and shame is the proof: it is a hontology, Lacan rightly says. If the subject, who is an honest-man-who-values-his-honour seeks to cover his eyes before the mirrors that reflect his shameful being, the subject capable of feeling shame perceives their being, but without fearing the loss of face, honor, or whatever you like, by playing the honest man. Shame shows them neither more nor less than what they are, and it is from there that they will be able to see, say, and act. Without mask, without honor. For Lacan, integrating shame into being means that one will not have wasted one’s own life, being, therefore, one day, worthy of death. Shame gives a life back all its meaning, and it is a chance. Lacan says it without ambiguity:

“He doesn’t deserve to die for that!” people say about anything and everything, thus bringing everything down to being futile. Said as it is said, with that end in mind, it elides the fact that death can be deserved. Now, it should not be a matter of eliding the impossible, as it happens, but of being its agent. To say that death is deserved —the time at least to die of shame that it’s not so, that it’s deserved. If it happens now, well then. it was the only way to deserve it. You weren’t lucky. If it doesn’t happen. which, with respect to the preceding surprise, is bad luck, then you’re left with a life of shame by the bucketful, by virtue of the fact that it is not worth dying for (Lacan, 2007, p. 180-1).

The honest-man-who-values-his-honour does not confess the shame for which he is always responsible. He represses, he scotomises, he chatters, he justifies, he accuses, but at bottom, of the real—the troumatic real that causes his own history to converge with the History of humanity—he wants to know nothing, nor even to perceive it. Examples of honest-men-who-value-their-honour are not lacking, and we have already named them: Netanyahu, Trump, Meloni, Steinmeier, Milei, Macron … but also all the political figures, journalists, intellectuals, artists, opinion makers, psychoanalysts who, with their postures of honest men and men who value their honor, are not ashamed of the genocide currently underway in Gaza. It saddens them, of course, it is even quite dreadful, but, you understand, things are complex, one must not be too ideological—and they evoke Israel’s legitimate defense, the fight against terrorism, the reality of political Islamism, geopolitical threats, the threat of antisemitism, the uniqueness of Israeli democracy in its region, human wickedness … Bullshit! A genocide is taking place: you should be dying of shame! We, we are dying of shame. You shame us, you even put our shame to shame.

What you see, what you do, what you think, and what you say, makes you believe you are in an honorably honest posture, whereas all of this, as Lacan would say, should not be considered worthy of a life, nor of a death, but only of a farce, the very farce you yourselves fear: Lacan specifies:

This is what must make it possible for us to take the question in another way than on the basis of the objection I made just before to touching on things in a certain tone, with a certain word, out of fear that they might get carried away by buffoonery. Begin, instead, with the following fact, that the buffoonery is already present. Perhaps, by adding a bit of shame to the mix, who knows, this might keep it in check … You lack for that, precisely, a bit of shame. It might come to you (Lacan, 2007, pp. 181-2).

For our rulers, politicians, journalists, academics, artists, and psychoanalysts who insist on having a “just position” with respect to what is happening in Gaza, this shame has not come. But it is not without a price to pay that one escapes something so essential, for being, as shame.

If some continue to avoid the hontology of Palestine, and thus, to deserve neither, as Lacan would say, to live nor to die, others cannot turn their gaze from Gaza: the shame they feel constrains them to it. It is impossible to repress shame when it takes hold of us, it is impossible to hide it when the body openly expresses the signs of this affection. Gaza makes us blush. These signs of shame prove that we have seen the Thing and it is too late to flee from it: yes, we have seen and we are ashamed. This existential shame is cruel, but also vital, for it pushes us to react: we are dying of shame.

The people who have risen up against States complicit in genocide and who have demonstrated in cities throughout the world in favour of Palestine know this very well, as do those who participated in the extraordinary humanitarian enterprise of the Global Sumud Flotilla, and of course all the people who have firmly expressed their disapproval of the State of Israel and of complicit governments, beginning with the inescapable figure of Francesca Albanese, the Italian jurist and United Nations rapporteur on Palestinian territories, who fights against the invisibilization of the genocide, and who finds herself so constantly ostracised by honest men—the angel of shame.

The honest-men-who-value-their-honour believe that these people are like them, that they want to do good, to rise to the height of admirable ideals. But no: they are dying of shame, that is all. It is the same Greta Thunberg who said to the great ones of this world, concerning climate inaction, how dare you, who finds herself on the boats of the flotilla to continue saying to the honest-men-who-value-their-honour: shame! Shame!

Yes, we are ashamed. That is the great misunderstanding: you believe we want to remind you of your duty, whereas we want to draw you into our shame—and we are ashamed to know in advance that this will not happen. Shame makes us responsible for the traumas inscribed in our unconscious, which we must now face directly: repression, forgetting, negation, scotomization, can do nothing when the traumatic real returns in the feeling of shame. It is too late, the hontology of Palestine has awakened us: the responsibility of our being pushes us to act, by our own means, different for each one, not so as not to die of shame, but because we are dying of shame.

Writing Shame

“Shame of being a man.” This phrase, well-known, is now associated with Primo Levi. But he was taking it from Kafka’s novel, The Trial. Joseph K is confronted with his judges, “It is in the end a human, not a divine, tribunal: it is composed of men and made by men, and Joseph K. with the knife already planted in his heart is ashamed of being a man.” (Levi, 1989, p. 109).

Primo Levi speaks neither of himself, nor of his experience of the concentration camps, but, each time he introduces the term “shame” in his writings, it is difficult not to think of his experience as a deportee. Indeed the word vergogna (shame in Italian) appears several times in his essays and novels: “Shame of not having died,” in If Not Now, When? (Levi, 1997), and, in The Drowned and the Saved (Levi, 2019), he expresses himself in still more poignant fashion: “Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another?” (Levi, 1988, p. 62). Shame, for Levi, strikes the private sphere as much as the collective: “we felt the feeling of a certain human co-responsibility from the fact that Auschwitz was the work of men and that we are men: it is the fruit of a civilization to which we belong” (Levi, 2019).

Shame, thought as hontology, reveals the responsibility proper to each individual with respect to the crimes of humanity in our history, past and present; personal shame also crosses the field of universal history: the mirrors of shame multiply the reflections which, like infected arrows, contaminate the being which, let us repeat, must not be understood as an essence, but as the very existence of the subject. A responsible existence, we have said, for oneself and for others, a co-responsibility, Levi writes. But what does it mean, for the writer, “co-responsibility”? Does he mean here that we are all, indistinctly, murderers and genocidaires?

Co-responsibility and fault are not the same thing, and we know that declaring ourselves guilty does not prevent us from committing other crimes. Here, the question is rather that of knowing what to do when I am traversed by shame, when I see a genocide in progress, in a world that swore “never again!”, and no one moves.

If I am ashamed of what is happening today in Gaza, of the indifference of “white”, hypocritical and opportunistic Europe, it is not because I am guilty of the genocide in progress. Nevertheless, I am responsible for it, and it is for this reason that I am dying of shame. There is a difference between me and the accomplices who justify the genocide: I am ashamed, they are not. The responsibility in the existence of the subject is proportional to the shame they feel, one does not go without the other. But there is also a difference between my shame and the shame of Primo Levi, my shame and the shame of the Palestinians who have also described it, this shame, while the genocide unfolds. This is the case of the Gazan poets Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazali (2025).

The difference between me and them is very simple: I am not a victim, Primo Levi, Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazali are, they are. My writing, which was supposed to be the trick for getting out of shame, now plunges me back into it: how dare I write shame, my shame, as Primo Levi, Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazal write theirs? And if my shame is entirely understandable: how can one conceive that a victim feels this same affect as me? Why do Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazal feel ashamed of writing what they live—so as not to die—through their poetry? And why does Primo Levi, victim of the concentration camps, feel ashamed of being a man himself? Is there a point of coincidence, or better, of continuity, between the shame of Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazal, of Primo Levi, and of myself?

It is again Deleuze who can help us to unravel the question. He affirms, concerning the Italian writer:

The shame of being a man, that means both: how could men have done this? Men, that is to say, others than me, how could they have done that? And secondly, how did I myself nonetheless make a pact, I did not become an executioner, but I made enough of a pact to survive, and then a certain shame at having survived, in place of certain friends who did not survive. (Deleuze, 2004)

Today, the question I ask myself is always the same: how is it possible that after the Shoah, people—yes, people like us—have been able to commit a genocide again? Of course, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is not the first genocide subsequent to the Shoah. The colonial massacres of Madagascar, Algeria, and elsewhere, at the very moment when the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity were being established, without counting of course the genocidal processes implemented by powers other than European ones (one thinks immediately of Rwanda, where however French complicity is overwhelming, but one might perhaps also speak of Communist China), were numerous enough to set us before this vertigo. But the short-circuit with the Shoah is nowhere, obviously, as stupefying as with what is happening in Gaza. How do we manage to psychically integrate the repetition of massacres in our history, from the singular as well as the collective point of view?

Primo Levi knows well on which side to situate the criminals, but he is ashamed of belonging to the same species. Not only is he ashamed because one must make a pact to survive, but also because one must survive while others, many others, almost all, have died. Others die today, too, in Palestinian refugee camps. They are exactly the same: men, women, children, human beings. Like us. And we are like them. And it is exactly here that our co-responsibility as human beings watching an ongoing genocide can only express itself in shame. Also, in the shame of writing. Writing is the junction point of our hontology faced with the massacres of peoples: Gaza revivifies the horror of the Shoah. Yes, it is still possible.

Hontology renders us responsible for the fact that it is still possible. But what to do if we do not want to fall into the cynicism proper to after-the-fact guilt? If, after the Shoah, genocides repeat themselves to the point of the “ethnic cleansing” currently underway in Palestine, it is still possible to react, to struggle, and to dissociate oneself from those who, without any shame, have integrated genocide into their psychic and material life. One then manages to react thanks to this shame, the “shame of being a man”, the only dignified way of being one. As Etienne Balibar wrote to me during an exchange on a first version of this text, “[we are ‘man’] not by identification with a ‘species’, a ‘gender’ or a ‘community’ of ‘semblables’, but by consciousness, or feeling, or despair, or by the will to measure (and to measure ourselves against) our constitutive alienation (we are not ‘like gods’)”.

But it sometimes happens that the shame-bearing struggle and hope associates itself with melancholic and deadly fault. That is another responsibility, without shame, therefore without possible reaction. This often happens to victims, who become responsible for the very wrongs they have suffered. Psychic life is strange: this inversion is proper to the traumatic experience and presents itself particularly in melancholy, that is to say when mourning becomes a difficult, if not impossible, experience.

I can evoke the experience of my mother, a survivor of the Marzabotto massacre, a small village near Bologna, where she lost her mother, as well as about fifteen members of her family, including five sisters and one brother. In recounting her experience to me, she would easily pass from the shame of being a victim, to the guilt of having survived her family, as though she were in some way responsible for everyone’s death.

Guilt in these cases of melancholy replaces shame and can take a tragic turn. Unlike guilt in the cases we described above, in melancholy it is no longer a defense or a resistance, but a push towards death: from infinite rumination, it becomes deafening silence, and it can draw the subject into an alarming fall, with risk of suicide.

I would like to offer here another clinical precision: guilt has from the point of view of the unconscious a different function depending on whether the subject is in the position of torturer or victim. In the first case, guilt acts as a defense for the subject: it is the blather, the rumination, the confession we spoke of above; guilt does not push one to act, and attempts at reparation are often ineffective. Quite different is the fate of guilt for a victim where, particularly in melancholy, it easily pushes the subject towards self-destruction. But one can never generalize: still referring to my mother, I can testify that she never attempted to end her life through self-destructive acts.

We may nevertheless ask whether, in Primo Levi’s case, shame did not in the end transform into fault, an absolute fault that pushed him at a certain moment to suicide. We cannot draw conclusions on this particularly delicate point of Primo Levi’s life, and in any case we shall never know. It must, however, be insisted upon: there is nothing fatal in this denouement. The poetry of Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazal testifies to this: another survival is possible. They speak of death, a death that sometimes seems to merge with writing, or better, to come alive in writing. It is as if poetry served to describe death, a death imminent or even already arrived for the Palestinian poets.

Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazal write from their experience of the genocide. Beauty in poetry and literature establishes a new pact with life, through a particular hontology, which allows being to encounter death, but not its own destruction: beauty is the barrier.

This barrier exists today for Hind Joudeh and Haydar al-Ghazal, and it did, at least for a certain time, for Primo Levi too, when shame accompanied his writing. “There is no better reason to write,” Deleuze (2004, p. 180) concluded. Shame can become an effective motor of creation, and of course, of rebellion, through literature and poetry. In this case, death, which expresses itself in the hontology of literature and poetry, does not annihilate the subject, but makes them react faced with their horror, and therefore makes them live, at least in writing.

Finale: Politics of Shame

I must confess that when, on 23 September 2025, I saw Italian squares fill with demonstrators expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian people, my heart filled with joy. I was relieved: they too, like me, must have been dying of shame. It is possible, and even certain, that shame is not the only mobilizing affect of a people: we can evoke anger, despair, humiliation, sadness, regret, anguish … But, if we follow Lacan’s hypothesis, shame is the only affect capable of mobilizing being to the point of the act (and the speech that accompanies it), starting from the most unconscious aspects, and at the individual as well as collective level. The word that came to me then is rather: scuorno.

The word scuorno is a Neapolitan expression, which does not have quite the same meaning as vergogna, shame in Italian. If shame is a fairly intimate feeling, which can be consumed in absolute solitude, this is not the case for scuorno, which needs a social scene to express itself. Scuorno reminds us of nudity, of the fact of being naked and finally uncovered. When we behave unworthily, scuorno takes hold of us. The body is therefore the first site of scuorno. If scuorno is often used to evoke amusing situations, the expression can also be charged with violence. The struggle against scuorno is a struggle for survival, which falls upon us unawares. An amusing and poignant example of the use of the word scuorno is found in the text of a song invented by Neapolitans upon the arrival of the great Argentine footballer Diego Armando Maradona in the city’s team: “Maradona, mo ca stai ccà / levancillo ‘o scuorno ‘a faccia a ‘sta città …” (Maradona, now that you are here, remove the scuorno from the face of this city). The “shame” of the city of Naples was probably a consequence of the racism of northern Italians towards southerners: Neapolitans were thieves, swindlers, Camorristas, indigents, layabouts, vulgar, ugly, dirty, wicked people, etc. The people thought then that if the genius of Maradona could make the Naples team win the Italian championship (which did indeed happen on several occasions), the city would be able to free itself from the scuorno that pursued it.

If one can therefore have the scuorno removed by others, as in the example of Naples and Maradona, one might be tempted to lay ‘o scuorn’ ‘a faccia on all those who try not to see what is happening in Gaza, in order to restore to them a little dignity. But this does not always work, and if scuorno certainly did not condition the choices of Italian rulers, its effects have been extraordinary at the level of popular mobilization: mettersi ‘o scuorno can then become a truly political act.

It is perhaps no coincidence that France, where the word scuorno does not exist, did not see its streets fill as in Italy, where the figures for “pro-Pal” rallies broke all records: 100,000 people in Rome, 50,000 in Bologna, and tens of thousands in Genoa, Milan, Turin, Naples, Palermo, Venice … Newspapers wrote that the Italian people had “awakened” thanks to Palestine, and I want to add that this awakening was possible thanks to scuorno. Scuorno produced incontestably subversive effects. On the demonstrators’ banners, one could read: Sogniamo la Palestina libera, ed è stata la Palestina a liberare noi (We dream of a liberated Palestine, and it was Palestine that liberated us).

Resistance in favor of Palestine had transformed into resistance against our governments, complicit in genocide: to resist for Gaza also meant to resist for ourselves, for, as Nelson Mandela said, we will never be free as long as Palestine is not. And I dare say that no struggle against antisemitism will be decisive if one does not at the same time struggle for a Palestine freed from Israeli settlers. One struggle does not go without the other: on both fronts, one must be intransigent.

But how to explain the reanimation of a people not as accustomed as in France to strikes and demonstrations, who barely expresses itself at the ballot box anymore, and who, when it does, votes for the far right? This broad mobilization is not a simple ideological phenomenon, as some have written. Ideology is a system of ideas constituting a compact doctrinal body, whereas the pro-Pal demonstrators were federated by no unified political position. I do not believe either in the hypothesis of empathy (how could I live, in my body and in my being, the experience of the genocide, when I cannot even think it?), nor in guilt, which, as we have seen, deresponsibilizes or triggers acts, at the singular as well as collective level.

The philosopher Rocco Ronchi affirms that the great demonstrations for Gaza have marked the birth of a “political subject”, the return of an “antagonistic subject” in liberal democracies in crisis. The political subject is today built on the action of disorganized “minorities”, that is to say, not coalitioned by a unifying ideal principle. “Minority” must be understood here not in the sense of numbers, but in the Deleuzian sense of the term, that is to say, particular—molecular—dissident actions that disturb the unitary —molar —and dominant forces. It is precisely the contagious power of these minority masses (LGBTQI+, feminists, racialized persons, veiled persons, unveiled persons, etc.) that gives authoritarian far-right governments goosebumps (Ronchi, 2025). It is enough to recall their indignation faced with the resolute action of the Global Sumud Flotilla, which, notwithstanding threats, criticisms, and accusations of all kinds, did not stop. The philosopher Federico Leoni (2025) is certainly right to think that this naval enterprise, which brought together pro-Pal activists from the four corners of the world, has a scope that goes far beyond humanitarian aid: for the philosopher, it can be considered a genuine “political act,” for it has opened a network of “new possibles” for all of us. These fields of new possibles touch the dimension of act but also of thought according to the philosopher Luca Salza (2025), for whom “the adventure of the Flotilla is absolutely philosophical”. It is philosophical because it is a “phenomenon of vision” (Salza evokes the thought of Deleuze and Guattari), and through its concrete action, the Flotilla has allowed us to see concretely the tragic picture of Gaza, as well as its reflection, the pitiful mirror of the West. We have seen what awaits us, and which is unfortunately already happening: war. It is in this sense that the Global Sumud Flotilla is an event, philosophical and political, and opens concretely possibles in thought and in political action.

The minority protests of which Ronchi speaks, evoked also by Leoni and Salza, have been fundamental, particularly in Italy, for recommencing the act of collective dissidence, and I have the most sincere conviction that they can undermine imperialist discourse and its consequent action. It seems to me that Balibar goes in the same direction when he affirms:

it is the development of a mass solidarity, crossing the borders between North and South, East and West, with the struggle of the Palestinian people, that draws it out of its isolation (which is also, reciprocally, one of the causes of the attraction exercised by terrorism, as the last resort of the ‘damned of the earth’, abandoned by all). Such an internationalist and anti-imperialist mass movement does not substitute itself for the struggle and the initiative of the Palestinians themselves, but it can put the complicity of States in check. This is why it should come as no surprise that its supporters are the object of severe repression, on campuses and in streets, in America and Europe. But nor must it be accepted. Palestine will ‘win’ in the sense that it will not die, but it will not win alone. (Balibar, 2025)

And we will not “win” alone either, without Palestine. “The struggle for Gaza” has given the Italian people back joy and hope, the hope that together we will have the strength to change something: for Palestine and for us. Palestine has opened our eyes: we have seen the design of those who seek to derive economic advantages on the backs of the dead in Gaza, to delegitimize international bodies, and to destroy the social state of nations. We have seen and understood that the cause of Palestine is universal, and that it symbolizes the violence of class difference in its most extreme and brutal form.

The genocide in Gaza slaps us in the face like the return of all the injustices, massacres, and pillages repressed by our civilization. We had said: “Never again war! Never again colonialism! Never again genocides!” And here we are now compromised up to our necks. Today, the ceasefire has not stopped the genocide in Gaza, which persists at “low intensity”. We continue to see images of a demolished city and its inhabitants struggling against famine and disease, while American oligarchs and their accomplices from the petro-monarchies make plans for a smart city on mounds of ruins and corpses. How does Europe justify itself before this? And how will it justify itself when history accuses it once again of crimes against humanity? The answer is simple: if history repeats itself, if the verdict falls, it will say again: “I am guilty! I have sinned! I will now keep myself in line.” But we already know that this confession of guilt and the feelings that accompany it will serve it to justify, again and again, the genocides it ceaselessly engenders like a mother inexhaustibly fertile in horrors. What shame.

Gaza is also the return of our lying, hypocritical, shameful speech. But our hontology pushes us, necessarily, to continue the struggle for and with Palestine: “Shame can be a bond [vincolo] stronger than love,” Carlo Ginzburg (2025, p. 17) writes. It must be done, for we are dying of shame—and that is our chance, our only chance! It must be done for Palestine, but also for me, for you, for us, for the whole community. The text Canta Palestina, sung by the Italian musician Enzo Avitabile (in Neapolitan) and by the Palestinian singer Amal Murkus (in Arabic), says it with the most beautiful words:

Enzo: How eager the stars are in Bethlehem

How eager the stars are in Bethlehem

How eager the stars are

And how smoke-blackened these windows are

And how smoke-blackened these windows are

Shut

And sing sing sing

Sing with the drum

And sing sing sing

Sing Palestine

Sing sing hope

And whoever has hope sings

And does not die in despair

Amal: It is a beautiful day here in Palestine

And I see the face of a dear person

And there is a new song

A wonderful flute

To make a mother and child smile

And we are all here singing

Enzo: How the flowers are wet this evening

How the flowers are wet this evening

How wet they are

And the sun and the moon mix the colours

And the sun and the moon mix the colours

The sun and the moon

And sing sing let us sing

Let us sing with the drum

Let us sing hope

And whoever has hope sings

And does not die in despair

Amal: Sing Palestine, sing for Vittorio, sing Enzo

And there is a new song

A wonderful flute

To make a mother and child smile

And we are all here singing

We sing for life

We sing for freedom

Together we light the road of life

Enzo & Amal: And sing sing let us sing

Sing Enzo, let us sing for Vittorio

And sing sing sing

Sing Palestine

Sing sing hope

Whoever has hope sings

And does not die in despair

Sing Palestine

Sing for life

Sing for freedom

Sing sing Enzo,

For Vittorio, for Palestine, for me, for you, for us, for the world

AI Declaration Statement

The author and editors acknowledge the use of Claude Sonnet 5, www.claude.ai, on May 14th, 2026, for the purpose of translation. We used the following prompts: “literally translate the attached document to English”. The output(s) from these prompts were used to translate an academic article from French to English for publication. We take responsibility for the content of all AI generated outputs.