In 2025, Franco Berardi “Bifo”, an Italian theorist and activist and a key figure in the autonomia movement in the 1970s, published Thinking after Gaza (Pensare dopo Gaza. Saggio sulla ferocia e la terminazione dell’umano, Timeo). In the book, the philosopher reads the events in Gaza as a turning point for the world’s future, and something that will haunt us for generations.
“To think after Gaza” he writes, “is to think without any future, without hope, without universalism and humanity”. He adds: “If the only way to avoid the repetition of the genocide is to build a state destined to perpetrate in its own turn the genocide, it means that ferocity, in history, has replaced law. (…). Only ferocity can protect from ferocity”.
Berardi participated in the conference “Shadows of Illiberalism” (Berlin, 13-15 June 2025), organised by Disruption Network Lab, in conversation with Palestinian scholar and activist Yasmeen Daher.
In agreement with the author, we propose here an excerpt of the translated book, which will be soon published in English for an international audience:
Thinking after Gaza
Auschwitz was the scientific exercise of all techniques aimed at extermination. It was prolonged and uninterrupted torture, the systematic use of terror against a population of inmates who had no chance of escaping. It was the unleashing of tremendous firepower against a defenseless, disarmed, naked population. It was the intentional pursuit of genocide, the systematic murder of innocents, of women, of children.
What the Israelis are doing in Gaza, what the Israelis have been doing for decades throughout the territory of Palestine, has the same quality of cruelty and scientific precision. Everything that has been said and written about Auschwitz can be said and written again about Gaza.
The siege causes hunger, thirst, the deprivation of everything essential for survival. The bombings inflict constant terror on innocent people who run from one side to the other without knowing where to take refuge.
Ethnic discrimination, deportation, torture, extermination: this defines Hitler’s Nazism, and we regularly find this in the behavior of the Israeli army.
The entire Israeli population (with very few exceptions) participated in the extermination of the Palestinians, just as the entire German population (with very few exceptions) participated in the extermination of the Jews.
These are not two equatable events, however, because there is a huge difference between that and this.
The difference between Auschwitz and Gaza lies in the public, proudly ostentatious nature of the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians. The lesson that the Zionists are teaching the world is that there is no way to defend our lives, our parents, and our children, there is no way to escape the unchained violence of a state that makes systematic use of ethnic cleansing techniques, apartheid, and mass deportation.
Gaza is not like Auschwitz, because in those camps back then there were no cameras, while today the whole of humanity sits in the living room and observes on-screen its own future, foretold in the present reality of Gaza and Jenin.
It’s hard to say what effect this display of horror is going produce on the minds of the new generation, of the children who witness every day the torture and mutilations that Israel inflicts on their Palestinian peers.
Once upon a time, when we talked about counterinformation, when we organized radio stations and websites to denounce evil, we believed that showing violence and denouncing murderers could help isolate and shame them, and ultimately could reduce injustice.
Ultimately I’ve been led to realize that the visibility of evil is not necessarily helpful to getting free from it.
Once upon a time, I was persuaded that free information and media activism could be a check on the aggressiveness of an authoritarian state. Back then, I thought that a thousand street journalists witnessing in words and in images the brutality of the police, the violence against migrants might be a check on the criminality of power
What is happening now is much more complex, and in some regards it is the opposite of what I had believed and hoped.
Violence has become visible, but this visibility works in a dual way: on the one hand, it arouses horrified emotions; on the other, it spreads fear and a feeling of impotence to the point of inducing identification with the aggressor.
The orgy of horror on small and large screens that is haunting us in every place and at every hour of the day produces, among other things, a sort of visual nihilism: an aesthetic addiction to horror.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality. The reality of genocide has the same visual quality as the horror movies and video games to which this generation has been exposed from early childhood. What kind of internal worldview is forming in the minds of this unfortunate generation?
Reenacting their own extermination seems to be the irresistible drive of the Israeli people: better to be on the side of the exterminator than on the side of the exterminated.
The black wave that is spreading across the world has thrived on the proliferation of images, because hypermediatization has accelerated the pace of information stimulus, spreading panic and making society incapable of reacting. In panic, the collective organism clings to the reassurance of identity, but this is completely artificial, because in metropolitan life there is no more community, and identity is an effect of fictitious reaction.
The only truly existing thing, the only sentiment in the heart of those who have grown up viewing horror stories since early childhood, is the despair of a collective organism searching for reassurance in a collective ritual of hatred.
