I was recently absent mindedly scrolling through Mike Gouldhawke’s archive, looking at various sections that caught my eye and found myself in the Collected Words for Alfredo Bonanno section where I then went to the Act For Freedom Now! Memorial piece written for Alfredo.
Toward the end was one paragraph I nearly missed, it reads;
“We would be remiss if we did not mention that it was while in the cells of Greek democracy after his arrest near Trikala city , that Alfredo Bonanno, wrote in a calm ferocity the many pages that would become the book “L’ospite inatteso“, (“The Unexpected Guest”). It was here that he revealed in intense, piercing stanzas his recollections of combat decades prior in the land known as Palestine. A struggle against torturers, massacres administered by grey men with a clockwork routine.”
Immediately I dug through the text to find the part mentioned and put it through a machine translation. It’s rough, but adequate enough to tell the story of a moment of his life in Palestine taking part in armed action against the IDF. From what I can gather, the book in its whole is a reflection on life and death and particularly what it means to be an anarchist and take a life.
I share this very rough fragment both for its thematic timeliness regarding the armed struggle against the ongoing genocide israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people, as well as the description of what it takes to organize an action many anarchists in the territories dominated by the american state would think of as a fantasy, far beyond their grasp.
I also share this with the hope someone out there with a grasp of the italian language and time to kill will see this and feel inspired to undertake the task of translating this book into english – or any other language really. Thinking seriously about the state of the world and what the struggle for total freedom asks of us all, the reflection on life, death, and what it means to take a life is – in my mind – of critical importance.
-An Individual who comprises part of Fugitive Distro
The Unexpected Guest – 203.
The desire, but perhaps more than that, the need for a larger project, buzzed continuously in my head, intensely and precisely in Palestine. Here the limitations to our work were fewer and we also had the possibility, at times, of developing a simple information provided by the movement into a more complex action than the linear identification and clarification of a single individual. Although the other side was more aggressive than elsewhere, being one of the most powerful and best equipped armies in the world, there was room for actions in the city, often not limited to just intelligence men or Arab informants who had gone over to the enemy. This situation sometimes led to a broader intervention and the collaboration of multiple groups. The study and preparation took longer, sometimes months, but the results could be more effective. A plan could be studied calmly and methodically and there was no shortage of competent people or groups willing to collaborate on a broader action.
The capture of three army men was one of these most successful actions. It required more than four weeks and the use of about thirty comrades, with central coordination and the availability of adequate weapons to block a moving military convoy. This is one of the most detailed and complex actions ever attempted – excluding what were considered suicide attacks. The findings were therefore not limited only to measurements and correspondence but also included a military assessment of the territory and the movement of military vehicles in a journey of approximately one kilometre. It wasn’t a question of putting a moving military vehicle out of action. This type of operation, while remaining very complex and difficult, is simpler from an organizational point of view. On the contrary, it was a question of blocking a moving column, detaching a part of it, the tail one, through an explosion, and taking prisoners, something that had previously been attempted only once, but with negative results. These soldiers, despite having received appropriate military training, were basically boys and, once attacked, at least that time, they did not prove to live up to their fame. After a pro-forma response, they immediately surrendered, exiting the armored vehicle with their hands in the air. Meanwhile, the other companions kept the rest of the convoy at bay, which due to the terrain could only stop or move forward. Although it may be considered an exception to the rule, there were no injuries or deaths. The unexpected guest remained idle.
The three soldiers taken prisoner were subsequently exchanged by the movement with thirty comrades who were in Israeli prisons. The excellent result led to a reconsideration of our work and a new planning approach. But, in short, the exhaustion of resources, the loss of some comrades, the ruthless hunt conducted by the intelligence men and the accumulation of information brought us back to the usual activity. It didn’t take long for the work to resume as before, the same and precise, while the possibility of achieving coordination of such magnitude as to be able to repeat the action described above receded. We also had to go in the direction the wind was blowing, do what needed to be done, strike headlong where it needed to be struck.
This is what I told myself as I reflected on my more or less hastily dashed hopes. The ideal of absolute liberation also had to pass through the bottleneck of these peripheral, disturbing actions, goads for people accustomed to hitting hard. It was enough to look at the generalized misery of an entire population forced every morning to line up and go to work for the enemies with just a few cents of pay, to realize that those actions not only corrected a monstrosity by deleting it from the list of the human race, but constituted a repayment for every suffering suffered. Many of these wretches felt their chests expand when they learned that a massacre had been shot. Who could object to this feeling of intimate satisfaction, of compensation for the wounds that the body of an entire people suffered? Who could claim the right to stay the hand of the unexpected guest?
