We are very pleased to publish—with the consent of those involved—this recent exchange of letters between Andrés Lasso and Achinoam Nini (Noa), which also concerns the Re-Imagine Peace Festival taking place in Florence this weekend.
Dear Noa (Achinoam Nini),
I am Andrés Lasso, a peace and environmental activist from Florence, active within the network Firenze Città Operatrice di Pace (Florence City for Peace). I happened to read your public exchange of messages with Palestinian blogger Karem Rohana (Karem from Haifa) on Instagram, regarding the festival you will preside over in this city, and it brought to mind several considerations that I felt important to share with you.
You begin your response by stating that you see a lot of anger and frustration in Karem. Some time ago, upon returning to Italy on a Tel Aviv-Ciampino flight, Karem was followed by strangers in a car, and then four people kicked and punched him outside his home. Evidently, someone had received his flight details and wanted to “teach him a lesson.” That someone went unpunished. The event received very little coverage in the newspapers; one can barely find a short paragraph in the mainstream media. This happens all too often regarding the suffering and injustice endured by Palestinians, which stir little public outcry in their homeland, but evidently not only there. Thinking about how much resonance the event would have had if the person attacked coming from Tel Aviv had held Israeli nationality instead of Karem’s is deeply thought-provoking. It makes one realize that, for a large part of our media and political system, not all injustices, and not all people, are equal.
This generates anger, frustration, and from what we experience firsthand, even resignation. Just like impunity—which in Karem’s specific case concerns unknown individuals, whereas for many events occurring in Gaza or in the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank, it often involves people acting with uncovered faces, filming their own war crimes, and humiliating activists in front of cameras, as has happened even to members of the Italian Parliament. This impunity generates anger and frustration.
I hope that while in Florence you will be able to listen to the testimonies of our fellow citizens who were illegally detained in international waters by Israel, harassed, beaten, and deprived of their personal belongings, solely for attempting to open a humanitarian corridor to bring food and medicine to the victims of a genocide.
For many, it can be difficult to “imagine peace” where there is such blatant and abyssal injustice, where those who commit crimes are never convicted, nor even prosecuted.
In this context, we cannot limit ourselves to looking only at an inner dimension, as deeply important as it is. This is also because every person has their own timeframe to heal from wounds—and wounds as deep as those of individuals who have lost their homes, children, siblings, parents, and limbs can take an entire lifetime to heal.
But in the meantime, while these wounds heal, justice must take its course; it must move forward. When I traveled to Croatia in 2002, I sensed a great deal of hatred towards Serbs among the Croatian population. The war had ended ten years prior. I probably would have felt the opposite towards Croats had I been in Serbia. Yet, even though that hatred still lingered in people’s hearts, they had resumed living for nearly ten years, homes had been rebuilt, and the activities of normal life had restarted. Healing hearts is important, but first what caused those wounds must come to an end. With bodies still under the rubble in Gaza, with bombs that continue to kill—including newborns, journalists, and doctors daily—with the devastation in the West Bank, with apartheid and genocide, the very first thing to do is for all of this to stop. If it then takes a lifetime for those who have lost everything to look without anger at a citizen of the nation that made them orphans, widowed, disabled, or homeless, we will have to wait for that time. But in the meantime, let the victims be heard, the perpetrators punished, and the homes, schools, and hospitals rebuilt.
In our city, we have met Israeli conscientious objectors who paid with prison time for their choice not to cooperate with an occupying army and with genocide. Some spoke with their faces covered to avoid being recognized on video in their own country, which could evidently make them pay for the life testimonies they shared with us. In the Peace Committee of the Municipality of Florence, we listened to an Israeli activist who showed shocking videos of what occurs daily in the occupied West Bank. In the Tuscany Region, we listened to the testimony of the Hind Rajab Foundation and viewed the extensive material they obtained directly from IDF soldiers regarding war crimes committed and often “boasted about” on social networks.
We cannot leave these people alone to face injustice and impunity, which are the enemies of peace. Alone in seeking accountability—answering for one’s responsibilities, an unavoidable necessity for reconciliation. As the director of the Hind Rajab Foundation explained so well before the Tuscan institutions, it is justice that re-humanizes victims, who cease to be just numbers, but it also humanizes the perpetrators, removing them from the realm of the “inhuman” to bring them back to the level of human relations and human justice, where actions have consequences.
Without all of this, we risk seeking an abstract peace, reflecting ourselves in this concept like Narcissus at the lake, falling in love with our own good feelings but failing to take that decisive step so that the horror ends, and ends immediately.
I do not know if Karem will accept your invitation to a confrontation or if his anger will prevent him from doing so. I, who am not Palestinian but am nonetheless angry (because 20,000 children killed with impunity generate anger), am available for this dialogue. I hope in any case that the festival you will preside over speaks about all of this. May words of denunciation and concrete demands stem from it. For the liberation of Dr. Abu Safiya, for instance, detained for a year and a half, harassed and likely tortured, without trial, like thousands of his fellow citizens, including minors. For the entry of humanitarian aid, food, and medicine; for the return of the United Nations to Gaza; for the entry of foreign journalists; for the punishment of those settlers and soldiers who seem of no interest to Israeli courts. For the cancellation of a selective death penalty, which can become a further tool for ethnic cleansing.
This is how I imagine peace, under these premises. I hope the imagery activated by the festival you will chair will be on the exact same wavelength.
Kind regards,
Andrés Lasso
An Open Letter to Andrés
Dear Andrés,
Thank you for writing to me.
Your message has stayed with me. I have asked myself where to begin, and I realize there is only one place to start: with my own story.
I come from a family of Yemenite Jews who arrived in the Holy Land between 1895 and 1915, when it was still known as Palestine under foreign rule. Why did they come? Because they had no choice.
For generations they had lived among their Muslim neighbors. They looked Arabic—as I do. They spoke Arabic. They shared customs, food, music, and everyday life. The difference was that they were Jews. One day, that became enough to force them from their homes. They fled through the desert for more than a year, hidden and protected by Bedouins, until they reached the land that had lived in their prayers for centuries.
This was not an isolated story. It was repeated across much of the Arab world. Some escaped. Many did not.
Jewish history is filled with exile, persecution, displacement, and grief. The establishment of the State of Israel represented, for millions of Jews, the end of two thousand years of statelessness and vulnerability.
When I was two years old, my parents moved to the United States while my father pursued his education. Fearing that my brother and I would lose our identity, they sent us to religious Jewish schools. There I absorbed only one narrative. I knew nothing about Palestinians. Nothing about the Nakba. Nothing about the other history unfolding beside my own.
In my early twenties I had already become a successful singer in Israel and abroad. Then foreign journalists began asking me questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To my embarrassment, I had no answers.
So I began to read.
I discovered an entire reality that no one had ever taught me. It shattered me.
Then came the Oslo Accords. For the first time, peace felt possible. When I was invited to sing at a peace rally supporting Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, I accepted without hesitation.
I sang.
A few minutes later, Rabin walked off the same stage.
He was assassinated just behind me.
That night changed my life forever.
I decided that if the torch of peace had fallen, I would spend my life trying to carry it.
For more than thirty years I have done exactly that.
I have opposed the occupation. I have opposed extremism in my own society. I have spoken against Benjamin Netanyahu and those who preach hatred. I have advocated for equal dignity, equal rights, and a two-state solution. I have marched, sung, written, debated, demonstrated, raised money for humanitarian causes, and stood beside Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to surrender to despair.
The price has been enormous.
I have been threatened, slandered, mocked, boycotted, and vilified. My career has suffered deeply. I have lost opportunities and friendships. Yet I have never regretted choosing this path, because I believe an artist’s voice is meaningless if it cannot be placed in the service of humanity.
What pains me most today is not the hatred of extremists. I expect that.
What breaks my heart is being rejected by people who claim to seek the very future I have devoted my life to building.
What is my offense?
That I insist Israelis and Palestinians must one day live together?
That I refuse to dehumanize either people?
That I believe dialogue is not surrender but courage?
I do not blame Karim for his pain. How could I? I grieve for what he has lived through.
I grieve every single day for Gaza, for its children, for its families, for the unimaginable suffering they continue to endure.
I grieve for the hostages and their families.
For the victims of October 7.
For Palestinians living under occupation.
For Israelis living under fear.
For every child whose future has been stolen by leaders who profit from endless war.
My anger is not directed at the victims.
It is directed at the systems, the ideologies, and the leaders who continue to sacrifice innocent human beings in order to preserve power.
The horror must end.
That means Hamas.
It means violent settlers.
It means Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
It means Netanyahu.
It means Hezbollah.
It means the Iranian regime.
It means racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, religious fanaticism, political corruption, and every industry that profits from war while ordinary people bury their children.
None of these monsters belongs to only one nation.
Cruelty recognizes no flag.
Nor does compassion.
People often ask me where my tribe is.
My tribe is made up of those who choose life.
Those who refuse vengeance.
Those who recognize the humanity of the person standing opposite them.
Those who protect children instead of sacrificing them to ideology.
They exist among Israelis.
They exist among Palestinians.
They exist everywhere.
That is the tribe to which I belong.
We must also abandon the illusion that every tragedy has only one author and every people only one identity. The world is not divided between saints and monsters. It never has been.
Without compromise, without imagination, without the courage to envision a shared future, we condemn ourselves to endless repetition of the same grief.
That is why we created Re-Imagine Peace.
Not to beautify reality.
Not to erase injustice.
Not to pretend everything is equal.
But to demonstrate that even amid unimaginable pain, there are still human beings willing to sit together, create together, mourn together, and imagine together.
That, to me, is not normalization.
It is resistance against hopelessness.
So I invite you—and Karim—not to judge us from afar.
Come.
Listen.
Challenge us.
Question us.
Meet the extraordinary Israelis and Palestinians who have risked careers, reputations, relationships, and sometimes even their safety to stand together.
Give them, if nothing else, the respect of your presence.
I am writing these words from Germany, where I have just performed a series of beautiful concerts.
Eighty years ago, the ancestors of my people were slaughtered on this soil.
Today I stand here as a free Jewish woman of Arab heritage, singing songs of peace.
If history teaches us anything, it is this:
Human beings can choose another path.
I believe, with every fiber of my being, that Israelis and Palestinians will one day live in peace.
Not because it is inevitable.
Because it is necessary.
And because enough people, on both sides, refuse to surrender that dream.
My arms remain open to you, to Karim, and to anyone willing to walk that difficult road with us.
I will be in Florence on Tuesday.
If you wish to meet on Wednesday, I will gladly try to make time.
With friendship, hope, and solidarity,
Noa
Andrés Lasso answer
Thank you for your message and for sharing your personal experience.Thank you also for the invitation for Wednesday; unfortunately, due to family scheduling, I will not be able to attend.
I wanted to address some of the many issues you raised in your email.
At one point, after describing the difficulties, obstacles, and conflicts involved in your commitment, you ask, “Where is my sin?” I want to clarify that my letter is not intended to judge the sincerity and quality of your engagement, nor to provoke controversy, but rather to provide a framework for understanding the conflicts emerging today within peace activism and to suggest what I believe are the priorities for ending the extermination of a people that is taking place before our eyes.
I also recognize that my position is probably a more comfortable one than yours. I don’t live in Israel so your commitment fits into a potentially conflictual context, deeply intoxicated by supremacism and racism that is learned from school, where even saying words of common sense and understanding for the other part can generate enormous problems and retaliation of various kinds.
Given this premise, I think there’s an important point. You write that “no one has a monopoly on suffering.” It’s true; just look at what’s happening today in Sudan, but also in other parts of the world.
Yet it seems that someone has a monopoly on impunity. When the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda took place in 1994, the world wasn’t fully aware of what was happening. Today, the genocide in Gaza is taking place under the lens of thousands of cell phones, with IDF soldiers posting their war crimes on social media like trophies, without anyone being prosecuted by their country’s institutions. When South Africa and Zimbabwe practiced apartheid, they were subjected to sanctions from around the world, both economic and even sporting, and that global pressure helped overcome that abomination.
Today,apartheid against the Palestinians, certified by the ruling of the International Court of Justice in July 2024, a court recognized by 197 countries, has no consequences whatsoever. The UN Commission’s dossier on genocide generates no reaction, nor does the word of experts, including Israelis like Amos Goldberg, Omer Bartov, and other Holocaust historians, who say “we are facing a textbook case of genocide.”
And herein lies the concern of many activists, in a city like Florence, once at the forefront on certain issues, but which in recent years has been much more timid than other Italian cities in denouncing what is happening. This occurs in a country like Italy, which after the USA and Germany is among the main accomplices of the genocide and could in the future be held accountable for such complicity before the ICJ, according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. Many people between of fears normalization and habituation to a horror that has few parallels in recent history.Many of us believe that the issue of accountability for crimes is fundamental. (On this subject, I recommend listening to this speech of Dr. Abou Jahjaj during the event we organized in Regione Toscana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJZBPS4cvAM )
No other country has killed 300 journalists. No other country has killed and tortured doctors and paramedics in such numbers and with such ease. No other country has arrived at the UN headquarters in New York and ripped up the United Nations Charter in front of the assembly. No other country has arrested European parliamentarians in international waters in a piracy operation.
Furthermore, from the machetes that carried out the Rwandan genocide in 1994, to the drones programmed to recognize and kill newborns while they are being breastfed by Palestinian mothers, there is a qualitative leap in the organization of extermination that cannot be ignored, and which should move the entire world.
And so, even if there is no “monopoly on suffering” and it is a daunting task to historically classify the horrors committed by man against man, today the genocide in Gaza constitutes the ethical and moral bankruptcy of the entire West. This live-streamed horror is closely linked to impunity, to the knowledge that there are no consequences for those who kill or torture Palestinians, those who shoot children, or prevent food and medicine from reaching their destinations, or those who have destroyed nearly every hospital and
school, including those built by cooperation and NGOs in our countries. And impunity is guaranteed not by a government, but by a pervasive system of collusion that also involves our European countries.
When I visited Israel and Palestine in 2012, I greatly appreciated organizations working for reconciliation. Like the Tent of Nations Nassar Farm, near Bethlehem, where the slogan “we refuse to be enemies” is displayed in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Yet that entity has been fighting for years for recognition of its presence there.
Despite documents from the Ottoman Empire, the British protectorate, and so on, Israeli courts continue to deny that right. Over the past 14 years, governments and parliaments have changed, but no change has been seen in that situation, as in so many others.
Working for reconciliation is really important, even knowing it’s a long process. It can take a lifetime to change someone’s mind, it can take a generation or two to overcome hatred. But enforcing the law can be done today, immediately, if we want it, if the world takes action in this direction, embracing the tools of law. Some of these are also listed in the ICJ July 2024 pronouncements.
This is why I hope that the presence at the festival of Pizzaballa, of Combatants for Peace, and of organizations I appreciate, will raise a clear voice on this point. May the recognition of the suffering of others, of the fact that “there is no monopoly on suffering,” not lead us to perhaps unwittingly create a “symmetrical” narrative between the attacked and the aggressor: those who need the help of the entire world to get back on their feet and regain their trampled and violated dignity, and those who need the help of the entire world to stop and account for the devastation they have caused.
Best regards,
Andrés
