The Thing That Crushed You

The tragedy of history is that the oppressed do not automatically become liberators.

Paulo Freire named this. When people suffer under domination, they can begin to see the tools of domination as the meaning of freedom.

The border.
The gun.
The prison.
The checkpoint.

The right to decide who moves, who eats, who returns, who lives.

This is what Palestinians are living through now, and the world has stopped pretending it does not know. The question has stopped being whether a wrong is being done, and become which states are doing it, which are funding it, which are coordinating with it, and which are looking away while it happens.

Jewish history carries some of the deepest trauma Europe has produced, and the cry of never again was born from real horror. It is why so many Jewish voices, inside Israel and across the diaspora, are among the loudest to say what is being done in Gaza is being done wrongly, and in their name. A government is not a community, and a state is not a faith. Solidarity with Jewish life and Jewish flourishing, in Greece and everywhere else, is a condition of a serious politics, not an exception to it. What we reject is the move that turns historical victimhood into permission to dominate, wherever we meet it.

Two nights have already been written about. The duty in the zone, and the project the silence was protecting. The third thing has not been said yet, and it is the one that turns the silence into a case in law. Greece signed and ratified the Genocide Convention in 1954. The Convention does not only forbid genocide. It requires every state party to act, with the means at its disposal, to prevent it. Once the International Court of Justice issued binding provisional measures on Israel under the Genocide Convention in January 2024, the duty to prevent has been triggered, and a state that continues to coordinate with the navy responsible for the conduct has stopped being a bystander.

In international law, that has a name. It is indirect complicity. And the route to test it already exists. Article IX of the Genocide Convention allows any state party to bring another state party before the International Court of Justice for failure to comply with the Convention, including the duty to prevent. South Africa used that article against Israel in case 192. The same article is available against any state whose conduct falls below the standard. AURIO’s position is plain. There must be a case before the ICJ on Greek government complicity in the genocide in Gaza. If a state party brings it, Greece must answer in The Hague. If no state brings it, the Greek public is entitled to know, in writing and in detail, what its own government has done in its name, what legal advice it acted on, and which officials signed it off. A government that wants the protection of international law cannot pick the days on which the law applies to it.

We are asked, fairly, why we do not file the case ourselves. The answer is in the law. Article IX is a state to state instrument. Only contracting parties can lodge it. AURIO is a party in formation, not a state, and the day we pretend otherwise is the day we stop being serious.

What a political party can do, and what we will do, is build the political conditions under which a state will lodge it. Parliamentary questions in Athens once we are in the chamber. Joint statements with allied parties in capitals that have already shown they will act. Public legal opinions tabled into the record. A Greek public organised enough to make silence the more expensive option for whichever government holds the seal.

The case is brought by states. The conditions for the case are built by citizens. That is the division of labour, and we are doing the second.

A case at The Hague is not won by lawyers alone. It is won by a citizenry that has been taught to read what its own state is doing, in real time, in the language of evidence and the language of law. The flotilla night was the test. The silence was the answer. A citizenry held in that posture does not, in the end, build the file. It waits for someone else to.

This is why Pillar 05: Education as Liberation sits where it does in our programme. Education in this country has been instruction. Obedience. Reciting the state’s version back to it, on cue. That is not what education is for. Education is the practice of reading the world critically and acting on it together: the world, the state and the file at the same time. A people taught to do that with their own history are the people best placed not to repeat it on someone else, and best placed to hold their own government to the standard it signs into in everyone else’s name. That is the work the night of the flotilla asked of this country, and the work the country has not yet been taught to do at scale. The pillar is the answer to the silence.

And the same logic runs through the rest of the pillars.

Food Sovereignty
Community Energy
Local Economy
Direct Democracy

These are not four separate claims stacked next to each other. They are the same claim, made in four different places, that a community is the author of its own life. At home, and everywhere else.

AURIO is a principled party, and this is one of the principles. Memory must produce justice, not revenge. Security must be built through equality, not occupation. Freedom cannot mean becoming the thing that once crushed you.

No people are free while another people live under their boot.

AURIO