News

For almost a decade now, the Mediterranean Sea and Coast Foundation has been striving to rebuild harmony between human beings and the environment. Acting every day to save and strengthen the infinite web of relationships that sustain this harmony means going against History itself—against a long era of blind domination and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. 

Our tools are science, collaboration, vision, and determination. We know how hard it is to reverse the motion of the waves, how impossible it may seem. Such an endeavour requires a vast community and can only truly be fulfilled through universality. 

We know the events, the processes, and the names—but we wish to forget them. The Mediterranean becomes the ocean, the oceans become the sea, and the sea touches the entire Earth. Rebuilding harmony between humanity and nature demands that we understand and overcome our aggressive solitude—of individuals, groups, communities, nations, and geopolitical blocs. It requires the gentle yet firm preservation of identities, and the awareness that where these end, eternal similarities between peoples and individuals begin—their reflection in the delicate strength of nature and in its boundless beauty. Harmony is peace, and peace is harmony. 

For this reason, war—any war—represents the denial of what we are and of what we wish to become. The highest expression of what we are not, of what we reject, is taking place in the Gaza Strip. Two years ago, Hamas and other resistance groups in the enclave reacted with a brutal, unacceptable terrorist attack to the long history of oppression of the Palestinian people. The inevitable response of the State of Israel soon crossed the threshold of legitimacy, turning into genocidal and devastating revenge—driven more by goals of ethnic cleansing and colonial conquest than by the elimination of a threat from what is, in effect, the largest open-air prison in the world. Today, that prison is a desert of rubble, disease, famine, misery, and despair. 

For almost sixty years, the West Bank has faced the consequences of a silent yet relentless colonial erosion—pursued through the seizure of land and natural resources, the systematic destruction of its economic fabric, and the intimidation and violence of the army, the police, over 700,000 illegal settlers, and the judicial system itself. Over the decades, public opinion, international diplomacy, and various peace processes have intervened. Yet none has been able to build a stable and comprehensive solution, or the conditions of justice necessary for the peaceful coexistence of the two nations. 

MEDSEA joins with conviction the belated but powerful and inspiring awakening of civic conscience now spreading through Italy, Europe, and the world. This renewed awareness must be sustained and protected from the cynical manipulation of political factions, and opened to even broader public participation. The innocent people of Gaza and Palestine, and the millions of Israelis who have taken to the streets to demand an end to the conflict and the release of the hostages—just as environmental demonstrations did only a few years ago—have reminded us that political reality can be peacefully influenced, shaped, perhaps even transformed. The unjustified aggression against the people of Gaza must end immediately. 

The international community must ensure and support a genuine plan for peace and reconstruction, preventing it from sliding into yet another deceptive project of elite domination that has so often marked the recent history of Palestine and the Arab world. The Palestinians must decide for Palestine. 

Gaza and the West Bank must be rebuilt, liberated, and recognised as a State within the global community of nations. Harmony is peace, and peace is justice. Only through justice granted to the Other will the Israeli people finally be able to live in the security that their tragic history deserves. 

The al-Rashid coastal road runs along the Gaza Strip from north to south. On its shattered asphalt, hundreds of thousands of people migrate in search of safety, carrying in cars and trucks what remains of their shattered lives. On one side lie the ruins, the ghosts of over 67,000 dead, the pain of the amputated, the hungry, the sick, the orphaned—the near totality of buildings to be rebuilt, the poisoned fields, the environment burned by human cruelty. 

On the other side lies the sea—its vastness, its depth, its horizon. Not to imprison, but to unleash dreams, imagination, the thirst for knowledge, and the memory of an ancient civilisation. The sea knows no borders; it distinguishes neither flags nor religions. It is the common space where everything that divides can be overcome, where life renews itself despite destruction. 

We at the MEDSEA Foundation believe that from that sea—the sea of Palestine and Israel—a new season of cooperation and hope can be born. We are ready to work, together with scientists, communities, and institutions from both peoples, to restore destroyed coastal ecosystems, to protect marine resources, and to return to the Mediterranean its oldest function: to unite, not to divide. Because the future of us all can only be built through encounter, through justice, and through the shared care of our common home—the sea. 

We are, and will remain, here on the shore, where the Mediterranean touches the land of Gaza—ready to play our part in reversing the motion of the waves.