The Palestinian genocide has once again shaken the world in which we live. The capitalist system shows the crude reality of the dominated and expropriated peoples that it considers "despicable" in the project of wealth accumulation. However, this harsh reality also confronts us with the survival of a people who, after decades of persecution and punishment by a State protected by international powers, have been able to maintain their vocation to fight and their collective dignity.

People – social psychology says – decide to fight threats when they feel that the identity of each member is inseparable from that of others. This unity of identity is the reverse path to individualism and indifference to the suffering of others, and seems to be the most entrenched value today in Western societies.

Looking back on the past, Euskal Herria has known for centuries to reaffirm itself as a community with its own personality. One of its fundamental identity elements, the Basque Country, has survived thanks to the decision of the generations of men and women who decided to transmit and defend it as part of their being.

But it has not been the Basque people who have united us as a people. For decades we have collectively responded to situations of repression, aggression against labour rights or social need, injustice and taxation. We have not been a domesticated or passive people, and surely that feeling has built our identity.

But we must also recognise that the current situation is at least worrying. Social movements, which have been historic networks of action and activism of thousands of citizens, live in the low hours. However, it is undeniable that, with more or less force, they still have the capacity to mobilize against the aggressions of the capitalist system and to articulate their responses the feminist, workers and youth movements, pensioners, environmentalists, Basques ... while consumerism and cultural assimilation seem unstoppable as tendencies.

Even if it sounds like a lie, the idea that politicians are solely responsible for correcting the system's "errors" in organizations has been consolidating. Political parties have refused to organise, debate and give prominence to militant principles. And social media and social media have replaced contrast, collective decisions and public spaces. Our streets and squares have lost prominence and minimal activity is manifested only in election campaigns, where spindoctor speakers proclaim their prefabricated speeches to an already convinced public. The only objective of this activity is to increase the voters’ share, as if this achievement were closer to independence, feminism and socialism. In this sense, politics has become a video policy and citizen participation is closer to staging than to social struggle. We are not building a true alternative of power, we are content with a simple rotation in power.

The popular movement has lost the role it has historically played, neither a protagonist nor a secondary one. No less, a self-centred task. However, our society needs more than ever its proposals integrated into reality, it needs social protagonists to demonstrate that self-defense is possible, it needs a social dialogue with the powers to make it clear that we are still a people with their own personality and capacity to fight, yes, that trait that appears as an element of the past in the imagination of many people.

If we want to make ourselves believe that we live in the best world, that we can continue to grow without limits, that capitalism respects us for being "European" and that the Basque Country has managed to survive in history, the reality is that, seen from the point of view of precariousness and resistance to the expropriation of our identity, we have to know who we are and what we want to be to continue fighting.

How can we reclaim space and find the time to turn around and feel like a people united by their personality and their values? Perhaps we need new instruments that do not replace existing ones, that do not seek to monopolise space and that do not enter unnecessary competition. Perhaps new tools are needed to bring to life the empty social spaces, which will really serve to change the inert reality we suffer as viewers of video politics.

Perhaps our objectives, as a people, are based on the real priorities of human beings: to be able to live in our country and with our decisions, to live from our resources, without exploiting other territories and respecting ours, with our language and culture, with decent jobs and homes, with public and humanized schools and health care, open to the other peoples and people of the world who need us...

It can be a wish list, far from the fiction of middle classes with a high level of consumption: residential areas with lots of wealthy tourists, uncultivated lands and segregated cities to make annoying poverty invisible... But we cannot wait for the recovery of space and the moment of planting together, because it will be the best legacy that we can leave to those who persecute us the ancestral dream of a free and supportive people who care for their surroundings on both sides of the Pyrenees.

Mati Iturralde, Julen Larrinaga, Iker Mendibe and Joseba Alvarez