By TARSUS GENUS*
The conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Community has its economic assumptions related to the capitalist expansion of the last 200 years
The apocalypse of Saint John, considered the founder of Christian millenarianism, sees an angel descend from heaven with the key to an abyss and a great chain. There, John asserts, the angel grabs Satan and throws him into the abyss, so that he, for a thousand years, “will no longer seduce the nations.” John thus establishes a mystical temporal guarantee of “a thousand years” for peace between nations, creating a “presupposition” that is also an argumentative condition to project a good future with the incarceration of the devil. If Saint John's Prophecy were right, Human intervention – in the supposed mechanical fatalities of History – would be absurdly despicable. And always failed. When Netanyahu puts as a central argument to opponents of his war crimes policy that they want to prohibit Israel from defending itself, he creates an ever greater distance between himself and the democratic camp, around the world, because he lies: those who they call for a ceasefire, peace negotiations and dialogue in the region, they do not want to prevent Israel from defending itself, they want it to stop the massacre of the population of Gaza, condemning – at the same time – to death, both the members of Hamas, as its civilian population. Women, old people, children, young people are being murdered every day, mercilessly bombed! The results of its military actions are no longer “neutral”, within a defense strategy, but are part of a pre-conceived strategy of extinguishing the Palestinian people, as an eternal objective enemy. They are enemies because they exist!
For at least a thousand years, Saint John wanted to guarantee peace, which proved to be historically impossible, but there is always hope and this can only be built in a concrete situation, with a concrete analysis of the challenges it reveals. Hope is expressed, for example, in a supposed sentence by Arthur Koestler, when he delivers a lethal dose of morphine to Walter Benjamin, a fugitive sheltering in a modest hotel room in the city of Port Bou, on the coast of Catalonia, on the border between Spain and Spain. France. He wanted to cross it to seek asylum in Portugal, but Benjamin – a refined and brilliant Jewish intellectual – had no experience in escape and on his walk through the Pyrenees he had already reached a state of unbearable tension. It was October 26, 1940, the War was already spreading its putrid breath throughout the Continent, but, as Benjamin himself said – suicidal due to neglecting the art of escape – “no one becomes master of a domain in which he has not known the impotence". What was my friend Koestler's phrase, in his last dialogue with Benjamin about morphine? “Don’t use it, there’s still a way out!” His presupposed “argument” was that the intervention of conscience could change the destiny of Benjamin and Europe, already deformed by the force of the fascist hydra.
Erasmus of Rotherdam (1466-1536) wanted to move science away from War, because this – according to the philosopher's assumption – could lead to a destructive fight between “giants” and such a likely outcome made him think that the best thing would be to rely on the stupidity of the “brutes”, who would not learn anything that was “above human strength”. Kant (1724-1704) preferred to remove women from any civic and professional responsibility, as if making a “neutral” choice, which, in fact, was thought of as a (false) anthropological assumption of his historical method, to influence the time : as a wife, a woman “has to offer children and a great chatter” and “complement her husband’s understanding with her taste”. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) makes a conscious choice to try to understand the world. The presuppositions for knowledge go beyond metaphysics (what is the world?) as “inseparable from the epistemological problem” (what guarantees the truth of knowledge as true?), introducing a logic of approach to truth, conditioning it “guarantee” tests to get closer to it.
Some of the oldest law professors in Germany, before Nazism came to power, prepared – as did Wilhelm Sauer (titled in 1919) – the founding “arguments” of a theory of the State and Law of a dictatorial nature, in works such as that of Sauer's prestigious book (“Archiv für Rechtsphilosophie”, 1939) in which the author makes calls to “elevate the Führer to an (condition of) enlightened figure: a hero who leads the German soul out of darkness, towards light, showing the safe path to Valhalla, to God the Father, in the true German nation (…), so that all Germans (can) become brothers in God.” It seems delusional, but these arguments, put in a more or less refined way, in a more or less materialistic way, or even formatted according to a sophistry of falsified premises, helped to build the entire ideology and legal culture of Germany during Nazism.
There are fused mysticism, religion, racial superiority from the State, lines of sectarian thought that do not admit of contestation, because to want to replace these foundations of the regime would be to clash with the Führer and the State: to clash with the nation and with God. The political discourse of Sauer's mystical and at the same time theological work is not strange to the speech given by Netanyahu, who said in all words that the Israelis are “the children of light and the Arabs are the children of darkness” and that, in Gaza, “there are no innocents”. Fascism acquires specific forms in each crisis process, but the centrality of its fierce language is common, whether in Bolsonaro's Brazil, in Duce's Italy, in Hitler's Germany, as well as in Netanyahu's State of Israel. Between these types of governments and their final destination there are always mountains of corpses of innocent people on both sides of the War.
I have no illusion that a political-military organization, like Hamas, which commits terrorist attacks like that brutal one, which gave reasons for the resumption of Israel's military attacks against the inhabitants of Gaza, can bring any hope of peace and equality to region, either through a victory against Israel, which will never be achieved, or through a provisional ceasefire pact, which is also impossible – at the moment – because, on one side there is a weakened Palestinian Authority and, on the other, a strong Government, far right. This Government fulfills colonial-imperial tasks, originating in the USA, through the State of Israel, under the authoritarian direction of Netanyahu. In fact, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter provides the right to defense of militarily attacked countries, with the use of armed force until such time as the institution's Security Council adopts measures for the restitution of international peace and security, now always obstructed by the American veto.
The one who dominates that conflict, since the real failure of the Oslo agreements, is the USA, through the increasingly intense militarization of the State of Israel and the billions of economic aid of all types to Israel, together with the monarchical-feudal and semi-feudal governments. , of the Arab elites who finance Hamas, resting on the Oil wells that feed the US war industry. The ideology of the “Promised Land”, which underpins the nation’s mystique, adopted by the Israeli fascist right – led by Netanyahu – is in a fake war, which is less against Hamas – already isolated and defeated – but more in a real war against the Palestinian State: its entire objective is to liquidate Palestine as a nation and prevent the emergence of two States, as its right to defense – according to the norms of international law – has long been exhausted.
The conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Community has its economic assumptions related to the capitalist expansion of the last 200 years, as well as religious and cultural bases, strong questions of legitimacy regarding the possession of territories for the founding of their respective nations. And there are, underlying, ancient questions that do not fit into the scope of this article, although at present the conflict is mainly guided by the results of the Second World War: the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact, the “discoveries” of the Holocaust – the most terrible memory of the XNUMXth Century – and the elevation of political conflicts to localized expansive military conflicts, which resulted from that War. Conflicts such as between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, accentuated – by the way – by the non-compliance with the Oslo Accords, in the face of the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israeli settlers and militias, already sheltered in double complicity.
What is it: on the one hand, due to the omission of feudal and semi-feudal states, normally of a theocratic nature of the Middle East (today supporters of terrorist and political-military organizations such as Hamas) and on the other due to the active complicity of the American War Industry with the State of Israel, making it a highly offensive regional military power. Pressured in this conflict are the Palestinians, who live in the territory under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, who do not even have the right to have an airport to communicate with the rest of the world, as well as the people of Israel, who need peace with dignity to live freely in their own State, recognized by the international community as legitimate and legal. Ignoring the legal and legitimate existence of the State of Israel is betting on a dead end for the Palestinian issue, with the sacrifice not of thousands, but of millions.
It is known that in Nazi Germany the Jews, of any religion, ideology or cultural origin, more (or less) close to European democratic culture, were purged from the idea of nation and its State, and were therefore considered as enemies of a Humanity thought of as starting from race, idealized as an unassailable assumption of the German State, by Hitler's “science”. The foundations of an idea of technique – in science and politics – always contain its objectives, which are not “neutral” in relation to what will happen in the future. At the height of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled from several countries, as occurred in Portugal, persecuted, subjected to the barbaric processes of the Catholic Inquisition and stripped of their property, true processes of political and religious barbarism that prepared the “perfect” anti-Semitism. ”, of the Modern Nazi-Fascist State, built within the authoritarian assumptions of absolutism. It was the transition from the power of the feudal aristocracies of the Continent to the power of the enlightened bourgeoisies of the Enlightenment. Inside it, however, was the serpent's egg that matured, in the heat of the crises, bringing Hitler and his cronies to the surface.
Arguments based on assumptions that present themselves as “neutral”, both in political (historical) conflicts and in issues that debate complex problems of nature (scientific) – both in politics and in biology, as well as in issues related to modern chemistry , for example – are conceptual frauds that need to disguise their real objectives, to be accepted within a certain historical period. These frauds can also span the History of Humanity, usually doing so through the manipulation of religion. They are “fundamentals” that are always inspired by an absolute authority – divine and/or earthly – that covers and legitimizes all the procedures of those who use them in real life. Stalin, for example, forced the Soviet Party to adopt the teachings of “comrade” Lysenko, in biological science research, claiming that the Party scientist's theory was correct, because it was opposed to “bourgeois biological sciences”. These would, if not revised in their epistemology, lead to their methodological “impurities” in the scientific investigation of biology in the Proletarian State. Absolute failure of biological Stalinism, as fallacious and dogmatic as the racial tests of Hitlerian Aryanism.
In the theory of the “perfect market” there is another example. In this, marked entirely by money as a universal mediator of exchanges, with currency circulation – according to its theorists – it would carry a series of “information” about the spontaneous laws of the market that, in itself, would be enough for the proper functioning of a fully fair society. merchant. Both in the first “Stalinist” hypothesis and in the second – by Von Mises and Hayek – there is no conceptual “neutrality”, but the dogmatic incarceration of the concept, subordinating it to the ends chosen, ideologically, by its proponents, for society to function. according to your worldview, in one direction or another. In Stalin's case, the evolution of biology – according to Lysenko's (false) “laws” – would help the “proletarian” victory, including in relation to scientific knowledge in collectivized agriculture, to show the superiority of the Socialist State in relation to the bourgeois State. , in the field of agricultural production.
These “ends”, therefore, granted to science and politics, are never neutral, nor are they mechanically determined by their research methods. Its most condensed example is the Concentration Camps of the Third Reich, as in them the chemical research into the most suitable gases to kill human beings (a political choice) was combined with the falsehood of biological research aimed at legitimizing – politically – the end of a “race” (“Jewish”), aiming – therefore – at its mass murder, by another race (“Aryan”) thus considered superior and dominant. The methods used to research the production of gases could either be used to obtain the correct product, intended – for example – to combat a pest originating from an imbalance in natural conditions, or to provide greater productivity to an agricultural project. However – by political choice – the research was programmed to promote murders on an industrial scale.
How was this possible? With conceptual fraud, mutilation of reason, mystical expansion of romanticism idealized in History, mythical nationalism and appeal to religion: distortion of religion and identification, of the nation and the homeland, with an unattainable, “earthly” or divine figure. Netanyahu has so far been able to deceive a good part of his people, who have recently been subjected to the stress of Hamas' barbaric terrorist actions. But, it will deceive less and less: endless violence, endless death, endless pain, the endless eyes of dead children, twinkling like stars on a summer night are, almost always, a harsh passport to reason and solidarity, even between those who have been on the harshest frontiers of violence. Ehud Barak and Arafat said, when they landed at Camp David. Arafat and Rabin said, when they arrived to sign the Oslo Accords. Try again, always try, as Neruda said in his “Spain in the Heart”, as long as they come “through the sky, kill children and in the streets children's blood runs simply like children's blood.”
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts) [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]
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