Westerners, hypocritically, continue to display the trophy of pacifists and characterize as violent and terrorist any and all demonstrations contrary to the interests of the Western world.
Until the first half of the 20th century, Western culture boasted racist scientific theories that justified European dominance over the globe. However, the rise and fall of the Third Reich represented a turning point in this culture and the emergence of liberation movements among colonized peoples. Even so, Westerners, hypocritically, continue to display the trophy of pacifists and characterize as violent and terrorist any and all manifestations contrary to the interests of the civilized Western world, that is, any manifestation of the Others.
Terrorists were and continue to be Algerians, Mozambicans, Vietnamese, Colombians, Iranians, Palestinians, etc. Terrorist was not the military dictatorship in Brazil committed to arresting, torturing and exterminating people who demonstrated against the excesses of the military who, encouraged by the Western world during the Cold War, took power in a coup d'état; terrorists were the Others.
Violent was Frantz Fanon, this descendant of sub-Saharan Africans, born in Caribbean Martinique, who received his doctorate in France, returned to Africa, to the Maghreb, and became a militant of the Algerian National Liberation Front, this intellectual with a trajectory transnational that only a colonialist empire like France could have produced.
Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel's clinic: the revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon, promptly took a stance on the massacre in Gaza, on October 19, 2023 [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies]. After October 7th, the citizens of the “only democracy in the Middle East”, feeling the helplessness and terror that the Palestinians have experienced for a century, committed themselves strongly to ending the violence of the Others.
But amid the current carnage played out in color and in real time, while some Israelis continue to feel that life in Israel is running its course thanks to its powerful “defense” army, other Israelis appear to be beginning to feel worried about the future of the Jewish state.
Tantura became a key point in the deconstruction of the disguised official epic narrative of the creation of the State of Israel, that 700 of the 900 Palestinians, who then constituted the majority of the country's population, simply abandoned their homes, villages and cities. The master's thesis The exodus of Arabs from the villages at the foot of Mount Carmel do Sul, introduced by Theodore Katz in 1998, was banned from all libraries across the country. In 2022, Alon Schwarz resumed the controversy by launching a documentary in which he interviews soldiers from the Brigade Alexandroni, responsible for Tantura massacre of 1948. Schwarz declared that any future for the State of Israel must necessarily involve recognition of Zionist violence. And the question gained attention again Israeli newspaper headlines.
In the 2022 documentary, among the various testimonies from soldiers who say “we killed them, without remorse” and “if you killed them it was a good thing”, Amitzur Cohen reveals “It was the time when Ben-Gurion said we had to do everything to expel the Arabs… They fled without fighting. They didn't fight, nothing. When we entered the villages, the bread was still warm. Do we kick them out? We fight, we don't expel anyone. Whoever ran away, ran away... I was a murderer, if someone raised their hand, I didn't take prisoners, I shot everyone dead.”
How many people do you think you killed like that? “I didn’t count. I really couldn't know. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. See, I shot, I couldn’t count.” (And Amitzur says this laughing to the point of shaking his body.) “I didn't tell anyone about it, not even my wife. What would count? That I was a murderer?” (Again, he says this laughing, shaking, without realizing the contradictions in his speech.) In the army archives, probably released out of carelessness, there is a document that makes reference to a mass grave in the cemetery of the village of Tantura.
In 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, I participated as a listener in a seminar Online about the Holocaust and Latin American dictatorships during the Cold War years. The fact that I am the son of surviving Polish Jews and was a political prisoner in Brazil caught the attention of an Israeli historian. We then began an intense and fruitful relationship via email… until she read my text Returnees, which chronicles the exodus of Israelis from the Promised Land in the early 1950s, and left me talking to myself.
In antiquity, it is estimated that 90% of Hebrews abandoned their culture to embrace the seductive dominant Hellenistic culture en masse and that only 10% remained faithful to their tradition, defying central power. Likewise, today it is estimated that 90% of Israeli and diaspora Jews embrace the seductive “civilized” Western culture in their fight against the violence of Others.
And this applies to both secular Jews and liberal and orthodox religious people. The vast majority of Orthodox people remain Zionists, but the apolitical Satmar and the fierce Neturei Karta are fervent anti-Zionists, faithful to the ancient pacifist culture of the diaspora, you shall not kill!
*Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of Returnees [amz.run/7C8V].
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