By PETER PÁL PELBART*

“Not in our name.” The urgent call to Brazilian Jews against the genocide in Gaza

1.

The Face of the Other says: Thou shalt not kill! This is the greatest expression of Jewish ethics, says the thinker Emmanuel Lévinas.

Now, what we see most today are the faces of Palestinians pleading, asking: Why are they killing us? The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip are dying of hunger, thirst, lack of medicine, murderous drones, aerial bombardments, forced displacement, exhaustion, psychological and physical terror. They are burying their babies by the dozens every day, their parents, their husbands, their wives, sometimes entire families, and we see devastation and revolt, hunger and pleading on their faces every day.

Let us imagine for a moment if two million Israelis had been subjected by an invading foreign state to an equivalent confinement. If more than fifteen thousand Jewish babies had been murdered, as many Jewish women massacred.

Let us imagine two million Jewish Israelis surrounded on all sides, dying of hunger, thirst, disease, lack of medicine, in devastated cities, without electricity, without telephone service, having to move incessantly from one side to the other, from one city to another, on foot, in search of an occasional ration, at the mercy of random bombings, subjected to humiliation, dispossession, the destruction of their minimum living conditions, and the explicit threat that hangs in the air advocating their total extermination.

Wouldn't the Western world rise up in unison to denounce a new Holocaust, a Genocide, an unprecedented barbarity, and use all the resources of economic, media, military and, if necessary, atomic pressure to counteract and try to prevent such a hecatomb in time? Wouldn't Europe, always trying to atone for its guilt, and the United States, always an unconditional ally, send its naval fleets equipped to the teeth to the region?

They will tell me that this imagined scenario actually happened during the Second World War, and that no one stood up against it in time!!! It is true! And this stain will forever stain European and American history. At the time, according to what we are told, most people did not know about the camps. And the few who did know, from the Pope to the American president, did nothing. And it is true!

But today we all know, we see it live and in color on television and on social media, and yet we watch in silence, as if it doesn't concern us. But we know! We see! We witness! Why do we keep quiet?

The Israeli government claims to be defending Israel and preventing a Holocaust from happening again: never again! and it claims to be doing so in the name of Jews all over the world. Not in our name, shouted Jewish students in Berlin and New York months ago, before being arrested by the police.

The State of Israel has not received from the Jewish diaspora any mandate to exterminate, in its name, Palestinian society and expel it from its land, much less to decimate it. Donald Trump's delusions about the Middle Eastern Riviera, as well as those of Israeli government ministers who advocate a Nakba definitively will still have to be judged by history, along with their perpetrators.

2.

Any Jew, no matter how far removed he or she may be from the life of the Jewish community, no matter how free he or she may feel from any mark referring to Jewish life in its cultural, religious or communal dimension, still, in most cases, has somehow survived a collective Catastrophe explicitly directed against his or her Jewish ancestry.

That is why I allow myself to address each and every Brazilian Jew who still harbors some feeling of repulsion towards any and all genocidal wars, let alone one committed by Jews. I also specifically address each and every Brazilian Jew who has any public, written, oral, media, academic, institutional, scientific, political, artistic, religious or economic influence (and there are many – but this call obviously extends to everyone), because I know that nothing disturbs the Israeli establishment more than protest demonstrations by rebellious Jews spread throughout the world.

Protests against Israeli government policy that occur outside Israel are immediately dismissed by the press as anti-Semitic, and are even used to reinforce the cover-up belief that “everyone is against us.” But when they are carried out by Jews, this accusation cannot be sustained – at most they can be described as treasonous. Perhaps this is the only element of pressure we have left. And what if this wave catches on, and the alibi that Israel acts in the name and in defense of all Jews falls apart!

No, what is at stake is not the survival of the Jewish people – which Israeli policy directly undermines, fueling anti-Semitism around the world – but the survival of the most brutal, fascist and corrupt government in the history of that country. And obviously the survival of the Palestinian people.

Therefore, aware of the multiplying power that economic growth and social inclusion in the most diverse spheres of Brazilian society has given to its Jews in recent decades, I believe that we have an ethical duty to speak out publicly and encourage the silent majority to find the courage to challenge the ideological and political guardianship that Israel exercises over Jewish institutions and communities, silencing them or forcing them into automatic alignment.

3.

Two recent articles in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul are a sign of the internal upheaval that affects some Jews: Bruno Blecher's text last Sunday (“Israel is like an older brother who protects and disappoints”[I]) and that of Vladimir Herzog’s son (“Herzog’s son accuses Israel of starving Palestinians to death”[ii]). That such isolated initiatives multiply and manage to resonate with progressive voices locally and abroad, from Jews and non-Jews, would already be a gain.

I write in my own name, but also on behalf of the publishing house that I helped found 15 years ago, n-1 dições. Alongside our catalog, which is in tune with the issues that affect contemporary thought, we have tried to intervene in the public debate on extreme occasions, from the abject murder of Marielle Franco, the high school student movement, to the macabre mandate of Jair Bolsonaro, the tragedy of the pandemic, and several other episodes, linked above all to the fascism that is rising everywhere.

Therefore, we could not, at this time, fail to propose some actions linked to the current context. We organized a public reading of Franco Berardi Bifo's book (Thinking after Gaza) at the Oficina Theater, as well as a public act against war and genocide, at the 9th of July Occupation. We also made available several texts related to the subject in the Terra arrasada dossier.[iii]

Starting last Tuesday, we started publishing a weekly text in the subseries “Nakba never again”. “Mourning as Resistance. Necropolitics of Israel, from Palestine to Lebanon”, by Dalia Ismail, is available there, and yesterday we uploaded the excellent “Every People Has the Right to Existence – But Not at Any Cost”, by Étienne Balibar. And many others will follow.

What was once shame has turned to anger. Yet we feel that all this is insufficient. For our impotence in the world's theater is great.

*Peter Pál Pelbart He is a professor of philosophy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of The reverse of nihilism: cartographies of exhaustion (n-1 Editions). [https://amzn.to/406v2tU]

Notes

[I] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrissima/2025/05/israel-para-mim-e-como-irmao-mais-velho-que-protege-e-decepciona.shtml

[ii] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/monicabergamo/2025/06/israel-age-para-matar-palestinos-de-fome-em-gaza-num-crime-desumano-diz-filho-de-herzog.shtml

[iii] em https://n-1edicoes.org/leituras/terra-arrasada/.

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