Almost all Israeli and diaspora Jews support the existence of an artificial country that, since before its creation, has oppressed and exterminated the natural population of Palestine.
Nise da Silveira, shortly before leaving, sitting in a wheelchair in her apartment in Botafogo, bent over with age, looked at us with her piercing eyes, pointed her finger at the small group gathered there and said that she wanted us to remember that “people, dogs, cats… they are all the same thing”.
The Chinese eat cats and dogs, to the horror of Westerners, who spare these friends but consume other cousins. To make it easier to sacrifice them, the English (and North Americans) solved the problem at its root (of the word). The English eat chicken, lamb, pork and beef; more hen, sheep, pig or cow, no way. If you ask an American if he eats pig he will be horrified, as he only feeds on pork. However, the blood of these illiterate people, ingested by humans, certainly manifests itself in the behavior of those who feed on sacrificed animals.
When someone wants to degrade someone, it is common to refer to them as “an animal” or “a dog” (poor thing, that nickname had to be given to our poor and faithful friend, didn’t it?!). The dehumanization of people and nations is also used to facilitate their extermination. Leonardo da Vinci, Liev Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Isaac Bashevis Singer believed that as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be wars.
The degradation of the Palestinian people, “these animals,” is part of the State of Israel’s tactics in the current war in Gaza, which is far from being a war; it is more precisely a massacre that includes the mass extermination of the civilian population, mutilation, destruction of buildings and institutions, debasements that will translate into traumas that will accompany the Palestinians for generations. Fueled by the governments of the United States and Europe, Israel’s asymmetric military power in relation to the Palestinian people determines how much each life is worth, who are humans and who are animals. “Israel, necropower and dehumanization”, signed by Lincoln Veloso, emphasizes the political and ideological manipulation, the process of dehumanization of the Palestinian people that is at the root of the ongoing massacre.
Many people continue to watch the carnage in Gaza impassively. They do not like, in their comfort zone – they already have enough problems that surround them in their daily lives – to worry about the misfortunes of others. Sitting on their sofas, watching the massacre in real time and in color as if it were entertainment, in line with the mainstream media, there are people who justify their inaction by blaming the fate of the Palestinians for their own sins, without bothering in the least to understand the misfortune that has befallen them since the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1917, with the Balfour Declaration, England, then the ruler of the world, offered the Jews the lands inhabited by an indisputable Palestinian majority (92% of the population). The detailed study by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, Palestine: A Century of War and Resistance (1917-2017), as well as research by new Israeli historians, discredit the official version of the State of Israel.
The hypocritical Zionist left, by deceiving the Palestinians, paved the way for the outspoken right to finish the job. In Khalidi’s words, “Jabotinsky and his followers were among the few who were frank enough to admit publicly and bluntly the harsh reality that would inevitably arise in establishing a colonial society in a place with an existing population… He [Jabotinsky] wrote in 1923: ‘Every native population in the world resists colonization as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to free itself from the danger of being colonized. This is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and will continue to do as long as there is a single spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel.’”
In addition to massacring the Palestinians, the Zionists also decided to take over and hold the patent for the words genocide and anti-fascist. The Jews, victims par excellence of genocide by fascism during the Second World War, would be anti-fascists by definition. This assertion may still have an effect on the post-war generation that grew up under the impact of the Holocaust, but not on the new generations, for whom the testimony of the current massacre of the Palestinian people speaks louder.
Until recently, the genocide of the Jews was always used as a reference by other victimized peoples and social classes. However, given the almost absolute unconditional support of the Jews for the State of Israel, they are no longer mentioned in demonstrations that mention indigenous peoples, blacks, gypsies, Armenians, etc.
My parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, who lost their grandparents, parents, brothers, cousins and nephews, nine out of ten relatives sentenced as subhumans, vermin, lost their homes, cities and homeland, immigrated in 1948 to Israel and abandoned the “Promised Land” in 1953.
I was born in Jaffa, an eminently Arab city, which even the United Nations, in its partition plan of 1947, had reserved for the Palestinians. However, to avoid the enclave, even before the creation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the Zionists took charge of throwing 45 Arabs from Jaffa into the sea, who anchored in Lebanon.
Almost all Israeli and diaspora Jews support the existence of an artificial country that, since before its creation, has been oppressing and exterminating the native population of Palestine. But I, who inherited humanist, pacifist and internationalist values from my parents, do not recognize myself, do not feel like I belong to this group of oppressors, and do not want to be part of it. So I am torn between remaining a dissident and changing my identity to Palestinian Buddhist.
Some people have already come forward to assure me that the anti-Semites will not endorse my change of identity. Others have warned me that I will not be accepted among the Palestinians, how could a Palestinian trust a Jew? But that is not what matters to me. I am not seeking to escape the anti-Semitic referendum, nor to be accepted by the Palestinians. My identity crisis is what keeps me together.
*Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of Jaffa [amz.run/7C8V].
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