By JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI*
It is important to reflect on the chain reaction of the Brazilian press and the importance attributed by conservatives to the words and concepts used by the Brazilian president
The Brazilian president's interview given in the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on February 18, 2024, when he compared the genocidal behavior of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler and the German genocide of the Jews, provoked a small diplomatic crisis and a great reaction from the Brazilian conservative press. The Israeli government's irritation is understandable, given President Lula's international importance, because this comparison had already been made by other leaders of lesser global importance.
However, it becomes more difficult to understand the chain reaction of the Brazilian press, which did not bother to read the interview and began to repeat together the diatribes of the Israeli authorities, as if they were subsidiary bodies of the Israeli far right, determined to prove the existence of a kind of hierarchy of genocides, some more important than others, depending on the origin of the populations affected by the murderous violence of the genocide.
As if the collective murder of Jews by the German State had a tragic superiority in relation to the 15 million Chinese who were killed by the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s, in the so-called “Asian Holocaust”; the 20 million Russians who were murdered by the Germans between 1941 and 1945; or the genocide of two million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, also called the “Armenian Holocaust”; or even the “Tutsi genocide” during the Rwandan Civil War in 1994, among many other tragedies of the XNUMXth century.
Even so, it is important to reflect on the importance attributed by conservatives to the words and concepts used by the Brazilian president. The facts are known. On October 7, 2023, a group of Hamas militants or fighters entered Israeli territory, killed around 1.200 Israelis and kidnapped around 280 other people. Then, the Israeli government besieged the territory of Gaza, inhabited by about two and a half million Palestinians, blocked the entry of water, food, energy, medicine and communications, and began an aerial and ground bombardment of the territory of Gaza that it has lasted five months, so far killing 30.000 Palestinians (80% women and children), injuring and maiming another 80 and leaving around a million and a half people homeless, hungry and without medical attention.
The numbers and images transmitted by television channels seem to speak for themselves, but on the political battlefield, things don't happen that way, because words are not neutral, and every description of reality involves value judgments and position taking. , political, diplomatic, or simply ideological, as in the case of the Brazilian conservative press.
Therefore, in this sense, there is no doubt that the words used by President Lula (the hypothesis that it was a “gaffe” is absolutely ridiculous) were chosen rigorously and contained, without a doubt, a value judgment and a radical condemnation of murderous behavior. of the Prime Minister of Israel, and of the Holocaust of the Palestinian people that is being committed live and in color, in front of the horrified eyes of humanity. An even more courageous stance when we know that the Israeli attack was supported and encouraged, from the first minutes, by Western powers that consider themselves creators and administrators of international morality. Even though these countries have changed their official position, horrified by the daily genocide broadcast on television, despite the fact that they remain unable to stop their own creature and continue to supply the weapons and resources used by the Israelis to carry out the slaughter of the Palestinians.
One thing, however, is the conceptual disagreement within this “war of narratives”; and another completely different, much more serious and complex, is the impossibility of establishing rules and defining arbitrators capable of intervening efficiently in the case of contemporary international conflicts. The United States has insisted on the idea/proposal of a “rules-based international order”, but no one can define who judges, arbitrates and punishes within this order.
According to what was said at the recent G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro, in 2023 there will be 183 international conflicts, which have almost entirely escaped the classical control of Europeans and North Americans, creators of the “international morality” in force over the last 200 or 300 years. And this is what we are witnessing right now, with maximum force and cruelty, within the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip.
An increasing number of countries around the world are calling for a “ceasefire,” and no one can stop the Israeli government’s destructive rampage. Before that, in recent decades, there were 180 resolutions approved by the United Nations General Assembly and 247 resolutions by its Security Council on the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, or in favor of the formation of the Palestinian State itself, which were strictly ignored and disregarded by Israel , always with the support of the United States and England, who were, after all, those truly responsible for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
And now again, at the request of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in The Hague has opened a process to judge the legality or illegality of the Jewish occupations of the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. More than 50 countries and regional organizations came forward to give their testimony, between February 19th and 26th, about “the policies and practices” of the State of Israel.
The decision that the International Court of Justice will take is not binding, but even so, with the exception of the United States, Canada, England and Fiji, which proposed that the Court not comment on the matter, all other countries, at all the world, as well as Brazil, defended Palestinian rights against the Jewish invasion. More than that, almost at the end of these hearings, China simply “turned the tables”, changing the terms of the trial itself.
Based on the rules of International Law established and recognized by Western powers, the Chinese defended the thesis that Hamas' military attack against Israel is legitimate, once the right of oppressed peoples to fight, even if violently, against Israel is recognized. its external domination. And at the same time, China's representative maintained that no people have the right to self-defense of territories that have been militarily occupied, and that this would be exactly the case for Israel in Palestine, and in particular in the West Bank and Gaza. It is essential to emphasize that the Chinese seek to remain absolutely faithful to the International Law established and recognized by Western powers.
Therefore, the contemporary international problem is not whether or not there are “rules”, or a “rules-based order”. The problem is knowing who interprets these rules, and who judges and arbitrates each particular international conflict. In the last 300 years, in general, it was Europeans and their descendants who played this role, supported by the superiority of their “gunboats”. But as the head of European Union Foreign Policy, Joseph Borrel, recently stated, “the era of Western global dominance has come to an end.” At the same time, the institutions created after the Second World War to exercise “global governance” expired.
In 1945, there were around 60 independent countries, and today there are almost 200 countries with seats in the United Nations. Therefore, the interstate system greatly increased its size, and the “international order” became more difficult and complex to manage. The awareness of this “power vacuum”, together with the feeling of impotence in the face of the Palestinian holocaust, explains the emergence of the Brazilian proposal, taken to the presidency of the G-20, to reorganize the “government of the world” so as not to have to go through a new great “world war”.
* Jose Luis Fiori He is professor emeritus at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Global power and the new geopolitics of nations (Boitempo) [https://amzn.to/3RgUPN3]
Originally published in the magazine International Observatory of the XNUMXst Century, no. 4.
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