By FÁBIO ZUKER*

Reply to Bruno Huberman's article

When I wrote an article, published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul, about the reactionary co-option of the concept of decolonization by nativist projects, I was sure that my comparison between Hamas and the Israeli far right would cause strong repercussions in some circles.

What I did not imagine is that I would receive in response a pro-war text that defends precisely the use of the concept of decolonization to maintain that Hamas has the legitimacy and legality to massacre the Israeli civilian population. Israel would be an illegitimate state and would therefore be subject to a war of extermination.

In reply to my article, Bruno Huberman accused me of “claiming that the victims, the Palestinians, 'are co-responsible for this genocide'”. Now, it would have been enough for the author not to have deleted the subject of the sentence I wrote, showing respect to the readers: “Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniya, Mohammed Deif and other Hamas leaders are co-responsible for this genocide”.

What shocks me is not only the bad faith of Bruno Huberman, who distorted what I wrote to defame me, but above all that he replicates the essence of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism cultivated by the Israeli extreme right, which confuses the Palestinian people with three terrorists who , as the Wall Street Journal reported from messages from Sinwar, see the death of civilians in Gaza as a necessary sacrifice.

Not confusing the Palestinians with Hamas is essential for any serious debate. Just pay attention to the strong opposition that the group faces. According to a research, 67% of the population of Gaza, just before October 7th, had little or no trust in Hamas.

By advocating a war of extermination, the author becomes complicit in both the cold-blooded murder and rape of Israeli civilians and the devastating Israeli response, indiscriminate bombing and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. A violent action is responded to by another violent action. If Bruno Huberman proposes that this is the path of attack, he also accepts that this will be the path of response, in a defense of barbarism as a form of exercising politics.

Furthermore, even though I wrote that there is a “brutal asymmetry” when it comes to the military capabilities of Palestinians and Israelis, I have been accused of false symmetry.

Finally, it is surprising that the author forgot that the Arab revolt of 1936-39 took place in the context of Nazism and amidst the difficulties that Jews faced in escaping Europe.

In this reply, I would like to focus my reflection on deepening what I wrote, not on its distortion, debating the perspective that Israel would be a colony and, therefore, massacring its civilians would be legitimate. I start from four dimensions: ethics, legal, historical and political. Let's get to the arguments.

From an ethical point of view, the defense of the October 7 attacks is problematic for two reasons: according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, the Hamas attack was designed to target the Israeli civilian population, which in itself is reprehensible. However, if the defender of the attacks has little sympathy for Jewish lives, he should be concerned about the consequences of this action for the lives of Palestinian civilians.

Israel has a history of disproportionately killing its enemies. For its military strategists, this is a way to deter new attacks – the so-called Dahiya doctrine was developed in the conflict in Lebanon in 2006, when Israel destroyed a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut where most of Hezbollah's leaders lived.

Thus, it was obvious to anyone that October 7th would trigger a devastating reaction from Israel. Defending the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas, when tons of bombs will be dropped on the innocent civilian population, is a serious ethical failure, which makes it clear that these people have no real appreciation for the Palestinian population.

From a legal point of view, I briefly quote Kenneth Roth's article recently published in New York Review of Books. For the former director of Human Rights Watch, the Hamas attacks were “a flagrant violation” of international humanitarian law, which prohibits killing or abducting civilians and considers these acts to be serious violations or war crimes.

This is because, while international law recognizes the right of armed resistance, it is not absolute, but limited by international humanitarian law. This is the beauty of law and international relations classes.

From a historical point of view, it is important to remember some facts. Zionism was not born as an ideology for the colonization of Palestine. It was born amid the fragmentation of multiethnic empires (Hapsburg, Ottoman and Russian) as a search for self-determination of the Jewish people in a national state. The great historical question of the late 19th century was not whether Jews could have a state, but whether all peoples could have their own state.

Because empires were geographically broad, ethnic groups were spread out. The founding of national states in the Middle East was marked by extreme violence to bring together different groups in the same territory. Greeks were expelled from what is now modern Turkey and Armenians suffered genocide by Turks, for example.

The same happened with the Jews, who lived dispersed. Their concentration in Israel was not due to a colonial movement, but to repeated processes of ethnic cleansing that they suffered in the countries where they lived.

The Arab revolt of 1936-39 is an additional chapter. It was erected not only against the British, but also against the Jews of Palestine – around 500 were killed – and those trying to escape Nazism. From a political point of view, the revolt resulted in the United Kingdom closing Palestine to Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust.

A few years later, faced with the refusal of Arab elites to accept Israel, the nascent Israeli state perpetrated the Nakba, ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of 750 Palestinians during the 1948 war. We must not mince words, but condemn it absolutely.

This is the horror of nationalisms. The process of defining national borders remains one of the main causes of political destabilization in the region.

History might have been different if the initial understanding that a Jewish state was an anti-colonial and legitimate project had been maintained among Arab elites. This was the understanding of King Faisal, the main leader of the Arab revolts, in the Faisal-Weizmann agreement of 1919.

So that there is no doubt: Palestinians, Jews, Druze and Bedouins are all native peoples of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Nativism is the political project of the Israeli far right and Hamas, which essentializes this belonging by excluding others.

Finally, the political dimension. It is difficult to point out ways to end this devastating conflict, but it is relatively easy to prescribe the recipe to perpetuate it: maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza, deepen the dehumanization to which Palestinians are subjected daily and increase the power of two fanatical political groups, each seeking the entire territory for themselves and blowing themselves up in the name of indigeneity.

The path to resolving the conflict is not the destruction of Israel, which supremacists seek to legitimize under the name of decolonization, nor the destruction of Palestine.

As Edward Said, the leading Palestinian intellectual, wrote, “The question is: how much land will Israel actually give up for peace?“. It seems to me that this is precisely where international pressure should apply.

*Fábio Zuker is a journalist and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo (USP).

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