By DANIEL AARÃO REIS*

Ehud Olmert: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination…an indiscriminate…cruel and criminal killing of civilians…and, yes, Israel is committing war crimes”

1.

In the mid-1970s, a courageous journalist, Helena Salem, a Brazilian of Jewish culture, wrote a book about the saga of the Palestinian people with a controversial title: The new Jews. In fluent and unpretentious language, without sentimental sentimentality, the author pointed out, already at the time, justifying the title, the disturbing similarities between the destinies of Jews and Palestinians.

The history of the Jews is well known. They were a people who were discriminated against, persecuted and slaughtered for centuries, especially in Christian Europe, and especially in the central and eastern part of the European continent. The Jews, scattered throughout the world, deprived of the protection of a national State, were almost always forced to live apart from the national communities in which they were part, in the so-called ghettos, a word of Italian origin, designating a neighborhood in Venice where they were forced to live.

From time to time, their communities were massacred, and a specific word was even created in the Russian language for the phenomenon: pogrom. The sinister term specified the storms of violence that fell from time to time upon the Jews, stimulated by centuries-old religious prejudices and encouraged, and covered up, most of the time, by the States of the region or/and by the darkest forces disseminated in societies.

The process, as we know, reached a dark peak during the Second World War, with the extermination of the Jews promoted systematically and industrially by German Nazism, the Holocaust or Shoah. In Hebrew: destruction, catastrophe. In the context of pogroms and the Shoah the annihilation of the Jews did not obey any particular social or political criteria: the Jews were certain candidates for death because of what they were by origin and cultural formation: Jews.

It should be noted that, during the course of the War, evidence of this dark process filtered and accumulated, but, for various (un)reasons and prejudices, it was ignored or underestimated by the main leaders and States that fought Nazism.

Even before the war, seeking alternatives to discrimination, Jews, in different movements and with different political orientations, began to emigrate to the historical territory from which their ancestors came and where small Jewish communities lived: Palestine, then under British control since the end of the First World War in 1918. One of its leaders described the migratory movement as that of a people without a land to a land without a people. But there was a people there, the Palestinian Arab people, with a specific religion, Islam.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the coexistence between those who arrived there and those who already lived in the territory, which had been peaceful until then, began to experience tensions and deteriorate, around two issues: land and water, which were scarce in the region and essential for human survival. The contradictions became more acute after the war. Driven by the horrors of the Holocaust and the indifference of the Europeans, the emigration of Jews grew exponentially, interested in building their own national state, capable of defending them from traditional – and historical – persecution.

2.

The alternative proposed – and approved by the UN General Assembly – was the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. In this context, the State of Israel was founded in 1948, dominated at the time by a Labor Party affiliated with the Socialist International, with a secular orientation, and with the sympathies of the two superpowers emerging from the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, opposing the division of the territory and considering themselves excluded from the approved agreement, the neighboring Arab states (Egypt, Jordan and Syria) had no interest in sponsoring the formation of a Palestinian state. They occupied the territory earmarked for this purpose and declared war on the new State of Israel. They were defeated in a conflict that lasted just under a year (May 1948 to March 1949), in which the Palestinian Arabs suffered the most, being expelled from much of their land, beaten and humiliated.

Some of them remained in Israel, becoming second-class citizens there. Most of them gathered as best they could in refugee camps or in small towns in the regions that came under the control of Egypt (the Gaza Strip) and Jordan (the West Bank). Their suffering and exile earned an Arabic word: al-Nakba, the catastrophe. The saga of the “new Jews” had only just begun.

In the second half of the 20th century, the region would be redefined according to the parameters of the Cold War and the interests of the states involved. The State of Israel, under the banner of a liberal democracy, became an unconditional ally of the United States and the main European states. Supported militarily, politically and diplomatically by Western powers, armed to the teeth and with a highly educated population, it came to be seen by the Arabs as a kind of Western enclave anchored in the Arab world.

The emerging Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s made the destruction of the new state a program. In an unstable alliance with the Soviet Union, a unified, secular state was proposed for the territory of Palestine, where Arabs and Jews would coexist. Under the wings of this nationalism, encouraged by it, several Palestinian revolutionary organizations were created, united in the Palestine Liberation Organization/PLO, recognized in 1964 by the Arab League as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. But the Palestinians soon realized that the Arab states were prepared to fight Israel to the last… Palestinian.

In the context of the Cold War and the radicalization of Arab nationalism, three wars followed. The war of October 1956 lasted five days. Israel allied itself with the English and French states, which, as was said at the time, had mistaken the century, landed troops in the region to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Although victorious in immediate terms, the English, French and Israelis were forced to withdraw due to Soviet and American pressure.

The 1967 conflict lasted one day longer than the previous one, between 5 and 10 June, and resulted in a disaster for the Arab states and the Palestinians in particular. Israel, once again supported by the US and the European powers, swept away the various Arab armies and occupied all of Palestine and some territories belonging to Egypt and Syria. A new catastrophe for the Palestinians, since the domination of the neighbouring Arab states would now be replaced by direct Israeli domination.

The situation would get much worse for the Palestinians during the so-called “Black September.” This occurred in September 1970, when Jordanian Arab troops massacred the PLO guerrilla units stationed in the country, expelling them to Lebanon, with the aim of paving the way for a normalization of relations with Israel. At the end of this fateful month, the great Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the PLO’s greatest supporter, would die. The Palestinians, once again, realized the fragility of their alliances with their Arab brothers.

A new war would come, that of 1973, which began on October 6th with an Egyptian offensive, coordinated with Syria, which surprised the Israelis on one of their holy days, Yom kippur. It ended twenty days later, with controversial results, as both sides claimed victory. From the Palestinian point of view, the most important thing was that the war gave way to long negotiations between Egyptians and Israelis who, under the auspices of the United States, signed the so-called Camp David Accords in 1978. The following year, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, formally recognizing the existence of the State of Israel in exchange for the return of its territories lost in 1967.

3.

And the Palestinians in this whole story? Left to fend for themselves. And their revolutionary organizations? Forced to redefine themselves. And the program of destruction of the State of Israel? Archived.

The Palestinians tried to adapt to the new times. In 1974, Yasser Arafat, the great leader of the PLO, was received at the UN. In a speech that had great repercussions, without laying down his weapons, he offered an olive branch. This began a long journey that would lead, years later, in 1988, to the Palestinians recognizing Israel's right to exist. It was a historic and promising milestone. Not least because it occurred in the context of the first major social movement of the Palestinian people, who, in the West Bank and Gaza, protested with stones and shouts against the Israeli occupation.

The Intifada (to agitate, in Arabic) between 1987 and 1993 demonstrated the Palestinians' desire to establish their own state, generating worldwide sympathy and providing the framework for talks between Palestinians and Israelis, resulting in the Oslo Accords in 1993, which envisaged the gradual creation of a Palestinian state. The following year, Arafat, for the PLO, and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for the long-standing Israeli labor tradition, were rightly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It seemed that the proposals of 1948, almost half a century later, would finally be realized.

But the Palestinian dreams of a state of their own did not come true. Yitzhak Rabin, one of the main architects of the Oslo Accords, was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist in 1995. The fact that he had no worthy successors showed the weakening of tendencies in favor of understanding with the Palestinians. In the context of society, the consequences of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza, led to the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands by tens of thousands of settlers.

Despite the lack of international recognition, the new colonies have consolidated and today they are home to around 400 Jews, many of whom are motivated by messianic goals of forming a Greater Israel, which entails the submission, expulsion or extermination of the Palestinians. On the political front, right-wing and far-right tendencies have grown in Israel, reinforced by the influx of immigrants from Russia, estimated at around one million people, the majority of whom identify with right-wing extremist policies.

Benjamin Netanyahu became the political expression of this process, allied with religious parties that were also committed to messianic purposes. Thus, the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s, became a dead letter and a second Intifada, in the early years of this century, did not have enough strength to rebuild a dynamic of mutual understanding.

On the other hand, Arafat's successors in the semi-autonomous Palestinian territories, under very adverse conditions, were unable to gain the trust of the Palestinian population, beset by corruption scandals and accused of undue conciliation with the Israeli government. Their declining prestige led them to resort to expedients to perpetuate themselves in power, sabotaging or annulling free elections that threatened them.

Hamas' popularity grew in this context, especially in the Gaza Strip, but its strength had already been the subject of controversy in recent years, due to violence against potential opposition or criticism.

The terrorist offensive launched by Hamas in October 2023, with its string of cruelties, had a major impact on the world and, in particular, on Israeli society, which was mobilized by the desire for revenge. However, the massacre of the population in Gaza that began then has long since surpassed any proportion. The indiscriminate bombing of a defenseless population with no means of fighting back is cowardly and unjustifiable.

The situation has also become critical in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers harass, persecute and make life unbearable for Palestinians, as documented in the recent and moving film No Other Land/No ground, directed by Jews and Palestinians (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal).

Leaders of the far-right alliance in power in Israel, always supported by the US government, are already openly talking about annexing the Palestinian territories at once, promoting a gigantic “ethnic cleansing”, comparable, on a larger scale, to what was seen in civil wars in Europe (former Yugoslavia) and Africa (Congo and Rwanda).

Meanwhile, the United States and the main European states remain either supporting the current Israeli government or silent and passive (China, Russia, India), naturalizing the slaughterhouse that Gaza has become. Even the Arab states, continuing their traditional policies of instrumentalizing the Palestinians and conciliating Israel, limit themselves to innocuous declarations of solidarity.

And Brazil, despite having its ambassador disrespected by Israeli authorities, has not shown any firmer or more decent attitude. As for the Brazilian left, they have also limited themselves to words. This is a colossal ethical failure, as the writer Francesca Melandri rightly pointed out.

While saving the honor of humanity, signs of a movement of indignation are beginning to emerge, albeit weak. In May of last year, the government of South Africa denounced Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague for committing genocide. The governments of other European states (Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland) are timidly pressuring the European Union to condemn the massacre.

Furthermore, public demonstrations in several European societies are protesting the carnage. Even in Israel, civilians and retired military personnel are beginning to speak out and denounce the war. Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Prime Minister, did not mince his words. He said: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination… an indiscriminate… cruel and criminal killing of civilians… and yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

The Palestinians, left to their own devices, used, abused, humiliated and tyrannized, wounded and murdered, are definitively transformed into new Jews. And it is an irremediable historical tragedy that some of the former Jews themselves become the perpetrators and responsible for this transformation.

*Daniel Aaron Reis is a professor of contemporary history at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Author, among other books, of The Revolution that Changed the World: Russia, 1917 (Company of Letters). [https://amzn.to/3QBroUD]

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