By TARSUS GENUS*
Humanitarian actions to save children and civilian populations have become “attacks on the existence of Israel”
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us, says Giorgio Agamben, that the “state of exception in which we live” (on the world stage) “is the rule”. And he continues, following Walter Benjamin: “we must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds with this fact [...] because power today has no other form of legitimization than the situation of serious danger to which it appeals everywhere permanently and that, at the same time, strives and produces it secretly”.[1]
War is the greatest storm that makes the world the way it is. War sweeps away all other storms, suppresses moralities, oppresses consciences and bodies; it changes classes, customs, reveals pasts that were dead and reopens new and worse possibilities to the world; Just as men make wars or allow them to be made, they – wars – also shape the future. The heroes of wars do not shape the future because they were forced to know how to kill and whoever kills always suppresses something of himself, no matter how generous the reward of victory. Wars leave few true heroes on the surface of history.
Bombings came to be called “explosions”, military action in retaliation against a terrorist attack came to be called “war against Hamas”; humanitarian actions to save children and civilian populations became “attacks on the existence of Israel” and incendiary bombs against hospitals began to be – first – “lightly” justified as technical errors, then – heavily – as side effects of a war against The horror. The only way out of the war, as she reveals today, is to return to negotiations around compliance with the Oslo agreements which, if this is not possible, will implode the rest of the XNUMXst Century.
On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center claimed 2.996 lives, shook the world and reinforced the Empire's willingness to go to war with the manufacture of weapons and the reconstruction of countries that would be destroyed. The century began promising barbarity, but more than 10 deaths from phosphorus bombs thrown at hospitals, schools and the civilian population in the Gaza Strip are still too few to give meaning to the conscience of the democratic and Christian West.
We are entering a period in which the colonial-imperial newspeak, which covers everything, slides smoothly to make official the inevitability of the genocide that Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government thinks it has the divine right to carry out. He says that Israel is the absolute “good”, which fulfills a divine mission sheltered in a theological State and the Palestinian people are the diabolical evil, which can and must be swept from the earth, which makes it justifiable to transform an entire people into a cursed people, without respecting the lives of mothers, children, young people, civilians of all types and species.
It is towards the justification of this divine will – or its “naturalizing” acceptance – that most of the media has been moving, after some balanced coverage showed a certain plurality in the face of the horrors of a new carnage in the Middle East.
Benjamin Netanyahu says that he fulfills a civilizing mission and argues that all the values of the “West” are at stake there, as happened with the Empire in Vietnam, as happened with the search for chemical weapons in Iraq, as was absolutely true – for three decades in Latin America – that civilizing mission of the USA, with its torture instructors teaching interrogations for the dictatorships of Latin America.
Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the Jewish people – confronting “good” against “evil” – based on religious values read in a sectarian and contradictory medieval way, is not just a fallacy, but is a strategy of power and alliances founded in fear of all the fundamentalisms in the world, including those governments and countries that may still support a Palestinian State.
What appears to be just a religiously correct fallacy, in fact suppresses the political categories of modernity and thus opens the sacred State to any pragmatic alliance, in favor of its religious truths that cannot be glossed by history.
The rest of the 2st Century moves towards a situation of indeterminate dangers, in which the Government of Israel, by delegitimizing all the efforts made by the UN, supported by the winning countries of the XNUMXnda. World War – including by Soviet Russia – can be thrown in the trash. The US military industrial complex, the Central Banks around the world, the war speculators, the legal and illegal loan sharks of the global financial system, can be taken to one side or the other, according to their immediate interests of domination and survival. The only part of humanity – the majority of humans – that did not contribute to its outbreak does not have the capacity to intervene decisively to end the war.
The human costs of the war, so far accepted by the mainstream media, which show Israel's battle against Hamas being transformed into a war against the entire Palestinian people, indicates that they do not care and will not forgive anyone who dares to stand up to their system of domination: the deadly tractors of this century will accustom surviving humanity to accept that those plows that harvest children are also necessary to feed the market of death: the manufacture of bombs, weapons, tanks, ammunition, rockets, missiles and gases that they asphyxiate, they form the essence of colonial-imperial Keinesianism, which generates many new rich people, selective jobs and collective deaths on the horizon of the century.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I
Note
[1] Giorgio Agamben. Means without end: notes on politics. Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2010, p. 13 and 14.
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