By LUCYANE DE MORAES*
Israel declared war on Palestine 75 years ago and since then it has continued, until, perhaps, the lesson learned – and now better taught – in the “final solution” classes is concluded.
These few lines do not intend to intend, but rather to reflect. We are living with a tragic reality in which mediation, debate and dialogue are more than necessary. There is no place to defend violence as a method. All war is vile. Every war is nasty. Every war is hard. Mainly those carried out by proxy, always justified by the unjustifiable.
For some, I would not have a place to speak: I have no Jewish origins and no relationship with victims of the Holocaust. I am not a European citizen nor do I come from the Middle East. Still, it is necessary to declare support for the Palestinian cause and state the obvious: what Israel has done over the decades in Gaza is mass extermination. This is justified by the demonstration of solidarity by Israelis and Jews, even by Hasidic rabbis, in various parts of the world, against the Israeli massacre, in favor of the Palestinian population. All of this, through an appeal to rationality. A rationality that often escapes humans.
The defense of corporate media in favor of the victims of the actions of Hamas (fundamentalist group that emerged in the First Intifada) is witnessed around the world, without, however, much demonstration of empathy for the victims of the aggressive and unrestrained military offensive of the Israeli army , under the argument that the State has the right to defense. The due importance given to the contradictory voices is not evident in the actions of the interested media, not even declarations, even if timid, of condemnation of the intense bombings of Israel. Nor is there any commitment to the growing mobilizations in favor of Palestinians around the world in the media. There is certainly a widespread inversion of values here.
In 75 years of occupation, there is nothing in Palestine that is not under the yoke of the State of Israel. No dignified conditions, no freedom of movement, not even any possibility of existence are allowed to the Palestinians. It does not seem unnecessary to state the truism that these people, like any other, have the right to self-determination.
Under the imposition of hegemonic forces, dependent media create their own facts, invent other modes of narrative and name, with complete independence, opponents under the nickname of terrorists. Despite the enormous differences, not only public opinion, but mainly that of the public, is deviated without any reservation, under the aegis of indifference. If what is meant by terrorism is the indiscriminate act of provoking fear and panic through the use of violence, how can we ignore the hostile foundations that underpinned the creation of the State of Israel, marked by the occupation and destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns, always in the name of the nameless?
Wouldn't talking about terrorism also mean unreservedly naming the actions carried out by Israeli forces? Under a determination imposed as truth, today a terrorist is understood as any individual or group that contests the hegemon and his establishment. For no other reason, we are led to reproduce and internalize, often inadvertently, the vertical discourse attributed to the supremacy of values identified as truth.
The Palestinians, long subjugated, wait patiently for a resolution, in the unanswered search for the right to possession of the land, promised long ago by the League of Nations. They demand the historical non-erasure of Nakba of 1948, in which more than 700.000 Palestinian Arabs suffered the effect of the exodus, an allegorical example of another occurrence 3.000 years ago. As a (in)consequence, according to the United Nations, the descendants of Palestinian refugees currently number more than four million people.
On October 31, Israel announced the attack on Jabalia, the largest of the eight camps in Gaza that houses around 116 refugee descendants, killing 50 people and injuring hundreds more – an action justified by the death of just one Hamas guerrilla – , this being yet another allegorical example of a crime consciously committed against the civilian population. Unsurprisingly, in less than 24 hours this same field, not coincidentally, was again bombed by Israel, an action equally exemplary of many of the incidents always perpetrated in the name of the Lord of wars.
If the justification is a ‘repair’ of the Shoah, which occurred during the Second World War, doesn't it seem ironic that these same people, brutalized by the Holocaust and having suffered severe attempts at eradication, reproduce to the same degree and measure the most violent acts of colonial oppression, under the method of mass extermination? "An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth". Revenge, resentment, retaliation? This lays the foundation for the permanence of the eternal return, the always-the-same of historical repetition. Oppression generated by the formerly oppressed.
In an allusive sense, it is not out of place to think that Hegel, indirectly, mentioned something similar when referring to the dialectic of master and slave, in which the first, seen as “for itself”, determines the second as a thing, or that is, as a “being-for-the-other”, based on the “subject-object” relationship. In turn, Freud, through what psychoanalysis understands as 'identification with the rival', saw the risks of the Jewish people reproducing with other people the same thing they had been suffering, in a kind of inversion of the poles of their fantasy. In other words, to come to express a desire for annihilation with the very object of identification.
Today, curiously, Germany justifies the idea of historical reparation, as a fair means of correcting the past, a rhetoric that no longer seems to convince. This is not a moral issue, as people would have us believe. And if that were the case, what kind of reversed morality would one be defending? It is also unnecessary to say that this is not a religious war justified by the return of a Savior who calls for a land purified of infidels. What is at stake, everyone knows, are the most diverse geopolitical interests, claimed mainly by the owners of the world, representatives of the collective West.
Today, the fact is no longer ignored that the State of Israel, in addition, is a military base, a weapons depot for the USA, which pays eternal tribute to it for its commitment to the services provided to maintain a region of political and core economy. It is in the name of such interests that Israel intends to relocate 2,2 million Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, in an effort to forcibly displace that population. It is equally unnecessary to remember that forced migrations are considered a type of ethnic cleansing, condemned by UN Security Council resolution 1674.
If the idea of there no longer being reliable sources that guarantee the truth of such occurrences is correct, this reiterates the fact that no one seems to care anymore which versions are told and which actions committed to the media they insist on taking, contradicting the conscience of others and their own. history. Easy adherence to the discursive variants of the information industry generalizes condescension and generates identification with interests that, although not those of the majority, represent those of hegemonic power, always focused on neutralizing the Other.
Israel declared war on Palestine 75 years ago and since then it has continued, until, perhaps, the lesson learned – and now better taught – in the ‘final solution’ classes is concluded. As second nature, violence in Palestine was accepted and normalized. What is happening today, especially in the Gaza Strip, is just part of the brutalities that have long been understood. So, this war is not something new as Benjamin Netanyahu wants to make it seem, who – under the pretext of the destruction of Hamas – spoke about its emergence to troops of young Israeli soldiers: “It’s kill or be killed.”
To assume that the Israeli government knew nothing in advance about the counterattacks carried out by Hamas forces means to agree with it, justifying the massacres. The Zionist government and its far-right leader degenerate the concept of history, taking it out of context. It is the fight of good against evil, as an exercise in bad faith carried out by their acclaimed masters. Exemption from knowledge by the population? This reaffirms the continuous denial of the historical right to land and the resulting ethnic extermination.
If it is true that the success of a war is measured by the number of civilian deaths, then Israel's latest actions already occupy a prominent place in the pantheon of Scripture. And if history, in fact, is always told from the point of view of the victors, it will be equally true that the Palestinians, marked by misfortune, are the people chosen for extermination. Death is not a side effect. It's the main cause!
In addition to the imperative repudiation of any and all reasons for war, this one in particular is the most insane of all the others, due to its qualified rational care. This considers, among others, the different private interests involved, more than ever indifferent to human survival. Even young people, even children. As violence persists, the hope of the hopeless is undermined.
If it is utopian to think about the creation of a multinational State, it is at least urgent to demand the implementation of the UN resolutions that guarantee the creation of the Palestinian State, before the first televised ethnic genocide in history also takes on a spectacular second-nature character.
*Lucyane de Moraes She has a doctorate in philosophy from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Author of the book Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin: around an elective friendship (Editions 70/Almedina Brasil). [https://amzn.to/47a2xx7]
Originally posted on InComunidade Magazine.
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