By HENRIQUE N. SÁ EARP*
Rethinking our core values, priorities and alliances, and maturing through collisions, is a historic task for the internationalist left in the struggle for Peace, Justice and Free Palestine.
The fractures caused by the Palestinian issue did not emerge on October 7, 2023. The pressure cooker of the seventeen-year Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip exploded in the attack coordinated by Hamas, which broke the military siege and proceeded to massacre hundreds of civilians and hundreds of soldiers, and to the capture of hundreds of hostages in Israel. Nor were such divergences inaugurated by the reaction of the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which consists of the complete obliteration of the territory with the highest population density on the planet, with more than two million people – half of whom are children. Faced with the scale of horrors, world public opinion has seen the cynicism and passivity of recent years crack into fissures much more diverse than the worn-out paradigm of 'polarization'. In particular, the global left is divided over concepts such as self-determination, anti-Zionism, tactics and strategy of international militancy; and this is the only field in which such dilemmas interest me, because, in matters of solidarity, the right already helps a lot when it does little to hinder.
My analytical premise, which I hope is uncontroversial, is that all human lives and suffering are equally valuable. As a white man born in this patriarchal ethnostate that we conventionally call Brazil, I recognize multiple structural mechanisms of supremacy, privilege, and violent oppression of marginalized social groups, as well as the erasure of their historical and cultural memory, which are found in the narratives of dehumanization about the Palestinians. On the other hand, I am clear that the cycle of atrocities that we have witnessed for decades will only be broken with political pressure exerted with maximum unity, which will inevitably expose contradictions and discomfort within the left itself. Furthermore, I understand that some perspectives on this conflict are based on an asymmetrical perception of the dignity of a certain group involved compared to the others; if you have such ties, it is likely that some parts of this text will be unpleasant to you. If it is any consolation, all parts of this text were unpleasant to me.
Necroarithmetic: necropolitical algebra of mourning
A rhetorical expedient that is frighteningly common among the militants involved in the conflict, and which seems intolerable to me, is what I propose to call necroarithmetic. You have certainly heard comparisons between the number of Israeli victims of Hamas and the number of Palestinian victims before and after October 7, calculating a disproportionality in Israeli war crimes that relativizes or even justifies the atrocity of that attack; on the other hand, it is also the highest mortality of Jews in a single attack since the Holocaust, whose trauma relativizes or even justifies the scale of Israel's indiscriminate reprisal against the civilian population of Gaza. Now, if all human suffering is worth the same, then it seems inevitable to me to paraphrase the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, in her text “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”, postulating that the number of victims always add up, never subtract or divide.
Necropolitics, according to Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe, is the ultimate expression of sovereignty in which a power (such as the State) has the capacity to decide who can live and who must die. Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle uses this concept to denounce the mechanisms of erasing collective memory and managing mourning: in structurally violent cultures, such as Brazil, the exercise of power is even based on the decision of who is worthy of mourning and who dies as a thing. From this perspective, we can understand that necroarithmetic practice, on the one hand, responds to a certain economy of mourning, since it operates precisely to nullify the affective dissonance of feeling compassion for victims on “both sides”; on the other hand, it seems clear to me that the incorporation of necroarithmetic theses into activism is in itself a reproduction of the underlying necropolitics, and therefore counterproductive to confronting it. In addition to being morally destitute, such theses are politically divisive and therefore ineffective for the cause they purport to support. It is not “more left-wing” to minimize the barbaric deaths and kidnappings of Israeli civilians by subtracting them from the number of Palestinian deaths and prisoners at the hands of Israel; just as it is an insult to the memory of the victims of Nazism to base new Israeli crimes on their suffering, dividing any martyrdom of the Palestinians by six million. I propose to label and vehemently denounce the rhetorical use of necroarithmetic operations on any side of the Palestinian question.
Countries and citizenship
A country is an imaginary polygonal line that separates the Earth into two disjointed regions, one of which is colored with fetishes and the other is also colored with fetishes. This stupid symbolic geometry of the human presence on the planet did not derive from any rational project, but rather from the historical coagulation of spheres of power and their reciprocal capacities for violence. The format is based on the invention of national mythologies, as if the commanders who died in the measurements of border forces did not resemble each other much more than they resembled their commanders – who, more often than not, spoke the same language. Any essentialist expression of national identity that claims ideal forms of a culture or particular moral characteristics of its people is equally artificial and foolish.
However, nation states are the current form of providing citizenship, protecting minimum individual rights and promoting collective well-being – as long as this does not unduly harm the interests of the property-owning elites. Taking as a moral imperative the access of all human beings to full citizenship in a state that makes it possible, we arrive at an impasse between the Zionist national project, in its various nuances, and the undeniable claim of the Palestinians for territorial and political sovereignty.
Specifically, the idea of a State of Israel destined to historically express some prophetic promise to the Jewish people seems to me as strange as a Brazilian, French, or Indonesian State, destined to carry out this or that essential mission in the trajectory of that people. Symmetrically, the urgency of a Palestinian State imposes itself as a pragmatic need for access to citizenship, and not as a projection screen for some anti-imperialist idealism in which, not infrequently, the immediate suffering of the Palestinian people is an oratorical pretext without strategic centrality. If the national function of the State of Israel is to offer protection and self-determination to that people, then by the same argument the Palestinians also have the right to a full State that guarantees them the same, without preconditions or additional bargains. Israel's “right to exist” is predicated on the same right to exist of the Palestinian State, and this must be the urgent strategic goal of international solidarity.
Self-determination of peoples, ethnic supremacy and the Zionist left
The previous point naturally alludes to the principle of self-determination of peoples, which also produces fractures when applied to the interior of a given country, insofar as its polygonal layout includes groups that are culturally diverse to some extent and unequally inserted in power relations. After all, if a country expresses the cultural essence of one of its groups, it is inevitable that it will grant subordinate citizenship to the others. Seen in reverse, it can be inferred from this idea that every non-hegemonic ethnic or cultural group is ontologically a threat to the self-determination of the hegemonic group, which can therefore only be expressed and guaranteed under a regime of ethnic supremacy.
It is frightening to find, even in perspectives identified with the pacifism of the left of Zionist laborism, the premise that the security of Jews in Israel requires the containment of non-Jews in the region in a social position, at best, of second-class citizens. This inserts demographic necroarithmetic as a divisive element in the working class, and this is the central contradiction that left-wing Zionism seeks to justify with impressive rhetorical contortionism, supported essentially by two pillars. First, that the self-determination of the Jewish people translates into the right to social hegemony in a country, since they are a minority in all other countries. In this sense, I wonder what social group would have the right to social hegemony in Brazil, for example? At the minimum level of any substantive notion of self-determination of the Brazilian people, the only social hegemony that should interest the left is that of the class that produces everything in alliance with traditional peoples, and I do not see why Israel should be any different. Second, that such hegemony would be a necessary and potentially kind lesser evil, as the Israeli Palestinians live better than the other Palestinians or other peoples around them, relying on one of the most detestable vices of the left, which is the unshakable conviction of one's own benevolence. The fact is that the Palestinians will never be satisfied with a horizon of sub-citizenship, even if the tyrants consider themselves kind, and much less with brutal and incessant expropriation, precisely because either self-determination is the right of all peoples, or it is the right of none.
Therefore, either the Zionist left openly defends the immediate creation of a Palestinian state, without preconditions and with the total withdrawal of the settlers from the Occupation, a balanced solution for the return of refugees and a commitment to radical social equality in the long term – that is, it is open to redefining its self-determination as a vision of the future – or it is not left. Furthermore, it must denounce the official lies, the human rights abuses and the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli far right, our common enemy. On the other hand, the internationalist left, if its priority is the suffering of the Palestinians, therefore has the obligation to accumulate forces for the historic victory, and not the luxury of choosing allies. It is easier to ally with those who defend a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders than with the Brazilian 'democratic right', for example, and look where we are; Whether the left in Israel has the political strength to turn the tide or not also depends on our support, removing them from a defensive position and reinforcing their morale to overthrow their extremist government. Any individual or group in the Zionist camp that sincerely adopts the above agenda is, by definition, our tactical ally, even if we disagree on its immediate supremacist component. Convergence is possible based on our common horizon, in which overcoming all forms of discrimination is a strategic objective in the process of expanding citizenship in each country. That said, I remind you that countries are teams invented for a stupid game, in which we all lose, and the self-determination of one people or another is at best a palliative reward.
Right to exist and the responsibility of the World
An abstract Right to Exist is in itself a confusion of categories; a lake, the word 'eggplant' and Brazil exist due to a series of past events that culminated in their formation, not as an expression of a Law that predates them. States recognize their reciprocal rights based on their existence as historically organized poles of force in the territories they already govern. In this context, the creation of a State as an expression of a Law is in fact a singularity of Israel and the future State of Palestine, whose mutual creation emanates from Resolution 181 of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), a piece of International Law also known as the Partition Plan for Palestine.
This is where the incessant demand among supporters of Israel lies that its right to exist, with or without the explicit predicate of Jewish statehood, be recognized as a precondition for any criticism of its policies. The concern is that singling out the consequences of Zionist self-determination for the Palestinians, while numerous other national states are also based on the present or past oppression of minorities, would constitute a fundamentally discriminatory predilection. After all, why does the internationalist left show so much solidarity with the Palestinians and not, to the same extent, with the Uighurs in China, the peripheral blacks in the United States of America, or the Bougainvilleans in Papua New Guinea?
An easy answer to this insinuation is that all these oppressions add up, never subtract from each other in a necro-artificial way, and therefore one of them cannot be justified by the others. Another, more controversial, is that the left also stands in solidarity with the struggles of all oppressed peoples, even if it fails to explain the singular emphasis on solidarity with the Palestinians. The left then dedicates itself to explaining the centrality of the Palestinian struggle based on some universalizable principle, as a spearhead of the global anti-imperialist struggle, a challenge to the hegemonic geopolitical projection of the United States, or the quintessence of the decolonial ideal… you name it. Such approaches, however, do little to dispel the underlying suspicion among the unconverted, supported by real precedents, of a latent structural anti-Semitism supported by new semiotics.
It seems to me that the most forceful response to any statement, even if issued in bad faith, must start from what is true in it; in this case, it is true that the State of Israel has the right to exist. This right is a historical singularity granted to it by the victorious powers of the Second World War and by the UNGA, forcibly imposed on the Palestinians, and for whose brutal consequences the world has since been jointly responsible. This right is also, by corollary, the Right to Existence of the Palestinian State, since it is formulated in the same document of the international order. This right the Palestinians did not lose because they disagreed with its unilateral implementation, based on British colonial violence, and which no other people would accept either; just in case, would Israel accept the 1948 borders today? Therefore, the world owes it to the Palestinians to create their State, urgently and uniquely, precisely because Israel has the right to exist.
These brief notes do not exhaust the current issue of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and they overlook many important points. However, I hope that they will contribute to opening up angles that have hitherto been little considered in the debate and political action. Rethinking our fundamental values, priorities and alliances, and maturing through conflicts, is a historic task for the internationalist left in the struggle for Peace, Justice and Free Palestine.
*Henrique N. Sá Earp Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computing at Unicamp.
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