By ANA SELVA ALBINATI*
When peace is war and crime goes unpunished
1.
The other day I read on a shirt: “Gaza – the soul of my soul"I thought it was beautiful, but I couldn't quite understand its meaning. I've been reading the news about the genocide in Gaza, I've been trying to understand the origin of this drama through authors who go back to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the usurpation of lands, the expulsion of Palestinians, the catastrophe of 1948, the so-called Nakba, which culminated in the creation of the State of Israel, with the expulsion of more than 750 Palestinians and the destruction of around 500 villages.
I have also been following the breaking of all agreements by Israel regarding a possible occupation of that space by two nations and I have seen the ineffectiveness and impotence of international bodies such as the UN, the indifference or veiled or open adherence to the crimes committed by the State of Israel by many countries, as well as the demonstrations of support for the Palestinian people that occur in so many parts of the world, but which are generally hidden by the media and penalized by institutions.
But nothing gave me the deeper meaning of the proposition.”Gaza: the soul of my soul” than reading the book Sumud in times of genocide, by Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabr[I].
Nothing had the impact of this blow to the soul as strong as the account of personal dramas, pain, somatized traumas, shame due to impotence, guilt for surviving when relatives and friends die, the unspeakable suffering of individuals who, at the extreme of their daily, everyday, routine dehumanization, try to resist. Go ahead means resistance. Resistance when there is no peace, when every day is war, even if it is not reported as such by the Western media, and when crime is perpetrated at every moment against everyone, children, adolescents, women, men, mothers, fathers, grandparents, who feel threatened 24 hours a day, and with no hope that these crimes will be punished.
Go ahead It does not just mean the ability to survive or the ability to re-establish oneself to deal with stress and adversity. Go ahead It is the achievement of these things, plus the willingness to maintain an unwavering defiance of subjugation and occupation. Sumud is not an innate characteristic or the consequence of a single life event, but a system of skills and habits that are learned and can be developed. Sumud creates the foundations of a lifestyle of resistance, clinging to the land like a deeply rooted olive tree, preserving one’s identity, seeking autonomy and freedom of action, and preserving the Palestinian narrative and culture in the face of destruction. (JABR, 2024, p.114-15).
It is the dignified response to the extreme of dehumanization, to the end of civilization of any kind, to the end of corporate agreements, to the march of arrogance of those who can over the souls of those who support it.”Go ahead means maintaining optimism, moral and social solidarity while dealing with dark realities and oppressive structures.” (idem, p.115)
If we have had moments similar to this in history, we have, however, our own characteristics in the genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionist project of occupying the entire Palestinian territory.
Zionism capitalizes on the historical suffering of the Jewish people, especially that resulting from the Nazi horror, to demand what at first seems just: a Jewish state. To this end, it clothes this political project in a religious guise, in order to try to justify the choice of Palestine as a territory for legitimate occupation.
2.
The term Zionism dates back to 1890, created by Nathan Birnbaum in the wake of the ideas of modern Zionism advocated by Moses Hess.
Moses Hess, initially an author close to Marxism, later reverses Marx's materialist perspective, developed in On the Jewish question. In this text from 1843, Marx seeks to explain the Jewish condition not in religious terms, but in profane, historical-social terms, or in his own words, he seeks to deal not with the “Sabbatical Jew”, but with the “everyday Jew”. (MARX, 2013, p.56) Responding to an article by Bruno Bauer about the conditions for the emancipation of the Jews, Marx will say that “Bauer understands only the religious essence of Judaism, but fails to understand the real and secular foundation of this religious entity”. (MARX, 2011, p.128). The Marxian proposition is, therefore, to understand religious consciousness in its relationship with material life, with history, with the form of sociability that makes it possible, and not in an autonomous way.
Moses Hess, who knew this text well and identified with this proposition, distanced himself from Marx to such an extent that in 1862, in Rome and Jerusalem, lInstead of analyzing the “everyday Jew”, that is, the social determinations that are in the constitution of the Jewish people, he will speak of the Jews as a historical race, exalting a Jewish essence, from which the Zionist project will be constituted.
As Daniel Bensaid observes: “Two orientations are radically opposed. In 1843, Marx advocated a political emancipation of the Jews from the perspective of “human emancipation” against the restoration of a “chimerical nationality”. In 1862, Hess advocated the “conquest of the national soil” against “chimerical emancipation”. His ideological descendants – from Leo Pinsker to Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau – would devote themselves to exporting the European crisis to Palestine, within the framework of imperialist expansion towards the West”. (BENSAID, 2013, p. 104)
Zionism was established from this perspective of Moses Hess. It was Theodor Herzl who developed political Zionism, claiming that the only way to get rid of European anti-Semitism would be to create a Jewish state in Palestine, in The Jewish State of 1896. This thesis was not unanimously shared by Jews in Europe, who advocated assimilation into the societies in which they had already integrated. Nor was the choice of Palestine seen as an unequivocal destination; it was merely one of the possibilities discussed. In addition to Argentine Patagonia, countries such as Uganda and Congo were also considered as possibilities. The choice of Palestine was defined at the first Zionist congress in 1897, in Basel, under the leadership of Herzl, already postulated as a legitimate return of the Jewish nation.
Altman observes that “although Zionism was initially secular, religion gave Zionism two very important discursive elements, two key ideas. The first was that of the 'chosen people', and the second, that of the 'promised land'.” (ALTMAN, 2023, p.48). Ideas that converged towards the notion of a natural right to Palestine.
The point is that at that time Palestine was occupied by about half a million inhabitants, including Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as Ottoman and European soldiers and officials. In Ten myths about Israel, Ilan Pappé clarifies the demographics of the Palestinian territory as well as dispels the myth of the Jews as a landless people, as a large part of the Jews were already assimilated in various countries. To such an extent that it was necessary to convince the arrival of Sephardic Jews from Africa and Asia to initially reinforce Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Still, Zionist propaganda spread the idea of “a land without a people for a people without a land”, a slogan created by Israel Zangwill. This slogan, in addition to being mystifying, translated the racist view that considered the Palestinians as a “non-people”. (MERUANE, 2023, p. 32) Golda Meier even says that “‘there was no such thing’ as the Palestinian people”. (idem, p.126)
Jews identify with the West's colonialist projects to maintain the Palestinians as a non-people. To this end, they use methods and expressions they themselves experienced during the Nazi persecution to describe the Palestinians as savages, backward and less than human. They use textbooks to disseminate these ideas in the education of Israeli children.
It is no coincidence that the narratives legitimizing the colonization of Palestine give the Jew the stereotype of a worker, a warrior, and a virile man, which inverts the discriminatory European perspective, especially the Nazi one, which considered him an inferior group. And it shows him, in a form of mirroring, as the Aryan type that massacred him.
The capitalization of the undeniable Jewish suffering under Nazi rule acts to commotion and, consequently, to public acceptance of the creation of the State of Israel. Combined with Islamophobic media coverage, the State of Israel would then be configured as an “outpost of the West, of civilization against barbarism.” (MISLEH, 2022, p.32.)
As if that were not enough, in the face of Arab resistance, the idea is propagated that Zionists practice self-defense as if they were the victims, a self-defense based on the fear they feel in the face of the hatred that Palestinians and Arabs in general reserve for them. As Samah Jabr analyzes, “the fear of Israelis is not simply an innocent traumatic inheritance, it is a suspicious political instrument, a perverse manipulation that justifies the cruel treatment meted out to Palestinians.” (2024, p. 40) Such fear is absolutely disproportionate to the real harm that Palestinians cause them, but it serves as an element of empathy conveyed by the Western media, while the image of Palestinian hatred serves as justification for Islamophobia.
Discourse disseminated through the idyllic images of kibbutz, from publicizing the Jewish people's capacity for work in transforming the desert into arable land, hiding the fact that this was a violent occupation of Palestinian territory, carried out in a studied and premeditated manner to secure the best land and "cleanse" the traces of the Palestinian presence by destroying homes and plantations, including the centuries-old olive trees that bore witness to their historical belonging.
At the end of the 2023th century, there was a movement of Jews moving to Palestine, through the purchase of land financed by the World Zionist Organization, founded after the Basel Congress. And although there was a division between left-wing and right-wing Zionists at that time, Altman observes that “this supposed Zionist left […] embraced the same fundamental thesis, that of a state under Jewish supremacy”, and that “this was the group that commanded the first stages of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians”. (50, p.XNUMX)
After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Palestine came under the control of Great Britain, which, although promising to create a Palestinian state, ended up favoring the interests of the Jewish occupiers. In the 1920s, Palestinians represented between 80 and 90% of the population. The British favoritism towards the Zionists led to the Palestinian revolt, manifested in the 1929 uprising and the 1936–1939 uprising.
If Great Britain's reaction to the first uprising was initially to “embrace Palestinian demands” (PAPPÉ, 2016, p.34), the Zionist lobby redirected the government towards its interests by increasing Jewish immigration and its harmful effects on the situation of Palestinian workers and peasants. This led to the uprising of 1936.
According to Kanafani (2022), the loss of jobs due to the policy of exclusive employment for Jews and the loss of lands of Palestinian peasants led to an economic disaster for this population, which, together with the humiliations suffered, was the trigger for the revolt that lasted from 1936 to 1939. According to the author, this was the closest moment to Palestinian liberation, which, however, was massacred by the English authority, with an estimated 20.000 victims between dead and wounded among Palestinians and Arab allies, assassination of leaders, explosions and demolitions of houses.
Eventually, European partners joined in and provided weapons and financial resources to the Zionists. At that time, the Zionists built roads to connect the Jewish settlements. This was followed by mapping the Palestinian region, with the clear intention of controlling the territory.
As Pappé analyzes, “the absence of most Palestinian leaders and viable Palestinian military units made life much easier for Jewish forces in 1947, in the incursions into the interior of Palestine” (2016, p.34.)
And in this condition facilitated by the English, they will be seen as an obstacle to the Zionist project, especially when attempting British control over Jewish immigration after the Second World War: “The primary topic on the Zionist agenda in 1946 and 1947, the fight against the English, was resolved by the British decision in February 1947 to leave Palestine and transfer the Palestinian question to the UN.” (PAPPÉ, 2016, p.47)
3.
In 1947, the UN recommended the partition of Palestine into two states (Resolution 181), without any consideration of the ethnic composition of the population. Jews were given 53% of the territory, although this group constituted only a third of the population at the time.
The partition resolution was passed on November 29, 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947, with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighborhoods in retaliation for the vandalism of buses and shops during the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution, in the first days after its approval. (PAPPÉ, 2016, p.60)
According to Pappé, the plan for ethnic cleansing had already been drawn up, based on plans that initially aimed to dissuade Palestinian attacks on Jewish settlements. The pinnacle of these plans was Plan Dalet, which decided to systematically and completely expel Palestinians from their homeland, either because they offered some kind of resistance or because their villages were located in strategic locations.
In 1948, more than 750 Palestinians were expelled, the population was indiscriminately murdered, more than 500 villages were destroyed, houses and fields were burned, a catastrophe that is said to have Nakba in Arabic. Soon after the withdrawal of the British, the Jewish Agency declared the founding of the Jewish state in Palestine on May 14, 1948, immediately recognized by the USA and USSR, followed by other countries.
This is followed by a process of “reinvention of Palestine” by the Jewish occupation, “a systematic academic, political and military attempt to de-Arabize the territory – its names and its geography, but, above all, its history” (PAPPÉ, 2016, p.260-61). In this sense, forgetting the Nakba, burying it under a new architecture of parks and cypresses, was and continues to be an important point for the Zionist strategy, including for discussions towards a “peace process” on the terms that interest them.
But as Jabr says from listening to his psychiatric patients: “The Nakba is a contemporary insult renewed for every Palestinian humiliated, imprisoned or killed; salt is added to the wound of the Nakba with every house demolished and every piece of land confiscated.” (2024, p.49)
Other Arab-Israeli wars occur, always with an expansionist outcome on Israel's part. Conflicts in the region continue one after the other, and there is no international diplomatic solution. This incites armed resistance on the part of the Palestinians.
The first Intifada in 1987 gave rise to the Islamic resistance group Hamas. Initially a social welfare organization, it began to resort to armed struggle and suicide bombings when the Palestine Liberation Organization joined the Oslo Accords in 1993. These agreements resulted in the recognition of the State of Israel by the Palestinians and the recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. It also provided for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the transfer of control of part (about 40%) of this region to the newly created Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
In addition to favoring Israeli interests, such agreements do not address the issue of the return of refugees or the recognition of Nakba. In addition, Israel did not comply with the order to withdraw from the settlements and, contrary to this, continued its project of occupation of the region. Faced with the fragility of the agreements for a peace solution for the region, and with the recognition of the State of Israel by the PLO, including its largest faction, Fatah, and by the PA, Hamas radicalized its action and disputed with Fatah the leadership of the Palestinian people, establishing control over the Gaza Strip through elections from 2006 onwards.
The situation of daily oppression of the Palestinians under the Zionist occupation, as well as the incapacity and ineffectiveness of a diplomatic solution to the issue, makes part of the Palestinian population recognize Hamas as a legitimate force, no matter how much the West trumpets its “terrorist” character. About this, Jabr writes: “To this day, the Palestinians do not have a state or armed forces. Our occupiers subject us to curfews, expulsions, house demolitions, legalized torture and a variety of human rights violations. […] The American media calls our search for freedom “terrorism”, placing the Palestinian in the role of the international prototype of the terrorist. This has shaped Western public consciousness and resulted in an international bias that usually describes cases of violence against Palestinian civilians in indifferent language, reducing Palestinian losses to mere faceless statistics, while using emotional language and visual resources to describe Israeli losses”. (2024, p.106)
The author asks us: “Why is the word 'terrorism' so readily applied to individuals or groups who use homemade bombs, but not to States that use nuclear weapons and other internationally banned weapons to ensure submission to the oppressor?” To conclude very correctly that “'terrorism' is a political term used by the colonizer to discredit those who resist”. (JABR, 2024, p.106-07)
It is truly unbelievable that the stigma of terrorism is attributed only to those who resist situations of oppression, even though the disproportion between Israeli-American and Palestinian weapons is amply documented, the disproportion between human losses on both sides, with the aggravating factor that 70% of Palestinian deaths are women and children, the disproportion between the time of oppression and the time of revolt, the violation of all agreements attempted by international organizations by Israel, the destruction of schools and hospitals, the prohibition of the entry of food and health supplies, the murder of doctors, nurses and technicians, the murder of journalists, in addition to the refinements of cruelty, physical and psychological torture, emotional dismantling and mockery broadcast on social networks by the Zionists.
Given this situation, it is worth asking what the future holds for this genocide, since a two-state resolution seems increasingly distant. The State of Israel has been systematically failing to comply with the agreements it has signed, even though these agreements are clearly favorable to it, but do not seem sufficient for its expansionist project.
The UN’s recognition of war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel, as well as Netanyahu’s sentencing to prison, do not seem to have a significant effect on the course of this genocide, despite the growing awareness and demonstrations of the population around the world. The clear objective of the state of Israel is to carry out the extermination of the Palestinian people and there seems to be no international force capable of stopping it. This leads us to wonder what forces sustain it beyond the ideology conveyed about the cultural and religious conflict between Arabs and Jews; and beyond the supposed historical reparation for the Holocaust.
4.
Let's go back to Jewish Question in an attempt to shed light on this phenomenon. This text was the subject of great controversy, with Marx even being accused of anti-Semitism. However, recovering the context in which it was written, it is a response by Marx to the position of the philosopher Bruno Bauer. Bauer argued that if Jews wanted to participate as citizens of the Prussian state, they would have to renounce their religion, and the state would also have to become secular. The question of the secular state was a fundamental element in understanding the economic, social and political backwardness of Germany in the 19th century.
Although Marx was also a defender of the secular state, he opposes Bauer's argument, emphasizing that one of the characteristics of the secular state is precisely the disconnection between state and religion. Therefore, the creation of the secular state, as seen in the modern state, results in the relegation of religion to the sphere of private freedoms. This raises the question of why discrimination against Jews persists even in countries that have already achieved political emancipation.
Marx's analysis seeks to indicate the limitations of political emancipation, although such emancipation evidently signifies an advance in relation to the religious state due to its particularistic nature. The modern, secular state, on the contrary, would express the universality of human freedom in its rights and duties. This is the reason for Hegel's great praise of the modern state. However, in this text on the Jewish question, Marx develops the characteristics and limits of political emancipation, beginning the critique of Hegelian thought. In short, Marx recognizes the modern universalist state and its legal and ideological apparatus expressed in the declarations of the rights of man and of the citizen as the result of a need posed by civil society, an instance marked by fragmentation and inequality.
When analyzing the legal concepts present in the formulation of the rights of man and of the citizen, Marx clarifies who this man and this citizen are: the citizen who abstractly formally shares universal rights, and the private individual who in his individual life does not recognize himself as a citizen in such a way as to have, among other elements symptomatic of his unrealization, the religious need and the freedom to choose his creed.
Based on the recognition of the limits of political emancipation, Marx develops the notion of human emancipation in which the rights achieved in modernity would effectively be part of the lives of individuals, breaking the citizen-private individual, state-civil society split, a proposition that culminates in the critique of politics and the state as elements to be overcome in a revolutionized society and restructured in its determining instance, the sphere of production and reproduction of social life.
Still using imprecise language – Marx was 25 years old at the time and had not yet developed his economic studies and his fundamental concepts for the critique of political economy – the author identifies the principle of bourgeois society with practical necessity, selfishness, whose god would be money.
When referring to the Jews, Marx identifies in them the very spirit of modern society, because the Jew has consolidated himself as the man of money (Geldmensch) in the commercial and financial sphere, acting as a merchant, banker and usurer over the centuries. Marx's search is for a materialist, historical understanding of Judaism in the modern world as an expression of a “practical necessity, of egoism”, posed by capitalist sociability. (2013, p.60)
If practical necessity is the issue to be primarily resolved by civil society, the way in which this occurs in the capitalist world develops egoism as an element of social life. If this is so, Marx identifies Judaism as a symptom that can only be resolved by transforming the principle of civil society, that is, by overcoming egoism and the god of money, or in other words – not yet used by the author – by the end of capitalism. The Jewish question historically posed in modernity would then be resolved in and through history:
We will try to break with the theological formulation of the question. The question about the Jew's capacity for emancipation becomes for us the following question: what is the specific social element to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the modern Jew's capacity for emancipation is equivalent to the relationship of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. (MARX, 2013, p.55)
It is about this relationship that the author will think about the Jewish question: “Judaism has not been preserved despite history, but rather through history. It is from its entrails that bourgeois society continually generates the Jew.” (idem, p. 57) Marx identifies the Jew as an individual in the capitalist world; not exactly as a person of a particular religion, but as a form of being that develops in the capitalist world, centered on exchange relations and, therefore, on the power of money. Still using imprecise vocabulary, he associates Judaism with the monetary system, without being able at that moment to unveil the fetish of money as a superior form of the fetish of merchandise, which he will do later in The capital. Em The holy family, the emancipation of the Jews is formulated as a “general practical task of today’s world, which is a world Jewish to the root”, or even “the task of the sublation of the Jewish essence is, in fact, the task of the sublation of the Judaism of bourgeois society, the inhuman character of the practice of present-day life, the culmination of which is the monetary system”. (MARX, 2011, p.129)
Bringing these passages to light in this article aims to contrast the Marxist orientation in understanding the Jewish question with the theological understanding that has clothed it since Moses Hess to the present day, culminating in an alleged legitimacy of the usurpation of Palestinian territory. The purpose is to strip away the Zionist ideology and revisit the Marxist thesis of overcoming the Jewish question through the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society, even if only as an illumination to think about contemporary impasses.
5.
The Jewish question concerns the possibility of assimilation or not of Jews in Western societies, an issue that became more pronounced from the 19th century onwards.
According to Abraham Leon, the presence of Jews was tolerated in antiquity and the High Middle Ages as elements responsible for the exchange of goods and loans at interest. Their presence was necessary, but despised because it was associated with usury. He notes, however, that: “From the 1975th century onwards, parallel to the development of Western Europe, the growth of cities and the formation of an indigenous commercial and industrial class, the situation of the Jews began to seriously worsen, until they were almost completely eliminated from most Western countries.” (LEON, 14, p.XNUMX)
The emergence of a native merchant bourgeoisie did not require the intermediary of the Jews. While some of the Jews assimilated into this bourgeoisie, a large number went to Eastern Europe, which was lagging behind in terms of capitalist development. There they remained in their positions, especially in Russia and Poland, until the end of serfdom in the 19th century and the end of the feudal regime in rural property.
As Leon explains: “The accumulation of money in the hands of the Jews did not originate in a special form of capitalist production. The surplus value (or surplus product) came from feudal exploitation, and the lords were obliged to hand over a part of this surplus value to the Jews.” (LEON, 1975, p.17). This is a pre-capitalist commercial class. Or again regarding the accumulation carried out by the Jews: “Usury and commerce exploit a specific procedure of production that they did not create and to which they remain foreign.” (idem)
In contrast, pre-capitalist commercial capital will be subsumed under capitalism in its development in Western Europe, assuming a specific function in the capital cycle.
With the end of serfdom in Eastern Europe, the return to Western countries took place under very different conditions: on the one hand, the economic and cultural assimilation of the wealthy Jews, and on the other hand, the emergence of the Jewish proletariat within the framework of industrial capitalism. Here the Jewish question arose, that is, how to integrate the Jews economically.
In effect, the development of capitalism has driven the evolution of the Jewish question along diametrically opposed paths. On the one hand, capitalism favors economic assimilation and, consequently, cultural assimilation; on the other, by uprooting the Jewish masses, concentrating them in the cities, and provoking the resurgence of anti-Semitism, it stimulates the development of Jewish nationalism. The 'rebirth of the Jewish nation', the formation of modern Jewish culture, the creation of the Yiddish language, and Zionism accompany the processes of emigration and concentration of the Jewish masses in the cities and are parallel to the development of modern anti-Semitism. (LEON, 1975, p.138)
Historical discrimination against Jews increased in the 19th century, with a more clearly economic motivation, stemming from the struggle between unproductive financial capital and productive industrial capital. A struggle within capital, a struggle “between cousins,” as Marx would say, which to a large extent clouds our understanding of the movement of capital to this day, as if there were bad capital and good capital.
The legacy of materialist criticism can be found in several theorists who, like Marx, assumed the dissolution of the Jewish question in the development of a society emancipated from commodity fetishism and its consequences. But history has proven to be more complex. In this regard, Bensaid says: “Condemned to extinction outright by the socialists of the 2013th century, the ‘Jewish question’ persisted in the 112th century under the triple effect of (Nazi) genocide, Stalinist reaction and Zionist nationalization.” (XNUMX, p. XNUMX)
The approach to the Jewish question suffered a setback after these events, returning to the orientation of Moses Hess, who transformed history into a theological event. Instead of a historical understanding, one fell back on the myth of the Jewish essence, the Jewish race, the promised land and the chosen people.
The state of Israel is the result of this regression. A theological state that would apparently be pre-modern because it was born without the fundamental characteristic of the modern state that, although formally, is built on the recognition of human universality. It reestablishes the alliance between state and religion and promotes discrimination, elevating the particularities of a creed to the status of a political constitution. In this way, “the Sabbath Jew and the profane Jew that Marx distinguished are thus reunited, sewn together in the theological Jew resurrected as the Israeli Jew. The 'chimerical nationality' has become an effective nationality, armed and booted.” (BENSAID, 2013, p.118)
But behind this apparent anachronism, one can recognize the current relevance of the State of Israel as a response to the crisis of capital and the international struggle for world hegemony. As a fundamental element of financial capital, the creation of the State of Israel is the response to the interests of capital that represents the confluence of what is most nefarious (but necessary from the point of view of the dynamics of capital today), which is the industry of war, armaments, and destruction.
6.
Theo-colonial state uses religious arguments as a shield to fit into the Western project of economic domination, especially the United States, at a critical moment of dispute in the face of China's initiatives and its project of a new Silk Road. In this struggle for a new global recomposition, a struggle between major capitals, which is seen in wars and conflicts that are unfolding today, the usurpation of Palestine becomes the most visible case, and it became more visible precisely because of the dramatic action of Hamas, which interrupted the alliance that was to be signed between Saudi Arabia and Israel, favoring American interests and further weakening the Palestinian cause, and brought to the fore the suffering of the Palestinians, without which they would continue to be massacred daily in the silence of the media.
Such genocide makes very clear the economic basis behind the religious and ethnic guise, and it is very clearly an unequal confrontation between the holders of capital and those expropriated and violated in the open, in full view of the entire world, with the connivance of rich governments and their vassals.
Thus, despite the peculiarity of this “war”, all the particular elements that seem to indicate tension between the Arab world and the Western world, the course of events dispels this image (so conducive to the dissemination of the ideology current in the media about the Arab danger and its savagery in the face of Western civilization), to the extent that the disposition of the countries in their positions, including the Arab countries, reveals the economic interests at stake. And it reveals, as Reginaldo Nasser rightly points out,[ii] that it is not just about ethnicities, but fundamentally about class struggle.
The atrocious way in which this massacre is being carried out, openly and openly genocidal, without any filter to hide the fact that this is now a project for a final solution for the Palestinian people and for the total occupation of the territory without any respect for international regulations, shows the fragility of the law in times of crisis of capital, its sociability and its morality. At a time when the contradictory development of the capitalist economy now touches, in a forceful way, on all the limits of the sustainability of social life, planetary life and the very meaning of humanity, what we have is the raw vision of barbarity that imposes itself hand in hand with a new cycle of accumulation of wealth and its mechanisms to preserve and expand it at all costs. It is time for the extreme right to shamelessly embrace barbarity in favor of capital.
Hence the motto Gaza: the soul of my soul It touches us deeply when we identify the suffering of the Palestinian people as a living symbol of the global struggle between what remains in terms of left-wing perspectives against the advance of the extreme right. Such televised, spectacularized suffering represents in contemporary times the culmination of the suffering of colonized peoples who still suffer from this condition today, of the suffering of individuals who are violated in the most diverse ways in their daily lives, of the suffering of nature and its consequences for planetary life, in such a way that it constitutes the moment of the total loss of ethical, moral and legal limits, sounding like a warning of what awaits us as humanity.
The fable refers to you!, Marx warns us in the preface to The capital, reminding us that this world-system affects us all in some way, even if under particular guises. We live this conflict every day. Always the same class struggle under particular circumstances that often make us lose the greater meaning of the struggle. Any social patch, any public policy that means even a little relief from the many daily sufferings always clashes with the interests of capital that affects us in the capillarity of our lives.
Gaza is the most terrible image of this struggle. That is why it is so emblematic. Hence the meaning of the proposition “Gaza: The soul of my soul”, because it sums up our most secret fear as social individuals, which is the affront to what we call humanity, the breaking of the thread that makes us see the other as a self despite all the differences. Gaza, the soul of my soul, resists as the ultimate possibility of reaffirming a social project while the state of Israel emerges as the Dantesque figure of the state of exception in times of capital crisis. We are talking about a rupture in the already fragile fabric of social existence, of the surpassing of all the normative limits that sustain social life. In his psychiatric office, Jabr listens to the collective trauma of his patients: “I feel that my body is intoxicated, oppressed, exposed to injustice; that my desire is broken”. (2024, p.57)
As the author points out, crimes against Palestinians “are not only a violation of the rule of law, but also a betrayal of our shared humanity.” (idem, p.140)
Every act of defense and solidarity with the Palestinian people is our way of resisting, our contribution to sumud Palestinian and our learning from sumud Palestinians to exercise the long revolution of economic structures that is necessary on the path to a more humane life. This is the perspective that must be repositioned on the horizon of a daily life of alienation, discouragement and capitulation into which we have been thrown. The genocide of the Palestinian people is an attempt to erase the possibility of resistance as a human right, it is the opening for a programmatic dehumanization in favor of economic interests, in their religious or political guises. That is why the Palestinian cause touches us in the soul. And as Bensaid points out, “Marx’s call to transform theological questions into profane questions is still equally relevant.” (2013, p.119)
The road is long, but as Samah Jabr says: “The urgency today lies in reviving our dying humanity, which has failed to preserve the lives of Gazans, to promote compassion and restore the values that define us as human beings. Let us rescue the remains of our humanity from the rubble of Gaza.” (2024, p.140)
*Ana Selva Albinati is a retired professor from the Department of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais.
References
ALTMAN, Breno. Against Zionism – a portrait of a colonial and racist doctrine. Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2023.
BENSAID, Daniel. Introduction and afterword in MARX, Karl. On the Jewish Question. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.
JABR, Samah. Sumud in times of genocide. Rio de Janeiro: Tabla, 2024.
KANAFANI, Ghassan. The 1936-1939 revolt in Palestine. So Paulo: Sundermann, 2022.
LEON, Abraham. Materialist conception of Jewish questioning. Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Yunque, 1975.
MARX, K./ENGELS, F. The Holy Family. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
MARX, Carl. On the Jewish Question. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.
MARX, Carl. The capital vol. I. New York: Routledge, 2013
MERUANE, Lina. Becoming Palestine. Belo Horizonte: Reliquary, 2019.
MISLEH, Soraya. Al Nakba – a study of the Palestinian catastrophe. So Paulo: Sundermann, 2022.
PAPPÉ, Ilan. Ethnic cleansing in Palestine. So Paulo: Sundermann, 2016.
PAPPÉ, Ilan. Ten myths about Israel. Rio de Janeiro, Table, 2022.
Notes
[I] JABR, Samah : Sumud in times of genocide. Organized and translated by Rima Awada Zahra. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Tabla, 2024. 192 p.
[ii] Interview with Reginaldo Nasser. Ceasefire in Lebanon: Can you believe it? Opera mundi: Program 20 minutes. 28/11/2024.
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