Stated Motivations Have Effects

 

I have read the Hamas Charter, both the one from 1988 and the one from 2017 – supposedly the most civilized one. I believe that knowing their declarations, their principles, is a way to shed a light on the History of the region, a History that sometimes is shown to us in a confuse and superficial way, to say the least. If we see that their way of seeing the World is one of aggression and violence you can have a better idea of who is provoking the painful situation in the Middle East. I will focus on the one from 2017, since it is the “current” one.

It starts talking about the land of Palestine, defining its limits as absolutely all the territory “from the river to the sea”, with absolutely no space anywhere in the Middle East for Israel, and how it all belongs to the Palestinian people. It pledges absolute loyalty to Islam, and puts the “right to return” to the “occupied land” as a priority for this religion.

It describes the “Zionist project” as a racist, colonialist, aggressive, and expansionist project, opposed to the “national project” for the Palestinians, that is, their legitimate “right to return” to where is now Israel, and states that there never should be any recognition of the “Zionist project” – that is, what the World calls Israel – Article 19 – and rejects any possible “alternative” solution or compensation – article 13. It does use the words “from the River to the Sea” and states that nothing must come in the way of the “resistance” against “occupation”. The “national project” must be the goal of all institutions that exist or might come to exist in Palestine

You see a lot of use of some nice words, like “peace”, “institutions”, and even “democracy” and “tolerance”, but they put these words in service of their fight goals, not their fight in service of those concepts. For instance, let’s take article 25. It states that “resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.” Note, it uses the nice words “international laws”, but just to say that their fight is protected by those laws, not, in any point, that the fight will be guided by these laws. They don’t have to follow the laws, it’s the laws that give them all the right.

And notice the use of the expression “with all means and methods”. That is, anything, absolute anything they ever do to “resist the occupation” is lawful. To have a military group ruling a country, a group whose charter says it will use “all means and methods” without even once submitting to any other convention or even mentioning any limits should be considered against Internation Law.

Article 28 says that Hamas adheres to managing the Palestinian relations in basis of “pluralism”, “democracy”, “partnership”, even “acceptance of the other”, but followed by the words “to fulfill the goals and aspirations of the Palestinian people”.

The whole charter is like a funnel, where a lot of things are thrown in, like “justice”, “freedom”, “human rights”, “basic principles”, and it all goes to a bottle’s neck, which is “national identity, national project and national goals”, and falls in the bottle, with is “resistance”. The goal of everybody, individuals and institutions in Palestine must be to serve the National Project, which is defined in the beginning of the Charter ss taking “back” the whole land and “resistance” is the most important form of serving this “project”.

Article 23 says that Jihad is a totally legitimate form of “resistance”, not forgetting that “resistance” is the most important thing of all and so Jihad is a “honor and a duty” for all Muslims. We know that their interpretation of Jihad means that their military actions are a duty toward God, and everything they do in that context is blessed. In fact, there were people in Gaza, right after October 7^th, shouting words of praise to God to celebrate the attack, that included cold blood murder of infants and rape of young woman.

In the end, it is clear that no law, convention or norm ever limits their religious interpretation of their “fighting duty”, which we know is absolutely radical. Where in the charter there is room for compromise or agreement? Where in the charter they speak of “resistance” as subjected or limited by any universal norm?

In article 9, Hamas states that Islam upholds the higher values of freedom, indignity and is the true enemy of discrimination, but this is a way of saying that Islam is the higher authority that should rule above all. Islam is above the international norms, and it is going to be someone’s interpretation of Islam of course. I think religion is good, but it definitely shouldn’t be the sole guide of military actions. Otherwise, their religious leaders always “know best” than anyone who comes to speak about international laws and norms.

It is clear that they place the right of the Palestinians to “return to their land” ss a duty above any other obligation. That is the justification for their total commitment to do everything possible against Israel, as long as anything called Israel exists.

And what can I say about this whole land issue? Well, Israel triplicated its size as a result of Wars that were started by Seven Nations against them. They gave back part of it – including Gaza – but not all. And when they gave back Gaza it became a home for Terrorism aimed toward Israel. Why? Because they wanted Israel to go back to its original size? Why don’t we read the Hamas Chart? They clearly state “nothing at all to the Zionist”.

By the way, you can be a Muslin in Israel. And instead of thinking just on the British mandate of Palestine, we can think of the Arab World. The Arabs have more than 7 million square kilometers in the middle east, and were asked to give 10 thousand to the Jews after World War II, and they didn’t accept. And the Israelis defended from their attacks and ended up with 22 thousand. How terribly colonialist, Imperialist are the Jews right? Who is surrounded by who?

Hamas knows that they can’t simply talk about this issue in terms of square kilometers of land, or material property. Jews lost a lot of material property in the 20^th century, that they had in Europe and in Muslim Arab countries. Hamas knows that a total materialist view on “land” can’t convince people yo give everything – their safety, their basic needs, their lives and the lives of their children – to fight for it.

If I once had a land, that was just a piece of land, and because of a conflict I was removed from it, I would accept monetary compensation. Right now. Most people would. Hamas knows that to engage a whole group of people in fighting to “return” to a land it is not enough to speak about land as property. They need to put it as a “special place”, a “holy place”.

The Hamas charter itself is at least good at this point: it clearly shows us that the point of the conflict is not property itself, but the concept of a “special place” for the identity of a people. This is not something so strange to humanity, we don’t live in a World of only material things. We adhere to concepts, we are loyal to ideals. The Muslims have a right to see a land as Holy, just as the Jews have. But everybody knows the holiest land for the Muslims is Mecca, birthplace of their prophet.

So, Hamas just happens to be claiming total rights, with no compromise, over their “second holiest place”, that just happens to be other people’s one and only holy land, for thousands of years. Now who’s expansionist?

And why would the Jews dream with a land? In the twentieth century the whole thing may sound even a little weird to some, but I see it in other way. Reading the Old Testament / Tanakh, which, whether you are religious or not, is at least an ancient group of texts that show the concerns and aspirations of a people during a long period of History, I see the dream of the Jewish people ss a dream of Peace and Union. The Bible says, “I will gather you again in Israel”, do the land is not only land, it is the place where the Jews will be “gathered”.

And seeing through this lens, the whole land thing doesn’t sound so anachronical. How can you have peace and union if you don’t have safety? Considering that the Jews have real reasons to be preoccupied with the safety of their people and their children in this World, given to the many persecutions they faced and that even they good experience in America is not without a dose of insecurity and antisemitism, they need a place to call their own. They need to gather in a place that gives them all the legitimacy ss a sovereign people. Where they are sure that the laws, the institutions will not be suddenly turned against them.

The Jews have good reasons to believe it wouldn’t work in any other place, like, let’s give the Jews this place here in the middle of Europe or something as compensation to the horrors of World War II. At any moment the tide could turn against them as it did many times in History, and someone could claim the “right of return”, saying that the choice for that specific place was arbitrary. Israel is the only place where they can answer to any “right of return” claim with one of the oldest documents in History, that show their identity as a people was built precisely around that land, and nobody else has nothing older or more culturally solid than the Torah.

Countries are not made of paving stone. To keep existing, it is needed that the people see themselves as somehow “in the same boat”. A lot of countries invested resources in affirming a National Identity, in order to create some Unity among the people. Cultural movements even reinvented or changed a little of their countries History to have a solid National Identity. Israelis don’t even have to invent nothing, since the basis for their peoplehood were laid millennia ago, and point precisely to that land. In the uncertain and volatile world we live, and considering that Jews are a small minority, they need something solid and very legitimate to build their sovereignty upon.

Now, of course Arabs and Muslims have the right to have all that too. But they have many sovereign states and nobody is claiming their holiest place. There were many bad things that happened in the 20^th century, but shouldn’t we be glad that the Muslim Arabs didn’t lose what was most important for them, neither did the Jews? And then, start to build a new future…

Hamas insists that there is a Palestinian people with right to return to Palestine. But they are culturally Arab Muslims. Hamas itself, in the charter, insists in the unity of the Muslim people. Of course it is a right they have, but the Jews don’t subdivide their Unity in a lot of sub-peoples to claim different parts of the World as their special places.

That land is clearly singular, and Hamas knows that. We live in a secular world, but this doesn’t mean materialistic. We live in these abstract things called countries, which are mainly dreams we have and defend. Israel should keep existing for mainly two reasons: their documented cultural and religious tie to the land, that is older than any other documented tie, and the fact that they don’t have any other.

Now a war is raging, as an Israeli response to a brutal surprise attack directly aimed at their civilians, and intentionally cruel and depraved. Images of horror overtook the whole country.

And people in the World want it all to stop, they don’t like the pain and death that come with such a war. Of course, who does? So they want peace. Who doesn’t?

But imagine you make a perfect law that nobody can touch a hair of nobody in absolutely any circumstance. That’s beautiful, but in practice, if someone breaks that law, you can do nothing about it because you would be breaking the law too. The role of Law is not to depict how the World would look like in a perfect situation, but precisely to give society the right to use some force in cases where people’s actions go really out of hand, otherwise we can’t keep a common goal of peace.

Of course it is more complex and painful when it comes not to individuals but nations, but the hard truth is that, just as it happens with individuals, if the peaceful and democratic countries swear to never use any force in any situation, what will the bad leaders of the World do?

War is the last resource, after all alternatives have been exhausted, and you know that it is necessary for keeping the hope of peace, and that you are serving the dream of a safer World for everybody.

There needs to be some response to some kinds of aggression. Unfortunately, you can’t just pray it don’t happen again. As for the genocide accusation, to even start to have a case that a country is committing genocide, you either need to show that a country is attacking without being provoked – which is not true given the October 7^th massacre – or that the number of civil casualties is disproportionally high – which is definitely not the case, considering the successes of Israel in this War and the Terrorist leadership eliminated, especially in a war where the enemy is embedded among the civilians more than in any other war known.

Just as the charter sees no limits to “resistance”, it doesn’t see the death of their own people in the process as a bad thing, since Jihad is “honor and duty” of every Muslim, and in their interpretation it includes being ready to die. Considering that, the numbers show that the Idf is working with a high degree of care.

In the Hamas charter, “resistance” is the only thing that matters, and it is by “any means necessary”. So it clearly shows that “liberating” the land with the killing of all Israelis wouldn’t be considered a bad thing. That is, a genocide against Israel would not be a bad thing.

          And they did “a little” of that in October 7^th. You can’t let such attack be considered “successful” by an enemy who is still there, trying to destroy you. The only possible answer is to fight the Terrorists, destroying the enemies’ capabilities for aggression. You act in the most ethical way you can, and you fight until a ceasefire is reached.

And what is a ceasefire? A ceasefire is a cessation of attacks from all sides. There are missiles falling on Israel too, the difference is that Israel is extremely committed to protect the lives of civilians, evacuating people from areas of danger and providing shelters to protect from bombs. Hamas has tunnels too, but normal people can’t get in there to protect themselves.

And, how does it work, the Cessation of attacks from all sides, if your opponent is ruled by a charter that says the main goal is the destruction of your country – by the way, forgive me if I’m blind, but I didn’t really believe there was any other goal there – and this enemy don’t subject himself to any external norm, and surprise attacks and breaking ceasefires are obviously included in “every form of resistance is legitimate?”

Why is so hard to the World to agree that Terrorist groups should surrender? There is nothing in their bag to build peace with.

It is not a situation where both sides are equal. Israel would just have to stop fighting, once peace is achieved. It would not have to surrender its institutions, because they are not aimed at “eradicating any Arab Muslim project from the Middle East”. And this is something to think about: both the Arab Muslims and the Jews are peoples who have deep roots in the Middle East, there is no debate about that. It’s also a region where Jews always had presence. Then why would the Jews have absolutely no place in the Middle East?

I hope it was clear that this essay was not one against Muslims, but against Hamas and other Terror Groups, so I’d like to finish it hoping that the Muslims more and more realize, as the good Muslims already certainly know, that they already have what they need and they should invest in opening doors to each other, and to the World – which would require a good level of deradicalization of some of their people, so they can pursue and achieve peace, happiness, health and prosperity.

Of Confusion And Aerodynamics

 

Did you notice that when people talk about someone they think is smart, they always say, in one way or another, that the person challenges the “status quo”? Probably because we feel there is too much bullshit around, and nobody wants to be on the side of the total conformists

But conformism shouldn’t be something we think about in strict political terms. If you observe, you’ll see that people in any of the political extremes think the people in the other side are conformists. But is it that simple?

If you say to the right wing guy that socialism is the solution, or if you say to a left wing guy that capitalism is going to solve all the issues, you fit into their scheme of things, and they are going to love to pretend they hate you. In fact, you are enforcing the image they have of themselves. But if you say to a capitalist that you believe in free commerce and industry, but we are doing it wrong, without higher values, or you say to a left wing person that you do believe  that this World is indeed due to a good deed for the poor and oppressed, but stimulating their anger and vengeance feelings will just result in more misery, then they are  really going to hate you, because they are going to feel threatened in their positions.

And if you think about the fact that sometimes authoritarian left wing governments rise in countries that were terrorized by extreme right in the past like some places in Latin America, and far right governments rise in places that were terrorized by extreme left like East Europe, and that the allyships between countries don’t follow a black and white “right with right”, “left with left” scheme – which is something you can see when you analyze the allies of the people in power in Russia, for instance – it really makes you doubt that picking one of the opposites really means nonconformity. Aren’t people in both the extremes playing by some rule?

Does this sound too conspiratory? Well, for my own sanity’s sake, I’ll assume that nobody is so powerful as to be able to control everything, like, year 14 this will happen, year 17 that, like a perfect plan where all the individual events in the World fall in place. No, I really don’t think that way, but there are definitely people who have too much to lose if they don’t find out what is the most advantageous moves they can make in the present, to guarantee their influence in the next years. What is best for their influence right now, what will be the leaders more willing to have their help? And if they want to gain more and more influence over people, there is no law that obliges them to go in a straight ideological line.

Democracy has a system of resources that shouldn’t allow things to get too “locked”, so nothing that the people in power do becomes irreversible, if we realize it wasn’t right. We may all have some strong beliefs, but if we are pursuing the truth, we must know that truth can only gain in a climate of freedom and serenity. Democracy is not God, neither does it bring us all we want automatically, it’s just the best arena we found to fight for what we believe, with fair play. Also, it is always good to listen to the opinion of others to the extent possible, and adjust our methods and even our goals according to things we learn, since nobody knows everything.

Because we don’t want to be nonconformists just for the sake of not conforming, right? In this World, there is more than one or two ways of being wrong, so not conforming to something is not a guarantee that you will be right.

People want to go against the “status quo” because they believe what is being offered to us is not the best, is not leading us to a better world. It’s important to note that all the sides say they want to bring “good”, “peace”, so what is a problem to us is that they are not coherent, and what will threaten their status quo is not simply that people desire good, is that we become more coherent.

Again, I know this idea seem too conspiratory if we imagine a little group in a small lit room saying “let’s make them less coherent”. But think of the algorithm of a machine instead. The programmer told it to raise the X, X being the current value of something. The algorithm realizes that when the system does A, X increases, and when it does B, X decreases. So the algorithm tries to push the system to do more A and less B.

In fact, this is a simplification of how human mind works, at least the side of our minds that is worried with quantitative results – and some people have that side of their minds totally prevalent. So, if for a group of powerful people, it is important to influence the people in a country, and they want to do it with money, they are going to evaluate, for themselves and now with the use of technology, what kind of investment brought the better result. That is, what type of propaganda makes people more influenceable.

Back to algorithms, let’s think about Internet. They feed us with the things that the algorithm found we tend to react more to, not the things we would consciously like to be seeing. Like a guy who would like, if asked, to be more cultured, but has a weakness for, let’s say, soft porn or very dark humor. He still can’t read ten posts about poetry in a row. On the other hand, he sometimes goes very far with soft porn and very dark humor. He feels a little guilty, but the algorithm is satisfied with his higher “engagement”

We all have two sides, and obviously politics, especially the big scale politics, will have to be in that game of talking to our more impulsive selves, otherwise their opponents will win. It’s all about numbers, and they believe they can’t afford to be too “goody-goody”. I think we must remember that the real righteous ethical behavior is a tree that is growing slowly since the beginnings and it is still not fully represented in real big scale politics.

Big scale politics have their place, of course, it is necessary, but to do our part in a Democracy, that is, to choose the candidate we think is better for that moment in History, and to behave much better than them in our lives, we need the very thing that our content sources won’t give us by themselves: coherence.

I do believe that searching hard for real coherence in your life is about the most nonconformist thing you can do. If you think, it is much easier to “satisfy” the people if they have a mind that is separated into pieces that don’t speak to each other. You just have to satisfy each piece, each “department” of that mind, with some pill, and the whole of what you are selling don’t have to make sense.

If we allow, they might just “satisfy” our need for God with some very homeopathic spiritual sugar, and at the same time satisfy our need for sex with pornography. (Yes, I’ve been there, and I still have nothing against masturbation, but pornography involves other people, and it’s mean and getting meaner). We will feel a little guilty, but maybe comforted by the fact that people on the other political side “are far worst”, and then we move on.

And I have not been really following the trends, but I imagine they must have some really good pills to satisfy a person’s desire for being solidary with some “gay right, woman right” pill and the person’s desire for Justice Between Nations with some “Islamic Extremists are not the worst” pill. The sugar rush is so good you don’t even remember to try to put those pieces together, which would be impossible.

So, the Internet bosses have their commercial algorithm that don’t have a side in itself, but for mathematical reasons privileges the content that speaks to our lower selves. And then we have a lot of agents, commercial, industrial, political, ideological, fighting for numbers in that jungle, each speaking to a particular desire we may have, and never worrying if our ends meet.

I used to be dismayed by incoherence, like, how can these people say those words and do these things? But then I realized that incoherence is the “normal” of mankind, ever since the words “peace” and “good” got into fashion but the giants didn’t fall.

It’s coherence that must be hardly pursued and it is coherence that ends up being the most subversive of all, in the good sense. Because as our mind gets more and more coherent, that is, our different goals become more compatible, we find out that it takes effort, it takes creativity, to live a coherent, a whole life, in a fragmented World. A lot of time we will have to be the ones that do things “a little different”, in school, in the work, etc. That’s why being a nonconformist is not all about politics, it’s about trying to be yourself as much as you can in all areas of your life.

Of course, this road brings some pain, because so many people instinctively react in a negative way to what is different. Not being accepted is painful. A lot of people dismiss the psychological and emotional hardships that badmouthing and exclusion, even persecution, cause. It’s as if people totally forgot that most official conventions against torture define it as cruelly inflicting pain be it physical or psychological. People turn a blind eye to that and say things like “you look healthy, nobody is beating you, you’re eating, you have nothing to complain”.

I saw a video of some Jewish young people inside a school library, while there were people outside punching the doors and windows and screaming against them. People tried to dismiss the ones who were protesting again this aggression, mentioning that the police later said, “there was no actual danger of physical harm”. Really? Even if it is so, isn’t this kind of injury, offense, this attempt of demoralizing, bad enough? Is this what we should say for young people who are persecuted? “Well, nobody broke any bones…”

 Usually, the people who are unable to see the pain of someone who “didn’t break any bones” are people who never even once tried to swim against the tide. There is a lot of conformity that starts in school, a lot of “I’m like the hot ones, the different are the losers”, which just teaches people who gather in groups even without sharing real values. Obviously, there is a lot of “content” in the Internet that enforces this kind of behavior. I do believe people can change, but the fact is that a lot of people don’t. A lot of people go to college, or to work, and while they pledge allegiance to more noble values, their mind is still in the “I’m like the hot ones, the different are losers” mode. Peer pressure and humiliation are strong weapons of conformity since always, and we can still see it at play everywhere, in the virtual and the real World.

I know that the violence in this World goes far beyond “just” psychological, including the violence against Jews, but I am writing this to say that I know that times are not very easy for people who want to go against the waves, be it in politics, their jobs or any other scale.

Well, I have never been the kind of guy who says “never give up on nothing”. Sometimes people give up things, nobody was born with the perfect plan on their heads. But wherever you go, and I hope you go to the places you know are right for your trajectory, you may find hard times. I hope you are not alone, but if you are alone at some moment, I have something I always think.

Imagine a person that is doing something that he knows to be the right thing, but no one else knows it. Well, he knows it, so it is like a reality that only exist towards him. But since nothing in this Universe can have only one side, then there must be a pair of “eyes” in the other side, right? That’s a way to connect to something higher, I believe.

Where I was?  Oh, yes, the necessity and the hardships of going a little against the tide, be it by doing things differently, taking a stand for what you believe, or simply saying no to the algorithms.

I need a bit of “content” in my life like everybody else, but more and more I am taking care not to become a walking Babel Tower. You won’t get a better vision of the World consuming “everything” that’s around. You need space to let things you learned long ago to give its fruits.

Being a little inside your own mind is how you conciliate new information with the essence of who you are. Like an artist that will not be at his creative best if he is so worried with the trends that he doesn’t have time to remember things that moved him in his childhood. And I think being ourselves – which doesn’t mean following all impulses, which are reactions to external things, but on the contrary, finding your true essence – is the only way you can be something different than what “they” want you to be. And maybe “they” just want us to fit in any of the stereotypes offered. Which are obviouslly not coherent.

 

The Mist And The Machine - Volume 3