The Non-Negotiable Minimum

 The present moment should be clear. There is a ceasefire signed by Israel and Hamas, that says not only that Israel will gradually withdraw from Gaza, but also Hamas will disarm, its terror capabilities will be dismantled and they will not rule Gaza anymore. Why isn’t the World, the leaders, the press, the people in the street, demanding that not only Israel, but mainly Hamas, uphold what they signed?

Wouldn’t it be the best for everybody? Since when being ruled by masked men who can kill whoever they want is a good thing? But the World seems to be too resented for that. Resented with Israel for the simple fact that they went to war, and there was pain and suffering. This is war, although in the present the Western World feels too safe from it, to need to really look at the complexity of conflicts.

There is a long-held common notion, through History, that a country has a right and a duty to defend itself, and war is sometimes unfortunately necessary. Now people don’t want to see any war – although they are focused on this one more than any other, God knows why – even if they don’t offer any other solution for Terrorism.

But till recently in the History of mankind, nobody would have any shadow of a doubt that something like oct 7^th was reason enough to go to war against the source of that attack, of that danger.  

Of course, mankind must always evolve in the direction of seeing more and more the value of the life of everybody, but unfortunately it doesn’t change the reason why some wars are considered justifiable in first place. A justified war is a war against something that destroys the peace of the innocent without cause.

Some people want to bring up a complex past between Israel and Palestine to deny that peace was broken there, but there was no open war In October 7^th, Israel was not striking Gaza before more than a thousand Israelis were indiscriminately and intentionally slaughtered by surprise.

Of course a war must always be the last resource. They should we waged only when there is no other way to ensure the minimal decent safety of your people. It is not reasonable to let a massacre go unresponded. It increases exponentially the chance of happening again, and in the near future.

When someone stabs someone to death in the street to steal her, we know that if these things pass unresponded, this criminal will do it again, and more people will do it too. We don’t say, “oh, you are speculating, nobody knows the future, maybe he won’t”.

Of course nothing excuses a country of defending itself with ethic. And Israelis do take risks for themselves, for instance, when they make war on the ground instead of just by air, or when they give up the element of surprise to warn Gazan civilians of where the strikes will be.

But taking risks is one thing. Doing nothing against the source of danger is another. You can’t expect a country to give up their own people’s defense against imminent danger.

And when this “doing nothing” ceases to be simply a risk and becomes forsaking? Precisely after the killing already started, as it did on October 7^th. From that moment on, every decision carries the weight, the weight of responsibility, of avoiding a future where you would look back and know you have forsaken your own people to death and horror.

This modern way of seeing things, of trying to care for everybody, is good, but can it make the act of abandoning your own people to their own fates a good thing? Should we conclude that?

I know it’s hard, painful, and I thought a lot about it. Think with me. Isn’t the notion of caring for your people, your own children, too basic, too essential, for such a trade-off to ever be righteous in this World? I think this can’t ever be what will bring us good.

And if you think straight about how the World works, it’s obvious that it won’t bring good. As I’ve said before, obviously that dilemma was proposed by Evil, evil groups, real groups and with real intentions and plans. So, with leaving horror unresponded, at the cost of your people’s minimal safety, what good is guaranteed for the World?

Evil exist, and it is not under control. There is no level of prediction at all about what murderous groups can do. You give freedom to violence, and it will take lives. There is an Ideology of death growing in the Middle East and in parts of Africa for a long time.

This same people you think you would be protecting by not fighting terror, can be turned against themselves. With this terror groups in positions of power, fighting for even more power, there is always the tendency for more blood.

Civil wars, like the Syrian civil war, that killed 300 thousand, the Yemeni Civl war, that killed 375 thousand, among other examples. You never know how far it can go. The Second Congo War killed 3 million.

This is not speculation. There is no gravitational center of peace in this World, where things left on their own “naturally fall back to”. Letting massacres of your own people go without strong answer would be for no good in mid and long term.

This is not abstract thinking. It is a sad truth rooted in reality, the same sad truth that made the strikes by the Allies in World War II justified.

It is the sad reality of a war that someone else provoked. You never aim at civilians, and try to mitigate civilian harm as much as possible. But you can’t totally avoid civilian tragedy, especially when your enemy doesn’t care at all for the safety of their own people and use them as shields.

Why the World doesn’t scream against using people as human shields? They think that Hamas represents the Palestinians, which are a “poor people”, so the Hamas is the “poor side”, so they don’t have to have the minimum of integrity? 

So, an enemy like that makes the work of mitigating collateral harm especially hard. Unless you are willing to give up on doing anything at all to avoid the worst for your own people. But if you do give up, you are not helping to bring a World of peace. On the contrary. You are just giving freedom to a monster that is trying to eat the whole World.

Let’s hope for peace. Real peace. But the ground is been shaking for a while, and peace doesn’t always come as naturally as we would like it to. I think this might be the best moment we had so far, for the World to defeat Terrorism. Terrorism, which is the worst thing not only for Jews, but for Muslins and for everybody.

No, nobody should ever be demanded to throw all their strength away in times of terrible danger, and then be hoping, against all odds, that it wasn’t totally in vain.

Waves of Hatred

We can see clearly, at this point, that antisemitic incidents and mentality are at a peak. You can look in the news for the incidents, you can check the numbers that show it rising after Israel went into a war provoked by a massacre they suffered.

It is very preoccupying, to say the least, to see how leaders everywhere are dealing, or not dealing, with the situation. They disguise the problem of rising antisemitism by speaking against “all forms of prejudice”. Yes, we must fight all forms of prejudice, but when you refuse to name one specific problem that deserves to be highlighted at this precise moment, you are neglecting to give a group of people the attention they deserve, when some things are pointed specifically to them. No other form of prejudice, I think, had a rising to steep in these recent times.

It seems that the leaders are desperately avoiding any real conflict with the latest “righteous” trend to place all the blame in Israel for the suffering that began with October 7^th. But by allowing a  group to be harassed, to be cut from working in the Art world, in the literary World, lose professional opportunities, even suffer violence – there were murders – that was aimed specifically at their identity, you are weakening one of the main pillars that sustain what we call civilization – that hatred between groups must not be allowed to grow, to generate violence and banishment.

Of course a lot of people will say it is not antisemitism – just “antizionism”. But the Jews that support Israel as a Nation – not speaking about specific governments – are an overwhelming majority of Jews. The connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel is thousands years World, even if only in prayer. “Zionism” was the belief that they should aim to return to their ancestral land – they had no other place to call their own. Now, in the present, “Zionism”  simply represents the belief that Jews have the right to live in Israel and defend it. If half of the World was saying that France should not exist, they would need a “Francism”, too.

The Jews that support Israel deserve protection because they are not committing any crime. They are not preaching violence, definitely not preaching any theory of supremacy, they just disagree with a noisy group of people when it comes to foreign events. They have a right to not believe the “suspiciously biased” news people have been receiving. They have a different version of the facts, and have a right to democratically speak about it. They don’t defend “genocide”, they just think – like I think – that this is simply not what is happening. They believe this war is one of the wars that unfortunately need to be fought.

Think about the meaning of the expression “war crime”. There is a reason why there is a thing called “war crime”. If a war can have “war crimes” or not, it means that “war” itself is not necessarily a crime. Civilians tragically die in all wars, and that’s one of the main reasons why war must always be the last resource, after other ways of solving the problem have all been tried and you have no option but fight for your safety.

It is hard for many people to accept that, because people don’t want war, and they shouldn’t. But sometimes someone else starts a war, and if you don’t fight, you can die. As I always say, nowadays people agree that Nazi Germany should be defeated, and that was needed to be fought. In the case of Israel, they were horribly attacked at home. How could they not want to eliminate that source of horror?

I’ll simplify this with an illustration: you are at your backyard with your family and someone from the other side of your back wall throws a grenade where you are. You run to it and scream: “Hey, I’m gonna throw it back”. Another grenade comes from back there, and you don’t know what’s happening next. You grab both and scream: “I am throwing it back now!”. And you throw it. You can’t be considered a criminal for what happened on the other side.

Now, of course someone could use this kind of reasoning to justify some wrong deed. That’s why, even if some wars are justified, you need to show clearly it was not you who provoked it, you must act under the International Law and remain accountable. Israel did all this. They didn’t ignore when the International Court of Justice opened a case for genocide. They went there to defend themselves. And they won.

There is a talk that the Court found genocide “plausible”. That was before the judgement. “Plausible” means just that a case is valid enough for a trial to even start. Like, it’s “plausible” that that man stole a car, so let’s bring it to the court. Then we will say if he did it or not. The final verdict matters far more than the initial “plausibility”. It’s like the International Court said, “the complaints have a right to be listened”. But the final word was “no”. No genocide. And nobody who saw the performances in UN can say the international organizations are biased “in favor” of Israel.

It's hard for us, from far, to understand the world the Israelis live in. The Middle East is a land that is trembling. Dictators rise, dictator fall, replace by other dictators, terrorist groups with no allegiance to any universal moral limits grow and dominate regions.

There are dark colors in the landscape. People live under the rule of groups that preach nothing but violence as solution for all the problems. It’s not a desirable life at all, I think. Under oppressive “religious” regimes, anyone can be denounced for not following the “religious” law. You can also be denounced for not being loyal to the regime. These are arbitrary regimes, so they are not under a constitution, which means the punishment can be arbitrary and cruel.

I still didn’t forget what happened when the US withdrew from Afghanistan. People were so afraid that Taliban would take over – which they did. People desperately tried to be taken with the US military to somewhere else. A teenage boy, who dreamed of being a soccer player, died tried to travel in the wheel compartment of a plane. Soon, Taliban was in power, and life became dark again. People living extremely frustrating lives.

And these groups do the best to canalize the frustration that they themselves created in their favor, to take advantage that people are deeply frustrated to make them place the blame in someone else – the Jews, the Americans, the West – and become radicalized. And a lot of people do become extremely radical.

It’s not a good land for dreams. Men walk around with guns and with their faces hidden by black masks, having the power to kill, to torture. That’s the scenario. A kind of dark heat growing in much of the Middle East. And the favorite target of hatred is of course the Jew. This is the atmosphere around Israel.

And on October 7^th the ground under Israel has shaken violently. Something happened that people didn’t think was possible. A massacre so horrible that it is impossible to describe the cruelty. And that was the first event in this sequence that unfolded. And the future was uncertain. And Israel went to war, to destroy the group that perpetrated that horror. The ground would not stop shaking any other way.

The academic people say they see humanity in hurt Gazan individuals – they say they care for every single life lost – that would be not wrong, but when they talk about hurt Israelis, Israelis that were brutally murdered, women violated, they instead focus on the perpetrator and their “sociological” motivations, they focus on excusing the perpetrator “sociologically”, never on the victim. No Israeli victim was seen by them as individuals.

They claim there is an “apartheid” there, as if securing your borders and trying to keep track of terrorist organizations was the same as discriminating your own citizens based on race, which Israel doesn’t do. After October 7^th, instead of realizing that Israelis were right to be cautious – look what happened – a lot of people inverted the logic, saying that the horrific attack was a logic consequence of Israeli “exaggerated” security measures.

Of course Israel is not perfect, as no country or no Society is, but should the World condemn Israel to accept all horror that befalls them, for not being perfect?

And most of the news – not to mention the “random” social media – just offered snapshots of the war. Israel striking and the side effects. They didn’t seem to care that Hamas, who started it, was still attacking, and they could stop it all anytime, by returning the hostages and surrendering their destruction machine.

They don’t say that all peace proposals Israel made to their main enemies – there were many – were always rejected. They don’t tell an almost 80 years History where Israel only continues to exist because they fought back when needed. One of the things that Israel accomplished during this war was to seriously damage Iran’s nuclear program. Iran finances Hamas and was – it’s been proven – one step from making a nuclear bomb.

People prefer to choose the easiest version, the version that says Israel could have “just stopped”. It’s easier for them to pacify their conscience, not having to deal with hard questions. Not having to think on all the work that needs to be done to bring peace to the Middle East, and to the World.

So they ask Israel to leave their people in danger of new horrors, while the World offers no solution. For Israel or for Gaza, for that matter.

Then the hate speech against Israel and Jews goes more and more to the extreme. A lot of people seem to think it is not the time, right now, to condemn the neo-Nazis that crawled out of their caves recently to hitchhike on the wave of “criticism”. Some think that this time they might not be so wrong. Some are starting to think that maybe they were never completely wrong. Oh, Lord.

This is what you get for looking so fast for the easier answer, instead of facing the facts and demanding that the World fixes the real problem. Why was it always so hard to simply include Hamas’ surrender in the demands?

Oct 7 proved that the danger was bigger than anyone thought, and nobody could be too certain about the future. Especially with Iran and Qatar funding all the terror and so much of the World turning blind to the suffering and the danger in the only democracy of the Middle East. If Israel didn’t focus on the dismantling of Hamas, it is obvious that the cycle would go on indefinitely.

Now, because we think the World with no war that we live in is easy to achieve anywhere, and we blame Israel for the fact this World with no war still simply does not exist in the Middle East, antisemitism then comes back. Why it always does? There are more deadly conflicts in other parts of the World… Why every time History seems to be at a crossroads, the Jews are on the line? I surely don’t have the ultimate answers for the causes of Antisemitism, but I have been thinking on some aspects of it.

Think, there is difference between someone who wants to influence people in a positive way, enrich their lives, help them grow and be more independent, and someone who wants to use people for his own selfish agenda. And if you are interesting of growing this kind of selfish influence, what is more profitable? To try to destroy old prejudices or to ride them? To fight old fears or take advantage of them?

When you surf hatred, you can gain followers, by being perceived as “the one that had courage to say what nobody else is saying about that people” – even if there are a million idiots saying the exact same thing. It brings concrete political gain if you are a politician, or if you are someone in the media, it gives you audience, that can be converted to political influence.

When you surf fear, you can push conspiracy theories, and generate distrust in Civilization. You make people believe that there is no solution “inside the system”, that institutions are worth nothing and we must abandon the hope of using the institutions in our favor. Then people are ready to welcome and cheer new “saviors”.

Corruption exists, but the institutions also represent a common wealth of values of humanity, they can be improved, of course, but a total distrust in everything, a total disbelief in any common ground, have very bad consequences for society, and very greedy politicians know that, but they do it anyway.

This is happening in the Western World, and a harder and more extreme version of it is been long growing in the Middle East. In a lot of places, all possibility of trust in anything that relates to a “modern” Civilization – and they call almost everything “modern” – has been replaced by hopes of a Paradise that they will find in the next corner of History, when they finally defeat the enemies, the infidels. Which mainly means Jews, but not only.

All this, of course, ends up working against the very people the extremists pretend to be defending. Because the “cause” is infinitely more important than the lives of people, they have an excuse to harass, to beat, to kill. Hamas rules Gaza through terror, and recently they have been very active in silencing – including with executions – dissents that emerged during the time of war, when Hamas didn’t care for nobody except themselves, even being caught in video stealing aid from the people.

Now, let’s see what we have in the present, this very moment. A ceasefire deal was signed, and it says not only that Israel will gradually withdraw from Gaza, but also that Hamas will give away their weapons and not be governing Gaza anymore.

Will the World demand, that not Israel, but also Hamas, uphold it? Or is it politically incorrect to demand the surrender of a terrorist organization?

The attitude of most of the World toward this present ceasefire situation shows once again that Israelis have a reason to be worried with their future, with their safety. The difficulty so many people, including political leaders, have shown to demand the dismantling of Hamas military power – as the deal determines – show that Israel can’t take the World’s good sense for granted. It shows the uncertainty Israel lives in.

Israelis live surrounded by a region that is not in the 21^st century, in terms of mentality. We live in a World where we can say big wars are part of the past – and I hope they continue to be, but that is not where they live. And they are not magically protected from the brutal past that lives around them.

Israel didn’t make the ground on Middle East shake, but that’s the world they live in. And the World have the opportunity now to show it really condemns terrorism – not with vague statements, but in a concrete way.

It is time to choose if we will endorse fake theories, used to relativize the pure evil perpetrated by terrorists – like a fake theory of stolen land, that keeps people stuck in the heat of hatred – or we will do something for real peace.

When so many people, who claim to be so worried about human beings around the Globe, seem unable to condemn fascistic dictators who oppress their own people, for me it is clear that their focus is hatred – hatred for Israel, hatred for America – not really solidarity with the poor.

If it wasn’t by hatred, and the fear that some people have to lose business opportunities abroad – the World would be able to see clearly the two paths we have ahead of us, to choose.

Will we take the path of saying that the only democracy in the Middle East is always the villain, and terror organizations are not so wrong, which allows a domino effect that ends up making a country like America hate some of their most honest citizens? And, of course, just allows Hamas to rearm and increase the cost of their defeat again.

Or will we take the path that really is more likely to bring us a safer world, for everybody – the path of opposing tyrants and fighting terrorism, knowing that waves of hatred never stop on their own, and you never know how far they will go…?

You don't do good for humanity fearing to place the responsibility on people who couldn't care less for it. You just allow evil people to turn everything upside-down.

Try No Terror

 I was hearing in my mind academic voices saying things like “You pro-Israel people are denying the Historic Processes of Oppression and their endurance, you deny that, if not fought back somehow, these things persist in time, because of the System.”

Then I realized: they are the ones who are saying that a people that has been persecuted through centuries until 6 million were finally thrown into gas chambers, became the contrary in last than one hundred years. They seem to be saying that those “Historic Structures of Oppression” are very easily changed very quickly, right?

But wait, aren’t the Muslin Arabs historically oppressed? Where? Let’s take Palestine then, for instance. When they were historically oppressed there? In the centuries they lived under the caliphs or the five hundred years they lived under the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, or the 28 years under Britain?

It was Muslins living under the rule of Muslins.

Unless you consider the Sultans part of the oppressed. And the sheiks. But don’t you realize you will be calling men who smoke fancy cigars and have collections of luxury cars, and rivers of petroleum, an oppressed group? Don’t you see how crazy this is?

This is the story of a people who were outcast and persecuted everywhere, and another people who, if oppressed, were being oppressed by their own leaders. Then finally the Ottoman Empire was over, and less than one percent of the Middle East was given to the Jews after the genocide they suffered. That less than one percent was in their Holy Land, the place they prayed to return to, generation after generation.

In that map redefinition, Jews had to flee Arab countries in a hurry not to be killed, Jews had to leave Europe, some after their family had just been exterminated, and a group of Arabs had to flee the part of Palestine that was given to the Jews. The number of displaced Jews in the Middle East is at least as big as the Arabs.

A lot of sad aspects to it, but still a deal that was fair enough, and the Jews were right to accept. They were right to not step back when the Arabs said “no, we want to rule one hundred percent of the Middle East, not ninety-nine and something”. Those Jews didn’t want to be forever without a land of their own, and they had very good reasons for that. In their tradition, and in their past and recent History.

They then had to fight for it, because Arab countries attacked, seven nations against one, and the Jews miraculously won. And they were attacked again, and again. After some time, the modus operandi of their enemies was not so much open war anymore, but the funding of Terror Groups, so these groups can attack and Israel supposedly can’t fight back, because these group “are not” the countries, even when they rule a region like Gaza or a piece of Lebanon.

Of course some people think, why armies? Why soldiers? Why guns? I wish things were so simple that anytime you “spoke with someone with open heart” you could completely avoid violence. But if that was the case, we wouldn’t have so much violence all over the World. All over the World countries need police, countries need armies.

Doesn’t the existence of this ideology that says “Death to Israel” – in their own words, read the Hamas charter, listen to the interviews of their leaders – doesn’t the existence of this ideology change the reality? Doesn’t it make us think, well, Israel needs to take precautions, there were thousands of Terror attacks, they need security measures, they need to arrest people that throw stones – stones can kill, and that’s the intention of the throwing. They need to check people who cross borders.

Isn’t it insane to be complaining about that instead of thinking of how could the Palestinian people move away from this ideology?

How can anyone say Israel doesn’t want peace if their enemies didn’t try peace yet even once?

Couldn’t they ever have tried nothing different? Didn’t money get in there somehow? How much do a maze of large tunnels under cities cost? Could it have been spent on something else?

Now, after the horrible massacre of October 7^th, Israel had to go to war. Imagine if the rulers of your neighbor country commanded October 7^th in your country. Imagine it happened closed to your home. Wouldn’t you want to go after that group of people? Wouldn’t you have to?

Now don’t use numbers to invert the logic. All that happened later was war, and wars are not beautiful. Israel proves it don’t target civilians. Israel offered peace many times through decades. The images from Gaza, that’s what wars look like.

There is an evil campaign against Israel everywhere, but the question we should be asking is simple: who should ask for the end of this war?

Television showed people from Gaza say they don’t want bombings. Of course. I wish, and I am being sincere, that people in Gaza would say, “We don’t want any war with Israel, now or ever”. 

Isn’t it a good first step for the changes people say they want, for the better of Palestinian people? They can’t say that because of that ideology. Because of Hamas.

It’s time for the World to show we don’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing a Terror Group gone.

Television is mostly believing Hamas claims that they didn’t break the ceasefire when Israel strikes, even when Israel shows videos of Hamas violating the deal, but most journalist are “forgetting” to remind people that Hamas agreed to put down their weapons. Isn’t this crucial for peace?

So many people spent this entire time saying they “differentiate the people of Gaza from Hamas”. Yes, let’s do this differentiation, this separation, but not only in our little hearts, but in reality. Free the people of Gaza from Hamas. What better opportunity than now?

This war is not what I wanted for the people of Israel and the people of Gaza. But as I said, we need to get the people of Gaza to say, “We want peace. Now and in the future. Gaza just wants to mind its business”.

 

Choices

 

People that fight for values X People who distort values to look good

( this is kind of a reminder to myself, for whenever I fail to recognize the masks that Evil uses, and start to give importance to things that are not worth nothing to the good people of the World )

Rivers of Power

I spoke, in an earlier essay, about the power I believe the Academic World has. Don’t take me wrong, I don’t go for those kind of weird theories that say someone have some Godly power, by which they control all the events in the World like a perfect chess game, I just think that there are groups and institutions that fight for influence.

I’m also not saying all the teachers in the World are the same, obviously, or that we don’t need schools – we need – but if there is one completely dominant line of thought, then the growth of the Academy and the growth of this ideology will mean exactly the same.

It is natural that groups fight to gain more influence, but Academy should be the arena, a battlefield for different lines of thought to compete, not the headquarters of one.

The way we have things now makes it extremely easy for ideological groups that have influence, to completely obliterate other people, to point to an opinion that someone has, deem it evil, deem the person evil, then justify the complete shutting of all the doors to that person, to the point of making impossible for someone to keep earning a living in their field of work, even having committed no crime that can be proven. This is a big power.

Of course, when we speak about power of the Academy, it may sound contradictory to the vision many people have, that it is capitalism that rules the World, and if the Academy says they are against Capitalism, then Academy must to be the rebels, not part of the system, right?

Yes, money has a big power in the World, huge power. Harvard, for instance, have been receiving a billion dollars in donations every year, recently. Things are not so simple, so bidimensional, as some think.

Follow me here: If the system of capitalism is so closed and controlling everything, and the mainstream Academy is so rebellious and dangerous to it, why this “omnipotent” system allowed the Academy to be there, and be so prestigious? Why didn’t they built another Academy, more aligned with their thought, with all the money and power they have?

The Academy still benefits from the prestige they received due to the many advances that the Scientific Thinking brought to the World, the advances that physics brought to engineering, and chemistry and biology brought to medicine, and more. Why wouldn’t the powerful super rich want in on their side? Why wouldn’t they do anything to get that legitimacy to their side?

At some point in my life, I couldn’t help but start thinking that maybe the mainstream Academical thought is not so bad for the money World, or at least to a big part of it. International commerce is a huge thing, and I think a lot of people don’t want to see this business being affected by considerations about the level of democracy of countries, or even respects for human rights. There is a lot of people that deal with big money, that don’t want to displease leaders of rich authoritarian countries in the Middle East, for instance.

Our mainstream intellectuals don’t challenge these people. On the contrary, they somehow made it wrong to say too much bad things about someone who is “not white”, even if it is a bloodthirsty dictator, he can’t be the real big villain. The Marxists have their explanations for why you can’t really place blame on those people.

When you have a “logic” system of thought, with intellectual credentials printed on it, that says that a group of super rich dictators can’t be the real bad guys, a lot of greedy people will be happy with it.

Let’s think about all this logic, once again. The prestige of the Academic World, the success it showed in many areas, came from simplifying the situations to a few variables, which allows us to make predictions using plain mathematics. This works fine for phenomena of the physical World, but some thinkers hitchhiked on this success of Science to propose simplistic schemes of how Society works as a whole.

Karl Marx simplified all the process through which people produce things to very few elements, to say that a person can’t be a profiting business owner without stealing his employees. He reasoned that, if someone buys a set of things, then sells a transformed version of those things for a higher price, it means he paid less than the value of something when he bought. Then he said it can’t be the technology or the raw material, so it’s got to be the work of the employee that was underpaid  - that’s a simplified version, but the reasoning is basically this.

He didn’t say employees should be paid better, but that wherever there was profit, there was stealth, as if Civilization itself had not started and grown precisely because of the fact that the Earth can give to man more than he puts in it, and creativity has the power of multiplying things.

To be honest, the left wing economists evolved, in their language and mathematical approach, from that ultra simplistic vision Marx had of Economy, but that simplistic original Marxist thought planted a seed that is still defining the general view these people have of the Universe. The idea of a very limited World where everything that is gained creates a vacuum somewhere else, and peace cannot be built without a total rebellion.

In the Marxist World, people still see any kind of success or comfort that someone may have in Society as something gained necessarily at expense of someone else. The algorithm in the head of most people in the Academic World who say they are concerned with social causes is still very simplistic, and the main focus, that once was about workers and bosses now is about race, and a concept of race hiper simplified by the tone of color of the skin.

They take abominable facts of the past, like slavery, which is real and must not be forgotten, and say it is still the base of all that we have in the present. The past does have consequences in the present, we can’t deny, but there are always factors that they downplay, when it comes to explain the stagnation of some sectors of our society, like the pervasiveness of mass culture, and drugs, and so on. They also often disregard the many aspects in which our society already evolved in human terms, so they create a World View that justifies rebellion against absolutely anything, even violence, to no gain at all.

All this to keep the Marxist view that Society won’t evolve, won’t fix the problems that are still there without big mass movements as the main – or sometimes only – possibility of redemption. And in the end, of course, instead of giving people the tools they need as individuals to grow and do better for their families and communities, they create a World where all that matters is politics. Yes, in the end, they make political and ideological leaders our only saviors.

And they extend their view to the Global situation, oversimplifying the very complex History and present of the World to that same tone-of-color scheme. For instance, they are always kind of blind to the fact that Arabian countries are not “poor victims” of History, that those countries we always very smart players. They made huge fortunes in the time of land trade of spices and other things the Europeans wanted from the East, when they controlled the land routes and intermediated everything.

They lost their protagonism in that matter when Europe braved the sea routes, but kept making money, including with slavery. Yes, they made money with slavery of black people, and not just a little. Research it. Then, of course, when petroleum became a super powerful thing and they found they were sit on the biggest reserve of it, they gained protagonism again. And they have an interesting partnership with Russia, which has very big reserves of a lot of natural resources.

All this don’t fit the simplistic view of the World that mainstream intellectuals want us to swallow, where tone of color defines oppressed and oppressors. That’s the problem with start reducing the complex History of Humanity more and more to simple equations.

To be fair, much of the capitalist world also subscribes to a simplistic logic. Adam Smith simplified all the processes through which people trade things to very few elements, to say that the fact that, in the world of trade, each person seeks his own benefit, will bring a mathematical equilibrium that automatically will lead us always to a better place, as if the constant difference of urgency that a particular transaction has for each part didn’t require that men keep consulting the old richness of wisdom and morals that humanity gained through centuries, and is still our biggest treasure.

Of course, more and more people in the world of work and production are realizing that supply and demand don’t give us all we need for people to have satisfaction in their lives. More and more people are bringing human values to the world of work.

Think about “meritocracy”. I don’t believe in it in a Darwinist way, like, “let the non-adapted perish”, there’s no reason why not to lend a hand for people who haven’t reach their full potential yet, but in the simple sense of rewarding people who maximized their creative contribution, yes, it is necessary. But more and more people are coming to see that just saying “no to Stalin” and “yes to profit” is not enough to bring real meritocracy, there are a lot of human tendencies to cheapness that need to be overcome, and we always have more to learn about ethics. And I hope more people are realizing that the same applies to “Fair Competition”.

But the people who deal with huge scale international commerce, still seem to be guided solely by immediate numbers. It seems that these people, generally speaking, won’t do nothing to raise awareness about how some of the biggest players in International Commerce disregard democracy and even human rights.

All this may be good for “business as usual” but if we don’t make clear that we don’t approve dictators that disrespect basic freedom, and if we don’t denounce – and some of us even support – ideologies that teach people to place all the blame for all their problems on someone else, some other people, then we are encouraging the growth of armed hate groups. Terror groups, that can be used by wicked political leaders to destabilize regions and bring fear to the World, always with some pretext for refusing peace when it is offered to them.

We should be doing all our efforts to urge the Middle East countries that want to be seen as peaceful to condemn all murderous ideologies that propose the extermination of someone else as the solution. But sometimes we do the exact opposite, giving wicked leaders, that don’t care for their own people, not to mention about the other people, special sits in our “Conventions”.

So, this is how Academy can grow in power, because they are not a natural enemy of all the greedy, they are just a group that learned an algorithm, that they can increase their influence with a simplistic ideology that allows them to pose as rebels while not really setting anybody free.

I definitely don’t know the future, and sometimes it seems that these Rivers of Power have a mind of their own. I hope they don’t take us to a World where money flows freely but thought is more and more controlled. It can create a World where anyone can be banned – which feels like death – at any time, arbitrarily. It won’t do any good for our human relations, it will take us in the opposite direction of happiness.

People should realize that “big quantity” capitalism is not always opposed to social control, the “all in name of the people” kind, as you can see in China. I hope we are not going in a direction where, instead of, little by little, bringing more democracy to authoritarian countries, we end up flattening down the whole planet. Some people may not care, but people who know the meaning of joy and personal freedom have the right to be against that.

I do have faith, faith that people can make different lines of thought visible again, and to learn that things are not so black and white. That money can coexist with moral and moral can’t be replaced with the latest ideological trend.

I believe that in the future we can have a World where a person has a right to relate to a peoplehood, but also the individual has all the opportunity to grow in freedom.

I believe in the power of though. Not only logic, which requires a reduction of language, and is so many times necessary, but also the broader Reason, that dwells in all the richness of human language and sometimes even beyond.

Some people, for their immediate convenience, pretend not to see what doesn’t fit their narrative, even when it risks leading us all to a worst place. But as I always say, almost nobody wants to look in the mirror and say “I’m bad”. People like to think of themselves as good.

Let’s expand on it.

A very strange kind of dilemma

 

2 Years

It's not like I told them what's happening here. They told me.

Hamas and the Growth of Aggressive Power

During this war between Israel and Hamas, people wanted ceasefire. At the time of this writing, there is ceasefire. Now we should talk about Hamas, we should talk about Terrorism. Of course, so many people are still focused on Israel, as if Israel was the “villain”.

Some people in press are saying Israel made strikes again, during the ceasefire, “claiming” that Hamas broke the ceasefire. Israel is not simply claiming, they showed evidence, and they reacted according to the terms of the ceasefire.

During the war, people acted as if they were so worried about the tragic consequences of the war for Gaza, that they couldn’t put Hamas as priority. What about now? How can now not be the time to talk about Terrorism? The dismantling of Hamas is the only thing that can bring peace. Do you want peace, or is your main goal to inflict some kind of punishment to Israel?

It should be easy to remember what started this war, in October 7^th. A country has borders, and an army to defend the land from foreign enemies. You look at History and you see why this is necessary. And there are things that start wars.

Like a horde of men from the neighboring region, men belonging to or sympathizers of a Terrorist group, invading the south of a country, killing civilians at random, mutilating, beheading, abusing women violently, in a real life nightmare that ended with one thousand and two hundred dead plus two hundred and fifty kidnapped.

Is this action, planned by the leadership in power of this neighboring region, a declaration of war or what? Could Israel just say, “well, they went back to their region, so we can’t go after these men, all we will do is try to improve the security”? It would be like saying, “this is the game: We do our best to improve our security, but whenever you manage to break in, no matter what you do to our people, after you go back to your region you’re free”. A State that is sworn to defend its citizens obviously can’t act like this.

Now, after the Israeli Forces fought with intelligence and sacrifice – more than nine hundred soldiers lost their lives – they were able to eliminate Terrorist infrastructure and many of their leaders, pressuring Hamas to a point where they accepted a ceasefire deal that was brought by the United States. The living hostages are back home – of the 250, 168 ended up being brought back alive in throughout these two years, and there are no more living hostages in Hamas’s power. And, as I said, there is a ceasefire.

When October 7^th happened, so many people in the World were horrified by the cruelty of that attack. But when Israel fought back, that initial feeling seemed to have been drawn by numbers. Because the civilian casualties in Gaza were many times more. But this is not about mathematics. There is a timeline here, a story with causes and consequences. Hamas, the tyrant leadership of Gaza, caused a war, and the people of Gaza unfortunately suffered consequences.

I know that many say, “most of the dead were not members of Hamas, and it includes children”. Yes, although the real numbers are probably very different than the numbers the press got from “Gaza ministry of Health” – run by Hamas, yes, the war was very tragic in that aspect.

But again, how could Israel avoid it, if they want to give the necessary safety for their people? October 7^th was the cause of the war, and 1200 people is not a small number. Read about October 7^th and imagine it was your country, if you live in a small one. If you live in a country that is many times bigger than Israel, imagine it happened in your state or province. Wasn’t there the necessity to go after the ones responsible for that?

The Israeli Forces showed the World that they try their best to warn people to evacuate areas before strikes – and how Hamas tries to prevent people from doing so. The Israeli Forces showed their efforts to mitigate civilian harm, and also undeniable evidence that Hamas built a long maze of tunnels, secret passages, an immense underground infrastructure for their Terrorist operation, embedding it with civilian life as much as they can, using Hospitals, Mosques, Schools, Residential Buildings, also operating dressed as civilians, all to make it harder for Israel to separate them from the civilians.

In World War II, many Germans died who were not active in the Nazi army. We know there was the necessity to fight that horrible expansionist power.

This is the kind of tragedy that happens when Aggressive Power is allowed to grow. When the people in power somewhere are not devoted to the wellbeing of their own people, they tyrannize their people and not only that, but also dream of destroying others. Because the Nazis grew as they grew, World War II was necessary.

Then the UN was created. I believe its goal should be to make the best not to let aggressive tyrants prosper, because that is what endangers the World. But now they make tyranny “relative” and just say the word “peace”, without solutions, when real problems happen.

To prevent aggressive power to grow, you need a set of values, everything can’t be relative. If you can’t say some forms of government are better than others – which has nothing to do with a people’s religion of ethnicity – how can you work for World’s peace?

Instead of being firm about what is acceptable and what is not in terms of the exercise of power, the UN just makes everything relative. They have bought the Academic vision of the World.

When the old Empires ended in the end of the 19^th and beginning of 20^th centuries, and the map of the whole World was redefined, the Jews legally got the small land of Israel, their Ancient Holy Land where they prayed to return to for two thousand years, with the approval of the UN. Now intellectuals want everybody to believe that Muslin Arabs  -with all respect for the decent ones - are oppressed because they "only" have 99 percent of the Middle East, the richest land in petroleum of the World. This doesn't help the honest Muslins, it helps only Terrorism.

Because, mostly, their leaders don’t give them the freedom that Israelis have, so much frustration has grown in some countries, and the same leaders canalize this anger against the Israelis, because it would be glorious for them to conquer the Holy Land of the Jews.

So this hatred against Israel have grown, more and more people became radicals, Terror has gained infrastructure, financing, equipment. Iran is behind not only Hamas, but also Hezbollah, the Houthis.

Israelis have been trying to warn the World about this for so long, but the World was too busy to be concerned with that “unsolvable part of the World”.

Then when Israel suffered a massacre – 1200 people is a massacre – and fought back, everybody got focused on asking them to stop fighting.

Now there is a ceasefire. Will the World focus on what now?

There is still so much anti-Israeli propaganda going on. Some are even talking of humanitarian aid “finally getting to Gaza”, as if Israel has not shown that there were thousands of tons of aid going in during the majority of the time of the war.

All this to avoid the simple question: “Isn’t Hamas Terrorist? Didn’t they cause this war? What should the World think about the future with Hamas there?”

I know that many leadership figures – the ones that surfed the wave of indignation against war, not even making clear with they made any difference between people who said they were just concerned with the suffering of war and the people who openly supported intifada – will say the focus should be on “repairing” things for Palestinians. But as long as Hamas is there, any resource given, any “compensation” given, will be a compensation for Hamas, because they are an absolutist power over Gaza.

Hamas existence can’t ever be dissociated of Terrorism, can’t be dissociated of aggression. Their charter says explicitly that their goal is the complete end of Israel “by any means necessary”. Israelis saw what “any means necessary” means. And they also make it clear that, because for them martyrdom is a good thing, the fighting goals are more important – much more important – than the safety of their people.

This poses to Israel a deadly question. The more a group like Hamas grows, the bigger will be the cost, in terms of lives, to defeat them when it becomes necessary. The more time passes, more the people became shields, more people will die when it becomes inevitable to fight to defeat them.

It’s definitely such a hard question. What is the right moment, then? It’s a question so complex and hard, that Israel didn’t fully attack them before October 7^th, the moment that signaled that this couldn’t go on any longer.

And let’s not forget that over this past two years, Israel also had to fight other groups with the same characteristics: the Houthis and Hezbollah – this one had all prepared for their “Operation Conquer The Galilee”, an invasion of the North of Israel bigger than October 7^th. And, of course, Israel had to destroy the nuclear program in Iran, that was undeniable on the verge of making an atomic bomb.

Now there is a ceasefire – that so many people asked for – but the time is still passing. When will come the time for the World to admit we must do something about Terrorism, put it as a priority?

Are we going to let Hamas grow again, an increase the cost of their defeat again?

 

Yom Kippur

 Wishing a meaningful holy day for jewish friends including you who always seems to be working. 💙

Power, Credentials, Ideologies and Crimes

 As I always say, I know that there are a lot of things going wrong in the World, and a lot of things that should be working for the benefit of everybody but a lot of times just don’t. I think most of us feel that there are some forces at play, forces that serve goals that are very different from the best for all mankind.

So, some come with weird conspiracy theories, like old Antisemitic visions of Jews controlling the World. Well, what I think is that just because things like the theory of relativity turned out to be very useful in Science, it doesn’t mean that, in all aspects of our lives, the weirdest a “theory” is, the more we should feel it is true.

On the contrary, I think that when it comes to human power, we don’t need more and more strange and unverifiable information, I believe we must clear the dust from before our eyes, to just see clearly what is in front of us, probably the answers are more obvious than we think. We just have too much weird information in our heads to be able to just step back and look at things with clear eyes.

For instance, when it comes to who controls what, I see things in a simple way. I think that the most powerful people in Russia are Russian super rich guys and Russian politicians. The most influential people in Italy are some powerful Italians. The most powerful people in Muslin Arab countries are powerful Muslin Arabs. The most influential people in Israel are some Jews. In the United States, it’s super rich Americans and politicians.

There are more Jews in the high circles in America than there ever were anywhere – outside Israel, of course – because America gave them opportunities they never had – but I don’t think the majority of powerful people in America – that are not Jews – would let someone else control them, even if that was what the Jews wanted. And why would you consider that all Jews are taking part on a “plan” commanded by the few super rich Jews, if you don’t do that with any other people? There are so many reasons why these conspiracy theories about Jews controlling things make no sense at all…

Anyway, even knowing that there are powerful people – that is, people who have much more influence than the common man – acting violently is the worst thing you can do in a democracy, because it weakens the power of a set of rules that, even if not perfect, is meant to give our society other parameters that are not simply the law of the stronger. If there are no rules, the stronger will prevail, and this means precisely the most powerful ones.

And the structures of wrongful power are made not only of money, they are also made of notions that people in higher positions have more value as human beings than others, they are made of the power some institutions may have to tell people how much they are worth, or impose a unique vision of the World and silence all other ideas.

Academic people like to talk about power. They see all this cobwebs everywhere, that they call “structure”, “systemic” this, “systemic” that. I think it would be interesting for them to reason about the power that they have. Think, they are the ones who give credentials for people to work in the fields that people want to work.

They give the titles and the honors that people can use to promote a book that they want to sell, for instance. And how many of the people in International Organizations have beautiful academic credentials to increase their worth? Also,  I don’t know about the rest of the World, but here in Brazil it seems they want to forbid people without diplomas to work in more and more jobs that didn’t require it before.

And all this makes kind of a circle. Because the most influential people in Academia are also the ones who define the curriculum for Colleges and Schools, and think: when we hear someone make an analysis of a situation, most of us will give it more weight if it resounds with something we learned in school or college. It is a very big power.

I am not against the existence of Academia, obviously. I think we must have Academia. But I do think it is very bad when there is one line of thought imposing itself, silencing the voices of all other possible ideas and lines of thought, as if all the discussions already had been discussed and there were no more reasonable objections – this is not true.

And what is the vision of the World that the Academia has been pushing? Nowadays, it seems that they are looking at absolutely everything through the notion of “race”. I know that there has always been racial problems, but when they are talking about race, instead of thinking on what would be the solutions for the minorities to prosper more and more within our society, within the law, it seems that they are offering the idea that the “system” is so crooked that it is not enough to do your best and help each other.

When they say that an infraction, or even a crime, committed by someone of an oppressed minority should not be considered as such, the message is that people have a right to reject the peaceful way to happiness, even the peaceful way to fight for your rights. That crime is sometimes the only way.

Well, if the minorities need to break the law, need to commit crimes, then they will always need lawyers, then big political movements become the only big salvation. The individual dimension of life becomes insignificant compared to the importance of collective and organized struggle. The circle closes. The person who belongs to a minority should place all his bets in “movements”, nothing else. I think movements are important for some things, but they should never aim to create total dependency.

And when it comes to geopolitical issues, they extend this idea of race to everything, using concepts like “Imperialism”, to blame the Western World for absolutely everything that is wrong. It goes like this:

“The evil deeds that are done by people who we don’t consider as heirs of the Western prosperity, must not be treated as simple evil, because the Western oppression is directly or indirectly responsible for everything.”

Because of this thought, people can’t place in the oppressive leaders of the “non-Western” World all the responsibility – and fault – that they deserve for their actions. Also, you see feminists overlooking the fact that some “non-Western” societies are the most oppressive to women. The same with queer movements, cheering people who literally murder homosexuals. Putting it shortly, people who say they want to free people from oppression becoming unable to put any real responsibility to real dictators. Because they may say “I don’t agree with this dictator necessarily”, but the big villain is always someone else – the imperialist – so in practice, nothing can be done against those dictators.

I will propose a thought experiment that I think is interesting: sometimes, when there is a lot of confusion in a line of thought, too many contradictions, it is interesting to notice if some specific assumption is the center of all that contradiction. Then, just for a moment, consider the possibility that this assumption is not true. Let’s do it with this assumption:

“The evil deeds that are done by people who we don’t consider as heirs of the Western prosperity, must not be treated as simple evil, because the Western oppression is directly or indirectly responsible for everything.”

Just take this away. Consider for a minute that the things we see in the World are the result of a far more nuanced situation. A World where every deed counts, where people are always responsible for the use of any power that they have, no matter who they are or where they live. Think like this for a minute.

See the difference. Now, people who fight for gay rights can be enemy of the greater haters of the gays, feminists can denounce what happens in the societies in the World that most oppress women. People who are concerned with exploitation of the poor can oppose any political leaders in the World that get rich while keeping their population poor, not only in some places. If you are concerned with how powerful people can harm the common men, you can oppose tyrannic visions of Society wherever they appear.

That is, you are always in favor of what you say you are in favor, and always against what you say you are against. Wow. Wasn’t it kind of magical?

Also, now, when talking about a war, you can give the proper weight to the fact that a certain side started it, like, in the case of the current war between Israel and Hamas, it should be very simple to see that this war wasn’t there in October 6^th, that Hamas started it in October 7^th. And they didn’t surrender or stop fighting yet.

You can look at History and see that the war that the Terrorists create is not about land – the tiny strip that the Jews got of the Middle East when the Empires ended and the map of the whole World changed – it is a manifestation of a very old feeling that exists in the Middle East – a hatred against the Jews, that was and is encouraged by wicked and megalomaniac leaders.

If you were able to put responsibility on people who dominates regions – like Hamas dominates Gaza – you would not be talking about numbers of deaths as if the option of real and safe peace was there for Israel to easily reach. You would see the danger that would threaten Israel if an attack like that of October 7^th went unresponded. Like a city where that mayor says, “we will not punish crime anymore, we will just improve the security of buildings”. What happens?

Without all this bias and preconceptions against Israel, we can see the measures they take to mitigate civilian harm on the other side. They are fighting an enemy that is hidden among their own people, and that don’t care for their people. An enemy that uses their own people to create the most cruel dilemma they can for Israel and the World, making the cost of the war the higher they can.

The powerful people that created this dilemma – this is a war against Terrorist groups backed and financed by Iran and Qatar – can slow Israel, but totally stop to fight them would mean give them everything they want. It would be extremely dangerous to make the most cruel strategy ever conceived so successful. Violent aggressive political forces, that use cruelty as a weapon, will never be satisfied with one particular “victory”.

If the academic people and most of the press wasn’t turning a blind eye to this “other side”, if they were talking openly about the ones who created this cruel strategy of human shields, I think a lot of people in the World would see things differently.

This is a manifestation of how academic people do their “best” to show a vision of things that are happening that fits their general simplistic narrative about the whole World. With the “West” and Israel as the eternal villains, nothing can be done against the worst dictators of the World.

Usually people that have some power and influence don’t want to lose it, they want to amplify it.  If the influence and power that the Academic World has is related to some political agenda, then they will play it rough, to impose their vision of the World and to make people think that political ideologies are all that is really important in the World.

And with this idea that sometimes violent crimes are just an inevitable consequence of something else, they open the doors to a dangerous relativism, the idea that evil should not be seen as such, or that maybe there is nothing we can call evil.

In my opinion, there has been far too little attention to “how” October 7^th happened. People are just talking about numbers, as if one thousand and two hundred people slaughtered was too little to start a war – I don’t think it is. They don’t talk about the cruelty, as if “cruelty” was too subjective to be dealt with – only numbers matter.

But hordes of men coming and laughing while killing people at random and violating young women, burning families alive, killing children in cold blood – that matters.

We can’t let biased political visions prevent us from placing the blame of all the tragedy of war on the ones who caused it, the same ones who do nothing to make it less tragic – on the contrary. Why the World can’t answer: if not now, when Hamas will be dismantled?

I think it is very dangerous when political or social ideologies becomes infinitely more important than any rules or common sense that mankind has arrived to along our long History on this planet. And I don’t think a real peace will come if we consider half of the World as not really responsible for their deeds. Peace, I think, will not come if we don’t consider everybody responsible for the use they make of the power they have, wherever they are.

All those countries in UN recognize a Palestinian State

 This is the phrase that will be repeated in news. Not only the conditions - end of Terrorism - that the leaders say are necessary - come with no plans, but they will also not be spread by many newslets. The news that everybody recognizes a Palestinian State will get in people's ears a thousand times more than the word "terrorism".

It is just a coward way to try to make everybody in the World think: all those leaders think Palestine is absolutely the right side, no objections anymore. Without having to say it, and deal with the implications.

New stuff coming

 Hi. I'm just here to say that there is new stuff coming. Written word, for those who are interested in it.

I would hate to be called volatile, but...

I started this thing that was a book called "The Mist And The Machine" which I think is a cool name and so I was making this chapters, but didn't know I was going to have so much to say. The world just got crazier and I'm kind of trying to follow it - to some extent.

But before this numbers of volumes and chapters get too weird, I'll stop and my next things will just be essays, simply. Like, I posted a new essay, period.

Thank you

(picture of me thinking)

Coherence

 

I said here and elsewhere that I don’t like that music with lyrics that I consider pornographic.

I know a lot of people react to this kind of comment saying “hey, don’t you have better things to worry than criticizing someone else’s music taste?”

Well, I’m not saying it should be forbidden, just that I think it sucks. It’s my right to criticize an entertainment product.

Now, let me talk about something interesting that happened in Brazil the last few weeks.

A Brazilian youtuber denounced an Instagram influencer, who was exploiting videos and images of little girls dancing and exposing themselves. It was a big deal, everybody talked about it, Hytalo Santos is the name of the guy.

Everybody is mad with the guy, I get it, I hate him too, but I also think: as long as that is the music everybody listens, the dances everybody dances everywhere, how would you expect little girls not to want to do exactly that? Isn’t it obvious that they will always imitate what’s in fashion?

So yes, I wish the motherfucker rot in jail, but honestly, it changes nothing.

So call me a pain in the ass, but at least I’m coherent.

The Liberation

 

I wanna hear the News Girl say Dilemma

The war of Israel against Hamas goes on, and a lot of important people in the World keep saying “just stop”, “just stop”, because they say they are too concerned with the Gazans.

Since the beginning, I could not take this people very seriously. Because it all seems like political speech, that is, you don’t really look for solutions, you just erase the part of the story that is not interesting for the image you are trying to create for yourself. That’s how it works.

The question that needs to be asked is “Okay, nobody likes war, but then what?” What should Israel do when hordes of armed men invaded their country, killed, burned, raped, and kidnapped? These men come from Gaza, they are the members and sympathizers of the organization that rules Gaza, that is, Hamas. What should any country do in face of such an obvious declaration of war?

Israel didn’t wake up one morning and decided to go to war. There was this declaration of war from Hamas, in form of a diabolically cruel massacre. Which means, War was there, calling Israel in. Then what to do?

Think, there is a regional power – not some random solitary bandits that just happen to be there in Gaza, but a regional power, that is, they are the ones in power there – again, there is a regional power, right at your border, that started this war against your country, now will your country fight it or just watch it? How can someone just watch a war that was started against them?

What are you giving up, when you give up your right to strike back at someone who is attacking you? You would be giving up all your strength to defend yourself, giving up the defense you built through almost 80 years, that allowed your country to survive, to keep existing, after so many countries and terror groups declared war and attacked. You built strength to defend your family in a dangerous place, now people want you to just throw it away.

Giving up this strength is not a good idea, specially in the Middle East. It would mean you would be trusting your fate to someone else, someone who would come and fix the situation. Who would that be?

The International Community doesn’t even want to admit the questions are hard and painful. They don’t have a different solution for the problem of the power that Terror gained in Middle East, they are acting as if the problem doesn’t even exist. It is easier for their political game to make it look like everything is very simple, the answer is simple, “Just stop the war”.

They take advantage of the fact that most of us, who live in Western Cities, take the absence of war we have here, as the “normal”. War for us means an aberration, if someone is making a war, just “stop”, and everything falls back to “normality”, that is, a peaceful state. But in the Middle East there is not this “peaceful normality” to fall back to. Since Israel was founded, less than a hundred years ago, so many countries started wars against them, and terrorist attacks never seem to end.

Who will come to help them guarantee the peace if the International Community don’t even want to name Terrorism as the bigger problem and source of pain in the Middle East?

With a past and a present so full of threats, Israel needs to fight for their future. There is a bigger power against them: Hamas is actually backed by Iran, who is also behind Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. There is a bigger plan for the destruction of Israel, and the leaders of the Terror group speak openly about it, and so do the leaders in Iran. Iran, which recently Israel had to prevent from having nuclear bombs.

October 7^th was not one crazy guy that killed one Israeli. It was a big invasion and more than a thousand people died. It was carefully planned, the cruelty, the rapes, were part of the strategy. It was meant to be cruel, they had gear, information, and the kidnapping was also part of plan – there are still kidnapped Israelis being tortured in Gaza, you know. And Hamas and their supporters only had to go back to Gaza because the Israeli Forces fought them back. And they kept launching missiles.

Later, when fighting Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, the Israelis found everything practically ready for what Hezbollah called “Operation Conquer the Galilee”. They would invade Israel from the North and try to do even worse than October 7^th .

If you were told that Israel is this super powerful rich white country and could so easily guarantee a decent level of safety without fighting so much, then just imagine if, during October 7^th, or “Operation Conquer the Galilee”, the Terrorists managed to take a small Israeli city. The Idf fought and sent them back, but imagine if for some reason they were able to take control of one small city or town. They would certainly love that, maybe that was precisely the next step in their terror escalade.

Imagine the horrible choices the Israeli government and the military would be forced to make if that happened, with thousands of their own people under the power of the Terrorists. That would be an unconceivable nightmare, even worse than the nightmare that already happened, and in a certain sense is still happening, for there are so many hostages not yet returned.

I came to see that in these most unfortunate circumstances, Israel needs to fight to end Hamas, to eliminate this source of threat. There is nothing about Hamas that is not Evil, aimed at destruction of Israel, destabilizing of the West, and oppression of their own people. Of course Israel needs to fight with ethics, needs to avoid harm to civilians as much as possible. And they do, warning about future strikes, telling people to evacuate areas, with leaflets, phone calls and social media. And in general, going much slower than they could if they didn’t care. But Hamas is everywhere in Gaza, without uniforms, operating from inside cities, mixed with civilian life as much as they can, precisely to make the cost in terms of suffering in Gaza as high as they can, to manipulate international opinion.

Try to see from Israel’s point of view. They have communities, families, loved ones to protect from a Horror that already showed its face. They built resources to fight back threats, and they can’t throw it away, if they really want to protect what they love. Israel is not God. They can’t invent a way of fighting where you can just defend and totally avoid the risk for civilians on the other side, especially if the leaders on the other side openly praise martyrdom of their people. They can’t magically create a World where people in democracies and people under Terror regimes are all equally safe at the same time.

Yes, it is not beautiful, it does sound like a terrible dilemma. But the World is not proposing a different solution, they prefer to just act as if the dilemma wasn’t there. It is easier for them to just throw all the onus on Israel, so they can go back to their normal.

The UN seems to have forgotten what started this war. Now they are focused on accusing Israel of causing famine, using partial sources from within Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, and just ignoring all that Israel is showing the World in terms of tenth of thousands of trucks entering with aid, a lot of times even waiting for international organizations to pick up.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press amplifies it, sometimes simply spreading fake news, like showing and old image of a child with a genetic disorder, and which Israel already helped, as if he was a starving child.

The role of the press – and the Internation Community – should be, first of all, admit that there is no neutral informaaltion coming from Gaza. It’s from one side or the other. What they have to do is put both narratives side by side, and then start a work to find who is presenting more evidence, who is being more transparent. And even trust that people in the World are not completely stupid and can come to their own conclusions. But they choose to pretend that one narrative comes from neutral sources, and the other, they literally ignore. The mainstream press is being anything but transparent.

So, with all this bias in the World, where will the cavalry come from, to establish a state of peace, if Israel “just stop”? Is the International Community this cavalry? How could they be, if they’ve been so focused in only see the bad in Israel?

Israel can’t lay down and say “okay, you can attack us as cruelly as you want and we will not strike back with all our fighting resources, because of the losses that will be caused by your lack of care for people’s safety”.

So, Israel has no guarantees that everything will be fine. I think they have no option but fight, ff they want to protect their loved ones. Still, as I said, there is indeed a dilemma. Put in its most horrible form it sounds like this: “Would you kill civilians for the safety of your people”?

But first of all, Israel does not target civilians, there is a clear strategy on the other side, to make it impossible for Israel to fight without loss of Gazan civilian lives, and the danger for Israel is not a danger of maybe losing a bit of safety. It’s a danger of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and it already happened. Also a danger of getting to a point where they start losing more and more of the advantage they have in their own territory. So a most accurate formulation of the dilemma would be: “Would you take action to save your people, even if the other side will make sure that this conflict will cause death of their civilians?”

Still, of course, it doesn’t cease to be a dilemma, and a very cruel one. But we need to face this fact: God doesn’t give us this kind of cruel dilemma. Or the Universe. Or anyway, whatever your cosmological view is, this dilemma didn’t “just happen”, “naturally”. There are people of flesh and bones, walking this Earth, who created this dilemma and imposed it on Israel.

What could be the appropriate answer to such a monster? He can slow us, that’s inevitable, but can we let him totally stop us? Can we give him all he wants? We can’t talk about this whole subject, of an army fighting for its people, and people on the other side suffering the tragic consequences of a war, without including this “third character”, the monster who imposed the dilemma.

Give him all he wants can’t be the morally right answer, because who says he will ever stop? What happens with the World if the good side can never strike back against the evil doers, even when Evil very literally declares war? Because that is precisely what the World is trying to impose on Israel’s World. It is too dangerous, too horrible, and morally wrong to give the monster all he wants. There is no reason to believe he will ever stop creating more and worst dilemmas.

It is easier for the rest of the World to forget this “little detail”, this “third character”, at least while it’s not at their door. But Israel has no option but fight. Again, they have the obligation to do it in the most ethical way possible, trying to preserve life as much as they can, but they need to fight this War that called them in.

Defend your loved ones is not evil, is not wrong, and sometimes it’s the best you can do, for your people and for the World, while the World don’t wake up to face the real problems.