77 years of the IDF

 Yes, I learned to believe this Institution. Because what happens if we become such a bunch of cynicals that we don’t believe in nobody's values anymore?

Time of What

 I am a person who believes we must always think about what is needed to make things better, what values we must nurture, and so on. But now in our culture, starting from school, another way of seeing things is prevailing, a way focused not on “it’s time of what”, but on “it’s time of who”.

I mean, they say it is the time of the oppressed, those ethnic groups who suffered injustice in the past must now be given preference. I hope all those groups thrive, achieve prosperity and happiness, and we have a duty to avoid oppression – but we must be careful with this idea of “preference”. It can mean, and for a lot of people it certainly does, that the idea of “impartiality” in judging particular disputes should be set aside, in favor of some groups.

The concept of Justice, through History, has always evolved in direction of “fair judgement”, and that means impartiality. To judge a situation between two people starting from a clean slate, not taking in consideration who they are or what position they have in Society. The word “iniquity”, an ancient word used so much to describe the worst side of mankind, means precisely the “lack of equity”, that is, to measure two people by different standards.

And this vision of impartiality as the goal, is the vision that allowed people to prove that slavery was wrong, allowed black people in America and other places to gain Civil Rights, allowed women to demand equal salaries for equal jobs and so on. All this was about the idea of justice as an even scale, it was not about trying to tip the scale to any side.

I think what they are doing today is mixing the concepts of “awareness” with the concept of “judgement”. It is right, and necessary, to bring awareness to the problems that people face because of racism, sexism, and so on. But it is insane, and contrary to the principles that made we evolve so far, to say that a group of people should be subject to different laws than other. It should be about denouncing when the scale is uneven, not tipping the scale.

But now a lot of people say that Justice should be about “Reparation”, like fixing the bad things we have today that are consequences of the wrong deeds in the past, so it is okay to be partial when judging, because you are on the side of the “oppressed”. But then you are assigning an “original sin” to people who don’t come, or that you think don’t come, from oppressed backgrounds.

It is not fair, by the old core notions of Justice, that a person who did nothing wrong in a situation, be judged as if she owed something. I say this because there are actually people in the academic World, in schools of law – and they are not fringe – that say things like “burn the constitution, reparation is the thing”, and that say that a crime, even a violent crime, committed by a member of an “oppressed” group should be less punished, or even not be punished, because of the social differences in the World. This and other more subtle attacks on the old idea of Justice.

We must fight for a World where nobody is in a situation where he or she has no chance of living a good life and prosper, where nobody is left without opportunity. Not for a World where nobody has less chances of make money “in comparison” with someone else.

When people talk about “system” or “structures” in Society, we must differentiate if he is talking about structures that deny people freedom and opportunities, which is bad, or “structures” that simply put people in different positions, which is something not avoidable in the existence of the human being - and the better life we must desire for everybody has to do with work and respect, not with comparisons. Are we going in the direction of giving everybody respect or of simply comparing people? This comparison is the root of a lot of wrong deeds and needless suffering.

Honestly, will the son of a richer man receive better birthday gifts? Probably. And if he is the son of a rich man, he will have better connections in the city, too. It is life - and we must try to not let that people in better positions use it against other people, to take way their right, but to completely "flatten the universe" - even if it was desirable - we would have to create a system that totally controls everything and everybody. And then the people that are higher in that system will make everybody else’s life horrible, because that is what always happens.

Also, it’s the same as saying that human happiness only derives from the material World. You are not being fair to the other, who can’t be labeled as a “non-sufferer” because he is not in a certain group – even rich people suffer. You are not being fair to yourself and your loved ones because you may be blind to opportunities that would bring you good things. You are not being fair with Life, because maybe, if you stop the comparison, you could even be happier than someone who has more material things and connections.

This replacement of the basic ideas of Justice for a simplistic social comparison goes against the basic morals of humanity, and we can see this clearly by the fact that it just can’t bring good. When someone from a historically oppressed group robs a car at gunpoint, some Law student from a magnificent University may say he must be punished with less rigor, or even not punished at all, for the sake of “social justice”.

But, despite the student’s and the professor’s trip, a person doesn’t rob cars at gunpoint to bring peace and happiness to their people. They do it for drugs and for money to show off to his “friends”. It’s just the facts, and crime continues to be something that brings nothing good to nobody. Just as all these attacks on the old idea of Justice can’t bring nothing good.

Now, moving somewhat abruptly – but I believe you’ll see the connections – to the most talked about geopolitical event of the moment – and the main theme of this book, the war Israel is waging against Hamas – I would like to bring up again the massacre of October 7^th, that started it.

There was a music festival, where suddenly armed men came in motor paragliders and started shooting indiscriminately, killing people while abusing young women. Not only there, but all through the south of Israel, rape was committed alongside with murder.

Now, how can this be about anything other than perversion? A guy that can be sexually excited while a young woman is screaming is perverted enough, then what about someone who does that while shooting at random? The impulse to do something like that can only come from a total woman hater, someone whose frustrated sexual desire is only matched by his hatred.

 A man doesn’t rape while killing people because he is not allowed to live where his great grandfather lived. This act is not about land. It’s not about politics. Punitive rape can only be committed by men who hate themselves and viscerally envies the freedom of someone else. How can some people turn this into something that is part of a “political issue”? And how can this “contextualization” come from people who call themselves “feminists”?

Well, I think it is done by defining, beforehand, immutable roles of victim and villain. You “find” something in the past that makes this always the “good side” and that always the “bad”. Then there is no need, there is no sense, in applying any universal moral rules to any event that might happen.

In fact, with this idea of “reparation”, they already emptied the concept of Justice of any universal moral values. They reduced it to this: “Justice is undoing the injustices of the past”. Oh, thank you very much, teacher.

The evidence that this circular thought is unfruitful to say the least, is that every judgement will therefore depend heavily on History, but the study of History itself becomes less trustable.

If we have a set of basic universal moral rules, we can study how these rules were broken in the past, and think how we can avoid that those things – slavery, the Holocaust – ever happen again.

But with this idea of nothing but “reparation”, History becomes a battlefield where you look not for wisdom, but for justifications for deeds that would otherwise be considered simply wrong or evil. The human being, flawed as we are, will study History with greed, looking for “credits” for his political side to bend more moral rules.

There are interests, in villainizing Israel. The extremist Islamic groups use it to help them push further the radicalization of the Arab World, and the western mainstream intellectuals use it to help them in their strange war against any solution that doesn’t mean turning everything upside down.

And then they look at History with these interests. And in fact, with this thing of “reparation”, with these social and racial stereotypes, they already have people in the right mindset to be against Israel. The students are already used to justify crimes committed by individuals of groups they consider oppressed, they are already thinking of themselves as a weird kind of “humanist” hero, bolder, smarter and better than the “normal” people.

So, all the teachers have to do is to present some “justification” in the past. The students are already in the right mindset for this kind of things, so it doesn’t have to be a verifiable truth.

They say it’s “stolen land”. Well, in 1948, with the agreement of the UN, half of the British Mandate of Palestine was given to the Jews, an exilic and persecuted people who had just been subject to the Holocaust in nazi German.

And the solution was pretty fair: the Jews were always present in the Middle East, but a minority, and also a minority in Europe, and they didn't have their own country for two thousand years.  The British mandate of Palestine previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. The Jews were a minority, so they didn’t get a big part of the previous Ottoman Empire, they didn’t get a big share of the British Empire. They got a tiny strip of land, their Holy Land, and the others – mainly muslin Arabs – got all the rest.

“Oh, but they were also a minority in that little strip of land”. Well, by this logic, it is absolutely impossible for an exilic people to ever have an official home, right? Even if the total population of that tiny strip of land when the division happened, was a third of only the Jews who were killed in Holocaust!

Some might want to “remind me” that not everybody that is asking for Israel to stop fighting is subscribed to these radical views of ending Israel and killing all the Jews. Well, okay, but there is all this academical established “vision”, so anyone trying to bring out the differences between the societies in Israel and Gaza, is immediately discredited.

So what we get is, at best, a vision of the two societies as morally equivalent. But they’re not. Obviously I don’t mean to say that the life of a Palestinian has no value, I just mean that the official leadership in Gaza is a terrorist, extremist, authoritarian theocracy, that is focused – publicly focused – in the destruction of Israel, based on this lie of “stolen land”. While Israel is focused on building and defending their own nation, and subscribes to International Law and conventions.

What is served to us is the image of two regions, one of them poor and being bombed. Israel is being bombed too, all the time, but they shield their people, don’t use them as shields as Hamas does. And the Israeli Forces are committed to avoid civilian harm as far as they can, while Hamas is committed to see every Israeli as an enemy, literally no exceptions. As I mentioned, even rape is put as “resistance”, as absurd as it is.

 Some “news” make it look like Gaza is just a place where people were living normal lives, and then it started being bombed.

But there is something happening there that is far from “normal”. The growth of radicalism, of a cult of death, a perverted version of their religion, that says the greater aspiration of a true religious man should be to exterminate any Jewish presence in the Middle East, and someday the World. And this thing is growing in the Middle East, backed by powerful countries and people.

The Jews know perfectly what can happen when the growth of this type of mentality is not stopped. Some may say it is alarmism, and I pray that nothing as terrible as October 7^th ever happens again, but time is crucial when it comes to stop these “movements”. Between Hitler’s ascension to power and the extermination of 6 million Jews only 12 years passed.

And the leaders of the World, that should know that too, just say “stop the war” without any serious position on the complex matters that lead to the war, as if it was simply wrong to fight bloodthirsty dictatorships with insane global “dreams”.

My point with this essay is that this replacement of basic principles for a simplistic war of identity and race, to the point where horrible crimes are relativized or politized, clearly benefits people who want violence more than the people who really want freedom and peace. It blurs our vision of the past and the present.

Horror And Danger Are Not Independent

Israel is not safe with Hamas there.

Yes, there is pain and death in Gaza, just as Israel is still being attacked by rockets, and Israeli soldiers still fall in combat with Hamas, that didn’t put their guns down. Also, the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas have not all been returned yet. A lot of them were killed, including babies. All because of a war that Hamas started in October 7^th.

Some people talk of Israel as if it was a powerful country that just decided to create a war where there was peace. But there was no peace.

The history of Israel is the History of a country which many of its neighbor say that it shouldn’t even exist, and for some reason the mainstream intellectuals of the World agree that it shouldn’t exist. And this have caused, and still causes, so much death and blood. Even if the circumstances of its birth didn’t involve displacement of Arabs, but also Jews, even if displacements were not rare in the forming of the modern map of the World. Even if there was always Jews in the Middle East, and now they only have Israel, their Holy Land.

So why should Israel be the only country whose birth should be reverted? And why should the Palestinian people be taught that they can’t move forward and seek their own happiness, that their fate depend on destroying their neighbor?

Just because Israel is modern and prosper – modern and prosper enough to make it difficult to believe that their people really desire war, by the way – doesn’t mean they are a super powerful agent in the Middle East. Search for a map of the whole Arab World with little Israel in the middle, highlighting we all the countries that have once been in war with Israel in its less than a century of existence, and the countries that still don’t recognize Israel as a legitimate Nation.

That gives us more perspective. So many countries have fought Israel, Iran is a powerful dictatorship, and they support the terrorists. Very rich Qatar never recognized Israel either.

The growth of radicalism, extremism, in the Muslin World is not a philosophical matter. We know that, when you are a dictator, giving the people a “big villain” to hate makes them direct all their frustration, about their own lives, towards that enemy. Making people believe that their time is coming, that soon they will revert the game and conquer the big enemies, make the most violent ones euphoric.

The big villains for the Islamic extremists are Israel and America, that represent all the liberties that they hate, liberties that the Western people enjoy but so many “forget” to recognize it’s a good thing.

Anyway, I don’t know how far Iran and their friends are really disposed to go in their holy war against America in the near future, I really don’t know that, but Israel is very close to them, alone, geographically surrounded by non-friends. Having victories against Israel is the best thing that radical leaders can use to attract radical followers, give them a teste of “glory”.

If you think about the disgrace of World War II, Hitler didn’t devastate half of Europe just with money and equipment. He needed people to do that. People that were getting more and more radicalized, hating their “big villains”, and at every victory getting more pumped up, believing that they were oppressed in the past but their time had come.

The radicalization of muslin people in the Middle East means the raising of a totalitarian army. More people willing to join the Terrorist armies, and more civilians willing to help them in their attacks. It will give power to their tyrants, power over their own people and power to threaten their enemies more and more.

So, what would be more glorious for those extremist leaders then destroying Israel? If they could achieve this, it would make the hate-filled ones so confident, that those tyrants would have momentum enough to dominate, and enlist people in their anti-Western agenda, for decades.

Of course for us, in the Western World, it is almost impossible to even imagine a solid country like Israel being wiped out of the map. It seems just impossible. But think, things like that don’t happen in a day. What the enemies of Israel would really like first of all is to, God forbid, gain some terrain. Taking some small cities, to start.

They could use the people of those places as human shields. So many western intellectuals would welcome that, and a lot of people would be ready to show Israel as violent if they wanted to take it back. God forbid it ever happens, but that would probably be the path those groups would want to take to weaken Israel slowly.

And what would the World say in that case? Would the World be ready to finally say a loud “no” to an ideology based on the dream of destruction of a country? Would the governments with socialist tendences be ready to defy the mainstream intellectuals? Would the World see it as a criminal invasion that have to be responded, or just one of those things that happen in the Middle East, too complex for us to judge, when it is executed by the extremist Arabs?

The reality for the Israelis is that they don’t have few enemies, and those people would like to destroy their country. And it is not philosophical, the guns stored by their enemies, the rockets being produced – and launched – the terrorist soldiers being trained, none of that is abstract. A terrorist group like Hamas is not a gang of small bandits in rags, they have thousands of soldiers, training centers, infrastructure, a whole region like Gaza under their command.

Horror and Danger are not independent from each other. October 7^th is not only a horrible event that happened in the past and must be dealt with emotionally. Israelis have all the reason to see it as a signal of big danger, something they thought their enemies were not capable of doing but did, not only they broke in, in numbers that couldn’t be predicted, but acted in a way that shows they have no limits for cruelty. Israelis have all the reason to think about that unprecedent event as something that speaks not only of the past, but also of the future. How would they not see it as a sign of danger?

Someone who was born in Israel in the beginning of the 21^st century already saw the violence of the Second Intifada, and so many terror attacks, and now the Horror of October 7^th.

We have to remember what happened in October 7^th. For two days, that was the big news. And it shouldn’t have been forgotten. If we think about that horrible event, it has all the elements of something that we should speak more about, try to analyze what makes human beings act in such a cruel way, what makes them desire the blood and pain of others so fervently. Why the sociologists are not so interested in talking about the deeds of the terrorists that day?

It was not a dozen victims, it was more than a thousand. People were killed with cruelty, in cold blood, including elderly and children, entire families. How can the fact that a peace music festival was invaded by men with machine guns that shot indiscriminately while abusing young women, killing more than three hundreds, not be a mark of terror for the whole humanity?

As I said before in other texts, the reason seems to be that, by seeing the horror and the danger, people, even disliking war, would have to ask themselves, then what? What is the solution? They would see that those leaders and celebrities of the World, while asking that Israel stop fighting, do nothing serious against Terrorism.

War is bad, that’s for sure. People dying is bad. But to achieve peace, there is thinking to be done, actions to be taken. It seems that a lot of people see “peace” as just the “absence of war”. But peace is not just an absence, peace is something mankind is trying to build. 

If there is an ideology of death banging at the door of the world we are trying to build, an ideology that considers the “other” so evil that you don’t even have to think about any of that people, who they are, that says that just for being the “other” there is nothing you can do against them that will be wrong – if a movement, a force like that is banging against the door of our home, then we need to think about the resources we have, the things that we hope will guarantee that the worst side of the human being don’t take over humanity.

We have to think, what happens when the armies of democratic countries cannot strike against a source of real and intentional threat, an extremely dangerous source of threat? And what happens when a group that dominates a region is not considered the guilty one for the death of their own people, people they left without any protection in the midst of a war they created, people they use as human shields?

The Israeli forces have no option but fight, in the most ethical way they can but fight. Defend what they swore to defend. It’s their obligation, because, truly, nobody knows the future, and the climate in the Middle East is far less calm than in the Western World, and leaders of dictatorships are far less predictable than they may appear when they occupy places of honor in International Organizations.

We sometimes may not think that the option of not fighting represents something terrible for the Israeli soldier, but what falls apart if they don’t fight? What falls is the foundations of how they kept their country so far. Yesterday was Israel Memorial Day, when they remember their more than 25 thousand fallen soldiers, without whom there would be no Israel.

It is not about politics. It’s about fighting against the biggest threaten to their families. Neither is this an abstract fear, an exaggeration about some “isolated cases” of terrorism. The Israeli Defense cannot allow the terrorists to create this situation where Israel is only allowed to fight them while they are inside of Israel. Like a horrible “game” where they enter, do horrible things, and go back to Gaza to hide, untouchable, until the day when they come in and manage to stay somewhere.

The Israeli forces do a lot to avoid civilian deaths, as no other army ever did – also, they help humanitarian aid to get into Gaza as no other army does for his enemy, because the war is against Hamas, not the people, but in the end of the day, the ways of the terrorists – installing themselves in hospitals, mosques, schools, residential areas, dressing as civilians to the confronts - makes it much more difficult to Israel to avoid civilian casualties, than it would be if they fought like a normal army, like the Israeli forces, always protecting their civilians.

They are not selfish for defending their own people, because when you live an honest life and someone gives you no option to protect your family but war, you know you are not fighting for your family only, but fighting against ideologies and regimes that want to destroy everything that brings peace to the World.

There are forces of death being raised in the World, with no leaven but tyranny, cowardice and radicalism.

Where there is horror, there is danger, and can anyone give Israel an option that does not imply in they giving up the right to defend themselves? International Organization don’t exist to be a moral judge living in the top of a beautiful mountain, but to propose solutions, I guess. The Israeli forces have to do what they can’t avoid anymore, in the best and most ethical possible way. But can the World say they are doing the best they can?

We have to think, what if? What if Israel can’t fight Hamas? On the other hand, what if a group that dominates a region is considered responsible for providing the minimal safety in a war, and held accountable for the lives they used as human shields? How this would affect terrorism, how this would make less advantageous to use this kind of strategy of human shields, in the future? What if the World, that say they care, start to think about solutions, which means start to admit that there are things worth defending, and things we need to strongly oppose?

What if everybody points their finger at countries that provide for Terrorism, like Iran? What would this do for the World in the future? For the human lives that inhabit the World?

And for the thousandth time, what is so hard about demanding a Terrorist group to surrender? How can you say, let’s achieve peace, then we will see if it is necessary to demand the end of terrorism…?