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.