The Fence

 

I can understand why people want wars to end, want people to start suffering and dying. I cannot understand people carrying flags of Terrorist groups who hate women, hate gays, hate people of other religions and races, that I cannot understand – maybe they just found a flag that nobody else will carry, so it is the only chance of lazy people to be the big heroes – but I can understand why people don’t want wars.

I don’t like wars either. But if you are going to think about the World, and you want your empathy to, somehow, work in the direction of better things for people in the World, it is not enough to close your eyes and say, “I value every individual life in the World”. I mean, of course it is not wrong to do that, but you also have to think on how the world works, what the people in power in each region are doing, so you can see what exactly is in the way between the people you care for and the life you would want them to have.

Looking at the television, the current war between Israel and Hamas is being portrayed, by most channels, as a war between a big and rich Israel and a country that only has poor people. Israel portrayed was the big one fighting a small enemy.

It is not so. How could Hamas break into Israel and carry out a horrible mass slaughter full of cruelty? They had guns, vehicles, equipment. Hamas is the organization in power and Gaza, with an equipped army. Hezbollah control a part of Lebanon and have one hundred thousand armed men, and means to wage war. The Houthis in Yemen, also with tens of thousands of men. They have plans to attack, they didn’t stop launching rockets at Israel, and they have the support of the radicalized muslins.

And these groups have ideological, financial and strategic support from Iran. The news don’t think this connection – that can be proved – is worthy to talk about, just as they don’t seem to care when powerful people in places like Qatar are shown to have connections with illegal groups.

Friday night, the news said the tensions between Israel and Iran escalated to a conflict. In reality Iran had already launched missiles at Israel in April and October 2024. The news said Iran was responding to attacks by Israel.

The question is that early last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed that Iran had lots of Uranium enriched far beyond the necessary to generate electricity and dangerously close to the necessary to be used in atomic bombs.

Israel stroke military personal and military and nuclear installations. Iran “responded” attacking Israeli civilian areas at random.

Iran is not secret that they consider the very existence of Israel wrong. They called it a cancer, they support all Israeli enemies and they attacked before. What will be their limit? Would the World be ready to stand with Israel if the worst happen? Should Israelis count with that, considering the many times various European leaders turned their back on them and the somehow volatile politics in America?

The Jews know that hate towards a group is not something abstract, it can acquire very concrete forms. Not a hundred years has passed since World War II.

Why do we say the nazis were evil, and that a neonazi can’t be ever right? It’s mostly because they consider that the lives of a group of people have less value, in fact, no value at all. They made a strange mix of Social Darwinism, religious prejudice and other weird philosophies, but what is more important is their conclusion: that it is not wrong, in fact it is a duty, to overcome “these people” and their evil influence, even killing them if necessary. And what is more, the German nazis acted on it, they carried out and executed a plan to annihilate those people. The Jews. And they murdered 6 million.

What the muslin extremists nowadays mostly use to turn people again Israel – the only Jewish State – is “resistance by any means necessary”. That is, they are teaching people that the presence of Jews, the existence of a Jewish State is something so evil, that nothing, absolutely nothing, that ever may be done against those Jews and anyone who support them will ever be wrong.

So, what the Israelis have ahead of them is an axis of enemies that are attacking and trying to create conditions to attack even strongly. And with Iran in the scene – and it is in the scene – it is not a small enemy, that you can neutralize so easily and magically bring peace.

Considered as a whole, there is a big, strong and extremely bellicose political movement, with a big structure, that does everything to bring the worst in its adepts – appealing to instincts that have nothing to do with politics. And the leaders of this movement have dreams of World domination, and their first and favorite target is Israel. And they are attacking. How can Israel not target the sources of the threats?

 The civilian casualties in Gaza come from the strategy of Hamas of not caring at all for their own people. Since the beginning, and even far before this war, Israel has been claiming that Hamas uses their own people as human shields. This is not an abstract thing. The use of people as human shields is something considered real in conventions about war, and considered a crime of war.

The Israeli Forces have been shown images of tunnels under hospitals, under residential areas. Entrances to this underground infrastructure were found under beds in civilian residences. Why don’t the press show all these findings, and let the people have a chance to judge if the human shields claim is true or not?

I find it very unlikely to show it is not true, especially if you show the leaders of Hamas speaking openly, in public interviews, that it is not a bad thing when their people die – that it is a “people of martyrs”. They don’t open exceptions even for their children.

Of course, someone may say, even with the human shield thing, it doesn’t make the deaths of people “okay”. Sure, nobody is saying it is not a bad thing. It’s damn tragic. But here is the main point of this essay: the fact that these people that we are trying to show empathy for live in the other side of some kind of fence. It’s sad, but it is true if you think.

Some people seem to feel guilty because other people live in regions where they don’t have a lot of the good things we have here. It is true, but it is not just about material things. Much more important than that is freedom, is living under a government that don’t act as if they have the right to do whatever they want with their people.

True, we have a lot of problems here in the countries of the World that we call democratic – and I do believe that they are at least much more democratic than in those other places – we had slavery, we abolished slavery, some problems remained from that, we have a lot of greed, but also, we have laws that say that the individual has a space where the government cannot intrude, and we have mechanisms to fight against leaders who try to trespass the line. Sure, only this will not make everybody happy automatically, but at least we have a good degree of freedom to build that happiness if we truly care for each other.

There are a lot of things, historical processes, that brought us here, and it wasn’t the same in all the World. In some places they jumped from rural life to industrial communism by a bloody revolution. In some places, the separation between religion and government was never deeply ingrained in people’s mind, so, even after some periods of liberalism, they went back to theocracies.

And in these theocracies, the people in the government also hold the “power of God”, in their vision of course, and there are not much limits on how they can control people. These leaders profit by being in war against the “infidels” of the World and in their societies there is nothing that says that it is wrong to use their people as tools in their “holy wars”.

If you do a little research, if you think about the World, if you try to see what is happening in different places, you will see that there is more than one reality existing at the same time in the same Planet.

And these people, that we want, and should, have empathy for, live on the other side of the fence. It’s a side where individual lives have less value. If we are just watching from our side, we can’t avoid homosexuals to be thrown from the roofs of high buildings, we can’t avoid political dissidents to be tortured, we can’t avoid misogynist crimes. We can’t avoid people being used as tools and human shields, and dying in wars that their leaders create.

Because their reality is one of fire and iron, and it will clash with other realities sometimes, and people in democratic places will have to defend their homes, their people. So, what can we do?

We must defend the things we value, the principles of freedom we believe. When a regime somewhere gets too powerful and aggressive, there may be no other way but neutralize the source of the threat by force, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Just by standing up for what we believe, and making a clear differentiation, that there are better and worse forms of government, we already take some of their power. “Better” and “worse” cannot be forbidden words, otherwise why international organizations even exist? Why do we even care to follow international politics?

Democratic countries cannot really be friends of dictators. They must not be accepted, or given places of honor in international organizations, like the UN gave to Iran two times in 2023.

And if the democratic countries state clearly that anyone threatening one of them will be an enemy of the democratic World as a whole, it will make it more costly for them to make wars and put their own people at risk.

Sometimes it feels like the World is doing precisely the opposite. Reports from terrorist regimes are taken quickly and spread by the press. The press says “according to” as if it excused them of any responsibility. And they never show the tons of images and videos that the Israeli forces have of terrorist infrastructure in civilian areas and so on. If these images were fake, you would know. But nobody acknowledges the existence of these evidences.

Like the Hamas men shooting people in a center for aid distribution that Israel had set in Gaza. There is a video, that unfortunately was not widespread. It seems that the celebrity Greta Thunberg in a ship to “bring food” was more interesting – a totally unnecessary super production, since hundreds of trucks were entering with aid, some waiting for international organizations to distribute it.

Well, the news don’t even show the leaders of extremist groups when they publicly declare their ideology. These are not philosophical or sociological discussions. When a leader preaches hate ideologies, they are stating their goals for the future.

When the press talks about the conflicts and don’t use any time at all to speak about the radicalization in the Middle East, it is as if someone was just “narrating” the battles in the beginning of World War II but just not mentioning what the nazi ideology even was. Just saying that “some countries were having a conflict somewhere”. People can’t be informed at all, this way. They don’t have the knowledge needed to decide for themselves what is the right thing.

Most of the world’s intellectuals will point “the oppression of the west” as a cause for radicalization, but it is not true. There is a lot of petroleum money, the leaders of these regions are ridiculously rich, they can count with commercial – and a lot of times political – partners like Russia and China. The leaderships of these regions made a choice. After the fall of the Ottoman and the British Empires, they could have directed the newly independent countries to the pursuit of general prosperity, freedom and happiness.

Instead, they used the fact that, in the middle of the new Middle East, there was a tiny strip that was given to the Jews, who came from all over the Middle East – where they weren’t really welcome – and from the disaster that happened to them in Europe, to their small ancestral homeland. A tiny strip for a minority, fair enough. But those leaders used this fact to bring their people to rage, to make them see the “necessity” of fighting the western world. Instead of the path of building things, they chose the easiest – for them – path of war against an external enemy. Nothing suits a tyrant better.

And that is what puts the civilians of these countries in another side of a fence.

Of course we must have empathy for the suffering of these people, but we can’t do this by refusing to see things as they are. I, too, dream of a World where everybody is free from danger of violence, but think: How the existence of these Giants will not affect the lives of people under their power?

How will that people not suffer, not only from war, but also deadly political and religious persecution, sexist tyranny, racist massacres of neighbor inside the same country?

Let’s pray that not everything have to be about war, but when a country like Israel is deadly threatened like they are now, there is no option but fight against the sources of the danger.

Yes, it is all tragic, and nothing exempts us from acting the most ethical way possible, but the consolation is that fighting those Giants is the right thing, the necessary thing. Because they won’t decide for themselves to stop making everything worst for everybody. These angry Forces will not decide, by themselves, to stop starting fires wherever they can.

We have to admit. Some forms of power, even if far from perfect, are better than others. The result of we all just admitting it can be surprisingly good, for everybody.

On the other side, think of what would be the consequences of a defeated Israel and a nuclear Iran, with their “death to Israel, death to America, death to all infidels” ideology? What would be the result for the whole World?