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.