Simple Drawing

"Marry me, I love you" (Fernando Spagnuolo)

Greed for Virtue, Good Seeds, and the World we Have Now

People want to be good. But because of vanity and because of politics, sometimes it is easier to appear as good. And, if the person can convince others, I don’t know, maybe she can convince herself. This is a question as old as mankind – only the means of showing virtue changed. Now it’s all very fast, people want to show all their value in one picture or small text on social media.

There is a way of showing virtue that I, personally, after living four decades, came to consider as not honorable at all, to say the least, and it is used by the mainstream academic world, among other people. It consists in showing you care so much for the ones you consider more vulnerable, that you don’t even consider important to defend the rights of anybody else.

You are claiming that nobody cares so much as you, because you are the one that cares so much for the oppressed, that you even view the rights of the groups you don’t consider oppressed as some kind of “luxury”, you will not let it stop you in your virtuous quest.

You are trying to make yourself a hero without much hard work of finding real positive solutions, you just subtract groups of people from the list of people deserving of consideration. Just by doing that, you can be seen by a big group of people, who are led by momentary emotions more than reason, as virtuous.

But this is an unreal, unidimensional vision of the World. Life is not like that. The World is not neatly divided in two easily identifiable groups of oppressed and oppressors. There are different kinds of conflict, different types of pain, of struggling.

This black and white vision those people have, surely will lead them into very strange positions. Because there are different types of oppression, and those people start to make a simplistic mental scale, from biggest oppressor to most oppressed. And this leads to contradiction.

Like when you care for homosexuals, but there is one thing you care more about, that is, the ethnicities you consider most oppressed. What if an authoritarian group, like Hamas, rules a region inhabited by people that are “oppressed” in your scale – the Palestinians – and fights against a people who are “not oppressed” in your scale – the Israelis – but at same time they tyrannize the homosexuals among them?

You have to stand with Hamas, or at least turn a blind eye to their deeds, otherwise you would be “aligned” with the “not oppressed” people, and breaking your priority that is "race". Then you end up supporting a hell in the life of the homosexual Palestinian, which appears as twice oppressed in your list. Doesn’t seem the least bit smart. That’s why having a set of values as priority is always more coherent than dividing people in different groups of rights.

And why do people fall in these strange mental situations? Because they are trying to solve the problems of the World by basically focusing on all that is negative. Thinking it is alright to break all rules if it is in the name of the right people, as if taking chances with “tearing down the wall” having nothing to put in its place was more righteous than admitting that the present society is not made only of bad things, and there are positives aspects to work with.

If we believe it is wrong that people have their rights neglected and abused, then we should try to everyday get a little closer to a World where everybody is respected. And we should do so by acting in a way that is more and more alike the way people should act towards people, and not “doing wrong in the opposite direction of the tide to make things right”.

Because whenever you do wrong, you can’t control the consequences of it, and you can’t exempt yourself of the bad consequences when they happen. And if you don’t believe there is right and wrong, then why are you fighting for anything at all?

I know that working with patience and acknowledging the rights of everybody may not give the feeling of vindication that some people desire. I mean, when we read about, or see in movies, some monster injustices of the past, like the horror of slavery, we may be filled with emotion and a strong feeling that there should be some drastic accounting, some vindication.

But the thing is that it is not possible to go back in time and undo those things, nor is it fair to take revenge on the people who are here in the present and you think they somehow represent those perpetrators because of their ethnics, but they didn’t do any of those things.

The academic people say that we have a system now that is result of that situation of old, that there are vestiges everywhere. And by saying that they justify "revolt by any means".

But here it is important to make a distinction. Of course the past reflects in the present, but the present and the past being connected doesn’t mean they are morally equivalent. So you can raise awareness for the situations you think are still not fair, but you can’t walk around wanting to punish the normal everyday people as if what they do as they go on living their lives was morally equivalent to having slaves or something, because it is not.

Some people use episodes of violence against minorities to try to push the idea that “nothing changed” since the old times of terrible oppression. Those episodes exist and must be denounced, justice and acknowledgment must be pursued, but no, we are not living in the old times.

With all the flaws our society still have, we have people going to jail for murdering people of color, we have women successfully denouncing harassers, even sometimes big companies having to respond for wrong deeds and so on. We are far from perfection, but those are verifiable facts. We have a society where you can speak against someone who is higher than you in a social hierarchy. By the way, what we have is those matters is far more than what they have in China or Iran.

So even if there is a connection of the past with the level of opportunity someone has today, you can denounce when you believe the opportunity is not enough, but not talk about people driving a car to their work as if that was morally equivalent to having slaves, or supporting slavery.

Moral is about thinking of the consequences of your acts, and the consequence of living a stable honest life in the present is not the strengthening of the bad aspects of our society in the future, it is simply the continuity of a world where more things can be brought to discussion, where things still can get better. You can’t punish that.

The vindication you can have over the cruelties of the past, is to build a society where everybody can thrive and prosper, and where violence against minorities is punished. You can’t label people who did nothing as “oppressors”. Especially If you know nothing about them, or how they deal with their communities, or what values they have in their families.

By neglecting the problems of people who you don’t consider “priority” because you don’t see them as the most vulnerable, you are punishing individual growth, therefore standing against one of the main ways that mankind has to walk towards freedom.

Because the quest of humankind for freedom, for a better condition, is not made only of flags and political ideologies. It is also made of individuals, families, and their ethical and moral values. Cultural changes a lot of times happen in an organic way, from people to people. Mankind is not totally guided by politics.

Individual growth can spread to more and more people. Not as fast as slogans, but it does. This is not any baseless abstraction, we all know that the people that immediately surround us can have more weight in determining if we are going to grow or not than politicians. The respect or disrespect in workplaces, for instance, that is not always correctable by law. The self-esteem that people get from their families, and so on. Whole cultures on how to behave towards the other.

And the main form of spreading values still is first family, then community. Of course sometimes a person diverges and veers to a different direction than that of his family, for better or worse, but still, in general, family remains the main instrument of continuity that humans have.

Politics can help, and is so many times necessary, but there is this other, not less important, to say the least, form of making a better World, that is simply living up to high values. After all, you can always have good laws in theory and nobody abiding them. No political change can, all by itself, make a better World.

If in the past you had too much tyranny, the way to make things different is people growing and showing it is possible to be in a better position and still don’t forget to care for others. You can’t be so negative as to think that absolutely everybody that prosper will be a selfish person who will only take and not give, and not care at all for the vulnerable.

Why must we believe that nobody who grows in the workplaces is to be trusted to make a better World but people who grow in political parties are?

Think. If we are supposed to believe that students that come from well-to-do families can have empathy for the oppressed, why is it so hard to believe that people who achieve some individual growth in non-academical areas can have empathy too, and care for the vulnerable, just having a different approach, less ideological? Why does academia have to be the only place where people who were not born in vulnerability must be believed when they say care for others? Because they have a “unified speech”? Other people also share consistent values, older and more battle-tested.

Of course, for people who always want to quantitatively grow their influence over other, this other aspect of human evolution is not so interesting, so they dismiss it as unrealistic, even naïve. Their way of evolution – their “revolution” – has a promise of changing things fast. But if you throw away the consistency of values that slowly grow with mankind, anything that goes fast can change things for worst – fast. As many examples around the World show.

And I am in no ways a specialist in that, nor am I thinking I solved the matter, but it occurs to me – and I want to share it because I believe it’s worth the thought – that this may be one of the reasons for Antisemitism.

The Jews have important historical characters and inspiring religious figures, but still, after so many times in History refusing to be assimilated by what was around, they built a worldview where traditional values, individual worth and immediate relationships cannot be nullified by waves of “isms”. Still, they are criticized for an "ideology" - Zionism - that only says they need to  have a home in their ancestral homeland. A right they legally acquired in the UN 80 years ago.

They’ve built their communities in America and a prosper country in Israel not so much through political ideology as through families, communities, and personal relationships. This is not wanted in this Political Word.

People don’t lose power when they refuse to go with the “right” modern ideology, they lose power when they think modern ideology is their only savior. And I believe this is something important for the whole World to think about.

Nowadays we live in a World where anyone can be targeted for having said the “wrong thing”, and nobody will be defended by the big groups of “rebels” unless it is someone who they agree with. That is, everybody quiet, and only one group of “official rebels” speaking. Yes, official. Your University is not in an alley.

That is, not so much for new ideas, individual creativity.

On the other hand, to be fair, a big part of the World of capitalism also don’t seem to be really aware of what is at stake. Free commerce is one of the things that make up a free Society. But there are other values, freedom of speech, of opportunity, equal respect for everybody, and the need to defend the rights of people you disagree with when they are neglected.

If someone with a lot of money and political influence starts to play against these values, the laws of supply and demand, all by themselves, without higher moral values, won’t save us from going into a strange new kind of authoritarian world.

One instance of a thing that doesn’t seem to give people an instantaneous self-label of “defender of the most oppressed” and at the same time doesn’t represent a big issue to the huge quantity commerce, but definitely affects human life and free society is the rights of people on internet.

What can a person do if she is suddenly cut off from the big social medias? A lot of people are talking about the need to take certain kind of content from internet, dangerous content. I agree there is dangerous content, especially when it appeals to children and teenagers, and there is a need to deal with some of these things through law.

But there is another side to this coin. Why so little – or nothing at all – is spoken about the right that people should have to defend themselves if they believe they were “cut off” by wrong reasons – or no reason at all? Where is the right of someone to be in internet?

If they cut you off, you get into a maze of artificial intelligence conversations – never a real person – and without strong laws, hiring a common lawyer to fight that giant would be a desperating waste. Where is the political concern for that? People seem to like it when it happens with someone they don’t like, but they don’t see how this can affect the individual freedom, the right to be in the “arena”.

We don’t know how these guys – the bosses of big tech companies – think. To be very honest, I feel like they might live in a different planet. Does it make any sense? Anyway, maybe their whole ideology is that if people are using something, it’s because that’s what they want. Maybe they would say that, if people’s desires, coupled with an algorithm that seeks to increase interaction, lead everybody in a certain direction, it’s not their fault at all.

But we must think about the consequences of it. If the algorithm works to increase profit at any cost, it may decide that cutting off people with new ideas helps the machine to run smoother. It could happen automatically, by an algorithm that have a whole galaxy of data and a “will” to increase a few determinate variables – time of consumption, money.

Not to mention the possibility of it being used deliberately for political gain. There is a lot of money in politics.

But where would be the constitutional base for what I am saying?  Well, if you walk on a restaurant, can people refuse to serve you with no reason? Can a posting service refuse to send your letter? Can a bank refuse to take your money?

There is a reason for the universality of these laws. There is no peace without it.

I am not saying these things to bring up any kind of despair. On the contrary. My whole point is that despair is the greatest enemy of humanity. When people think that there is nothing in the civilization to work with, that nothing that exists currently is worth defending, they can make the awful bet of wanting to see it all fall hoping that “maybe” something better takes its place. History, wisdom and logics shows us how insane that is.

You can respect people who fought for Civil Rights in the past, and some of the people who fight for them now, and at same time acknowledge that we live in a different moment in History, and unfortunately some of the historically legitimate causes started being used for a larger and less clear political agenda. And that there are new issues to think about.

Offering simplistic solutions for problems that happen far away, where the consequences don’t affect you, screaming about wars that happen in the other side of the world while not giving a damn for the rights of individuals that stand right next to you is not only hypocrisy, but also helps to kill good seeds.

There has always been good seeds, and the good people of the past, not only the bad, made the World we have today.

The East Of Me (little poem)

We all hurt by the cold and the heat

Needing faith is by far no defeat

I just wonder how people can't see

The East of me

Many times i'm just walking along

With a smile I just got from a song

And I know there's a way to be free

In the East of me

They all come and they all disappear

In the morning our place is still here

And it's always you first that I see

In the East of me

16 Points About "Genocide" and Other Things

Now that there is a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, now that we got to the point where a terrorist organization finally signed a deal that says it must disarm and have no more political role – a deal that, if upheld, will set Gaza and Israel free of this terror – journalists, leaders, academic people, and protesters in streets and internet just want to talk about what they call a “genocide”, that they say is what Israel is doing.

Here are 16 points about this subject, that reinforce (and a lot of times repeat) what I wrote before.

 

How can the right moral stand be the one that shows no future?

Even the leaders of the World that tried to show virtue recognizing a Palestinian state said that Hamas should have no role in it – even if they offered no solution for how it should happen.

Now people in the street are mixed: some are openly supportive of Hamas, pretending they don’t know that Hamas – or Hezbollah or any of those groups – will never bring freedom and dignity to people while in power. Other people avoid the subject of terrorism, focusing on Israel alone.

If the ceasefire is upheld and Hamas is gone from power, a new future can start to be built. But if the protesters and the leaders who stand with them have their ways, then what? Israel, a nation of 8 million people should simply disappear? Then the different terror groups in the region will magically agree and build a decent country?

Or will there be just more blood? And who they will attack, since their political power come from attacking people?

If some of these people were asking for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, well, Israel started doing so, with the condition that Hamas will disarm so there won’t be a terrorist organization at Israel’s doorstep working night and day to destroy it.

 

Disagreeing with the main protesters about the causes of things doesn’t mean you don’t care for tragedy

The word “genocide” has been gaining traction from emotion. Of course, they show images, and some of these images are real. Not all, by far, but some are. Images of suffering. Because it’s a war.

The word “genocide” was coined in 1948 – right after the Holocaust, the intended destruction of all Jewish people that result in the death of 6 million – nearly half of them.

Deaths in wars are tragic, but not every bad word apply to every tragedy. Looking for clarity in words is not coldness – is seeking the truth.

We must refuse the emotional blackmail that is being done, when they try to make us feel that, by not demonizing Israel, we think lives doesn’t matter.

If someone believes – as I do – that Israel had no choice but acting to destroy Hamas – the deaths don’t cease to be tragic – but the cause changes.

A genocide is an intent to destroy a people, it is not a strike – with the collateral harm that always exist in such situations – on an armed threat that intends to destroy you. Simple as that.

 

If Israel wanted a “genocide” why did they sign the ceasefire deal? And why did they give them Gaza in the first place?

No, they did not resume the war. Hamas is a treacherous enemy and they do try to break the dividing line and inflict harm on Israeli soldier – to which Israel responds, because just “hoping they stop breaking the deal” won’t work with Hamas.

Israel has videos of Hamas members, armed, on the wrong side of the line.

And if they wanted a “genocide”, why did they sign the deal? Why did they stop their full attacks? By the way, why did they even give back Gaza to the Palestinians in September of 2005?

 

Hordes of armed, masked men invaded a small country randomly killing as many as they could, with cruelty. Those were the first moments of a war.

There has been a certain refusal to clearly pinpoint that moment as the start of the war, as if a terrorist attack that kills more than a thousand, rapes, burns, and takes more than two hundred as hostages was not a war declaration.

There was no open war between Israel and Hamas in Oct 6^th, 2023. There was a ceasefire from previous conflicts. Then the massacre, and then the war.

Doesn’t a massacre carried by a terror organization that rules the neighboring region count as a declaration of war? Then it is a declaration of what?

 

Imagine October 7^th was in your city

It is easy to just put in a drawer of “bad things that happen in the World” when it was so far away.

But imagine it was in your city. Imagine you knew there was hate against you in the neighbor region, but something happened in a way you could never have imagined.

Imagine it was your door neighbor, the daughter of the baker, a teacher you had, a baby in the family of a friend.

The next day everybody is in chock, pain, anger, despair. The government announces the country is in war, now. Of course it is in war.

 

When Israel was created, the Jews accepted two states, the Arab leaders didn’t. And they refused it again later

In 1948, the World was coming out of a major shift in geopolitics. Two World Wars had redefined the Globe. The Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empire had ended, and the Brittish Empire had entered its irreversible decline.

There were regional conflicts, violence, displacements.

The solution for the dispute for Palestine, between Jews – who dreamed of going back to their ancestral homeland all along two thousand years and had begun doing so – and Arabs – who were the majority there – was the division of it in two. The Jews said yes, the Arabs said no.

Then the War of Independence. A big number of Arabs had to leave Israel, and at least the same number of Jews had to live other countries in the Middle East, not to mention the exodus from Europe.

In the end of the Age of Empires, less than one percent of the Middle East for the Jews. All the rest for Arab muslins.

And ever since, every time Palestinians leaders were offered a two state deal for Palestine, they said “no”. They remain firm in their resolution of “never recognizing Israel”.

Isn’t this one of the things the United Nations should be tirelessly working for – the recognition of Israel by Arab Countries – since the UN agreed with its foundation in 1948?

 

October 7^th don’t end by itself. By the way, ever heard of “Conquer the Galilee”?

It took more than a day for the Israeli Army to send the terrorists back, to stop them. They were determined to go as far as they could. Now imagine if they took a village, and stayed there with all the people as hostages?

No doubt they would love to do it if they could, and imagine the nightmare – an even worst nightmare – that this kind of crisis would cause for Israel, with villages as hostages and the insane demands of terrorists?

Hardly they would plan of taking Tel Aviv soon and destroying the government, they would more likely create chaos in the country, advancing more and more.

Hezbollah also attacked Israel, so Israel fought them in South Lebanon, and there they found everything ready for operation “Conquer the Galilee”, an invasion of Israel from the North with more – and maybe bigger – attacks like October 7^th.

 

Israel has proven it does a lot to mitigate civilian harm

They make what no other army has ever made. They throw leaflets, make calls to residences of people, post on social media where they will attack, so people can evacuate. Giving up the element of surprise. Nobody does that.

They also ensure that aid comes into Gaza. They showed countless times the huge amount of trucks that come in bringing aid. The press don’t show that – again, if it was fake, say it’s fake, but instead, silence.

Although the press loves when Israel creates any measure of control to be sure the aid will not go to Hamas to exploit it. Then the press says “Israel is blocking aid”. Simple as that.

Israel chose to fight on the ground too, not only by air, so they could be more precise. And more than nine hundred Israeli soldiers lost their lives.

 

There is a power against Israel that is much larger than Gaza

I really don’t understand why so little is spoken in the press about the ties that these terrorist groups have to Iran. It is not like the dictatorship of Iran disguises their hatred for Israel – the Ayatollah talked about it many times openly, calling Israel a “cancer” and saying it “will soon exist no more”.

Their connection to the terrorist groups have been documented – they train them and they fund them – and there is no doubt. The “double role” of Qatar isn’t so subtle either.

Isn’t this part of the story? It is what Israel has been saying for so many years. At least listen. If it seems false, say it. But instead, silence. Why?

 

When radical extremist ideology put its hands in weapons, the result can’t be beautiful

There is a sad true about the Middle East that maybe most of the news people think is “too abstract” to make a story: the radical extremist version of Islam is ever growing, and more and more people think Jews don’t deserve to live, and that violence is a good way to solve any problem, and martyrdom is an achievement.

The result, of course, is that people’s lives gets worse and worse, being watched and controlled by armed masked men dressed in black, having no right to say anything. Fathers and brothers killing girls for honor, homosexuals force to hide or flee or get killed, dissidents tortured and murdered.

And of course, these groups take all the resources that could be invested in making people’s lives better, and use it to build their terror infrastructure. And after making people’s lives hopeless, somehow they teach people to take all the frustration and direct it against the “enemy” – the Jews, America, the West – based on promises of bliss after the “victory”, or even paradise after martyrdom – yes, some people really believe that.

That this all results in War and suffering should be no surprise for anyone.

 

Israel do have military power, but only if they use it

Israel is not among the five greatest military powers in the World. By the lists I found in internet, not even among the ten. At least not in quantitative terms. But they do have an amazing – unique – human power, the talent and dedication of each individual. So they always innovate and achieve things that could have seem impossible, like surviving alone surrounded by sworn enemies.

But this is because they use their strengths when needed, otherwise it is like having no strength.

When someone invades a building and kill someone, you have to go after him, you don’t say, “maybe he will never do it again”, and you don’t say, “it is not necessary to respond, let’s just increase the safety of buildings”. If certain things go unresponded, you can surely expect the evil and the danger to grow exponentially.

Israel’s history is a story of wars and terrorist attacks. Bombs on buses, on restaurants. People being stabbed in the streets.

Now is a chance like no other to start bringing peace to the region.

 

Evil forces always increase the cost of their defeat. For everybody.

Some people talk about “apartheid”. But Israel is a state with freedom where people of all ethnics and religions can be who they are, vote and be voted, and work anywhere.

Yes, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are poorer than Israelis in general, and yes, Israel watches over what is happening at its borders. But one thing is not the cause of the other.

How can people have good lives if their leaders only care about taking all the resources and invest in their agenda? And how can Israel not watch, having a sworn enemy there, that attacked so many times?

And the big dilemma is that, the more the time passes, more people adhere to the Terror ideology, more structure is built for the terror group inside the cities. More and more the terror is mixed with the lives of people. More and more they increase the cost, in lives, that will take for their defeat. This is precisely their strategy.

Isn’t the discovering an unbelievably huge maze of tunnels, a true underground city, with electricity, air circulation, metal doors, at least an interesting thing for the news? Why nothing is said about that, or about missiles stored in schools, or terrorism classes in schools?

I repeat: now the deal was signed, will the World allow Hamas to break the deal, rearm and increase the cost of their defeat once again?

 

Giving away the protection of your people is not an option

After the killing has started – and Hamas started it – “doing nothing” means forsaking your people. How would you feel if in the future you had to look back, knowing you didn’t fight the enemy and your people suffered hell because of it?

Such a trade-off, giving away the fate of your people to chance for a momentary peace, surely is not being proposed by a good hand.

And indeed the monster who is proposing this dilemma will not, no matter what you do to “appease” him, he will not stop doing evil by his own decision, doing evil to other people and to his own people.

There is no real peace coming from giving terrorism what it wants. They oppress their own people, they kill dissidents, one group sometimes fights the other in huge bloody civil wars, and they aim for a global domination.

They say it in their own words: “first Israel, then America”. They want it all. How far can they go? Well, if nothing is done, it is obvious that they won’t stop causing pain to everybody.

Iran only doesn’t have a nuclear bomb because Israel stopped their nuclear program with precise strikes.

There is so much more that the World should be doing against terror, against the teaching of extremism, even to children – but no, nobody should be asked to forsake their own duty of protecting their people, most likely to no gain at all.

 

All this focus on only one pain is making a people the big pariah. Again.

You have to wonder why Israel attracts so much anger when it fights back. In the very recent Tigray War, in Ethiopia, more than half a million died. Approximately half a million died in the Civil War in Syria. 240 thousand in Afghanistan. 300 thousand in Sudan. More than 300 thousand in Yemen.

All this sudden surge of “caring for each person who dies” makes no sense at all. The fact is that, when Israel fights, some people find their perfect villain: someone successful, someone who believes in the individual freedoms, someone who is Jewish.

And all the discomfort with these “different” people – that for some reason, seems like was never really gone – comes back to the surface, and you have Jewish young people being harassed in colleges, Jewish families being offended and threatened in public spaces, attacks to synagogues and shootings. Jewish people dying in places like the United States and Australia.

And news people talking about these killings as if they couldn’t see the relation between the way they talk about the conflict in Gaza and the rise of Antisemitism.

 

And how can it be “genocide” if Gaza can’t simply say “we just want to live our lives and mind our business”?

What country who was being victim of a “genocide” wouldn’t accept the offer of just saying “peace”, “long term peace”, “peace for good”, “let’s each of us carry on with our own lives”.

People in Gaza can’t say that because of the ideology that Hamas is imposing on the region.

Genocide is the killing with the intent of eliminating a people with basis of who they are. The Palestinians are not being eliminated, Israel signed a ceasefire agreement, there is a terrorist group that started this.

So how is this a genocide? If it was, you would have a “victim” claiming for peace.

So, seriously, Gaza, please say “we want to coexist in peace”.

 

Seems like a lot of people don’t want us to think seriously about dictatorships and death ideologies

Something strange is happening here. Most news people, and World leaders, talk about numbers and so on, but seem to be totally unable to differentiate between a democracy and a bloody dictatorship, in qualitative terms. Even slaveholding countries don’t have to answer for how they treat people.

Iran being invited to preside commissions of human rights. Everybody a “brother”, no matter how many people they killed.

Nobody seeing the difference between things. All a flattened ground for money and commodities to go from here to there, without much thinking about nothing.

Perspective

 

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.