To Valda (a poem)

 Sometimes everything

That everybody has

Is everybody this

And everybody that

Like everybody hates you

Everybody scorns you

But everything can change

At any moment when someone

Finds someone else

That is talented

Creative

Corageous

Beautiful

And everybody else

Just isn't everybody

Anymore

From The Globe To The Human

 

            Who rules the World, or is trying to? I don’t know any more about any connections than strict logic can infer from very well known facts. I don’t look for doubtful facts, I think the very well known ones must be enough for me to live my life in harmony with my best goals, without getting insane.

            I wrote in my last book, and still believe, that we don’t have to look so far to see that money and other advantages make people act in ways that deep inside they know that are not the most ethical way. So, people must change.

            But of course it doesn’t mean that people who put money to influence people don’t have goals. There are people looking for power, there are groups fighting in the World, and, once again, money screams loud. You can use money to invest in companies in other countries, or to invest in organizations that fund students, so it gets a little easier to “make their minds”. Let’s see for the good side: if they still have to fund students, if they still have to make their minds, it’s because History is alive, it’s not over yet.

Conspiracy theories a lot of times speak as if the World was ruled by One Big Group. Well, I think the super powerful people of the World don’t totally agree and trust each other, which can be a good thing. I mean, if you were a criminal, how much would you trust another criminal? And they probably have pride and other silly things we mortals have.

            So, they are playing a game for power. You can make alliances, make enemies, all the while making a lot of money. Maybe you don’t even know if you really need the “final victory”, after all you already have the biggest fancy car collection in the World, but you are a player, and play you will.

            Imagine you were playing a very rewarding game – rewarding from their miserable hearts’ point of view – with very few people, and there is a lot of people outside who are just paying for the game. If someone wants to come in, you may agree with your adversaries not to let it happen. And if one of the players gets very weak, the others may give that smart eye to each other and unite for a moment just to kick the loser out. A lot of things can happen. Hence, this mess.

            But how much power these “groups” of powerful people have? It helps a lot to have not only money, but political power, so being in command of countries in something very very helpful. But how helpful? If you want power to play the World Game thing, what is better, a dictatorship or a democracy? I would say dictatorships.

            Not that you don’t have super greedy people in democracies, obviously. But anyway, America and Israel, for instance, are democracies. That means people can do things independently. You can start a company or an organization without being strictly at service of the established power. Even with all difficulties of a difficult world, you can do your thing. Maybe hard, but possible.

            Not so in dictatorships. Whatever you do must be “aligned” with “the biggest mission of our people”, you know. So why so many so-called smart people only see danger in countries that, at least, still have some democracy going on? Aren’t the dictatorships the countries that have all their resources put strictly into a single direction?

            Why to be so soft when talking about bellicose dictatorships? Why to relativize so much, why so much overthinking? I know that not all human beings in a dictatorship are bad, God forbid I say so – but you know, these countries are all set up for the “game”.

            And why so much hate for Israel, and conspiracy theories? The idea of “evil Zionists” means that Israel, and most of the Jewish people, are taken as a block. Like they all have the same plans, from the billionaire to the middle class guy, from the politician to the poor guy in the street. Why only them?

            Why let this kind of conspiratory visions about a country make us blind to a story of attack, war, and of a very diverse people who are now suffering?

           We may have our opinions about israeli specifics in polítics (I am just too tired for that right now, or forever), but it's a democracy. 

            And the people who voted for him are not people who want a genocide. There may be a fringe super radical minority - Israel is a country, I repeat: a country - but mostly I think they are people who were justifiably concerned with security, wanting protection, after decades of terror attacks, from stabbing in the streets to bombings. The massacre of October 7^th show they were not wrong about that.

I think they also had the opinion that a lot of people on the peace side were being too naïve and romantic, and it is something that we, because I was always on the peace side, must think a little about too. Not giving up our core values, but being more realistic about what it takes to get there.

            I think their situation is really complex. I recently learned about the Golan Heights. It’s like a chain of mountains, and on one side is Israel, on the other is the West Bank. Considering that they unfortunately are far from being friends in the moment – ask people from the West Bank – who is in control of the mountain is not only a matter of “land”, but security, too.

            I said many times I would like to see less radicalism. I would like – and this I mean about the World – that more people on the “right” would say, “we will do our best to not lose a real opportunity of peace and mercy”, and more people on the left to say “we will not disrespect a person’s concern about the safety of her family”.

            It will take a while for us all to get there. So, even if you agree with me that Israel hadn’t found the “right government” yet, should they be punished for that? Are you, whoever you are, sure you already found your “right government”?

            And they are being punished, when taken as a block. Then you can choose one aspect – let’s say, “right wing government”, and, based on what “right wing” means here in the West, not taking in consideration how different life is in the Middle East, you say “they are right wing like mister Jack or mister John that we all know well, and that’s what’s driving them to war”.

            Journalism should not only be judged by what they say, but also what they don’t. If there is no effort at all to see Israel as the diverse society it is, people can freeze moments and make wrong judgements. Take the Army, for instance, that is mandatory there. People may think, “what a tough right wing country”.

            But it is also a democratic, technologic, intellectual cosmopolitan country. So the Army being mandatory, I can’t say that what works there should work for everybody, but it makes the Army diverse. The socially concerned guy and the capitalist guy both have to serve. The girl who works at a hospital and the girl who is a graphic designer too. That's interesting, right?

            So it is not right to take an old, solid and at same time diverse institution like the Idf and judge if by the current government or whatever.

            Delusions of “Zionist super power” come from taking most Jews as a monolithic block and downplaying other powers in the World. Attributing  super powers to someone is a form of dehumanizing them, because you will not believe if they say they are suffering.

Some people even plucked away posters of kidnaped people because they said these posters were there to distract from Palestinian suffering. But if both facts – the kidnaping of Israelis and the suffering of Palestinians – are true, why not keep both information available, so the normal people can think and come to their conclusions?

These kidnaped people are not super humans, they were just living their lives, with dreams that had nothing to do with taking anything from anyone, and they didn’t ask to be the object of any political negotiation.

Different Stories At The Same Time

 

            We are individuals and we exist in World full of other people. We must try to be happy and also do good for others. And this “do good for others” happens, of course, in many levels. We have our nuclear family, extended family and friends, the community I live in, my city, my Country, the World.

            When we think about the Global problems and what could be done about it it’s hard not to feel a little bit lost. It’s hard not to think about politics, and there is so much confusion and so many problems. There are massacres to think about in Asia and Africa – why don’t we talk more about that? I guess that’s a different topic in itself – there is slavery, almost slavery, there is War in the Middle East, there is even a terrible war in Europe.

            The urgency that these problems have to us as individuals depends on how far we are from the “scene”. Of course you can practice empathy from a distance, but when we are in a comfortable position there is always the option to say something that just makes us “look good”.

            You can take an organization that has terror and cruelty as it’s main weapons, and it’s publicly sworn to eliminate an ethnicity, and say this is just “one of the consequences of an ongoing land dispute in a hard part of the world that is unfortunately too far from a solution”, when the Two States Solution has been offered to them and rejected so many times. Yes, it would take a while to build that State, but first they have to say Yes – and Yes should mean “we totally give up on destroying Israel to have the whole land”.

            From a comfortable place you can even take a very simple story, the story of more than one hundred people just like you and me who have been kidnapped and remain in captivity for nine months, you can take this horror that should end right now, and make it “part of the conflict”, or, even more, “part of the very complicated situation in the Middle East”, so these human beings disappear in a haze, and you still look good. Or you think you do.

            Yes, of course there is pain in the other side too, as I’ve been saying here for a while, but what could be consequences of having terrorism so ingrained in a Society, especially if this terrorism remains virtually unchallenged by the World?

            Hamas – who is sworn to eliminate the Jews and publicly praises the death of it’s own people as “martyrdom” – is the Government of Gaza, and this is part of a Global problem, the problem of a World that seems to refuse to have any standards at all to define if a political group is an enemy of Civilization.

            Here in the West, most people in the College “Humanities” don’t care too much for the word “Civilization” to say the least, most journalists don’t know exactly the meaning of the word, and most “normal” people take the benefits of Civilization for granted.

            Now because of this confusion and this lack of will to stand for any solid value, we have all this hatred and violence mostly unchallenged in the Global level. And then you expect the Israeli people to just watch their world being attacked in the level of family, community, Country. You expect them to decline to defend their loved ones because of a huge Global problem of blindness, greed and cowardice.

            So why don’t we push for the right solution, that is, first the return of the hostages – those human beings like us – and then the surrender of Hamas? Why don’t we see this as a necessary first step to start building the path for peace?

            What can be wrong with the surrender of a terror organization? Hamas surrendering don’t mean Palestine surrendering the idea of having their Country. Imagine, what if Gaza was ruled by a respectable democratic Government? Wouldn’t it strengthen any plea that they may have? Remember that Israel consider themselves as a Nation subscribed to the International Law… You can’t say the right way don’t work if you never tried…

            Is this solution too good for now? How do Jews make peace with a “party” whose only plan is “no more Jews”? Remembering that countries did try to destroy Israel in open war, and lost, and then this terrorism thing rose, because “Hamas is not a Country”.

            But what would be the consequences for Israel to let diabolic attacks go unresponded?  What would be the moral consequences for their Society? We see that even in countries free of war the political divisions and other kinds of division are threatening to destroy any form of common hope, now imagine how it can work in a Country constantly under attack or serious threat of attack? Not to mention the value of each single individual lost, because they don’t raise their kids to be martyrs, as we don’t raise ours.

            Yes, we should care about Palestinian lives, especially children, but we shouldn’t wait for wars to start to start being worried. We could seriously worry whenever a teacher, under the watch of even with the help of international organizations, start teaching children that their biggest mission is to conquer the land of their neighbours by any means necessary.

            Yes, we should care for the poor countries, but somehow it became wrong to put our fingers in a very important wound that this World has, that is, the evil Governments that poor countries sometimes have. How did we go from “we must care for the poor of the World” to “we can’t criticize a government if the people are brown”? How can we help the World if we can’t put our fingers on that?

            There is a big problem in the World, of hatred that is growing and going mostly unchallenged. You can’t expect Israel to pay all the price – or to accept being the first – or to fix all this alone. Of course Israel must act in the most ethical way possible in this war – and it is a war, the enemy is armed and angry, and Israeli soldiers are dying – and I don’t remember hearing in History classes that  countries provide aid to enemies in a war like Israel does, but don’t it occur to you that Israel can’t save Palestine alone?

            I don’t want to be pessimistic, but we should consider that building a better World can be a little harder than saying “we vehemently condemn any ugly thing that may happen”. We should consider that is Better World is not just a photogenic peace sign or a look-how-righteous-I-am protest away.

            This can be crucial times, times when what matters is not just counting dead bodies in a total tragedy, but what did we really defend.

            Did we defend innocence? Did we really defend innocence?

In Spirals Goes An Eraser Of Stories

 

            As you have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about Israel. There are a lot of things about her that are so different from everything else I saw. I mean, you have a tribe of people that have been exiled for twenty centuries, and they found their way back to the place they’ve left so long ago. They went for centuries without a Country of their own, and they’ve finally built a Country in the exact place of their old Country, that an ancient giant empire, Rome, have destroyed.

            Their tie to the land is Biblical. But here we have to stop and think. You can’t impose the theological content of the Bible to others, of course. So how would we explain the legitimacy of Israel to an atheist? I have to say I have nothing against atheists, as long as they’re decent.

            Here is what I think: a real humanist, even if atheist, knows he can’t just throw away the narratives of the past, as if they were only just “silly fantasies”. Otherwise you are being nihilistic, that is, only seeing the negative in everything. Like when we find Science, which is fantastic, we don’t have to say “mankind has been ridiculously stupid so far”. We would be ungrateful to the men and women who carried the burden of humanity for centuries until we arrived at this better place, where we have democracy and other things.

            I really like the word “humanism”, to me it means being in love with the human being, having compassion for our imperfection and joy for our achievements. Valuing our collective narratives but never forgetting mankind is made of individuals.

Speaking of that, let me digress just for a moment. In the first chapter of the first volume of this book I said some things about education. It was before the attacks and this wasn’t supposed to be a book about war. So I think it is right that I say I do not consider all modern pedagogy as an enemy like Hamas, or they supporters. God, no. It was a totally different trip. I just worried that some theorists may be too romantically in love with the “collective” and I worry that the individual loses space. Imagine if someday someone says it is not desirable that kids produce any texts individually. Some things to think about. We can work it out.

            So, getting back to looking at Zionism by a humanist point of view, imagine that your ancestors, for several generations, dreamed with a country, that they never had in any other place. In every exile in the Old Testament, the prophets told people how beautiful Israel would be one day, after the tribulations. And after Rome destroyed the Temple and scattered the people, generation after generation was persecuted and held to the belief that they would come back home one day.

            And, less than one hundred years ago, people died in gas chambers during World War II, a lot of them hoping that some survivors could live free in a promised Israel that they believed would be established soon. And it was established, and survivors from various persecutions went to live there, and they truly built a thriving country. So the dream of the prophets, the faith of the people, the hope of individuals, was not “silly”, and was not in vain. It worked.

Seeing from this perspective, we see that, just like any atheist can obviously understand and agree with the phrase “everybody should hold childhood sacred”, we can understand why Israel is sacred to every Zionist – a word that simply means someone who believes that Israel must exist right where it is – no matter what he makes of theology.

            But then, of course, there is a counter narrative, that uses the ongoing conflict to tell a different story. The conflict, of course, is real. The pain of the Palestinians is real. But here is how I think the algorithm goes: you see only the pain in one of the sides, not the pain in the other. Then it is easier to make people believe that Israel is with intention of doing harm, and then it is easier to make people buy a false narrative about the past. And you establish the vicious circle.

            Because if we start by acknowledging that there is pain on both sides, not using mathematics to erase the pain in one of the sides, but seeing human pain in both sides, we will see the need to think straight about this long conflict that started as soon as the dream of a sovereign Jewish Country started to become real. We will see that the problem is “coexistence”. If coexistence had worked, there would be no conflict, but coexistence turned out to be an extremely problematic thing to achieve.

            We can see that Israel, from the start, officially accepted the Arab people and their right to live in the land. And they officially took more steps towards peace, made peace offerings when the other side didn’t make or accept any peace offering.

            Now this is where someone says, “the official position is one thing, the real attitudes are another thing.” But if you don’t take in account what people are officially saying, you get into a very nihilistic – and obscure – vision of the World. Even if we are suspicious of politicians, they need support. So if the official position of Israel is of searching a form of coexistence, it means this idea has support and acceptance there.

            Of course an official position that sounds good doesn’t mean that a Country is perfect or has zero people doing wrong, but it tells us something. Take for instance Hamas or any other extremist Islamic terrorist political and military group. They don’t say in their pronouncements that they want to coexist with Jews. In the world they live in, this would be a sign of weakness. So they say openly that the existence of Israel is unacceptable.

            But if we don’t even listen to what leaders of democracies and of dictatorships say throughout History, then History itself starts disappearing into a haze. You only have some pictures and numbers from last week, that may have been carefully chosen by the algorithms of whoever gets to you first, to establish the idea that Israel has bad intentions.

            And as I said, it all works in circles. People talk about the “disproportion” of Israel’s actions because of the number of civil casualties. Nobody is denying the civil casualties or saying they don’t matter. Wars are not good.

            But the leaders of Hamas embed themselves and their military infrastructure among civilians, thus the cost of going after Hamas will be high. Israel knows that, and that’s why, even knowing Hamas’ intentions, Israel wasn’t in open war with them at October 6^th.

            Then twelve hundred innocent Israeli civilians were hideously massacred – is this number too low? – and over two hundred kidnapped. And the only choices Israel had were to go after Hamas or not. And they went. And as modern people calculate their “proportion” idea with second grade math, instead of “necessity” and “two different methods of making war”, people start hating Israel. And – the circle – even not believing when the Israeli Army shows undeniable evidence of the way Hamas uses their people, playing a deadly game with their lives. After a while, even the Press feels free to ignore any suffering on the Israeli side.

            And then, with the climate against Israel, you can start rewriting all History, so that the Antizionist view that has been so popular among intellectuals for decades starts gaining the streets and conquering the “normal” people.

            The idea is that Israel is a powerful colonizer that’s been oppressing Palestine for decades. You can start selling this idea by showing people of Palestinian people being displaced. There were people displaced.

            Well, in the midst of the powder keg that was the World in the first decades of the 20^th century, a Civil War broke in the British Mandate of Palestine between parts of two populations, namely the Jews who wanted to establish a Jewish State there and the Arabs who didn’t want this to happen.

            In 1948 that land was legally divided in two for Arabs and Jews, and a seven nation army tried to destroy Israel, who succeeded in defending herself. As a result of that war, people were displaced. Then, the new Israeli authority dismantled the Israeli paramilitary groups, and was ready to begin a new story. But the people on the other side of the division did not start a new story. They said the displaced people needed to return home.

            Well, the distance between Tel Aviv and Gaza is of 70 kilometers, same distance between Tel Aviv and Ramallah, in the West Bank – or between New York and New Jersey. Well, an equally big or bigger number of Jews had to flee from much much furthermost Arab Countries, and it seems they would gladly accept peace with these countries with it is for real.

            So what’s in New Jersey? What’s in your old home, 70 kilometers from your new one, that you need to stop History and set the World on fire for? College people use fancy language to describe a poor people who needs to “return” to their “old land” – or die, but I don’t think they really answer this simple question. What is it they are looking for as they dream of a land free of Jews?

            A chance of happiness and prosperity that could have been? Well, they have space, and they have money coming from the Arab Countries, Europe and US, and even a lot of aid from Israel. So they could be prosperous if their leaders had ever tried to create something, instead of only attacking.

            Or is it something in that land that is sacred to Muslims? Well, as far as everybody knows, the sacred city for the Muslims is Mecca. Peaceful Muslims can still pray in their Mosques in Israel, but we all know that the land to which they must turn to is Mecca, which remains untouched.

            As for Israel being a powerful colonizer, it’s size is irrisory compared to the huge Arab World. And it’s Gpd, although impressive for their size and natural resources, is half the Saudi Arabia Gpd. So, I would like a college guy to really demonstrate that the ties between Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas are not worthy of consideration, and also to show us all how the incorrigibly evil West have been stealing poor Iran and Qatar for the last century.

              And at the end of the day, if everybody dislikes this War – of course nobody should “like” wars – why wouldn’t we be able to say “Hamas is terrorist and should not exist”?

            And why is the World trying to erase a very simple story: the story of more than a hundred people who were kidnapped 9 months ago, and the whole world knows they are still kidnapped, and a deal for their immediate release should be the single first step in any plan of future peace.

            What could be wrong in returning innocent kidnapped people, that includes babies and young womae, to their increasingly desperate parents and loved ones? If there is any “point of view” that sees a “bad side” in their immediate release, is this the point of view, is this the kind of thinking that will save the world?    

Your friends will bring us what?

 

            Do you know what people mean when they say someone is “romanticizing” something? Well, the expression comes from a cultural movement called “Romanticism”, a movement that valued the relation with nature, and the human emotions, as a reaction to the excess of rationalism after the “Enlightenment”. Of course they had some good insights and of course it produced great art. And of course it could deviate to naivety sometimes.

            That’s what “romanticize” something means. To idealize too much, too see unrealistic beauty in things that are more complex than they are in our dreams. To illustrate this, let’s imagine a “romanticized” scene, let’s pretend it’s a movie.

            In this movie there’s a Prince, and he asks his servant Sam to get him some clothes like the ones poor people use, because he wants to disguise as a poor man and go to the market to see how people live outside his rich reality. Sam does what he says and there he goes.

            When he comes back, he says, “Sam, I decided that I want to be poor!” “What?”, asks Sam. The prince replies – and you can hear a lute tune in the background – “Yes, Sam. I want to be poor. Poor people are so happy! They don’t worry about money, Sam. Yes, poor people don’t care about material things!”

            Of course he is “romanticizing”. Idealizing things. The reality is not exactly like that. Well, some romanticizing, at some phase in our lives, can be healthy, sure. But as we grow, as we mature, it can be a mistake to be too naïve. Specially when we part of groups of people who have political influence.

            Nowadays, the young people in colleges are absolutely obsessed with race, with skin color. I don’t mean to say that racism is not an evil that exist and must be fought, but I must remind you, risking to hurt some Harvard sensibilities: people with dark skin can be bad too. I’m sorry, but it’s true. They can make bad decisions too.

            We must never forget slavery, the struggle for rights, and the injustices that still must be confronted, but I am really worried that teachers are using the struggle against racism as an excuse to set aside some other matters that are really important. The kids, black and white, have a right to learn about the different ways that political power can be exercised.

            Seriously, are we still teaching what a dictatorship is? Are we still teaching that antidemocratic, tyrannical power is an evil thing in itself, don’t matter who is using it?

There’s this old theory that the oppressed people – the old favorite division was economical – the poor against the rich – now it is racial, but it works basically the same – must exert some tyranny for a while over their old oppressors, so that in the end we have peace in the whole world. But if the goal is peace, why not try to get there by the shortest way possible? Who is going to tell how mean the oppressed must be after they gain power – if they do – before they can relax and look for peace? Are we gods?

Dictatorships are a disgrace for Humanity. Every step towards dictatorship is a step in the opposite direction of peace. Dictatorships bring disgrace when they win wars, they bring disgrace when they lose, to their people and to the others. There is always a price that will be paid when a cruel dictatorship establishes itself in power. And as they expand, gain territories, they raise their price.

There’s always something that the World can and should do about dictatorships. Direct confront is not always the best move in all cases, sure, but we must clearly stand against what we think is unacceptable. A single Global Government would be a terrible idea, of course – if that Government became tyrannical, it would be very hard for the World to regain it’s freedom. We need a lot of countries and different perspectives, but we must search for a common sense of what is acceptable is not, based on the fact that we are all humans, after all.

The people who are protesting against Israel seem to agree with this necessity, too. After all, they are protesting, so they seem to believe that there should be a basic common sense shared by humanity. The problem is that people who are committed with political extremes are never the best to raise consciousness about suffering and abuse.

Because they have a political intention that is driving their speech, they will focus on accusing they perceived political opponents, and a lot of times they will consider the opponents of these opponents automatically as allies for their cause, and will overlook a lot of violence and abuse committed by this new “allies”.

When it comes to political extremes, “far left” and “far right”, I remember learning from a good teacher in school that “left” and “right” were legit in a democracy, but that the extremes, the extreme left and the extreme right, were dangerous and evil. They were both forms of Totalitarianism: people cease to be seen as individuals and become a “mass”.

I still agree with that. I don’t consider myself as “left” nor “right”, but I have no problem discussing with someone who is a little more to that side or the other than me. I hate the extremes. Both the extremes start by proposing some form of “camaraderie” just to, in the end, erase the individual.

So, we have to ask, if both extremes are forms of Totalitarianism, what makes them different from each other? In what are they opposites? I think we can focus on two main things: “property” and “the past”. In the extreme left, communism and socialism, private property is wrong, and everything should, in fact, belong to everybody. To “the people”. Under the care of the State, obviously. In the right, private property is very much respected.

As for the past, the fat right praises things that existed and were kind off lost in the past, like a little story that could go like this: “The Grampa was a good and strong man, the Dad became a little weaker and lost some battles, and now the Grandson will recover what his Grampa had, and maybe be even stronger than him.” Something like this. The socialist thinks that everybody in the past was a slave to “The Capital”, and everything must change radically.

I don’t see even one good reason why we shouldn’t consider the Islamic theocracies as Far Right Dictatorships. They don’t have the intention of dividing private property, and they value the past in the form of a radical vision of religious commandments, and a total entanglement of the State and an extreme version of a traditional religion. Besides, so many things that are so dear to the modern left, like gay rights, woman rights, are considered evil by them.

So why wouldn’t we consider them far right dictatorships? Because people have brown skin? Does brown skin bring some kind of genetical immunity to Fascism? Or is it because the common people there are poor and unhappy? Do we believe far right makes everybody rich and happy?

Let’s think, please. If these powerful rich religious tyrants want to influence the West, it is precisely the socialists that they have to conquer ideologically, because socialists are ideological people. As for the capitalists, well, it will never be that hard to find someone to do business with, as long as they have some stuff. It's unbelievable that far right dictatorships conquered the left, but it's true.

Is all this confusion happening just because of an exceedingly romantic vision about skin color that leads leftist kids to support fascist regimes? Do we believe that, in the global scenario, “left” only makes alliances with “left”, and “right” only makes alliances with “right”, making it all a big global struggle of “oppressed” versus “oppressor”? Isn’t it a bit naïve? The most powerful people tend to be selfish and smart. They weren’t born yesterday. And I think they are not so romantic.

I think most people are not so naïve. We are exposed to things as we grow. It’s just that some people choose to close their eyes so they can keep playing the super romantic in front of the mirror. Are we going to let an artificial and over simplified vision of the world scenario, as “oppressed” versus “oppressor” turn us blind to the suffering of a small country that had more than a thousand of their people murdered, raped, tortured, in the most cruel ways, and more than two hundred kidnapped, half of which haven’t been returned to their families yet?

Are we going to accept it because the oppressed unfortunately (and I haven’t heard they say “unfortunately” even once) have to be “a little mean” sometimes? Will we let it all become a numerical discussion, as we are presented death counts, so we make a simple math calculation and endorse solutions that are totally blind to the human beings in one of the sides?

Do this make us more human, or more like “masses”?

Individual Stories make the Context

 

            One of these days, in fact, in the day of the independence of Israel, I saw in one of my open Brazilian tv channels, a story about it. It was all about the “suffering and the destruction in Palestine”. They didn’t say the word “Hamas”, they didn’t mention October 7^th, and, good God, they didn’t even mention the hostages.

            Of course they probably said some distilled words about it in other stories, I don’t know how they control what goes in each story, maybe it’s influenced by how many people are watching, I don’t know. But I swear that in that day, they talked for some minutes about the war and didn’t mention these three “little facts”. And when you see so many people plucking down posters of hostages in America, you can’t deny that some people want to erase part of this story.

            It seems like a war on what must be showed and what must not. Israel is not denying Gazan casualties, but the other side don’t want us to even think about the horror of that day and the hostages. There are various levels of influence: some people that are more easily influenced can be convinced that it didn’t even happen, that it is a lie. Most people, though, I hope, will know that it happened, so for these people, they come with a more sophisticated argument: that if you talk about the horror and the hostages, you are talking about isolated facts and not giving the proper “context”.

            If you talk about it, if you tell a fact that they don’t like, they will accuse you of not giving the proper “context”. I can’t help but think that then, in this case, we shouldn’t even have twitter, right? Because it’s short. We should only communicate writing huge books and sending them to each other.

            But those “context” people do use twitter. Their tweets are short like everybody else’s, but we should believe they have context because the writers are supposedly educated. So it’s about people having the right credentials to tell facts.

            Of course you can add information to what somebody writes. You may think that person “forgot” some facts and you want to add. That’s perfectly fine. But that is different from trying to erase a fact that you know it’s true, by saying that, because of the context, that fact shouldn’t be mentioned.

            Let’s think. What should differentiate really educated academical analysis from cheap conspiracy theories, if not the belief that it is strongly steeped in real facts? Only then you can try to make the right reasoning. If you don’t start by considering as many proven facts as you can, you are not being honest. So why not let people provide proven facts to each other, making this context together, via twitter or whatever?

            Let’s remember that a cheap conspiracy theory is a set of imagined relations between facts, that can even be real. They usually sound crazy for people on the other “side”, but people buy them because, let’s face it, they give those people what they want.

            If the Academia and the Press consider that some individual facts must not be mentioned, how can we not think that they are creating a set of relations that is based only the facts they chose to mention? Makes me think of a circular thing: you don’t consider some facts because they are not surrounded by the right context, then you take the other facts and elaborate the context…

            The facts they are suppressing as they pluck down posters of hostages and silence about horror are individual stories of pain, danger, and fear. Of course there is pain on both sides, but as they erase the individual stories of one of the sides, they can turn it all into “maths”. They will just count casualties, not showing individual pain but just numbers, and so, they use it to confirm their “sophisticated” theories.

            Of course you realized that they paint Israel as an “oppressor”. Well, I think I can define oppression as violence and deprivation.

            Man, all violence in this story comes from the consecutive wars. And these wars all come from a sense that the Palestinians are being deprived of something. So let’s focus on deprivation.

            There is a story that Palestinians are told since babies, that because of the Israelis, they lost everything. (And now this lullaby is being sang to the whole World, it seems).

            I don’t think anybody lost everything. Gazans are not squirmished in a jail. It seems that they keep some people in tents for celebrities to visit, but the vast majority lives in cities, with buildings. The works.

            Some organizations give all them status of refugees because the grandparents of half of them once lived in what is now Israel. Well, when the first leg of this war broke a long time ago, some Arab people chose to live in peace in Israel, where their families now have all the rights. Most Arabs never wanted peace. And Israel have the credit of having tried peace much more. Even spontaneously giving back Gaza – that once was part of Israel. You can’t say “that peace wouldn’t work” if you never took a step towards it.

            Let me remind you, there was space in what they called the Brittish mandate of Palestine, for the arabs that lived there, for the jews that lived there, and for the jews that wanted to move there. But nations and more nations tried to destroy Israel.

            But both sides live in lands with space for their people and one of them even have a creative and productive neighbour. This could be a great opportunity, because there was no opulent nation there before.

            So, when a teacher talks to you about the concept of “reparation”, divide it in three concepts: “You want revenge”, “You want what you had”, “You deserve more than what you have”.

            Let’s not even talk about revenge, please. They can have more if they think they deserve. More prosperity, more happiness, all things they didn’t have before, if they accept peace. The terrorist Hamas can’t be a government of people who want peace.

            So, coming back, all that the pro terror people have are numbers of deaths, which are heavily affected by the fact that the Gazan leaders consider the death of their people as an honor to these people, as they publicly said so many times. This mathematics can’t be our guide. A sense of humanity, our shared humanity, must be our guide.

            If you think about people as human beings, not just numbers, you will have to face the fact that there is individual pain in both sides. We have to think straight, what is happening is a war, that nobody with heart can desire, but that started for a reason. When it started?  How? Why? Who started?

            And most of all, what are the compromises that must be expected from both sides for it to end.

            I don’t think there is any other way but considering the returning of the hostages as first and foremost, and the nature of the government in Gaza as second.

            That’s my context.

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