Anti-Zionism as hate speech

"It's the final judgment, the story of good and evil. I want to have eyes to see evil disappear."

Nelson Cavaquinho¹

I recently read Berenice Bento's text published on this website, Brasil 247, on February 15th, titled “'Left-Wing Zionists' and their Ghosts”². The text is intended as a commentary and response to another text that was also published on this site. websiteThe text, entitled “We Are Leftist Jews,” was co-authored by five Brazilian Jews and one Brazilian Jewish woman, who present themselves as a collective called “Zionist Leftist Jews”³. I had already read this text by the Zionist collective, with which I agree on certain points and disagree on others. I know two of its authors personally and almost all the others through the virtual world. I also have some important things in common with its authors. I am Brazilian, Jewish, leftist, and have been active for about 20 years against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and for a just peace between both peoples. I understood the text “We Are Leftist Jews” not as pretending to provide a general explanation for the conflict (far from it), but above all as a appeal. Appealing to whom? A a part From the left, which has often expressed prejudiced judgments regarding both the Jewish people and the Zionist movement and its history. Theses such as: “Israel must be destroyed” or “Israel has no right to exist”; “Zionism is colonialism,” “Zionism is racism,” or, worst of all: “Zionism is equivalent to Nazism”; “Jews have learned nothing from the Holocaust and are repeating it” or “the 'Zionists' have hijacked the memory of the victims of Nazism, who were not only Jews”; “the Jewish people don't even exist,” etc.; such theses, the authors of the text suggest (and I fully agree with them here), are not only wrong, but also abominable and deeply prejudiced. Furthermore, I would add, they constitute hate speechLikewise, the claim that Israel's civilian population is "killable," constituting a legitimate target for certain Palestinian "resistance," is hate speech.

As I will demonstrate below, Ms. Berenice Bento, while claiming to comment on the text, distorts it almost completely, manipulating it dishonestly and using it more as a pretext to spew the venom of her anti-Zionist theses, thus responding to the authors' appeal for dialogue and listening with more aggression and reiteration of hate speech. A hatred that is directed not only against "Zionism" or "Zionists," but, in reality, as I will argue, potentially against all Jews. 

Before developing my analysis, I need to warn the reader that, during its preparation, I realized that it would necessarily have to address recurring errors, misconceptions, confusions, and mystifications regarding both the history and nature of Zionism, and – a fortiori - about the very history and nature of the conflict itself. It was then that I realized that, at least in part, it had already been done. During years of pacifist activism, as a result of my personal experience, intense debates and much reading, I wrote a text that summarizes the main points of what I think about the essential issues of the conflict in question. It is called “The Democratic Left and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, and was published in April 2016, in issue number nine of Revista Fevereiro, of which I was also one of the editors[4]. Thus, not so much out of laziness as because I understand it to be useful and timely, I will allow myself here, in the analysis of Berenice Bento's article, to use this text extensively, adding the comments that I deem necessary. All quotations from Berenice Bento are from her text cited above.

On the nature of Zionism. Is Zionism colonialist?

In their eagerness to delegitimize the State of Israel and simply criminalize Regarding the vast majority of the Israeli people and a large part of the Jewish population worldwide, Berenice Bento states: “What was the motto of the European Zionist colonizers? 'A land without a people, for a people without a land (...). The relationship between colonialism and Zionism is umbilical.”

Citing this famous phrase by Herzl, and repeating it several times, the Author claims to "prove" two things: a) the colonialist "essence" of Zionism; b) the existence of a genocide in Palestine. We will discuss the alleged genocide later. 

First, it is necessary to undo what is perhaps the mother of all distortions produced by anti-Zionism, both left and right, namely: the conceptual and historical assimilation between Zionism and colonialism. In this sense, anti-Zionist ideologues always cite the famous declarations of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism, about "a land without a people for a people without a land" and about the Jewish state as a bulwark of civilization in "Eastern barbarism." It is clear that Herzl was a man of his time, a small-bourgeois Jewish-European, who saw in the support of the European colonial powers the only possibility of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, so that all his political dealings with the authorities of the European colonial powers were organized in the terms and categories of the colonialism of the time.

However, even a brief study of Herzl's biography and his purposes and motivations clearly reveals that what drove the Zionist leader was not the pursuit of material gain from any colonial enterprise, but rather the search for a solution to the then-called 'Jewish question'. Indeed, Herzl embraced Zionism only after becoming disillusioned with the expectations of successful assimilation of Jews by European nations. After covering the famous Dreyfus Affair in France as a journalist for a Viennese newspaper, he came to the personally painful conclusion that the project of assimilationist Jews, as he himself had been until then, was doomed to failure and that European Jews, both because of the fragility of their positions in European society and economy, and because of the special place they occupied in the Western imagination, constituted the most vulnerable part in the great civil war in which the nations of Europe would succumb. Zionism emerged for Herzl as a modern, national solution to modern antisemitism, which was no longer nominally religious but racial: a product of the social and political contradictions that internally tore apart European nation-states and inclined them toward war. In essence, therefore, it was a national liberation movement of a uniquely dispersed people. England's support could, contingently, only play the role of a vector.

Furthermore, even if Herzl were a hardened colonialist, this fact alone would prove nothing about a supposed "colonialist essence" of Zionism. The adherence of a significant portion of European Jews, initially a minority but which historically gained importance and strength, demonstrated that the Zionist project was anything but artificial. It was a plausible response to a genuine and poignant question for the Jews of the time; a question whose dramatic nature history would demonstrate is impossible to overestimate. As a national movement, progressively dominated by a militant and socialist left, Zionism was able to revive an ancient language and create a new people: the Israeli Jews, with all their diversity, culture, and institutions. Of course—it should go without saying—both Zionism and the State of Israel not only can but must be criticized. But by reducing the entire movement of liberation and reinvention of a people to a mere ideology of domination, what certain leftists do with the word "Zionism" constitutes a distortion and violence as great as that historically perpetrated by antisemitism with the word "Jew." For anti-Zionists, Israel comes to embody not the sovereign state in which a people sees and feels represented, and through which it exercises its right to self-determination, but an "artificial entity," the most perfidious embodiment of Western money and power. Nothing less than the product of an imperialist conspiracy to dominate the Arab peoples. It is in this context that the destruction of Israel and the mass murder of its civilian population become, if not approved, at least accepted as a legitimate "opinion" in (certain) so-called "anti-imperialist" leftist circles, which, on this issue, objectively forms a common front with the Islamist far-right. The obvious political result of anti-Zionist mystification is the strengthening of the Israeli right wing.This plays on the confusion between the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination and the destruction of Israel. A confusion that this right wing can be accused of promoting, but which it did not invent. Thus, it is not possible to derive a supposed "colonialist essence" from Zionism simply by quoting a phrase from Herzl. This, indeed, is attempting to "perform magic with words!" For what Herzl founded not It wasn't an ideology, but rather a national movementwhich, historically, has given birth not to one, but to a large number of ideologies, which, as suggested above, range from the far-right to the far-left. To understand the content of the various ideologies of Zionism, we would have to study, in a minimally unbiased way, the history of the Zionist movement and the history of Israel. But the Author doesn't need that, after all, she already has Herzl's quote!

The author, however, is not content with simply using Herzl to attribute a supposed colonialist essence to Zionism. She goes further:

The text "We are left-wing Jews" says that Israel not It commits genocide. “A land without a people, for a people without a land” – I repeat. Here, the crime of genocide is clearly acknowledged. No colonial experience reached this level of violence against the native population. Neither Spanish nor Portuguese. For a time, the Spanish Empire debated whether or not the Indians had souls. This was the famous dispute between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1547. The Indians existed. It was up to the empire to decide the place they would occupy in the hierarchy of the Christian worldview. The Zionists say: there are no people here.

This slogan already expresses the most violent symbolic level of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. For the European Zionist colonizers, however, those bodies only had the appearance of being human, but were not human, a dehumanization that continues vigorously in contemporary times at all levels.”

In other words, Zionism would not only be colonialism, but (astonishingly) the worst colonialism of all time! Essentially genocidal! Thus, Spanish colonialism, which dominated and exploited an entire continent for centuries, enslaving and, in fact, exterminating the natives; Portuguese colonialism, which dominated and exploited territories of continental dimensions, also enslaving and exterminating the natives – and which kidnapped millions of Africans to work as slaves in Brazil; both of these colonialisms become less bad than the national movement of a small and dispersed people, who were being massacred in Europe and who would suffer, at the hands of Europeans, a monstrous genocide. A people who were not even considered white by European racial thought – a thought that decisively contributed to the ideological elaboration of modern antisemitism. A people who, fleeing, migrated to Mandatory Palestine (a territory the size of the Brazilian state of Sergipe), legitimately buying land and working it. In fact, members of this people, in a context of continuous war and strong pressure, where the very survival of the people was often at risk, committed crimes. Some of them terrible and unforgivable. Just as Israeli Jews also suffered terrible crimes and, on three occasions, faced the possibility of annihilation. We have here, in effect, an old element of both medieval anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism: the character cosmic of the “crime of the Jews,” who allegedly murdered Christ—who came to cleanse the sins of the world—and who, in modernity, brought venality and perfidy to the world of 'authentic nations' in their perverse project of world domination. Finally, it is interesting to note how the procedure of delegitimization and criminalization used by Berenice Bento in relation to Zionism and Israel has its perfect counterpart in the Israeli and Zionist right in general. There, too, episodic elements of the Palestinian national movement are used, such as the political-ideological alliance of mufti From Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, with Hitler; the past terrorism of the PLO, as well as the current terrorism and antisemitism of Hamas, to criminalize the entire Palestinian national movement and justify both the occupation and oppressive actions of Israel against the Palestinian people. “Anecdotal” facts, often contingent on or stemming from war and conflict, are... abstracted from their context and after that, essentialized...in such a way that both national movements, and by extension both peoples, are criminalizedMoreover, this is exactly how all forms of racism operate, including antisemitism.

On the asymmetry (and symmetry) of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Regarding the issue of symmetry-asymmetry in conflict, Berenice Bento says:

The text 'We are left-wing Jews' says: 'It hurts to see our leaders condemning the bombing of Gaza out of solidarity with the families of the Palestinian victims, without a single word about the Israeli families' (...).

The structure of the text suggests that there is a symmetry of pain and loss between Israelis and Palestinians.

The same article also states: 'For any mother, the death of a child is an irreparable loss, whether she is Israeli or Palestinian. The pain in her heart is the same.' There is no doubt that the pain of mothers and families is immense. Unbearable. We agree. These are lives that deserve to be mourned. But what is the rhetorical trick here? I quote a passage from the article by historian Sayid Marcos Tenório, 'Israel and the silent genocide of Palestinian children':

'During the massive Israeli attack against Gaza […] 2.200 Palestinians were killed, including 550 children, 70% of whom were under 12 years old, and it was responsible for more than 11.000 injuries, including 3.358 children, and for more than 100 displaced people during the attacks that year, according to the annual report of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). On the Israeli side, 73 people died, including 67 soldiers.'

A simple calculation. In 2014, 2200 Palestinians were killed and 73 Israelis. That is, the life of an Israeli is worth 30 times more. closest that the life of a Palestinian. To not Saying nothing about the disproportionate military force on both sides, the text leads us into a world of illusion, according to which the necropolitics of the colonizer and The resistance of the colonized people has the same... ethical density (Emphasis mine). The demand for the equal distribution of grief is a trick to hide the genocide.” Against this, it must be stated, first of all, that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the historical product of the clash of two national movements for the same territoryTherefore, regardless of successive variations in the balance of power between the contenders, this is a conflict. structurally A symmetrical relationship exists between two powerful and equally legitimate narratives. Establishing this historical legitimacy of Zionism and the State of Israel has nothing to do with justifying the crimes and great injustices that have been and continue to be perpetrated against the Palestinian people by this State. What is at stake here is making it clear that both... Nakba Regarding the occupation, it was not the inevitable result of a supposed colonialist, expansionist, or even racist 'essence' of Zionism, but rather a circumstantial product of wars and internal political disputes within both national movements. After the Six-Day War (1967), the Arab-Israeli conflict increased in complexity. To its symmetrical structure, mentioned above, a clearly asymmetrical layer was added: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza placed densely populated territories of Palestinian Arabs under Israeli military occupation. It is precisely in this asymmetrical layer that the... discursive turn From then on, the entire bloc aligned with the USSR in the Cold War took a turn. Zionism definitively ceased to be understood as a national liberation movement, and the Israeli right to self-determination was displaced, if not simply annulled, by the discourse of the "Zionist entity," which was seen as nothing more than an imperialist "artificial enclave" in the Middle East. All the classic signifiers of modern antisemitism—"superpower," "world domination," "conspiracy," "parasitism," "artificiality," "uprooting," "war instigator," "racism," "media control," etc.—would be... displaced for the signifier "Zionism," which would then come to condense within itself a new version, palatable to a certain left, of antisemitic demonology. Again, Jews (or a portion of them) were dehumanized by a discourse that reduced them to a abstraction This opened the door, perhaps for the first time, for communist movements around the world to claim the destruction of a country. In short, then, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a unique duality: on one hand, it is... asymmetricsince the Occupation exists; on the other hand, it is symmetricalBecause Israel is not simply a colonial military camp, nor a US aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Israel is a state with a people. There are people on both sides. And the problem is that this confusion, which exists between both dimensions of the conflict, is not politically neutral, as it tends to strengthen extremists and rejectionists from both sides, while also isolating their respective pacifist and democratic camps. Therefore, separating things... cognize e think Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is not merely an intellectual obligation. It is also an "ethical-political duty"! A commitment to just peace and civilization. On this point, what does Ms. Berenice Bento do in her text? She simply accuses the authors of the text she criticizes of trying to erase the asymmetrical dimension of the conflict. As we shall see, she is not only wrong in this accusation, but, on the contrary, She is the one who wants to erase the symmetrical dimension of this conflict at all costs.Let's see. Is it really true that the authors of the text "We are left-wing Jews" evade the asymmetrical dimension of the conflict? I will quote only three excerpts from their text:

1. “Israel is responsible and guilty. Its attitude is indefensible. The settlements must cease and negotiations must resume.” 
2. "On the Israeli side, the population has become accustomed to the relatively stable situation, with episodic conflicts that successive right-wing governments consider manageable. The events that occurred during a recent confrontation with Hamas are symptomatic." While Israeli planes bombed the building occupied by the international press in Gaza, the inhabitants of Tel Aviv were in the streets celebrating the victory in the Eurovision contest, as if the Israeli population were vaccinated against war. (emphasis mine).
3. Is Israel a segregationist country? Yes, Arabs do not have the same rights as Jews, even though an Israeli Arab party, which is Muslim, is now part of the governing coalition. It must be acknowledged that a kind of apartheid exists in Israel." (emphasis mine)."

The question that arises is: how can someone who has actually read this text claim that its "plot" intends to establish a perfect symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians? What, then, bothered the Author? The answer is simple: the fact that the authors, addressing primarily a left-leaning audience – that is, an audience already very well informed about the asymmetry of the conflict and that the number of Palestinian civilian casualties is much greater than the number of Israeli civilian casualties –; addressing this audience, the authors exposed also The symmetrical aspect of the conflict, that is, the elementary fact that Israelis are also people; that their civilians are not intentionally killable without a crime having been committed! That all human life, as the Talmud says, carries within itself a absolute and that, therefore, it cannot simply be dissolved into numerical comparisons; that, despite its many faults, but not allIsrael has the right to exist. This, indeed, Berenice Bento cannot tolerate, for she only accepts the value of Jewish life when they practice a... conversion complete with the anti-Zionist creed. Outside of this, it seems, for her every Jew in the worldUntil proven innocent, he is guilty and must have the blood of Palestinian children on his hands.

“I wonder if the men who signed the text have ever served in Israel’s armed forces. If so, I would like to know more about their biographies, whether they have Palestinian blood in their souls, whether Lady Macbeth visits them in their nightmares (if they have nightmares).”

She even goes so far as to associate the authors of the text with Cabo Anselmo! This is because we are talking about Jews who are left-wing activists and who systematically denounce the Occupation and the crimes of the State of Israel, thereby exposing themselves to considerable violence from their own communities, especially those among them who have a more intense intra-community life or who live in Israel. 

Regarding the issue of asymmetry in wars, we must now ask ourselves: what is its ethical significance? Between Israel and Hamas, as is known, the wars have been asymmetrical, that is, they do not take place on battlefields where two armies confront each other, partly because Hamas does not even have an army. Thus, to attack Israel, Hamas infiltrates the Palestinian civilian population and launches missiles indiscriminately at Israeli cities. In retaliation, Israel bombs what it claims are Hamas bases in Gaza. What does international law say about this? Regarding Hamas, when it carries out its usual warlike practices, it commits at least three war crimes: 1) it mingles without military uniforms among the civilian population; 2) it uses civilian areas as missile launch sites, thus exposing its inhabitants; 3) it indiscriminately bombs Israeli cities. Israel, on the other hand, has the right to defend its cities. provided that it does so in compliance with all the requirements of the law of war and international humanitarian law. to save civilian lives. Successive Israeli governments claim they try to do this, but we don't need to believe Israeli propaganda here. Reports from important human rights organizations inform us that, in these wars with Hamas, Israel repeatedly commits war crimes. The evidence is robust and, to make matters worse, Israel does not allow any independent investigation. Therefore, according to reliable and independent NGOs, and also the UN, both Israel and Hamas They repeatedly commit war crimes. The disproportion between civilian deaths is not because Hamas has any concern for avoiding these deaths on the Israeli side. On the contrary! It systematically and criminally exposes its own civilian population and, at the same time, does everything it can to... maximize The deaths of Israeli civilians. In other words, brandishing the higher number of Palestinian civilian deaths as if this resulted in the moral superiority of the "resistance," as Ms. Berenice Bento does, makes no sense whatsoever. By doing so, she is doing nothing more than propaganda for the fundamentalist and terrorist group Hamas, that is to say, It fits perfectly into this group's strategy.Furthermore, she demonstrates a lack of understanding of the concept of proportionality in the law of war. According to this principle, the reaction must be proportional to the threat, not proportional to the number of deaths the aggressor inflicts. At this point, the opportunism and dishonesty with which Berenice Bento uses both international law and important human rights organizations, such as [organization name], become clear. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B'TselemThese examples are cited only to corroborate Israel's crimes. They are systematically omitted when condemning the crimes of Hamas, that is, according to the author, the "resistance," which, according to her, has a different "ethical substance." It is therefore equally demonstrated that the author's aforementioned statement, in which she argues that all lives deserve to be mourned and grieved, is also untrue. By supporting Hamas as legitimate resistance, she: 1) endorses and legitimizes the murder of Israeli civilians; 2) endorses and legitimizes the deaths of the Palestinian civilians that Hamas criminally sacrifices in its actions. JihadSimilarly dishonestly, UN resolutions on the conflict are used: it only cites those resolutions that condemn Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, as well as resolution 194, which establishes the right of return for Palestinians. But it omits resolution 181, which decided on the partition of Palestine and the creation, in part of its territory, of a national home for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, to which it recognizes no legitimacy. It also omits statements from UN representatives condemning Hamas's violence against the Israeli civilian population.

Therefore, on one side, we have left-wing Jewish activists whose defense of Israel's right to exist does not prevent them from systematically condemning the Israeli occupation and crimes, nor from defending the legitimacy and urgency of creating a sovereign Palestinian state, coexisting peacefully with the State of Israel. On the other side, we have an intellectual who advocates the destruction of Israel, who criminalizes the entire Jewish national movement – ​​and, by extension, the vast majority of Israeli Jews, as well as a large part of Jews worldwide; who supports Hamas, a terrorist and anti-Semitic group whose statutes were inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; who legitimizes the murder of Israeli civilians (including children) and covers up the criminal sacrifice of Palestinian civilians (including children). On which side is the coherence of being leftist found? Where is the moral superiority? Who has a soul stained with blood?

Is Hamas a legitimate Palestinian resistance movement?

As we have seen, Berenice Bento defends the legitimacy of the Hamas group, as well as its actions against the civilian population of Israel. This is because Hamas is considered a legitimate Palestinian resistance movement.

Regarding this issue, the question arises: is Hamas truly a Palestinian national liberation movement? There is no doubt that it is based in Palestine nor that it is composed of Palestinians. But this is not enough for it to be characterized as a national movement, insofar as a movement is only national if it carries within itself a specific project of nationhood. Now, Hamas emerges and gains strength precisely during the crisis of Arab and Palestinian nationalism, when the latter begins to decompose and lose primacy to Islamic fundamentalism, which no longer takes as its primary reference point any particular Arab nation, but the Ummah, the collective of the faithful, the Islamic “nation.” It is this Islamist essence of Hamas that imprints on its struggle against Israel an irredentist character, no longer national, but clearly one of religious duty to reclaim Islamic land.wafiqThis duty could only be fulfilled with the destruction of Israel (“Zionist entity”) and the creation of an Islamic state throughout historical Palestine. It makes even less sense to classify Hamas as a liberation movement, since simply having an occupying state as an enemy is not enough to acquire a libertarian status. Here it is necessary to emphasize the obvious: a liberation movement is one that fights for freedom. And there is no freedom on Hamas's horizon, only an obscurantist dictatorship whose establishment presupposes the genocide of another people. Therefore, with regard to Hamas, it is not even put The classic problem of liberation struggles, that of the occasional contradiction between violent means and ends: “peace,” “justice,” and “freedom,” is problematic because there is no contradiction whatsoever between the means and ends of this fundamentalist movement – ​​its ends clearly point to the destruction of Israel and Israeli Jews, without any distinction between combatants and civilians. It is evident that terrorism is the appropriate means to these ends. It is true that Hamas's strength comes, in large part, from the perpetuation of the occupation imposed by Israel. It is understandable – and this is not a justification of terrorism – that children and young people who only know Israelis as soldiers armed with tanks and rifles and the bombs that periodically fall from the sky – and who live a daily life of siege, hopelessness, and humiliation – are attracted by Hamas's propaganda of force and revenge, as well as by the “great God” (“Allah Akbar”) who will ultimately bring destruction to their oppressors and the enemies of Islam. There is no doubt that martyrdom and its cult of death may appear as a straight and seductive way out of the labyrinth of fear and impotence into which the Israeli occupation has transformed the lives of the Palestinian people. But to say that Islamic fundamentalism feeds on injustice and oppression is not the same as saying – as I have already alluded to above – that it fights for justice and freedom. Terrorist nihilism not only deceives Palestinians with its false promises of redemption, but also robs them of what is perhaps their most powerful weapon: the moral superiority of a people's struggle for freedom – a struggle that... determines to the extent that it chooses its ends and discriminates their means - which is another way of saying that indiscriminate violence will never be a means to fight for freedom and a just peace.

Gaza: Is the Palestinian people to blame? No, but Hamas is partly to blame.

Berenice Bento accuses the authors of the text “We are left-wing Jews” of blaming the Palestinians themselves for the Gaza blockade. This is yet another lie, because, on the one hand, they expressly acknowledge that part of the blame lies with Israel. On the other hand, they claim that Hamas (and not the Palestinian people!) also bears some of the blame, because, two years after the dismantling of Jewish settlements in Gaza (2005), in 2007 Hamas launched a violent military coup in the region, killing or imprisoning the entire Fatah leadership. After this, Israel imposed a strict blockade on Gaza, fearing (and still fearing) that the region would be supplied with Iranian missiles, far more powerful and destructive than the missiles made in Gaza. Therefore, the situation is truly not easy. It is necessary to demand that the Israeli government urgently resume peace negotiations and, initially, ease the blockade of Gaza, curbing anything excessive or even criminal within it. Within a process determined by a peace agreement, the Gaza blockade should be completely lifted. Furthermore, the Jewish authors criticized by Berenice Bento denounce the regime of religious terror established by Hamas in Gaza, imposing Sharia law on its population. At this point, the author, resorting to the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, accuses them of "Orientalism" (!), because, apparently, she believes that democracy and human rights are only "Western values," which would not be good for non-Western peoples either. Thus, criticizing dictatorships, religious fundamentalism, and human rights violations in non-Western countries would be, according to the author, Orientalist prejudice! Poor Edward Said...

The argument from complexity and its simplistic "refutation"

Berenice Bento accuses the authors of the text she criticizes of "arrogance" and "disqualification," which she claims are typical attitudes of the "colonizer" mentality. And why? Simply because they claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex and cannot be understood through simplifications and Manicheanism. But who are they "disqualifying" with this argument? It's understandable that the author feels disqualified, insofar as her approach to the conflict is, indeed, simplistic and Manichean. But when she states that, with this, "the Palestinians" are being disqualified, this is nothing more than... prejudice e projection, Because Palestinians are just as capable of addressing complexities as any other people. To "prove" this point, the author cites the "unbiased" Marxist-Stalinist author Domenico Losurdo:

“Not content with the moral lesson, the current teachers of the Palestinian people also intend to give a lesson in epistemology: to accuse Zionism as such – they judge – means to lose sight of the 'complexity' of this political movement, characterized by the presence within it of very diverse currents, from the right, from the left and even from the left with a socialist and revolutionary orientation” (LOSURDO, 2021, p. 33).

So, what do we have here? What is the argument, in fact? Strictly speaking, there is no argument at all, only the reiteration of the accusation of arrogance, now in the pen of an “authority.” In fact, the accusation of “complexity” (!) might even have some basis if the authors of the criticized text intended, with it, to exonerate Israel. But we have already seen above that they do not do so, since their condemnation of Israeli crimes is emphatic and very clear. So, what is the real problem? Where does this true hatred of complexity come from? Without irony, the answer is simple! It is that “anti-Zionists” like Berenice Bento desperately need Manichaeism to sustain their project of criminalizing Zionism and the Israeli people (and also “Zionist” Jews throughout the world). They need simplism to confer legitimacy on Hamas's “resistance,” making, as we have seen, the civilian population of Israel killable, especially through the validation of the criminal slogan of the destruction of Israel. In fact, arrogance, prejudice, and disqualification are all that the Author displays throughout her text, as she pretends to be – she herself – the judge of the history of the Zionist movement and the Israeli people. A history that she clearly doesn't even know. She is the one who wants to kill history, distorting it into a biased and one-dimensional narrative. For killing the history of a people, flattening it and making it banal, is always the first step towards killing the people who make up that people. This is valid for both the Israeli right and that "strange" anti-Zionist left.

Does Israel commit genocide?

We have arrived at what is perhaps the most delicate part of this answer. After all, as Jacques Semelin, a scholar of genocide, notes:

"Whether the use of the word 'genocide' is justified or not, the topic seeks to shock the imagination, awaken consciences, and provoke mobilizations that favor the victims (...). In these circumstances, whoever dares to claim that it is not 'really' a genocide is immediately accused of cowardice or sympathy for the aggressors. Morality always seems to be on the side of those who denounce the occurrence of a genocide. It is true that the 'genocide or not' debate seems immoral at a time when human beings are threatened with death or are, in fact, being killed. As a consequence, there is a veritable inflation in the use of the term 'genocide,' which completely dilutes its meaning (...). Finally, and this is no less important, the term 'genocide' can constitute an important..." propaganda weapon, becoming the centerpiece of any venomous rhetoric against a declared enemy."In the case of Jewish history, there would be yet another reason to approach the accusation of genocide with due caution:" The attribution of monstrous intentions and crimes to "Jews" is intrinsic to the history of antisemitism.As I have argued in favor of the existence of a clear displacement From the historical significance of modern antisemitism to "anti-Zionism," it is not surprising that the accusation of genocide constantly reappears throughout the history of this long conflict. In fact, I have heard it since my adolescence, in the late 1980s. There was a decrease during the Oslo Accords (1993), followed by a strong resurgence with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 – and continuing to the present day. As indicated in the quote above, there is now a veritable inflation in the use of the term genocide, which tends, in some circles, to approach the – albeit imprecise – meaning of the term "massacre." When the authors of the text that triggered this controversy argued that the State of Israel, despite its notorious crimes, does not commit genocide against the Palestinian people, they made it clear, through examples, that they were using this term in its original, more precise sense. Indeed, when the concept of genocide was invented, even before the end of World War II, by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, his aim was to name what he believed to be unprecedented crimes being perpetrated by Nazi Germany in its occupation of Poland, as well as in Soviet territory, starting with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. What are its distinctive characteristics? 1st) Intention of extermination, total or partial, of a people. This intention is necessarily followed by; 2nd) Practice systematic of extermination. This systematic practice, in turn, would produce; 3rd) the extermination proper In its entirety. With regard to Nazi Germany, the extreme case was, as we know, that of the Jewish people, in relation to whom, starting with the Wannsee Conference (January 1942), the notorious "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was defined, that is, the implementation, by the Nazi state, of the complete extermination of this people. For, according to Nazi ideology, Jews simply did not have the right to exist – neither in Germany, nor in Europe, nor anywhere else in this world. Following this came the Roma people, who were also subjected to systematic extermination, perhaps also with a view to their eradication. And finally, the Slavs, who, both in Poland and in the territories of the former Soviet Union, would suffer a policy that the Nazis classified as "reduction," that is, partial extermination, followed by the enslavement of the remaining people by the future colonists of the "Aryan race." It must be made clear that when one attempts to equate both the Zionist movement and the State of Israel with Nazi ideology and the Nazi state, respectively, it is an ideological fraud of this magnitude that is being perpetrated.

As we know, Nazi Germany was not the only country in history to perpetrate the crime of genocide, although it was the most extreme case. During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army also committed genocide against the population of China. The term has also been applied retroactively to the extermination perpetrated by Turkey against the Armenian people. And, in the post-war period, it is applied to the case of the Rwandan civil war (1994), with the extermination of the Tutsi people by the Hutus, among a few others. The concept has also been applied retroactively, in my view appropriately, to some of the great crimes of European colonialism against the native peoples of America and Africa. In short, it is necessary to analyze each case with due care.

Having said that, let's analyze the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What arguments does the Author use to accuse Israel of genocide – a crime that she claims is being cunningly "hidden" by the authors of the text she criticizes? Basically, two. First, the aforementioned phrase by Theodor Herzl, to which the Author attributes, as we have seen, not only a colonialist essence, but, even more radically, a supposed genocidal essence. With this phrase in hand, the Author allows herself nothing less than to take as axiomatic the "genocidal" character of both the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. It would then suffice to prove this belief by selecting "facts on the ground." To this end, she cites a text by the "historian," Sayid Tenório Marcos, who alleges that Israel is promoting a "genocide of Palestinian children." The evidence would include, among other accusations, the high number of Palestinian children killed and wounded in the recent wars between Hamas and Israel. The high number of children killed and wounded is true, but, as we have seen, it is... in part Due to Hamas's war tactics, which criminally expose its civilian population to bomb Israeli cities. However, there is no doubt, as we have already said, that some of the children murdered and wounded are due to actual war crimes committed by Israel. But war crimes and genocide are different things. To claim genocide with any basis, the Author would have to prove that these deaths are the result of a systematic practice of extermination by the State of Israel. Does she do so? Of course not, simply because such proof does not exist. Indeed, if Israel were truly committed to exterminating the Palestinian people, the number of deaths would necessarily be much higher than the numbers presented. Firstly, the Israeli bombings of Gaza would have to be indiscriminate, aiming at maximizing the number of Palestinian civilian deaths. In history, we have some classic examples of indiscriminate bombings against civilian populations. Let's cite just three, as a basis for comparison. The Nazi bombings of London, which, in total, killed more than 20 London civilians; The Allied bombing of Dresden, which in just three days (between February 13 and 15, 1945) killed more than 25 people. Another example from World War II is the American bombing of Tokyo (Operation Meetinghouse) with incendiary bombs that, in a single night in March 1945, killed between 80 and 100 people. None of this can be compared to the Israeli bombings of Gaza, whose population density is even greater than that existing at the time in the cities of the aforementioned bombings. It is also necessary to note that none of these bombings from World War II are considered genocide by scholars of the subject. They were considered (and effectively are) major war crimes, but they did not constitute a systematic practice of extermination of the peoples in question – a necessary condition for the crime of genocide.

Now, still on the accusation of genocide, let's consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its long duration, from the 1948 war to the present day. And let's compare it with other bloody conflicts in the region. The comparison here is not intended to diminish the gravity of Israeli crimes, but only to refute the accusation of Israel's "genocidal exceptionalism." Let's start with the latter:

Iraq – The number of people killed during Saddam Hussein's rule is estimated at 300, including approximately 70 Kurds, many of whom were gassed with chemical agents. This does not include the approximately 1 million deaths from the Iran-Iraq war;

Lebanon – The bloody civil war that took place between 1975 and 1990 left approximately 150 dead;

Yemen – In the civil war that ravaged the country between 1960 and 1972, between 100 and 150 Yemenis were killed. In 2004, further internal conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis killed more than 25; in 2015, a new civil war broke out, claiming more than 10 lives; this war continues to this day and constitutes the world's largest current humanitarian crisis, according to the UN.

Jordan – In September 1970, the war between the Arab Legion and the PLO killed, in just one month, from 10 thousand to 30 thousand Palestinians;

Syria – The persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hafez Assad's regime culminated in the Hama massacre in 1981, in which several people were killed. in a few days...approximately 10 to 40 people. Then, under the regime of Assad Jr., the civil war that broke out in 2011 has already killed more than 500 people. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? During the 1948-1949 war, approximately 13 Palestinian Arabs were killed, with about 800 Palestinian civilians murdered in 24 atrocities, including the massacre of... Deir Yassin, cited in the Author's text. In the so-called "war of infiltration" (1949-1956), which was based on the infiltration of Palestinian guerrillas into Israeli territory, mainly from Egyptian Gaza (the so-called fedayeenAs well as in violent Israeli reprisals, between 2.700 and 5.000 Palestinians died. Since the Israeli occupation of the Gaza and West Bank territories after the Six-Day War (June 1967) until 2017, approximately 11.500 more Palestinians died. Therefore, we have a total of about 30.000 Palestinian deaths in more than 70 years of conflict which, as we can see, in terms of the number of deaths, is far from being the most violent conflict in the region. It should be added that this long period of 70 years includes the aforementioned Israeli War of Independence (1948-49) – when Arab countries and local Palestinian leaders, rejecting the partition decided by the UN, waged total war against the people of the nascent Jewish state – in which approximately 6.000 Jews died, that is, 1% of the Jewish-Israeli population; plus two major Arab-Israeli wars (1967 and 1973), plus two Intifadas; plus 3 wars between Israel and Hamas. The cold numbers cited above are incapable of adequately portraying human suffering. This includes both the suffering of the Palestinians who died and those who did not die but were expelled from their homeland. I am referring here, of course, to... Nakba Palestine, materialized in the expulsion of more than 700 Palestinian Arabs from their lands. I also refer to the millions of Palestinians who, under Israeli occupation, have been deprived of their basic rights for more than 50 years. Nor do these numbers reflect the suffering of the Jews, both those who died and those who lost loved ones in wars and terrorist acts against Israeli civilians. As is already clear, the suffering is much greater on the Palestinian side. But the point here is that this unequal outcome was not produced, as Berenice Bento and her ilk claim, by any perverse “colonialist essence” of Zionism, but largely by circumstantial reasons (Israel won the three major Arab-Israeli wars). These numbers also do not reflect the suffering produced by the “Nakba "Jewish": which consisted of the plundering and expulsion of approximately 800 Jews from Arab countries, in a process as violent and criminal as the... Nakba Palestine. In fact, today, about half of the Israeli Jewish population is composed of Eastern Jews, who, as mentioned, were expelled from their countries of origin – Arab countries. This fact is yet another element that helps to dismantle the image of Israel as a mere European colonial enclave in the Middle East. Finally, just like the thesis of the “colonial essence” of Zionism, the thesis that Israel practices genocide against the Palestinian people is simply unsustainable, and has much more to do with the aforementioned characteristic of antisemitism, that of elaborating an anti-Jewish (and now “anti-Zionist”) monstrosity, than with true solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Antisemitism, the Memory of the Shoah, and Israel

The Shoah, the extermination of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany (simply for being Jewish), profoundly marked and continues to mark the very being of the Jewish people, constituting a terrible trauma with decisive effects on the formation of their historical consciousness and identity. This memory is collective, but the processing of this trauma also has an inescapable personal dimension. Each Jewish individual, from the moment they become aware of the horror of what happened – almost always in childhood – has the non-transferable task of trying to process and give meaning to this trauma in the construction of their unique subjectivity. A task, perhaps, for a lifetime. There are many ways to deal with trauma, and not all produce good results. This is because, by definition, one cannot control the effects of trauma. Hence, the accusation that "the Jews learned nothing from what they suffered" is simply absurd, since genocide is not a school for anyone. But this statement is not only absurd. It is also – and above all – cruel. Because, by using the pain of an entire people to attack them... collectivelyWhat this act does is reproduce the dehumanizing and stereotyping procedures that, historically, were at the root of the genocide itself, which is thus ratified. It is not so-and-so who misuses memory, but "the Jews"—or alternatively, "the Zionists." To this offense, antisemites add another: that "the Jews" or "the Zionists" have "hijacked" the memory of the victims of Nazism, who were not only Jewish. Here there is a mixture of the racist attribution of "superpower"—because "they" would have the power to determine how the whole world should remember Nazism—with the attribution of "perversity," because "they," just as they would aspire to the monopoly of the world's wealth and power, would use their own dead to also monopolize suffering and benefit in an iniquitous way. We have arrived here, perhaps, at the height of abjection and ignominy. Again, I quote Berenice Bento: “But there is a point that surprises me in the text: the account that some of the authors give of the loss of family members during the Holocaust. However, there is not a single word about the genocide of gypsies, homosexuals, lesbians, communists, and all the populations that should have been wiped off the face of the earth by the desire of the Third Reich. Why this lack of empathy for the pain of others? Isn't this the point of unity that substantiates the ideology of people who share a left-wing sensibility? How can one… recognizing people (my emphasis) "Who use and exploit the pain of their ancestors to justify the oppression of another people? The same lack of empathy for non-Jewish victims during the Holocaust also runs through the text in relation to the Palestinian people."

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine a Black activist who, in a debate about racial quotas, explains to their white, left-leaning interlocutors the pain that racism has caused and continues to cause them – how this pain has harmed (and continues to harm) their life and how they believe racial quotas can help in the process of reparation and healing. Now imagine that this Black activist, upon saying this, receives the following response:

"Why do you only talk about racism against Black people? Why don't you also talk about sexism, prejudice against LGBT people, prejudice against Indigenous people? You have no empathy! You have no shame! You are instrumentalizing the memory of slavery to obtain privileges!"

As demonstrated, Berenice Bento, both intellectually and morally, behaves like a swindler who picks a pocket, points at the victim, and shouts: “Catch the thief!” Thus, without knowing any of the authors personally, she can assert, about all of them, that they lack empathy and that they would perversely manipulate the pain of their own people. Of course, because, after all, they are “Zionists”! No, Professor Berenice, they are not obligated to elaborate a complete report of the pain of all the victims of Nazism every time they speak of their pain! Especially since they have no authority to speak, on behalf of others, about the pain of others. It is you who demonstrates the most elementary incapacity for empathy! It is you who, by accusing, perversely manipulates the pain of the Jewish genocide to attack Jews with whom you disagree and whom you unscrupulously target. dehumanizes.

Regarding antisemites, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his classic essay on the Jewish question cited above, establishes a division between authoritarians or fascists, on the one hand, and "liberals," on the other. The former were characterized by denying Jews any right to citizenship and, ultimately, even the right to life. The latter, in general, admitted that Jews could obtain citizenship rights, provided they abandoned their Jewish identity. In order to join "national society," it was necessary for them to forget their history and divest themselves of their cultural differences that reminded them that they were children of Israel. Thus, for the latter, Jews could live among them, but not as Jews.

The signatories of the text “We are left-wing Jews” publicly expressed their feelings about antisemitism, the Shoah, and the relationship between these feelings and the existence of the State of Israel. They emphasized that, for them, in a world where antisemitism is intensifying, Israel constitutes a limit to helplessness, a kind of “safe haven.” But it is not only that. For a large part of the world's Jews, Israeli or diasporic, Zionist or non-Zionist, Israel constitutes an answer. concrete, because Jewish, to antisemitism, which wanted (and still wants) to abolish not “only” their right to live, but also their right to live as Jews and to be recognized as such. Even Domenico Losurdo, an extremely biased and dishonest author in his criticism of Zionism, was able to recognize this. I quote:

"There is no doubt that the Zionist movement has several components, and it is also Zionists with a long history on the left who promote the founding of the State of Israel." 

And finally, it acknowledges that Zionism was a national liberation movement, because

"Zionism embodies the demand of a traditionally oppressed people to achieve recognition not only as a collective of individuals, but also as a people, as a culture, as a meta-individual entity'".

Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, a staunch critic of Zionism, also states: 

“It would be unfair to dismiss the power of Zionism as an idea for Jews or to minimize the complex internal debate that characterizes Zionism, its true meaning, its messianic destiny, etc. Simply addressing this issue, and even more so attempting to 'define' Zionism, is a very difficult matter for an Arab, but it must be analyzed honestly. (…) I know (…) what antisemitism means for Jews, especially in the 20th century. Consequently, I am able to understand the mixture of terror and jubilation that fuels Zionism, and I believe I can at least grasp what Israel means to Jews.”

The State of Israel is legitimate because it is the political expression of the right to self-determination of the Israeli people. It needs no legitimacy beyond this. However, it is also inalienable because it embodies the existence of the Jewish people as a nation, recognized as such by the community of nations. Anyone incapable of understanding this will never be able to comprehend the significance of the historical core of the Zionist movement, nor the importance that Israel holds for the majority of the Jewish people, even though its governments not only can, but... we dev to be criticized.

The Shoah between two forms of denial.

Holocaust denial (Shoah denial) emerged as a logical continuation of the radical antisemitism of the far-right, which provoked the genocide. If for the Nazis the Jews were not only an "inferior race," but the "counter-race," the negative principle and, as such, an insult to Nature – and therefore the great enemy of the Aryan race – the objective of erasing this people from the face of the earth would be better fulfilled by erasing their memory and, therefore, by erasing the memory of the crime itself. But what is intriguing is that, later, a left-wing denialism also emerged, as demonstrated by the case of Roger Garaudy, a French intellectual of the French Communist Party who converted to Islam and wrote a "pioneering" book in which he claimed that the Holocaust was nothing more than an invention "of the Zionists" to legitimize the creation of the State of Israel. This denialism stricto sensu It didn't prosper much on the left. However, another type of denialism developed in a part of it, which consists not in denying, but in trivializing the Nazi genocide, normalizing Nazi Germany—something the far-right could never achieve alone. The culmination of this process is the equation between Nazism and Zionism and the consequent characterization of Israel as Nazi Germany revived. In her text, Berenice Bento doesn't explicitly state this, but it's difficult not to glimpse this intention between the lines, insofar as she attributes a "genocidal essence" to both Zionism and Israel, identifying, as a corollary, the Palestinians as the "new Jews." Here, too, we have a mode of operation of magical thinking, in which annulment is obtained through the procedure of repetition: the genocide against the Jews is "as if" annulled by the equation "Zionist=Nazi." This is the core of the hate speech of antisemitism in a part of the contemporary left.

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Does anti-Zionism imply anti-Semitism? The most common, almost automatic, answer for the vast majority of left-wing people – and even for left-wing Jews – is an emphatic no. After all, criticizing Israel, a state that clearly oppresses another people, in principle, has no necessary connection with anti-Semitism. But the reader who has followed me this far will realize that the answer to this question is not as simple as it seems, because, contrary to common belief, anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are very different things. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to criticize Israel in the most emphatic way, to denounce its crimes in the harshest manner, without thereby intending to revoke the Israeli people's right to self-determination, that is, without defending the thesis that Israel does not have the right to exist. Only this last attitude is truly anti-Zionist. Now, the right of peoples to national self-determination constitutes a fundamental political principle of democratic field contemporary, both right and left. Therefore, if someone argues that Israel has no right to exist, then, in my view, there are only three possible ways to understand this attitude:

1. The person belongs to some group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom, for religious reasons, Israel could only exist by divine decree, with the advent of the Messianic Era;
2.  The person holds some form of anarchist ideology, which, regarding the law of nations, consists of advocating for the advent of a post-national world political reality. But in this case, they must necessarily also be against the existence of an Arab-Palestinian state and, in general, must oppose the existence of all nation-states;
3. She argues that, among all peoples, only the Jewish people do not have the right to self-determination. Therefore, she is indeed antisemitic.

Opposition to Zionism was perfectly legitimate at the beginning of the 20th century, when Zionism was merely a project and the Jewish-Israeli nation did not actually exist. From the moment the existence of this nation became an undeniable fact, anti-Zionism ceased to be legitimate and, as we have seen, acquired anti-Semitic characteristics. And, in effect, if it includes the advocacy of the violent destruction of Israel, a project that can only be carried out through a true genocide, then this anti-Zionism implies not “only” anti-Semitism, but the extreme type of this racism: extermination anti-Semitism. 

Antisemitism and the Left

Antisemitism on the left is not new. Historical icons of the left, such as Bakunin and Proudhon, displayed explicit and radical antisemitism. Even in the 19th century, August Bebel and Friedrich Engels, observing antisemitic prejudice in certain socialist currents, called it "the socialism of fools." In the 20th century, despite being strongly combated by Lenin in the Soviet Union, it reappeared within the Bolshevik party itself during the Stalinist period. During the Cold War, within the international communist movement and, above all, in Eastern European countries, antisemitic prejudice also intensified, masked as "anti-Zionism"—and Jewish communist leaders were persecuted and killed under the accusation of being "Zionists." Moishe Postone, in "Antisemitism and National Socialism," the text cited above, using Marx's theory of commodity fetishism very astutely, elaborates a brilliant explanation of antisemitism as... objective illusion Produced by the value form. Through the fetishistic dissociation between the “concrete” and the “abstract,” the abstract, mysterious, intangible, and corrosive power of Capital is projected onto the “Jews,” who are thus contrasted with the “authentic national communities,” mystically founded on what would be organic bonds of “soil and blood.” But why, unlike what tends to happen with other racisms, does antisemitism appear so strongly on the left? In a fundamental interview on this issue, Postone states:

“The way antisemitism is distinguished, and must be distinguished, from racism is linked to the type of imaginary power attributed to Jews, Zionism, and Israel that lies at the heart of antisemitism. Jews are seen as constituting an immensely powerful, abstract, and intangible global form of power that dominates the world. There is nothing similar to this idea at the core of other forms of racism. Racism, from what I know, rarely constitutes an integral system that seeks to explain the world. Antisemitism is a primitive critique of the world, of capitalist modernity. The reason I consider it particularly dangerous for the left is precisely because antisemitism possesses a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely exhibit.”

As Theodor Adorno had already noted, such an objective illusion cannot be dissolved by mere clarification, because, above all, it is embodied in the very structure of the personality. Thus, for Adorno, antisemitism is an objective illusion that implies a mode of psychic functioning completely opposed to that of an emancipated subjectivity. Herein lies the central role of Manichaeism and hatred in the authoritarian mentality. Unlike the "good anger," produced by indignation in the face of injustice and oppression, typical of the democratic left – which seeks a subjectivity based on solidarity and the yearning for justice – a resentful mentality, fascinated by violence and [unclear], is characteristic of a certain authoritarian left. sidewalk in hatred of the great Enemy, who brings Evil to the world and whose annihilation would restore social harmony. Therefore, the anti-Semitic issue is, in part, a larger symptom of the great division that exists within contemporary leftism, between its democratic and authoritarian components. One of the many complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is, in part, inflated by displacement of ideological hatred globally, this exists both on the reactionary right, with its ideology of a clash of civilizations, and on a certain authoritarian left, which has made anti-imperialism a true worldview.

Antisemitism: a parasite of the Palestinian cause

Berenice Bento, commenting on the part of the text "We Are Leftist Jews" where the authors state that Palestinians tend to see them as enemies, says:

"So, the Palestinian people should see them as allies? That would be the same as applying Stockholm Syndrome to the political sphere."

Of course, for the author, the true allies of the Palestinian people would be people like her, anti-Zionists who deny any legitimacy to the State of Israel. Perhaps also extremist militias like the Lebanese Hezbollah and Islamist dictatorships like the Iranian regime, which are openly anti-Semitic and possess the political program of wiping Israel off the map. But let's think a little: what would be the consequence for the Palestinians if the genocidal program of destroying Israel triumphed? Wouldn't the Palestinian people also be affected? Is it seriously possible to imagine a Palestinian state post-Armageddon? Simply posing this question reveals the supposed "solidarity" with the Palestinians on the part of anti-Zionists like Berenice Bento for what it really is: merely a convenient ideological cover to legitimize their anti-Semitic hatred. 

So, who are the true allies of the Palestinian people? The answer, I think, is clear: whoever the Palestinian people choose as allies. If the Palestinian people choose the Hamas program, then the anti-Zionists will, in fact, be their best allies. But if, on the contrary, the Palestinian people choose to fight for a just peace with the Israelis, then left-wing Jews (Zionist or not) should constitute themselves as their strategic allies. And vice versa.

Both in Israel and in the Palestinian territories there are movements and individuals identified with democracy, human rights, and the achievement of a just peace. The same is true of their respective diasporas. It is necessary for these groups to act in order to combat the objective and subjective confusion that, as I have tried to emphasize, has only favored polarization and nationalist and fundamentalist extremism. To this end, it is essential, above all, that very clear common objectives be established, as well as appropriate and legitimate methods of struggle to achieve them; methods that must do justice to the dual dimension of this conflict, through the following formula: “not to speak of peace without speaking of struggle against occupation. And not to speak of struggle against occupation without speaking of a just peace and respect for the self-determination of both peoples.” There is no doubt that with such clarifications (of principles, objectives, and methods) there will be defections on both sides, as both will lose many of their false friends. But this will be the price to pay so that Palestinian and Israeli democrats and pacifists, Jews and Arabs, can support each other, establishing in practice the unity without which they can hardly achieve the peace, freedom, and security they seek for their people.

Notes

See the beautiful version by Israeli singer Noa Peled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDCoaTVjNGo 

2 See https://www.brasil247.com/blog/sionistas-de-esquerda-e-seus-fantasmas

3 https://www.brasil247.com/blog/somos-judeus-de-esquerda 

4 See (http://www.revistafevereiro.com/pag.php?r=09&t=15), 

5 Even the compulsive way in which that phrase is repeated suggests, not an argumentative procedure, but the modus operandi of magical superstition. 

6 For an intellectual history of the Zionist movement, see Avneri, Shlomo, The Making of Modern Zionism, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. And for a good introduction to the subject, see Laqueur, Walter, A History of Zionism, Chairman of the International Research Council.

7 - The crime of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has a much simpler explanation, since Israel's policy in this territory, conquered in 1967 during the Six-Day War (a defensive war, however), has been a systematic policy of disrespect for the local population, colonization, and colonial aggression, with a view to territorial expansion. However, anti-Zionist ideologues, such as Ms. Berenice Bento, in their attempt to criminalize the entire Zionist movement and, by extension, the entire population of Israel, routinely fail to make the necessary distinctions, mixing things up. 

8 - But as I will demonstrate later, this apparent recognition by the Author of the value of the lives of Israeli civilians is a lie.

9 - Cf. Postone, Moiche “Antisemitism and National Socialism”, http://o-beco-pt.blogspot.com/2012/03/moishe-postone_02.html.

10 - "He who saves one life saves the whole world." Cf. Talmud Bavli, Vilna Standard Edition, Sanhedrin 37a.

11 - Apparently, Berenice Bento has difficulty even making the elementary distinction between State and society. 

12 - In Israel, too, there is a fundamentalist far-right that advocates for the establishment of Jewish religious law (chalachah) as state law. A law potentially as oppressive as Islamic sharia. It would be equally ridiculous if those who fight against this fundamentalist far-right Jewish current were labeled as prejudiced orientalists! 

13 - “Thus, antisemitism is originally a Manicheanism; it explains the rhythm of the world through the struggle of the principle of Good against the principle of Evil. Between these two principles, no arrangement is conceivable: one must triumph and the other must be annihilated (...). By this point, the reader will have understood that the antisemite does not resort to Manicheism as a secondary principle of explanation. But the original choice of Manicheism is what explains and conditions antisemitism.” Sartre, JP, “Reflections on Racism”, p. 27, Difel publisher. Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, also highlight this relationship between Manicheism and antisemitism: “It is true that the most psychologically human individuals are attracted by ticket progressive, however progressive loss of experience ultimately transforms the fans of ticket progressive against enemies of difference. It's not just the antisemitic ticket itself that's antisemitic, but the mentality surrounding the ticket in general.The fierce anger at difference is teleologically inherent in this mentality and is, while resentment of the subjects dominated by the domination of nature, ready to launch an attack against the natural minority...even when they are the first to threaten the social minority" (emphasis mine). Cf., Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M., "Dialectic of Enlightenment", p. 193. Zahar Publisher. And also: "Before, judgment went through the stage of weighing, which provided some protection to the subject of judgment against a brutal identification with the predicateIn advanced industrial society, there is a regression to a mode of judgment that can be said to be devoid of judgment, of power to discriminate (...) Therein lies the secret of the brutalization that fosters antisemitism.If, within logic itself, the concept falls upon the particular as something purely external, then with much more reason, in society, Everything that represents difference must tremble.The labels are placed.: You're either a friend or an enemy." (emphasis mine). Ibid., p. 188

14 - Cf., Semelin, Jacques, “Purify and Destroy”, Difel Publisher, pp 428-430. My emphasis. 

15 - However, I disagree with the authors of that text when they include the denialism and criminal negligence of the Bolsonaro government during the current pandemic in the category of genocide.

16 - Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, not only can but should be criticized. However, he is far from being the colonialist villain, the planner of genocide, that the Author portrays him to be. Indeed, in her book AltneulandIn a sort of modern utopian novel, Herzl describes the society of the Jewish State as he imagined it. In it, the native Arabs appear well integrated, satisfied with the progress brought about by the Zionist movement. From this perspective, one could say that it is paternalistic and orientalist. But it is far from being genocidal.

17 - See https://pcdob.org.br/noticias/sayid-tenorio-israel-e-o-genocidio-silencioso-de-criancas-palestinas/  This is a completely dishonest text, full of lies, suggesting that the murder of children by Israel is systematic and intentional. Therefore, it would constitute a true genocide. On the traditional anti-Semitic accusation against the "Jewish child killer," see Kurz, R., "The Child Killers of Gaza." http://www.obeco-online.org/rkurz370.htm

18 – See  https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz.

19 – See https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-51486829.

20 - https://aventurasnahistoria.uol.com.br/noticias/reportagem/bombardeio-de-toquio-1945.phtml.

21 - See Ben-Dror Yemini, “The Industry of Lies”, published by É Realizações. All the data on deaths in Middle Eastern conflicts cited above were extracted from this book by Ben-Dror Yemini. The data in this book are all correct. However, it should be read with caution, as it is full of half-truths. The impression one gets from reading it is that, under the guise of combating the demonization of Israel, it ends up serving to anesthetize consciences in the face of the gravity of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Thus constituting a form of hasbara (Israeli propaganda), even if well done.

22 - No international human rights NGO with respectable credentials accuses Israel of genocide. Nor does any United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Here is another example of the selective use of the authority of these institutions.

23 - Notice, in the quote above, in the emphasis I added to Berenice Bento's text, the revealing "Freudian slip" of the Author. Requesting that they be recognized as left-wing people, The authors of the text that sparked the controversy received the response that they are not recognized as leftists. nor as people. 

24 - Cf. Losurdo, Domenico, “The Language of Empire”, pp. 166-167. See also, in Revista Fevereiro, my review of this book by Losurdo, where I demonstrate the deficiency and partiality of his criticisms of Zionism. Cf. “The Language of Empire and the Art of Evasion by Domenico Losurdo”, http://www.revistafevereiro.com/pag.php?r=05&t=09#_ftn7 Despite everything, Losurdo acknowledges the legitimacy of Israel's existence and does not associate himself, as the Author does, with the program of its destruction.

25 - Cf., Said, Edward, “The Palestinian Question”, pp. 67-68. Unesp Publisher. Also, the way the Author manipulates some of Hannah Arendt's criticisms (apparently via Losurdo...) of aspects of the Zionist movement is completely dishonest, since Arendt never doubted that Zionism, however criticizable many of its currents might be, constituted a legitimate national movement of the Jewish people. Before the creation of the State of Israel, Arendt's position was in favor of a binational state with the Arabs, a position similar to that of so-called "classist Zionism"—the Marxist-Zionist left which, at the time, represented the second political force of the Zionist movement. For Arendt's positions on the Jewish question and Zionism, see Arendt, H., “Jewish Writings”, Amarilys ed.

26 - For this point, see Shavit, Ari, “My Promised Land”, Three Stars publishing house. Especially chapter 6, pp 160-203.

27 - Cf. Garaudy, R., “Los Mitos Fundacionales de la Política Israel”, https://www.rebelion.org/docs/121989.pdf This website, identified with the far-left, has been publishing antisemitic material for about two decades. For an analysis of the Garaudy case and left-wing denialism and antisemitism in France, see Taguieff, AP, “La Nueva Judeofobia”, Gedisa publisher.

28 - Postone, M., “Zionism, antisemitism and the left”, http://o-beco-pt.blogspot.com/2012/03/moishe-postone_2733.html.

29 - Cf., Adorno, T., “Studies on the Authoritarian Personality”, Unesp Editora.

30 - The current Russian invasion of Ukraine indicates that, in reality, for certain leftists, it is not anti-imperialism that has become a worldview, but only "American anti-imperialism." For a critique of anti-imperialism as a worldview, see my aforementioned review of Domenico Losurdo's book, "The Discourse of Empire." On this issue, Moishe Postone's text "History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anti-Capitalism" is fundamental. http://www.obeco-online.org/mpostone5.htm.