At the beginning of the ceasefire, under the pretext of punishing the delay in handing over the remains of hostages, Israeli forces limited the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. It was a perverse gesture, a new violation of the laws of war. Hamas was not punished, as it has plenty of food and fuel. The punishment fell on the civilian population of Gaza. The concept that sustains it is Hamas’s identification with the Palestinian people.
Salem Nasser, from FGV-SP, accused Lula of dealing “an unfair blow against the Palestinians” by stating that Brazil has a problem with Netanyahu, not with (). According to him, the president “commits a factual error by suggesting that Netanyahu’s policy does not have the support of the population of Israel and that this same policy would not be that of the State as a whole.” Its operating concept mirrors that used by the Israeli government: the identification of the Netanyahu government with the Israeli nation.
The fundamental obstacle to peace in the Holy Land is not the borders, the settlements or the status of Jerusalem. It is the concept that the other embodies absolute evil — a “genocidal” nation or a “terrorist” nation — and therefore needs to be exterminated.
There are two parallel narratives told tirelessly since before the founding of the Jewish State. On the one hand, the heralds of Greater Israel repeat the (true) stories of peace plans rejected by Palestinians and acts of terror committed against Israelis or Jews in the diaspora. On the other, the heralds of Israel’s rejectionism repeat the (true) stories of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, the establishment of settlements in the West Bank and the massacres perpetrated by Israeli forces.
The two symmetrical truths do not form historiographical undertakings. They are platforms designed to advance a political objective: “Greater Israel, from the river to the sea”, in one version, or “Free, from the river to the sea”, in the other. Polar extremism poisons public opinion, in the Holy Land and beyond, burying rational voices under piles of ideological debris.
The State of Israel, according to Salem Nasser, is equal to Netanyahu and his knights of ethnic cleansing. In it, there is no Rabin, murdered during the signing of the Oslo Accords, Barak or Olmert, authors of peace maps, leaders who denounced Israel’s crimes in the military campaign launched on October 7, 2023.
Palestine, according to Jewish supremacists, is the same as the anti-Semitic fundamentalists of Hamas, who dream of destroying the Jewish State. In it, there is no Arafat, signatory of Oslo, or Marwan Barghouti, the leader that the Israeli government does not release precisely because he seeks peace in two states.
Lula often makes mistakes, in tactics and tone, when addressing the conflict in the Holy Land. He always gets it right, however, on the ground of principles. By saying that Brazil has nothing against Israel, it reaffirms the historic Brazilian position in defense of the unavoidable peace solution: coexistence between the Jewish State and a Palestinian State. In this step, it goes against the interests of those who see the ceasefire as a short parenthesis in the endless war for the single State, “from the river to the sea”.
The supposed eternal, atavistic hatred between the two peoples is a myth. Anger must be sown every day, through the word. Lula’s “sin” is not sowing it.
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