We, genocide survivors!

In recent articles published sequentially in periodicals and other newspapers, columnists brought their opinions on the current conflict in the Middle East. However, when evoking the backdrop of the war that is being fought between Israel and the Hamas terrorist army, one of them brought unacceptable historical distortions. Vladimir Safatle , for example, published an article on 11/23 to “narrate” his perspective on events.

He begins his diatribe indignant at some of the exponents of contemporary critical theory such as Jurgen , Habermans , Forst , Deitelhof and Gunther who published a text as an open letter on 10/13 “Principles of solidarity. An affirmation”, in the original Grundsätze der Solidarität . Eine Stellungnahme . In the text published on the research website Normative Orders from Frankfurt’s Goethe University, those authors defended the obvious: Israel’s right to retaliate. An eloquent defense of that country, they denounced the “anti-Semitic feelings and convictions (hatred against Jews), under every form of pretext”, referring to any attempt to baselessly attribute Israel’s military counter-attack action as “genocidal intentions ” .

Here is an excerpt from the open letter:

“The current situation, created by Hamas’ unparalleled attack and Israel’s response to it, has led to a series of moral and political statements and demonstrations. We believe that despite all the contradictory opinions expressed, there are some principles that should not be challenged. They underlie the solidarity rightly extended to Jews in Israel and Germany. The Hamas massacre, with its stated intention to destroy Jewish life in general, prompted Israel to retaliate. The way in which this counterattack, in principle justified, is carried out is controversially discussed; the principles of proportionality, avoiding civilian casualties and waging war with the prospect of future peace must be guiding principles. In particular, Israel’s actions in no way justify anti-Semitic reactions, especially in Germany. It is unbearable that Jews in Germany are once again exposed to threats to life and limb and have to fear physical violence in the streets.”

Genocide is a word coined by Polish-born writer Raphael Lemkin , himself a survivor who escaped the Holocaust. Lemkin was disturbed when he heard in a radio broadcast by the then English Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “we are in the presence of a crime that has no name”. Lemkin , exiled to the USA in 1943, having lost his entire family murdered by the Nazis, imagined that the “crime without a name” required a more precise definition than the unnameable. The word was created from everything that was seen during the attempt to eliminate ethnicities and human groups, as was the case with the extermination of at least 1,500,000 Armenians by the Turkish-Ottoman army, known as the great crime, “ Medz Yeghern ”. Although other peoples regrettably also experienced extermination attempts, in the case of the Jews there was an unprecedented continuous, systematic and transnational action, which lasted about 6 years. Trains of Jews in train carriages from all over Europe systematically went to extermination camps where they were enslaved and then eliminated with Zyclon -B, a gas specially developed for mass murder. Lemkin then brought together the word genós (from the Greek tribe or race) and Cide (Greek – murdering or killing), and obtained the word genocide.

The word “genocide” only began to be used more frequently some time later, in 1948. The word, for example, did not appear in older editions of the Oxford Etymological Dictionary – but it was already present in American Heritage and became more enlightening:

“Systematic planning for the annihilation of a political, racial or cultural group.”

To dismantle the thesis that Israel proposes some form of genocide – and refute it – it will be necessary to turn to numbers: the Palestinian population of Gaza had a significant demographic growth rate growing at a growth rate of 2.25 (2018 estimate) and birth rate of 30.5 births per 1000 inhabitants. The population of Israeli Arabs, which numbered 151,000 after 1948, now numbers 1,995,000 million, a growth of approximately 1,231% with a fertility rate of 2.98 unborn children for each woman.

Now, what genocide (sic) is this, which produces a reverse mathematical result? That is to say, an exponential demographic increase in the population supposedly subjected to systematic and programmed extermination.

Safatle ‘s central argument :

“Genocide is not something linked to some absolute number of deaths, but rather to a specific form of policy of erasing bodies, dehumanizing the pain of populations, silencing public mourning that strips populations of their humanity and expresses historically reiterated processes of subjection.”

Now, it is almost self-evident that the description used – “erasing of bodies, silencing of public mourning that strips populations of their humanity” – would fit much more closely with the acts aimed at genocide by Hamas terrorists than to the Israel Defense Forces. In fact, it is practically the same script used by jihadist killers .

If you insist on stating that the “genocide” you are referring to, how about explaining better why it is not based on mathematical evidence of demographic decline? Would it be in another category? Can a genocide not necessarily be reflected in a population decrease in numerical terms? Would we be facing a genocide with a population surplus?

As we have seen, the article signed by Habermans and collaborators repudiates the “expressions of genocidal intention”, while the author of the article published in the São Paulo newspaper attributes such intention with poetic freedom to the government of Israel. Would he have been so reactive due to the accusation of “anti-Semitic convictions”?

Let us then once again evoke some facts, phenomena that embarrass those who feel they must give up their seats for grandiloquent speeches:

In 1939 there were 18 million Jews in the world. Today Jews number 15 million. In 1948, 951,000 Arabs lived in the Palestinian region and during the War of Independence – after Israel was invaded by Egypt, Jordan and Syria – 141,000 remained, and today Israel has 1.995 million Arabs.

Some TV media, such as the BBC and the French TV5 in Spanish, uncomfortable with the expression “terrorists” – even though the governments of the United Kingdom and France considered the Gaza group a terrorist entity – still grant the kidnappers and baby roasters, the nickname “militant group” or “ free fighters ”.

The outrage should be directed at those who justify the acts of 10/7 as a “proportionate” response to oppression. This is when the parade of slogans that try to pass themselves off as truth begins, such as “ apartheid regime ” or “terrorist state”, when it is known that the social integration of Arabs in Israel, although far from perfect, is an example of isonomy among citizens. In which apartheid regime are there opposition parties, the right to vote, the exercise of the same rights and duties and in which Arab judges are part of the Supreme Court of Justice?

These ideologically instrumentalized concessions/perversions of language operate in an ignominious way, and by bastardizing the word genocide there is, at the very least, bad conscience.

It’s time to lose the illusion that those who are convinced are persuadable. But in this global crisis it became clear that Hamas, in addition to using civilians as human shields under hospitals, temples and UN organizations, managed, at least initially, to deceive the press and public opinion. A temporary achievement, because it is unsustainable. By openly confessing that its purpose is to “blame and hold Israel responsible for the humanitarian tragedy” and that the objective is to “repeat what was done on 10/7 again and again” the false dilemmas about the evil nature of Hamas must dissipate.

No, in fact it is not a single cause, but it is the efficient cause.

While in the attacked country’s response, civilians are unfortunately affected in an involuntary and unsystematic way as they seek to dismantle the structure of the terrorist army financed by the Ayatollahs and other regimes governed by autocratic leaders, Hamas’ strategy is abjectly transparent: it proposes the elimination of a State and of its citizens in its “constitutional charter”. Furthermore, it wants to take its fight beyond the borders of the Middle East by proposing the globalization of jihadism . There are those who support the strategy.

The question is: to what extent will they support this? By making terror pop, do the masses who march with terrorist flags and insignia know what values they are proclaiming?

If you know, in this case you need to bear the consequences of your decisions: supporting the enemies of humanity will result in autocratic governments, theocracies, ruthless religious laws imposed on the majority of the population, intolerance to diversity, institutional homophobia with criminal sanctions and capital punishment, criminalization of other religions and cults, setbacks in individual freedoms, abolition of civil legislation and installation of a 7th century penal code.

If defenders of acts of sub-humanity persist in defending those crimes committed by murderers in a state of ecstasy, it will be necessary to create new social contracts, that is, to redo all the legislation and moral codes we know. If victims can no longer respond to attacks, we will need to re-found the foundations of international law and legislation as we know them today. If legitimate defense and acts of preventing the repetition of barbarism (repeatedly reaffirmed by terrorists and philo-terrorists ) come to be considered more malicious than the attack itself, it will be necessary to reconfigure everything we have learned not only from the point of view of culture, but also also, and mainly, on where our concept of civilization is based.

The malaise in culture predicted by Freud in the moments leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War may be repeating itself, although under another configuration, the central crisis is axiological: it is in values, in the meaning of the good, of self- transcendence, of ethical-moral axes, and culture itself.

The nodal point demands maximum attention from humanity: the choice between civilization and non-civilization. And here we can evoke Karl Popper’s principle: the paradox of open societies and their enemies. What if these societies allow the rise to power of groups that begin to fight to suppress it? How can we prevent these forces from turning against democratic values? What if religious freedom is questioned? What mechanisms do we have to stop the abuses of autocrats, populists and fanatics usually united to move forward on the path from catastrophe to catastrophe?

So far, reality shows that we have not yet found effective measures against these paradoxes. It is impossible to emerge dry from this sea of problems, and, without delving into the dilemma, no one will emerge unscathed.

Nobody.