HAPPY NEW YEAR?

 Years ago, I attended the inauguration of the Stefan Zweig Museum in Petrópolis (Brazil). It stays in the house where the Austrian writer committed suicide alongside his wife on February 22, 1942, depressed by the war and the situation of the Jews amid this tragic conflict. I asked myself why such a desperate act on the part of this author who was revered around the world.

As the year 2023 comes to an end, I somewhat understand the emotional hole Stefan dug himself into. From the top of his little house, perched on a hill in my beloved Petrópolis, he glimpsed the sad spectacle of humanity tearing itself apart.

Time passed, but the world changed little. It continues to be a planet inhabited by an immeasurable number of people blinded by hatred and prejudice.

A few days ago, I celebrated my birthday and the only advantage of getting older is that we can look around us with more critical and less naive eyes. What we see doesn't make our nights any calmer. We wake up at dawn, victims of a frightening lucidity.

It has been painful to read comments and posts from people I like and some I even admire writing nonsense regarding Israel, Zionism, the Jews, and this tragic conflict that is happening there.

The total lack of objectivity and historical perspective is what hurts the most. Well-intentioned people decide to shout as harbingers of justice, without looking in the mirror and identifying the image of medieval priests inciting the ignorant mob to invade the ghetto and slaughter the Jews.

No matter how “well-intentioned” they are, how much they legitimately sympathize with the fate of Palestinian civilians “massacred by the murderous rage of the Israelis”... They are simply and effectively repeating the role of all the triggers of pogroms and massacres that the Jews have suffered for the last 2000 years. And, like these, every drop of Jewish blood that has been and will be shed will inevitably weigh heavily on them in a karmic way.

The most dramatic thing about all this is that the non-Jewish world does not understand that Israel is fighting not only against Hamas, or Hezbollah. Israel is fighting for its existence. Any conflict between Israel and its neighbors has always been and will continue to be a life-and-death struggle.

Have any of you taken the trouble to look at the map of the region? If you haven't done it, do it. Look at the size of Israel and its Arab neighbors, most of whom still have no official peace treaty with Israel (Israel has only signed with Egypt and Jordan)...

Israel is slightly larger than the state of Sergipe (the smallest state in Brazil). Imagine the people of Sergipe having to face the rest of the Brazilians in a war. Two million people from Sergipe against the rest of the two hundred million Brazilians.

The notion that Jews are to blame for most of the problems of the ancient and modern world is beyond stupid. It's as ridiculous as thinking the earth is flat.

Today there are only 15.2 million Jews in the world, 0.2% of the world population, which is around 8.1 billion people. The equivalent of an ant threatening a herd of elephants...

We then arrive at the fallacy that Zionism is synonymous with colonialism, the fashion of the moment.

A people's right to self-determination is a fundamental principle of modern international law, defended as such by the United Nations. The accepted concept is that people have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status, without interference. This concept was first expressed in the 19th century and after World War I, it was encouraged by both Soviet Premier Vladimir Lenin and United States President Woodrow Wilson.

In 1920 there were fifty independent countries. Today, there are almost two hundred. One of the motivating forces behind this wave of country creation was self-determination – the concept that nations (groups of people united by ethnicity, language, geography, history, or other common characteristics) should be able to determine their political future. All people have this right, don't they? But the Jews don't. By asserting this right, they are accused of being colonialists and invaders...

Jews are a group united by ethnicity, language, history, and other common characteristics. Ah, but it lacked geography... Israel's detractors accuse the Jews of having no real ties to the territory they “chose” for their promised land.

Don't they have it? What other people have their history contained in the greatest bestseller of all time, whose content talks about how they emerged and lived in this land of their ancestors? A book that served as the basis for the two most important religions in the world today – Christianity and Islam. That little book is called the Bible. You can read it, it's all there.

But the Jews left there more than 2 thousand years ago, they say... Did they really leave?

The fact is that Jews remained in Israel even after the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. After suppressing the last Jewish revolts, the Romans allowed a Jewish center to remain in Galilee. It was in this region that important Jewish rabbinical and literary decisions took place in the Middle Ages, lasting until the middle of 400 CE.

Current historians guarantee that Jews constituted the majority of the population until the Muslim conquest of the 7th century in 638. A conquest made at the point of a sword – whoever did not convert, died.

In 1099 the Crusaders reconquered Jerusalem and in the process massacred many inhabitants, both Muslims and Jews. Those who survived became involved in the trade of coastal cities. At that time there were Jewish communities spread across the country.

In 1187 Sultan Saladin defeated the Crusaders, retaking Jerusalem, and invited the Jews to return.

And, in 1517, the Ottoman Empire conquered the region and there was mass Jewish immigration. The Jewish community was made up of both descendants of Jews who had never left the land, and Jewish migrants from the diaspora.

In 1610, the Yochanan Ben Zakai Synagogue in Jerusalem became the main synagogue of Sephardic Jews and in 1714, Dutch researcher Adriaan Reland published an account of his visit to the region and recorded several Jewish population centers over there.

Throughout the 19th century until the 1880s, Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe as well as groups of Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Bulgaria, and North Africa immigrated, and in the early 20th century, tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants began to arrive. Ninety thousand acres of land were purchased (not stolen) by Jews and the revival of the Hebrew language in the region began.

In 1917, the Ottoman Empire ended and the region was under British rule until 1948 when the Jewish State was proclaimed and the Palestinians gave up proclaiming theirs, as had been agreed with the UN.

Detail: even fake news was recently posted stating that the Jews who came to live in the state of Israel from 1948 onwards were not descended from the original Jews. As if the lack of ancestral Jewish DNA was more important than the right of these Jews to self-determine as such... The fact is that current DNA research shows exactly the opposite. Today's Jews are the same as yesterday.

And more. One day in Israel, in the 70s, when I lived there and worked as an international correspondent, I heard an interesting report on ‘Kol Israel’, the Israeli public radio station that had quite intellectual program. The radio show told about this Palestinian village researchers discovered that they interestingly referred to Jews. In Arabic, these Palestinians called them “cousins”. The researchers interviewed the residents. They wanted to know if the custom was because, according to the Bible, Arabs and Jews descended from Abraham. To which the inhabitants of that village responded: “No, we are cousins ​​because in the past we were Jews too”. When the 'gentle' Islamic wave swept through the region in the 600s CE, forcibly converting everyone, they stopped being Jews and became Muslims, but retained the memory of their 'genetic' past.

In any case, if we let the slogan “from the river to the sea” pass without comment, we will then have to assume that the Jews who do not swim in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe (adding to the thousands of refugees already plaguing the region) will have to, one way or another, abandon Israel because they are nothing more than a bunch of “colonialist invaders”.

Whoever signs under this notion must also, for the sake of justice and ethics, warn the entire Brazilian population who came from Europe, Asia, Africa, and other regions after the discovery of Brazil, that they will have to leave and return the land to its legitimate and original residents, the Indians...

The same will be required of the rest of Latin American countries, as well as the United States and Canada. Right? It doesn't matter how many generations have passed since the unspeakable colonialist invasion of these territories. The South Africans and Australians won't be happy about it either.

Leaving aside the idiotic ideas and the cluelessness of the vociferous and bloodthirsty mobs, the biggest problem with this whole situation is the difficulty of a clear perspective.

Although reality is transparent, people seem to be – on both sides – looking at it through the distorted lens of emotion. An emotion, in large part, poisoned by lies and false concepts that the Jew is a pernicious being by nature. As a result, the Palestinians in opposition end up with the Manichaean role of the ‘good guys.’ No one is a saint or a devil in this story.

The truth is, that the Palestinians have their reasons and their fair demands. But the Jews have theirs too. Both people do not seek possession of that region because it is full of oil, gold, or any other wealth other than their love for the land itself.

There are places around the world whose governments would be happy to see populated. So much so that they offer all sorts of economic incentives for anyone who wants to move there.

In addition, also to the fact that Palestinians are receiving billions of dollars in contributions, whose Hamas leaders use to live comfortably away from Gaza; and Israel's commercial and creative capacity also generates a lot of capital. These two national groups could easily buy land in countless parts of the planet. But both of them want that dry, forsaken, and poorly located patch of land that is Israel/Palestine. So, before you say nonsense about “colonialism” and “invaders”, think about these facts.

And please, before publishing your next poisonous posts, have a little common sense and character, avoiding inciting hatred and propagating prejudices, deliberately adding fuel to the fire. Admit the limitations of your knowledge about the complexity of the subject and let those involved seek a path to negotiations and, who knows peace. If you can, help us have a truly wonderful and fraternal New Year...

THE END