The colonial power targeting the Palestinian population is of a similar nature to that targeting the favela and marginalized populations in Brazil. We are talking about the same power and the same goal. We’re talking killable bodies, murderous cops, a soldout political class, twisted megabusinessmen, and the accumulation of wealth. We are talking about industrial reserve armies, that labor force that must be reined in from time to time to prevent uprisings and insurrections.
There are Israelis on the streets in Tel Aviv right now demanding that Netanyahu be stopped from continuing his genocidal rampage. There is a broad understanding that Israel will only find peace if Palestine recognizes its geographical boundaries and its people have access to dignity. There is agreement that Jews and Palestinians share similar experiences of persecution, extermination, suffocation and racism. In Israel there is more energy for peace than for war.
The point is that power wants war and we no longer live in democratic debate areas if we ever do. In the case of Palestine, Netanyahu’s government and his accomplices want to wage an endless war in the name of the illusion of protection and unification around a false enemy. Indiscriminate expansion of Israeli territory will not bring peace; it will bring more battles, more terrorism, more threats, more fear. Netanyahu doesn’t care, on the contrary: he is happy. He is not worried about the lives of the kidnapped Israelis, let alone the lives of the Palestinian babies. He wants blood, he wants guns, he wants ammunition, he wants profit, he wants power.
The notorious rise in antiSemitism is tragic news for those who defend the Palestinian cause because it warns that we will continue to choose the wrong enemy and wage an imaginary battle with one another.
We will finally be free when we emancipate ourselves from this patriarchal, warlike, capitalist and manipulative power. We lack recognition of the true and brutal enemy. Netanyahu portrays this power in dark colors. We have other representatives of the same methods here in Brazil. Just like in the United States, England, France, Saudi Arabia, Congo, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, etc. etc. etc.
What can we do? Follow the streets. We continue to despair over the massacres, be it in Gaza, Maré or Paraisópolis. And remember that they have the same root. They are not Jews, they are not Muslims, they are not people on the margins, they are not women or black people. It is the white, patriarchal, capitalist, manipulative, racist, misogynistic, heteronormative power that divides and destroys us.