New contemporary considerations on war and death

We could, with plenty of justification, spend the rest of our miserable lives deeply lamenting wars. That would not even seem inappropriate. Any human being who is bothered by murder has a good chance of being a decent person, even if grumpy. I propose yet another option: leave the role of resignation to those who have retired from the work of creating the world.

It is naive to think that creation is a finished task. Almost everything remains to be done, especially with regard to consolidating peace among peoples. This text may contain more or fewer elements than needed for a clear argument. So I anticipate and assure you that I am open to discussing it. I will avoid references and share only what is alive in me.

The lynching of the innocent Jesus is, without any doubt, a proof of love. It is from this founding act of peace that the wheel of violence has been spinning in a void for two millennia. If there was in us humans a need to tear apart a body for the performance of a rite of passage, that desire was fulfilled. If Western civilization is founded on this act, and it is, then we can progress to the awareness that follows from that act: “what have we done?”

I have little or no desire — in fact, none — to submit my reason to religious interpretations of religious texts. In my conception of God, it is not even in God’s nature to promote small things or privilege small groups. With that, I hope to have made explicit my conclusion that, regardless of religious strand, if the human sacrifice of Christ is present, then we cannot — under any amendment — countenance murder. This is, here, more a sociological and historical matter than a mystical one.

The Abrahamic split between Jews and Muslims is also a sociological and historical question, though not only that. Father Abraham, what have you done? Delegating this civilizational question entirely to the domains of religion is the same as abdicating civilizational progress as a whole. One hundred percent of the views on the war grounded in the individual transcendent are invalid for a peace solution.

For us Christians, smoking the pipe left our mouths crooked (old habits leave their mark). There were so many sermons and songs with the name Israel destined to occupy a certain kind of origin of our faith that now, when a country with the same name is at the center of a geopolitical dispute, we are tempted to settle the interpretation on the basis of promises of our religion.

If the Bible has any validity for Catholics and Protestants, in particular, and it does, I recommend a careful reading of the Book of Hebrews — my favorite both for its excellent literature and for its contribution to faith. Basically, the text deals with the human system of containing violence that failed miserably and presents a perspective of spiritual elevation by which every religious system dissolves through a final sacrifice. That is when the ethnic, regional god of the Israelites of the Old Testament puts his universal plan into practice. With the ethnic god also die the ineffective methods of solving human suffering, replaced by love.

This question must be observed when it comes to constituting a Brazilian interpretation of the war in the Middle East. The influence of our religious beliefs on the political public sphere became even more notable in the last two presidential elections. If we want to advance minimally on the peace agenda, we must be skilled at redirecting our individual emotions into more appropriate compartments. In this step, what belongs to undeniable, transcendental experience must be subjected to a test of relevance: does my perspective entail murders? If so, that perspective should be welcomed, respected inwardly, but disregarded as rational, public support. One does not dialogue with murder. “Thou shalt kill?” “Thou shalt not kill.” Case closed.

The guilt arising from murder, a problem we try to solve through submission to the divine plan of grace and other civilizational resources, can be nonexistent depending on the context in which the death occurs. In wars, the killer is integrated into an artificial mass formation, that is, the army. In joining the army, the individual renounces their individual moral standard, which is replaced by the group’s morality. In that case, they may kill at will, without asking why the devil they are doing it. Masses are dangerous formations, and their advantages, such as folklore, are the same ones that count for nothing in comparison with their harms.

We have been steeped in violence for at least thirty-nine years, since I came into the world. To keep from losing sensitivity, I began to tally death in the international metric system. By my count, we have had to bury about ninety-eight tons of human flesh supplied by Hamas to the world. Competitive, Israel was even more generous in its banquet, serving us 450 tons of corpses — many still unburied. Complete solutions for the future of humanity, which were in those people, were reduced to spreading depression, when the brain turns out the light.

The stones of Curitiba’s Passeio Público know that the nationalist and religious origin of the war quickly turned into big business. Now the rules of the market apply. It was never a matter of a weakened United Nations. It is the peoples’ negotiating skill that is weakened, so that diplomacy serves us as an index. The pathetic U.S. veto of Brazil’s resolution calling for humanitarian aid, followed by the pathetic offer of a new resolution by the same United States, led to a veto by Russia and China. The Israeli ambassador called for the resignation of the organization’s secretary-general. We have the United States and Israel talking only among themselves, while the rest of the world waits, stunned.

The basic constitution of a public sphere comes from private persons who debate on the basis of reasons. Rebelliousness is not a reason. Submission is not a reason. Intuition is not a reason. Impulse is not a reason. It is early to estimate a date, but not to affirm that, in the face of such a humiliating defeat, world diplomacy will have to evolve its communicative and deliberative practices. We will have to elevate names above ourselves that translate our confidence in problem-solving — intelligent, ethical and, above all, creative leaders in their proposals.

Does Israel have the right to defend itself? No, it has the duty. Is Hamas a sweetheart? It does not seem different from a Rio militia, except for its planning, its better weapons and an ancestral grievance. Are they equivalent institutions? As to formal constitution, no. But in the decrepit character of murdering, their results are not different, except for the quantity of blood spilled.

History records that Jews have been the object of irresponsible hatred perpetrated by countless institutions. That hatred manifested in different ways. Although it reached its apex in the Holocaust, it developed in more sophisticated — why not say civilized — ways without losing its character as hatred. The creation of a state for this people, far from being a mere favor of the international community, does not hide the true purpose of countries to keep Jews away from their territories.

From the perspective of contemporary philosophy, what is understood as the struggle for recognition ends, lamentably, in the Jew. The exterminations directed at Black people, uninhibited foreigners and every sort of unsubmitted people would, symbolically, be destined for the Jew. This interpretation is shared by authors who arrived at it independently. The Jew of the Bible, of the Holocaust and of comedy, however, is not the contemporary Israeli authority. That authority is not unanimous even among Israelis themselves, much less in the international community. Moreover, the Israeli born in today’s Israel is not even necessarily Jewish.

If we have the freedom to question the historical content of the Pentateuch and other Jewish compendia, and we do, we can quickly reach the observation that their approaches disproportionately favor a messianic people that calls itself chosen by God to rule over its brothers. In general and specific terms, a fundamentalist Jew, like the Islamic fundamentalist, believes he has a license to do whatever he wants, since God not only authorizes him but commands it. The whole salvific work that is consolidated, for Christians, in the death of Christ has no validity for these fundamentalists, so, for them, the wheel of violence turns on their special navel. If we must not constrain another’s religious belief, and we must not, but that belief transgresses the civilizational code, then we could at least count on the other’s adherence to the discussion of the civilizational code.

Israel’s current government has the appearance of a state: it has a prime minister, elections, but its actions show it is not a democratic state sufficiently developed in its interactions with the world. This shows in a refusal of dialogue. It is necessary to observe the emotional aspects of the relationship between Israel and the world. Even if the motivations intrinsically tied to the ethnic god and the practice of conquering territories ordered by that god have been overcome, the emotional vestiges of those experiences remain. It is understandable, though lamentable, that today’s Israel is connected to the belligerence of its historical past.

As for Palestine, it is the new Jew — considering the philosophy of recognition mentioned earlier. Taken to its ultimate consequences, the idea that the abused has an enormous potential to become an abuser could apply to a group, or even to mass behavior. Ten years from now, when I remember this war, unless something even worse surprises me, in my mind there will be the image of a Palestinian mother who, screaming, complained that her children were hungry when they were murdered. The Palestinian people are subalternized in many ways and by many interests. The information on this people, presented in this article, is available as an appendix on the YouTube channel Outras Terras Filmes (http://outrasterras.com.br).