The more than ten months of massacre, destruction and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip brought to the news topics hitherto restricted to academia and small circles. There is always talk of the “Zionist regime” or “Zionist occupation” of Israel, which is a mix of state, colonial enclave and Zionist entity. The actions of Israel showed the world the true face of Zionism, that racist ideology that resembles Nazism by its methods and its deeds, not only in Palestine but in various regions of the world.
Let it be clear that Zionism and Judaism are different things. The practice of this ancient and respectable religion has nothing to do with the ideology born in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Being a practitioner of Judaism does not bind its adherents to the fascist practices of Zionism, which appropriated Judaism as a way to support its racist and supremacist theses when we know that not all Jews are Zionists or support Israel’s atrocities.
After all, what is Zionism, this markedly colonialist, racist, fundamentalist, extremist, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic supremacist, murderous, arabophobic, Islamophobic, Christianophobic, anti-Semitic, genocidal, infanticidal, interventionist, expansionist, militarist, organ trafficker ideology?
The Zionist Movement was created based on the thought of its founder, Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, coming from a family of bankers and defender of a series of fanciful theses, among them: “a land without people for a landless people”. Zionism is based on the theory defended by Herzl in his 1896 book, The Jewish State, of the existence of an independent and sovereign Jewish national state in the territory where the imaginary “Kingdom of Israel” would have existed.
Contrary to what its apologists boast, Zionism is not a movement that sought Israel’s independence, because Israel never existed. There was no anti-colonial struggle, but a colonial occupation of Palestine, through the self-proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948.
A macabre creation of Zionism, Israel is not a mere scarecrow conceived by post-war American and European imperialism, but the most cruel and shameful expression of the civilizational model of imperialism, with the primary function of serving as the executing arm of the most brutal colonialist expansionism in the United States and Europe.
Organizations that support the crimes of Israel always use the bogus accusation of anti-Semitism against defenders of human rights and Palestinian sovereignty. Since 7 October, several people and entities have been accused, persecuted and prosecuted in a sordid campaign waged by the Zionists.
These half-truth owners do not mind telling you who the Semites are. People are persuaded to believe that Semites are only Jews when, in fact, Semites are the adherents of Abrahamic religions, such as Hebrews (Jews), Arabs (Christians and Muslims), Assyrians (Christians) and other peoples originating in the north of the Arabian Peninsula, and not just Jews.
Anti-Semitism is one of the most disgusting forms of racism.
The battered accusations of anti-Semitism are no longer accepted around the world because their political and ideological fragility has been exposed. The charge of anti-Semitism has been used to intimidate critics of the crimes of Israel or to sterilize the discussion and divert attention from real problems, when it is known that Palestinians and solidarity movements strongly reject religious or sectarian narratives of the struggle against the occupation, condemning any form of persecution or denial of rights, whether of Jews, Arabs – Christians and Muslims – or any other person and group.
The most obvious case is the relentless and cowardly persecution by the front organizations of the terrorist state of Israel in Brazil against the journalist, Breno Altman, convicted by a lower court judge with an unfavorable sentence in case of criminal injury, whose “crime” was to face moral accomplices of the most immoral state on Earth.
These entities function as agencies of Israel and its intelligence agencies, acting according to the dictates of their Tel Aviv bosses to persecute defenders of justice, rights and reparation for the Palestinian people, a constant victim of crimes of humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide, which aim to exterminate the Palestinian population to perpetuate the Israeli colonial occupation.
For exactly ten months, Israel has been waging a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, using all its capacity and all kinds of internationally prohibited weapons, ammunition and bombs, indiscriminately bombing schools, hospitals and areas protected by international humanitarian law.
Even with all the power and help of the United States, which has already sent more than 50,000 tons of military equipment, including armored vehicles, weapons, ammunition, protective equipment and medical supplies, Israel has been humiliated by the actions of the Palestinian Resistance in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, in a demonstration of the inability to win the war against Hamas and Hezbollah, neither quickly, nor ever.
Israel and its proxies know that they have already lost the battle in Gaza, Lebanon and world public opinion. The only achievements Israel can boast of are war crimes, genocide, the mass murder of children and women, the destruction of infrastructure and the elimination of all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip. Faced with this resounding failure, what they have left is the persecution of those who put themselves on the right side of history.
-Sayid Marcos Tenório is a historian and specialist in international relations. He is vice president of the Brazil-Palestine Institute (Ibraspal) and author of the book Palestina: do mito da terra prometida à terra da resistência (Palestine: the myth of the promised land to the land of resistance) (Anita Garibaldi/Ibraspal, 2019). His article appeared in MEMO.
