It is, believe me, with great sadness that I address you on this second anniversary of the massacre of October 7th. I suppose that the first lines of this text — if you even read it — will disqualify me as a “friend of terrorists” or “anti-Semite”, just as two years ago I was, due to my reaction to October 7th, disqualified as a “Zionist” and “accomplice of genocides”. I’m used to it, don’t worry.
First of all, I want to congratulate you on your unusual efficiency. I have enjoyed her on Portuguese TV, in which, unperturbed, she maintains the narrative of a fair, untainted and always victim Israel, skillfully deflecting the most difficult issues.
I saw him, for example, on CNN avoiding any qualification of the attitude of Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir when he went to film and inveigh against the detained members of the Sumud humanitarian flotilla, calling them terrorists and supporters of murderers and proudly broadcasting the video. In his capacity as ruler in charge of prisons, it was Gvir who decided to place those people, who were not suspected of committing any crime (let alone violent), in a high security establishment, and it was from him that the order came – which he announced in another propaganda video – to treat them as terrorists and give them ‘the minimum’.
The ambassador said: “Minister Gvir is not a spokesperson for the Israeli government, I am.” Thus, according to Oren Rozenblat, what a minister says and does does not represent or mean anything. We had already seen him say exactly the same when Minister Smotrich announced on September 18, impassionedly, that after “the Gaza demolition phase”, there was “a business plan, already in the hands of Trump”, to transform the territory into a “real estate gold mine”.
Forgive me, Mr. Rozenblat; Your guarantees are worthless. The various members of the flotilla already released confirm that Gvir’s orders were followed: they spent more than a day without food and water, those who had medicines were left without them, they handcuffed them for hours on end, they were put in cages in the sun in the desert, transported without knowing where, unable to make even a phone call.
Still, there were those in the Portuguese commentary who asked: “What were you expecting, a 5-star hotel?” Well, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” would be expected, to begin with, not to detain people illegally, and that, in doing so (finally), treat those detained with the dignity that is required of any detainee in a civilized country. Because — it seems that many people are unaware of this fact — the minimum requirements of a democratic rule of law determine that even those detained in the act of committing a crime, even those detained for terrorism, are treated with dignity, with any inhuman and degrading treatment to which they are subjected being classified as a crime. That’s the law, that’s the standard of international law.
If it served nothing else, Sumud’s action would have at least proven, to anyone who is not blinded by sectarianism and hatred, how far Israel has moved away from these civilizational concepts and practices. All the more so when it is known, as Mariana Mortágua said this Sunday, that the treatment to which the activists were subjected is a pale example of what the Israeli authorities allow themselves to do with Palestinian detainees.
Because, let’s face it, Mr. Rozenblat, that only those who don’t read the news and have never heard of the reports of human rights organizations that report on their country — starting with the Israelis, like the old lady B’Tselem —, you can continue with the refrain of the admirable democracy that Israel is. Only those who have not followed the path of these 77 years see Israel as “a civilized country”.
Civilization is a process, a path, and there are no perfect countries, far from it. Israel, like others (Portugal for example), was born in a particularly violent way. I’m not talking about what happened before the founding (including terrorism, and brutal, by Jewish organizations), but about the mass expulsions and documented massacres of the Palestinian population who lived in the areas allocated to the new country. Over these almost 80 years, Israel could have officially recognized these crimes and sought, as soon as possible (because it spent many years in successive wars with neighboring countries) the path to pacification.
There were, without a doubt, those who took steps in this direction — and even those who were declared traitors and murdered for this (Yitzhak Rabin). And there were those who, precisely having dubbed Rabin a traitor (Netanyahu), wanted the opposite: to go as far as possible into savagery.
It is this choice of savagery that explains why Ben-Gvir goes out of his way to humiliate detainees who include elected representatives of “friendly” nations, nations that have been silent for decades in the face of Israel’s abuses, that for decades have pretended not to notice that the country blatantly ignores all UN deliberations, continuing to occupy Palestinian territory and allowing settlers to terrorize and kill Palestinians, that the Israeli armed forces do target practice with journalists, that their secret services carry out murders and kidnappings in other countries without saying hello. It is this choice of savagery that explains your attitude, Mr Ambassador, of not even pretending that you are embarrassed by Gvir’s treatment of Portuguese citizens.
It’s just that the ambassador, like so many Portuguese people who speak out on social media (and even in political commentary), thinks that those people, just for protesting against their country’s actions, just for defying the blockade of Gaza, got what they deserved, or, perhaps, they deserved even worse.
Your sadness, Mr. Rosenblat, is reserved for the fact that Portugal recognized the State of Palestine; This is seen as tragic. Because for your government, there is, of course, no place for a State of Palestinians — there is not even a place for Palestinians.
And please, Mr Ambassador, don’t tell me that everything is due to October 7th. Before the 7th of October, Israel was already committing atrocities in rapid succession.
Note that knowing this did not prevent me from thinking that after October 7th your country had the right to defend itself, to persecute Hamas and other organizations involved, to use everything in its power to try to recover the hostages (whose return home I eagerly await). Even knowing the nature of your prime minister, and his history of supporting Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority and the dream of two states (a dream that Hamas, mirroring Netanyahu and other extreme right-wingers, never subscribed to), I considered it fair — how could I not? — for Israel to fight back.
However, it has become painfully clear that Israel has decided to use this right for genocidal purposes, seeing October 7th as an opportunity for a final solution, to annihilate/expel the Palestinians and annex the land that remains to them.
Against the desperate requests of the hostages’ families, well aware of what would come of it, their government did not stop, over these two years, bombing Gaza, leveling every building. He did not stop killing civilians with bombs, bullets and starvation – even using, as he said in the Midnight Express this Friday the social democrat Jorge Moreira da Silva, based on his experience at the UN, food delivery points to target Palestinians.
Certainly another anti-Semite who is a friend of terrorists, this Moreira da Silva. It could be something else, right, Mr Ambassador?
I ask for your patience, I’m almost finished. 33 years ago, when I was in your land (note that I say your land), The writer Amos Oz told me that on the night of November 29, 1947, when the UN decided to divide the land between Jews and Arabs, his father said to him, crying: “Son, when I was your age, in Russia, I was beaten at school for being Jewish. And my father, and my grandfather. You can be beaten at school, but not for being Jewish.” For Oz, this was the founding idea of Israel—that of a place where Jewish children could finally be children. Where Jews could finally be people.
It’s a magnificent, moving, fair idea. For a long time, this beautiful idea, the determination to never suffer humiliation again, to never lose again — because there is that, right? — led me to forgive your country a lot. There was an admiration in me for the savage side that had emerged from such a massacred people. It was a bit my fault as a European born less than 20 years after Auschwitz, Mr Rozenblat. My fault for knowing it had been possible.
On the same trip to Israel, I heard a man, in a settlement, tell me that the Palestinians “are sub-human” and that if his children (they were almost babies still) had to die for Greater Israel, then they would. I thought at the time that I was talking to an extremist who did not represent the country. Now, I know, it is people like him — and like you and your prime minister — who rule Israel (and much of the world, it must be said). What, Despite magnificent people like Amos Oz, and like so many of the dead and hostages of October 7th, your country has become a place where only Jews are seen as whole people, with all the rights in the catalog — and even then perhaps they only support the genocidal and fascistic intention of their government.
Your country, Mr. Rozenblat, is now the most absolute perversion of the idea of Oz. I have difficulty imagining a greater betrayal of the dead of Auschwitz, of all the dead of all pogroms anti-Semites, to all Jews who fought, throughout such a tragic history, against cruelty, racism and hatred.