The war

On one side we have an exemplary democracy, with an elected leader who the courts allow to be put on trial while in office; and on the other, a terrorist group, right next door, that does not tolerate any internal opposition and allows itself to attack its most powerful neighbor because it has a great country that supports it and that explicitly does not recognize Israel's right to even exist, committing itself to, as soon as it has the power to do so, cleansing the region of Jews – infidels to the true religion, intruders in a land that does not belong to them and allies of America, the Great Satan.

The terrorist group that governs Gaza launched an attack on October 7, 2023, which caused more than a thousand civilian deaths (and around three hundred soldiers), capturing around 200 hostages (or 250, in everything related to this conflict the numbers vary according to the sources), who were released in dribs and drabs in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, invariably not head for head but a multiple (sometimes more than ten times) number of Palestinians for each Israeli hostage.

Some of those returned were returned as corpses. And today there are still hostages in prison, of which it is not known how many are alive.

We therefore had a good (as far as one can speak of good) in this story and a bad.

There are plenty of secondary evils, such as Hezbollah in the North, in Lebanon, or the Houthis in Yemen, recognized as terrorists by almost all the capitals of the execrated West, with the common denominator of being financed by Iran, some Arab countries and even in another neighbor, the West Bank, a relatively hostile government.

But Iran is the dark shadow. It has been playing for a long time (the nuclear program began in the 1960s, with the support of the US, at the time in the context of the Cold War, but evolved with the Ayatollah regime to more than likely belligerent intentions) with the game of developing atomic weapons, amid sanctions, agreements, denunciations, advances and retreats. And since Israel cannot be certain, as it can with regard to Pakistan, or India, or Russia, or even North Korea, or any of the other powers that currently hold the bomb, that the Iranian regime will not commit the folly of trying to obliterate it once and for all, it lives with the understandable obsession of liquidating the pretensions of the Iranian theocracy.

So it reacts in a tit-for-tat manner to attacks by Iran, which in April was remembered for its missiles that it dropped on Israel in retaliation for an attack on the Iranian embassy in Syria, which in turn was responding to other mischief. Who started what depends on who tells the story, and if they are experts they go way back, to the point where by the time they get to the root of the story the curious have already forgotten the beginning of the story.

The war began. And this time Israel had a friend in the US presidency, who, like his predecessors, has no sympathy for Iran but, unlike them, has little instinctive faith in the merit of dialogue with abominable people, whom he distrusts. In fact, the fact that this friend is Trump, and not Obama, for example, is a contributing factor to the rejection of the left, which will be discussed later – Trump cannot, by definition, be right about anything. So Israel, having accumulated successes in eliminating military structures, members of the Revolutionary Guard and scientists involved in the development of the weapon, ended up stumbling upon its inability to reach the very deep underground where the uranium enrichment process takes place, a problem that America resolved by sending bombs there with the surprising tendency to first drill holes and only then, far below, explode. Which development, according to some, was already at 40%, according to others at 60% or 80%, in some cases months away from reaching the pump, and in others years away.

None of this matters, as do most of the arguments on both sides, because as is normal in wars and perhaps Aeschylus said, the first casualty is the truth.

Was Iran developing the atomic bomb? It was; today few people would argue that the program's aims were peaceful. Can Israel trust its survival with a declared enemy that does not recognize its right to exist, if the latter possesses a lethal weapon whose use, even with retaliation of the same kind, allows suicidal lunatics and fanatics to believe that, because Israel is tiny and has few citizens, and Iran is immense and has nine times as many inhabitants, one would be deserted and the other sufficiently functional? It cannot.

So whether the program was delayed by a year, five, ten or twenty is of great interest to analysts and little to sensible people. The problem may be solved, if it comes, by a change of regime; and in the meantime Israel remains on guard, and the war may continue but at a low intensity, through intermediaries, or it may flare up again.

But here's a curious thing: How can we explain that in a conflict whose hero and villain should be obvious, the Muslim world is not all in favor of Iran, and in the West not all right-wing people are on Israel's side, while on the left almost everyone prays, God forbid, for Iran?

The case of the Muslim world is simple: Iran is not Arab, nor is the sharing of a common religion peaceful, because there is as much hatred and conflict between Shiites and Sunnis as there was in the past between Catholics and Protestants, nor do geostrategic realities allow for the coexistence of various regional powers without rivalry. Pan-Arabism is a mirage, and the governments of several Arab countries do not confess their desire for Israel to win because they cannot displease the street, which does harbor an atavistic resentment against the infidels of the West who are richer, more powerful, and have heretical laws and customs, do not pray to Allah, do not apply Sharia, and allow women scandalous freedoms.

That the left supports Hamas, under the pious guise of theoretically finding the organization deplorable but in practice understanding its grievances, should not be surprising: the inhabitants of Gaza are poor, the Israelis are rich, Israel creates constraints on life in the region instead of magnanimously accepting that the locals (or rather, those who govern them) calmly dedicate themselves to attacks, and historically the birth of Israel should never have been allowed, at least there. Perhaps in Namibia, a hypothesis that was put forward but the Jews arrogantly did not accept.

Employees are always right against their bosses; the poor against the rich; the weak against the strong; and weak countries against the powerful, unless the latter have the purpose of creating heaven on earth through egalitarianism, as happened with the sun of the USSR that unfortunately ended in the last decade of the last century.

It is not that there is a lack of abuses and exactions, stains on the past, evils and torments; it is that the moral superiority of which the left is, according to it, the depository, can only be manifested under the banners of causes and it is certainly not a cause to defend someone who is perfectly capable of defending himself.

And for a certain right wing there is also fear: the war could evolve into a generalized confrontation with tragic or at least painful results even for those not involved, so the best thing to do is to postpone it and, instead of bombs, drop droplets, which is called diplomacy – that is what Europe has done.

However, wars are admissible in two cases: as a defense against attacks; and to prevent greater ones. Israel wants to eliminate, or at least weaken, Hamas, its enemy at its doorstep; and to prevent its main distant enemy from having the means to fulfill the sacred promise of Palestinianizing the entire area from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

So one can be for or against Israel; but one cannot be for Israel while advocating that its hands be tied.

Editorial note : The views expressed by the authors of the articles published in this column may not be fully shared by all members of Oficina da Liberdade and do not necessarily reflect the position of Oficina da Liberdade on the topics discussed. Despite having a common view of the State, which they want to be small, and the world, which they want to be free, the members of Oficina da Liberdade and its guest authors do not always agree on the best way to get there.