After being held for a few days Gestapofor cooperation in sending documents to an organization that opposed Nazism, the young German Jew Hannah Arendt fled inside France. Between 1934 and 1940, before she ended up in an internment camp in France from which she managed to escape, Arendt worked in an organization that brought Jews from Eastern Europe to the region that would later become the State of Israel.
In 1943, while she was already living in the USA, Arendt became aware of the existence of Nazi death camps throughout Europe. This was so absurd that it didn't seem credible. But it was real. The appalling perversity of mass murder, without any utilitarian criterion and with the sole aim of degenerating human nature and producing a mass of corpses, seemed to him something senseless, without reason and without foundation. With concentration campevil seemed to reach unprecedented levels.
This macabre enterprise, with all its rational and technical organization, aimed at destroying for the sake of destroying, exterminating for the sake of exterminating, this evil that went beyond even the personal interests of those who perpetrated it, is first identified by Hannah Arendt as absolute evil: “If it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil arises (absolute because it can no longer be traced back to humanly understandable motives), then it is also true that we could do it without it .” “I have never recognized the truly radical nature of evil,” Arendt will write in the foreword to the work The origins of totalitarianism.
As a good thinker, Hannah Arendt was strict with her concepts. The regime that enabled concentration camps (Nazi and Soviet) was different from tyrannies and dictatorships. In their opinion, since the totalitarian regime is a form of “total rule” and “the only form of government with which one cannot coexist,” we have “every reason to use the word ‘totalitarianism’ with caution.” .
For Arendt, the special nature of the totalitarian regime is also linked to the technical and legal qualification of genocide as a crime against humanity.
genocide
The first basis for the classification of this crime in an international text can be found in the founding act of the Nuremberg Tribunal of August 8, 1945. This tribunal, created to judge and punish serious war crimes in the Axis countries, had jurisdiction and venue within the meaning of Art. 6. its statutes, relating to crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
While crimes against peace and war crimes were already considered unlawful conduct from the perspective of international law before the Second World War, “the act described in Article 6. “c” of the Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal attempted to identify something new that had no specific precedent in the past had; represented a first attempt to criminalize the unprecedented nature of totalitarian rule,” as Celso Lafer explains in the book The reconstruction of human rights: a dialogue with the thoughts of Hannah Arendt.
The Nuremberg Principles were officially systematized by the United Nations International Law Commission at the request of the General Assembly in a resolution of 1947. With regard to genocide, these principles became an international norm through the Convention on the Prevention and Suppression of Genocide, which came into force on January 12, 1951. There the classification of the crime of genocide is made in Article 2. puts in the letter “a”, “b”, “c”, “d” and “e” define the objective aspects of the unlawful behavior and in the general term the subjective aspect, namely the “intent to destroy”. a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”
For Hannah Arendt, Celso Laffer further explains: “Genocide as a crime can only take place on the basis of the criminal law of a criminal state.” This is not just any crime that can be committed by individuals in isolation, but a crime that is “structural linked to a totalitarian leadership”, a crime based on a power structure placed at the service of perversity and in which evil becomes legality.
Genocide “presupposes humans as superfluous”; “It is not discrimination against a minority, it is not mass murder, it is not a war crime and it is not a crime against peace. Genocide is something new,” it is, to use Arendt’s own words, “a crime against humanity committed against the bodies of the Jewish people.”
Lula's antiSemitism
With this understanding, we can now measure the severity of the diplomatic crisis triggered by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and the degree of dementia of a president who draws an analogy between the Holocaust and Israel's war response against a terrorist group that attacked him, accusing Israel of Committing genocide is tantamount to considering Israel a criminal state and consequently denying it its right to exist.
If today's political struggle on social media is characterized by the distortion of important concepts, the same light and irresponsible use of serious words should in no way set the tone for a president's speech at an international press conference at a moment as complex as the current.
But the worst thing is that it was not just carelessness and carelessness. It was not a faux pas, an unfortunate mistake, or an inadequacy due to a simple lack of common sense. Brazil had already supported South Africa in the absurd accusation against Israel (filed at the International Court of Justice in The Hague), it had already pledged donations to UNRWA, while other countries stopped their donations due to suspicions Agency relations with Hamas.
Ultimately, Brazil made no attempt to recant to resolve the diplomatic crisis caused by Lula. Actually your speech ignited leftwing antiSemitismwho now hardly feels the need to dress up.
AntiZionism as antiSemitism
All attempts to change Lula's speech were worse than the sonnet. His wife Janja defended the good old man, who she said was defending the lives of women and children, and wrote the following: “The speech referred to the genocidal government and not to the Jewish people. Let's be honest in our analysis.”
To achieve the subtlety necessary for an honest analysis, I turn again to Celso Lafer, who wrote in an article published in Estadão: “Today, much of the criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza goes beyond the heated controversies over the application of norms. “humanitarian law or the very serious humanitarian situation in Gaza. They fall into denial of their existence. In this context, the question arises: To what extent is antiZionism, which is very present in criticism of Israel, a contemporary form of antiSemitism?”
The jurist, jurist, professor, former foreign minister and former student of Hannah Arendt helps the PT's ignorance by recalling that Zionism “sought the building of a state in response to the persecution that the Jews had suffered as a discriminated minority” . , in accordance with the principle of selfdetermination of peoples and that these aspirations were implemented in the recognition of Israel.
According to Lafer, the increasing denial of Israel's right to exist, which has occurred since the beginning of the war in Gaza, has a selective character, since there are no other manifestations of the denial of the existence of another state recognized in international life, resulting in criticism of its policies. Therefore, “this denial selectivity makes antiZionism a manifestation of antiSemitism.” It has an analogy to the revisionist denialism of denying the factual truth of the Holocaust.”
Janja's antiSemitism
AntiSemitism, Janja, is not necessarily religious in nature. It has several facets. The hostility towards the Jews may be somewhat veiled, as in your post, which speaks of a “genocidal government” without taking into account that the ongoing war is being waged not just by Benjamin Netanyahu, but by a coalition to which even the opposition heard.
To refer to a “genocidal government” or to claim, as Lula did, that “there is not a war in Gaza but a genocide” is to call Israel a criminal state and thereby deny it the right to exist.
As Norberto Bobbio, Celso Lafer and other authors explain, modern antiSemitism is different from traditional antiSemitism, “which is why we can more accurately speak of antiSemitism in the plural.” One of the current forms of antiSemitism is antiZionism.”
It is this kind of antiSemitism that you and your husband are falling into.