Coexistence

The temptation among us is to read the Brazilian guesthouse that bars former Israeli soldiers as one more chapter in the story of the world against Israel, and I would like to offer the reader a less comfortable reading, which is that what our children found in Itacaré, a fishing village on the coast of Brazil, is a direct consequence of Netanyahu’s foreign policy, which enlisted Israel in the far right’s global fight, a fight that is not ours and that has nothing to do with more than half of Israelis. The government that emerges from the current coalition talks must put an end to that policy before December, when the season begins again and a new wave of young men and women fresh out of the army lands on the coast of Bahia, and we need to stop shielding our own when our own do wrong.

Netanyahu has turned our foreign policy into a branch office of his party, and Brazil shows how that works, because he chose a man over a country, embraced Bolsonaro, who promised to move the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem and called him brother, and lined up with the network of Donald Trump, who punished Brazil with tariffs in an attempt to get Bolsonaro off the hook in his trial for plotting a coup, and when Brazilians returned Lula, the leader of the left, to the presidency, our government began to treat the Brazilian state as an enemy and the Bolsonaro family as its embassy. Lula insulted Jews when he compared Gaza to what Hitler did to us, and the insult called for a firm answer and got humiliation instead, a dressing-down in Hebrew, without an interpreter, delivered to the Brazilian ambassador inside Yad Vashem, followed by a public letter to Bolsonaro’s son and by the withdrawal of our nominee for ambassador in Brasília, so that Israel has had no voice in the largest country in Latin America just when our children needed one most.

The gravest consequence of that choice lies in our flag, which in Brazil no longer stands for the country we live in and has come to stand for a tribe, because the people who carry it there are above all Bolsonaro’s followers, who watched the Brazilian left raise the Palestinian flag and began to support Israel without any condition at all, as a reflex against the left, even when that means applauding what we do wrong. Evangelical pastors added to that flag the theology of a Jewish state that heralds the return of Jesus, and the historian Michel Gherman, a researcher at the Hebrew University, has a name for the result, an imaginary Israel, a model imported by the far right around the world and adopted by Bolsonaro’s movement, religious, conservative and right-wing, with no room for secular Jews, left-wing Jews or liberal Jews and, I would add, no room for Israel’s Arab citizens either, which is to say no room for more than half of us. Support that applauds even our mistakes treats Israel as a tool, and that flag went up onto the stage with Bolsonaro at a rally paid for by an evangelical pastor to defend him against the coup investigation, so that when a twenty-two-year-old Israeli, young man or young woman, walks into a bar on the Bahian coast decorated with the Star of David, half of Brazil sees a Bolsonaro supporter and the other half adopts the newcomer as the ally of a coup plotter, neither half aware that this young Israeli belongs to a people whose newly elected lawmakers have just denied Netanyahu the majority he needed to form a new government. I refuse to accept that this should be Israel’s flag in the world, and I refuse to accept that Netanyahu decided on our behalf that it would be.

None of this excuses what some of our own did in Itacaré, and those young people shame us, the ones who smashed the flowerpots on a street of bars and hurled at the face of a Black street vendor the phone she was using to film them, hard enough to break her nose, amid suspicions that they made monkey gestures, according to the local police, and the ones who tried to tear down a pro-Palestinian mural at night until fishermen sent them packing. Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence that “the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world,” and those young people proved her right, because the innocence our generation of soldiers lost in Gaza gives it no license to carry the war to people who have no part in it.

There are acts in what we did in Gaza that call for judges and for defendants with names, and a guesthouse in Itacaré posted, in English only, that war criminals are not welcome there, in a notice that repeats the error Arendt identified in the collective guilt assigned to Germans after the war, when she wrote that “where all are guilty, nobody is.” We commit the opposite error when we answer an accusation against one Israeli with the automatic defense of all Israelis, because collective innocence protects the guilty just as efficiently as collective guilt does, and whoever broke a street vendor’s nose must be identified, by Brazilian justice and by our own conscience.

The Brazilian left could have been an ally to the half of Israel that opposes Netanyahu, and it chose a stupidity that mirrors that of Bolsonaro’s followers, hating the same imaginary Israel with the same ignorance with which they love it, to the point that a lawmaker from a party to the left of Lula’s asked the president to bar Israeli soldiers at the border, an idea that would turn every twenty-two-year-old Israeli, young man or young woman, into a suspect on the strength of the passport they carry.

The village showed more sense than our government and more sense than the Brazilian left, because it refused to enter a fight that is not its own either, and the town’s communications secretary summed up that refusal in a sentence that both sides of the war have yet to learn to utter, “It is not for us to say who is on the right or the wrong side of history,” and shopkeepers and tourism workers took to the streets in defense of our young people, and fishermen protected the mural from them. Arendt defined power as the human ability to act in concert, and this village, which for twenty years has welcomed our children with menus in Hebrew, between the forest and the sea, holds the power that Netanyahu squandered, what political scientists call soft power and what goes there by a simpler name, coexistence among people who need neither an enemy nor a flag.

The next government must return foreign policy to the state, send Brasília an ambassador the Brazilian government is willing to receive, talk to the president Brazilians have just re-elected, end the family diplomacy with the Bolsonaros and take Israel out of the far right’s global fight, because our embassy, without an ambassador, kept silent when the Itacaré crisis reached the Brazilian government, and our children were left with no one to speak for them. We, who send our children to that coast, must refuse any protection to those who assaulted the street vendor and insist that they answer for what they did, one by one, by name and by face, because guilt that goes unnamed ends up shared among everyone else and burns what is left of the coexistence our children built.