Silvana Rabinovich / Elena Poniatowska

Silvana Rabinovich is a teacher at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the University of Rosario, Argentina, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Invited by the Sorbonne, she has published several books on Arabic and Islamic studies and now gives lectures day in and day out on the issue of Palestine, which has us all worried.

–Dear Silvana, we are all sickened by what is happening in the Middle East. Why should we remain alert to Israel’s attack on Palestine?

–It is very worrying and it seems to me that there is a secular political theology and, in the case of the State of Israel, it is the national and colonial political theology that comes from the text that I loved the most and learned from the lips of my grandfather, who smiled at me : the Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible there is a monarchical line and a prophetic line; The prophets always put limits on the kings’ lust for power, reminding them that God is above them. In fact, when the elders went to ask for a king, the prophet Samuel responded: No, a king is going to bring them a lot of problems, in some way he is going to take his sons to war and he is going to have his daughters as servants; You are lucky to not have a king and have God. King Saul, David, Solomon came and then the great empires arrived, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, and the possibility of a king was lost. Then begins a long, long history of the scattered life of the Jews. We Jews have always lived in all places, we have spoken the language of the place, sometimes adding Hebrew letters to that language; For example, we have Judeo-Spanish, which is Old Spanish, rogue, with Hebrew letters; in Spain also the Andalusian and in the northern Taifa; In Zaragoza, Jews wrote with Hebrew letters. Since the 10th century there has been a Log, he Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible written in Judeo-Arabic; That is, it is heard in Arabic, but the letters are Hebrew and God is called Allah, and it is translated without problem between Muslims and Jews.

–And the conflict that has us all on edge?

–What is happening is something of humanity that is broken and has already been broken many times, but now it is doing so with all the technological violence that accelerates and multiplies our dehumanization. They tell us that it is a religious, ancient conflict and it is not true; It is a colonial occupation that the emancipated Jews of Europe caused by having to flee European anti-Semitism. That is why men, women and children traveled to Palestine. Those who prevailed came with a settler colonialist attitude. They pretended that the original inhabitants did not exist and alleged that they turned a desert into an orchard when it was already an orchard of orange and olive trees. The inhabitants already knew how to cultivate the land, but the Zionist narrative insisted on the desert, as the colonizers do. I give you an example: General Roca declared Patagonia a desert, but it was a culture that had a relationship with the land that was not one of possession, but one of love. A Jewish minority, a Christian minority and a Muslim majority lived side by side, and they understood each other well. Jews have lived in Muslim environments for more than a thousand years without serious problems.

–Will they have had some conflicts like anyone else?

–Yes, but they solved them very well. When the British Empire is presented, the English and French divide the region (that is why the borders are so straight), and a type of government is inserted that had nothing to do with their reality. Within the Zionist movement, Martin Buber maintained that they had to flee Europe, because they were killed there, but they could have arrived in a much more modest, much more humble way, to ask for asylum from the original inhabitants and to act as good neighbors, in instead of transplanting that figure of the European national state in which Jews did not fit. They did not propose a form of organization, a confederation of autonomous communities in which no majority could determine the life of a minority. That was going to be part of the region called Greater Syria, because that’s what it’s called in Arabic too, and we call it Damascus. There were Jews who were not in favor of dividing the land of Palestine, as occurred on November 29, 1947; The United Nations issued resolution 181 to partition Palestine and declared that the Jews were in favor of the partition that the Palestinians opposed. It’s not true, not everyone was in favor; Even a group of professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Martin Buber, Yehuda Leib Magnes and Saúl Smilansky – went to convince the Anglo-American Commission that the earth should not be divided, and they took that message to the United Nations, but the powers They preferred to divide and propose two states, something that we know is unviable. Therefore, we must defend the Palestinian State and demand its official recognition, but in reality it is no longer possible, because the territory is completely fragmented, it looks like Gruyere cheese, full of colonies, illegal Israeli settlements in area C, of ​​the West Bank, or in Gaza, which is a strip of less than 400 square kilometers that is completely besieged by air, sea and land. At this moment we are seeing a massacre, because before we saw periodic attacks that were understood as an exhibition of new weapons that were then sold to other countries, because almost all of them are clients of Israel, which sells effective weapons. Israel boasts of this ability, which also boasts of having tested them before on the population of Gaza.

-How awful!

–It is tremendous because Gaza is made up of 90 percent refugees, the population born there is 10 percent, and the rest consists of successive refuges. In 1948, they possibly fled to Jordan, after Black September, and went to Lebanon. The survivors would have had to go to Syria, but with the war many took refuge in Lebanon.

“In 2005, Ariel Sharon implemented something that occurred to him, which is a euphemism, because they are all euphemisms, and he called ‘the Gaza disengagement.’ He moved the illegal settlements of Jewish extremists out of Gaza and into the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, offering them very attractive terms. Many Jews live in illegal settlements out of conviction, because they want the greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates, but some – who even believe they are leftist – live in the occupied territory because it is much cheaper to build their house there. The government encourages in many ways that Jews occupy these territories that are Palestinian. Therefore, the territory is completely fragmented.”

–And the two States, the Jewish and the Palestinian?

–It is not realistic to propose the possibility of two states. A philosopher who had seven doctorates, chemist, physicist, philosopher, Isaías Leibowicz, stated in 1967, when Israel conquered and occupied those territories: Either all this is returned or the Israelis who are going to live in Palestinian territory become Palestinians.

–And do Palestinians who live in Israel become Israelis?

–What I am saying is that it is not possible to live by stealing territory. They also took Syria under strategic pretexts, because they are highlands. We see the degeneration of what could have been good.

At the beginning of our talk, I told him that the biblical text has the monarchical way (which I have just described to you in its worst degeneration, as we are seeing now) and the prophetic way. The prophets always limited the power of kings, reminding them that they are human beings. Every Jew covers his head to remember that there is another power over him. Covering your head is an act of humility, but it is very common for a symbolic object to acquire a meaning that completely changes it.