Building the future.

New Year is a time to think about the future, to build visions of the future. It is for this reason that we share good words with those close to us when “the year turns”. We use words with positive content that express our desire for peace, happiness, joy, success, beauty, health, a full life. These are all wish-words for a time that does not exist, because the future is always to come. Even so, it is real to the extent that we project ourselves into it, deposit our dreams, inscribe our hope. The future thus constitutes a reference, an indicator of direction and a depository of possibilities that are not yet given, but that are already imagined, sought after, longed for. This is how the constructions we make towards the future make the future present since time is, in us, insofar as we are, we live, we exist, we think, we plan, we imagine, we decide to go forward.

As we start 2024, what visions of the future do we construct?

What do we imagine for ourselves as individuals, as families, as communities, as a country? What do we seek as humanity?

As Brazilian citizens, we can hope that in 2024 it will be possible to specify social and economic policies that deepen the reduction of inequality. We can look forward to equal treatment for all religious segments in the country and the affirmation of diversity. We can foresee the eradication of hunger, the development of a truly democratic culture that drives away the right-wing extremism so present in our society. We can enumerate a long list of good things that Brazil is capable of doing and will do so. We can also not forget countries and peoples whose future prospects are not as promising as ours.

In this sense, our vision of the future in relation to Palestine challenges us. Israel’s war against the Palestinian people usurps every possibility of a future for this population, and surreptitiously, for us too. For the Palestinian population, usurpation is real, literal, concrete, corporeal. It is happening through murder, extermination, genocide, destruction of all buildings, all infrastructure, all houses, streets, hospitals, schools; everything became rubble and over 20,000 lives no longer exist. For us, it is the inauguration of the most absolute helplessness, since it is clear that international law does not work, the conflict resolution mechanisms designed within the UN are ineffective, Israel’s authoritarianism in a permanent pact with the United States is imposed on the world, the forged argument of “self-defense” for extermination purposes is rubbed in humanity’s face every day. Once again it is proven that it is the weapons power that defines who will live or die in the world.

According to the 2023 Global Firepower rankings, Israel ranks eighteenth in firepower in the world, but the United States ranks first. To develop the Military Power Index, the following factors were considered: number of troops in active service in the armed forces, land force (tanks, armored vehicles, rocket projectors and artillery batteries, robots), naval force (aircraft carriers, frigate, destroyer, corvettes, submarines and patrol ships) and air force (fixed and rotary wing). From the analysis of the military power of the countries of the world, it is clear that the continuation of Israel’s war against the Palestinian people is only possible due to the permanent pact between Israel and the United States. Such a pact occurs not only through military power itself, but through the veto power of the United States in the UN Security Council, blocking any humanitarian initiative by countries that do not agree with the extermination of the Palestinian people. The Israel-United States pact is killing six children every hour and has killed eight thousand children in the last two and a half months. These countries are responsible for the impossibility of a future for the Palestinian people and for the destruction of the mechanisms that, in the last century, ensured a relatively peaceful future for humanity.

Palestinian people have the right to the future! Humanity and the planet have the right to the future! War, this masculine structure of destruction and death not only of people but of the earth and the species that inhabit it, cannot continue to be the answer to divergent interests. We need to start building a future in which the arms industry is controlled and there is balance between nations in order to limit the amount of equipment, weapons, personnel, and in order to establish the type of technology to be used. There needs to be parity in international forums so that one or two countries do not have the capacity to hinder the desire for peaceful coexistence of the others. A nation’s military capacity cannot continue to be the instrument of colonization and extermination of other peoples.

We want a future for the Palestinian people! We want children playing in the rebuilt streets of Gaza, on the sidewalks of Khan Yunis, on the slopes of Jabalia. We want fruit trees growing on the land and animals safely returned to their natural habitat. We want to see the inhabitants of the Gaza strip bathing in the Mediterranean Sea because, finally, the waters have become free for a free people to bathe in. Free Palestine!

This is the vision of the future we want to build.

Happy 2024!

Lusmarina Campos Garcia is an eco-feminist theologian, Lutheran pastor, doctor and researcher in law at UFRJ.