Yo
In February 2019, Dr. Gilberto Conde He gave a presentation titled “A reflection on the walls between nations: the cases of Mexico-US and Palestine-Israel” at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, in Tijuana.
Gilberto Conde is a native of Tijuana, professor and researcher at the College of Mexico, member of the National System of Researchers of Conahcyt, doctor in Asian and African Studies with a specialty in the Middle East.
Conde pointed out in that conference that border walls are built for various reasons, generally by the powerful party “with the desire to keep out the poor who themselves contribute to producing.” The walls, he added, are a filter to allow only those who have the economic capacity to be considered tourists to pass.
He added that, although in very different times, both the United States and Israel appropriated territories that they “considered empty or free, with the desire to create modern, civilized nations, in capitalist development and with a right granted by God.”
II
More than five years after what Dr. Gilberto Conde said in Tijuana, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin NetanYahu, told the United Nations General Assembly in late September 2024: “Hezbollah turned vibrant cities in northern Israel into ghost towns. So I want you to think about this in equivalent American terms. Imagine if terrorists turned El Paso and San Diego into ghost towns. Then ask yourself how long the US government would tolerate that: a day? a week? a month? I doubt they would tolerate it even for a single day.”
Netanyahu also said: “We face the same eternal choice that Moses posed before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, when we were about to enter the Promised Land. “Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath future generations a blessing or a curse.”
Netanyahu then showed a map of the Middle East titled “The Blessing,” while saying: “It shows Israel and its Arab partners forming a land bridge connecting Asia and Europe. Between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, through this bridge we will have railway lines, energy pipelines and fiber optic cables, which benefits two billion people.”
Next, without realizing that it was upside down (Xóchitl style), he showed a map of the Middle East titled “The Curse.” He corrected the position of the drawing and stated: “It is the map of an arc of terror that Iran has created and imposed from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Iran’s evil arc has closed international waterways. “It cuts off trade, destroys nations from within and inflicts misery on millions of people.”
Netanyahu complained that, in the last decade, the UN General Assembly “has passed more resolutions against Israel than against the entire world combined. In fact, more than double.”
He said goodbye like this: “As the book of Samuel says in the Bible: the eternity of Israel will not waver.”
This political-religious speech was the announcement that it would intensify its military actions on various fronts, just as it happened.
Oscar Wilde He said that life imitates art, but apparently it also imitates the social sciences.
III
In the aforementioned presentation “A reflection on the walls between nations: the cases of Mexico-US and Palestine-Israel”, Gilberto Conde stated that walls are not only a physical filter, but also a symbol of power with desired psychological effects, “what that the author Edward Said defined as imaginary geographies.”
Conde said that physical barriers at borders generate feelings of both belonging and otherness. Of belonging among those who feel benefited and of otherness among “the others”, the excluded, the outsiders, regardless of where the latter live, since they may be Mexicans or Latinos who work in the United States or Palestinians in Israel.
He emphasized the fact that the walls that separate Mexico from the United States and Palestine from Israel have very different contexts, but the similarities are what impact him the most.
He closed his 2019 talk with what he called “the artistic deconstruction of reality,” showing murals that have been painted on the border fences on both the Mexican and Palestinian sides: an image of Benjamin Netanyahu kissing donald trump and some more, among others, in which a wall opens only in appearance to give free passage to whoever wishes to pass through.
IV
Last Monday night, October 7, 2024, pro-Palestine organizations commemorated at the Angel of Independence one year of what they called “the genocide perpetrated by Israel with the help of the United States.”
It has actually been one year since the savage and cruel incursion of Hamas into Israeli territory (with 1,200 dead and more than 200 hostages), an act that provoked the even more ferocious and merciless reaction of the Israeli army (40,000 dead, two million displaced and destruction of much of the urban infrastructure of the Gaza Strip).
In addition to the speeches, in the middle of Paseo de la Reforma, Gaza, the strip of exterminationfrom Mexican Rafael Rangel. There were the images of the documentary projected on a screen and behind them was the golden Angel as a witness, with its stone column illuminated with a striking fluorescent pink. Among the attendees, a girl walked around wearing a death mask. One could also speak of artistic deconstruction of reality.
Half a block away, metal bars completely surrounded the United States Embassy in Mexico and no one could pass through either the Reforma side or the sidewalk. This wall was neither in San Diego nor in El Paso but in the capital of Mexico.
V
On September 28, 2024, aboard the plane that took him from Belgium to Rome, Pope Francis answered various questions from journalists. A reporter said that Israel had just eliminated Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon, using 900-kilogram bombs. Immediately, he asked the pontiff: “Do you think Israel has gone further against Gaza and Lebanon?”
The Pope responded: “The defense must always be proportional to the attack. When there is something disproportionate it shows a dominant tendency that goes beyond morality. A country that with its strength does these things, I mean any country, in such a superlative way, they are immoral actions. Even in war there is a morality to protect. War is immoral, but the rules of war imply a certain morality. When this is not done, you see, as we say in Argentina, bad blood.”
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