The Multiplied Gaza Strip

The Globalized Apartheid of Palestine and Brazil

Felipe Coimbra Moretti

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Shared Names

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The clearest picture of our present situation is illustrated by its strangest connections, the subterranean affinities that intuitively guide our understanding past the flimsy boundaries of the news cycles and intellectual analyses we find ourselves inundated by. Let us begin with one such subterranean affinity:

In almost every major Brazilian city you could find a neighborhood, or parts of neighborhoods, nicknamed "Faixa de Gaza", the Portuguese words for the Gaza Strip. In Brazil's urban, working-class terminology,  a “Gaza Strip” is any neighborhood where criminal activity, or confrontation between police and narcotrafficking gangs, is so severe that its colloquial salience harkens to the conditions of siege and crowding within Earth's largest open-air concentration camp. Such a subterranean connection, one that clearly points to a shared historical experience — and more, the immanence of a convoluted, but shared, global proletarian consciousness — cannot stand on its own if it is to be fully understood. Colloquial terms, like all knowledge, are all partisan: they speak to the conflicts that exist beyond them.

Capitalist society is founded and predicated on mass violence, wherein class and race live through each other. As Phil Neel eloquently put it — class, the raw stone of our social fabric; race, its chisel.¹ Capitalist violence emerges as a meting out of punishment, through incarceration, and to put it in the broadest of terms, the overwhelming maldistribution of preventable deaths among certain sectors of its subjected populations. In Brazil, the overwhelmingly punished demographics are the Black descendants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Life-outcomes for a Black Brazilian male are so skewed towards imprisonment or murder that Black militants in Brazil have long characterized this population as being subject to an ongoing genocide.²

Briefly, let us look at data that substantiates this sentiment. Brazil is one of the most violent “peace-time countries" on Earth — those being countries that are not currently waging any formal, declared wars. In 2023, its overall murder rate stood at around 27 per 100,000, a rate higher than that of both Colombia and Venezuela.³ Within the Brazilian state of Bahia, which holds a huge Black population, the murder rate goes up to 46 per 100,000, close to that of Jamaica.⁴

Of all murdered Brazilians in 2023, around 77 percent of these victims were Black. The femicide rate stood at 3.5 per 100,000 thousand, of which Black women compose a majority.⁵ All these figures resemble other Latin American countries. Finally, in 2023 Brazilian police killed over six thousand people — the vast majority of which, again, were young Black men. Averaged, this figure means that around seventeen people per day are killed by the Brazilian police. For comparison, police killed around thirteen-hundred people in the US last year.⁶ The disparity between these figures becomes clearer when one considers that Brazil's population stands at 210 million, while the US's stands at 337 million. Another important disparity between the American and Brazilian contexts is the organizing of police itself. In Brazil, the vast majority of daily policing operations are done by military police forces (polícias militares, or PM), a crucial holdover from the military dictatorship between 1964-1985. Military police are, as their name implies, not immediately subject to civilian authorities, even if they are under the authority of state governments. Unlike their American counterparts, state military police also do not have investigative powers, which is delegated to the (also state-level) civil police (polícia civil, or PC). Combined, these two factors constitute a policing strategy based on repressing and eliminating the enemy, a cat-and-mouse approach that easily lends itself to violent punitive and retaliatory operations that nonetheless fail to address the root causes of crime.

Even if the immediate causes of violence in Brazil are quite distinct from those in Gaza — Brazil’s slums are not occupied by a foreign government, but are rather at the crux of a transnational drug trade that makes the country the exit point for cocaine produced elsewhere in South America — prominent cultural imagery evidences a certain fascination and identification with the struggle of Gaza, the Muslim world, and what has been irreverently termed "terrorism", felt by young, poor Brazilians. “Faixa de Gaza” is the name of an old-school funk anthem that tells the glories and struggles of being a young narco soldier in the streets of Rio; MC Bin Laden is a famous funk artist from the favelas of Heliópolis in São Paulos; Okaida — a local interpolation of “Al Qaeda” — is the name of a new breakaway gang currently responsible for a wave of murders in the northeastern state of Paraíba; one of Rio’s weekend baile funk parties is named after Syria. In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo you can sometimes see young men wearing the shirts from these bailes or neighborhood soccer teams that will sport Bin Laden’s visage; in funk and rap slang, “terrorist” is an adjective meaning tireless, intense, or fearless.

I must add that this popular set of imagery does not translate into outright support for Palestine in Brazil’s favelas. With the rise of evangelical Christianity in the country, there has actually been a multiplication of another set of images indexing the Pentecostal belief that Christ will return to Earth by way of Jerusalem, and that a Jewish state is the necessary handmaiden of Apocalypse. So now in Rio there has been the rise of what has been called “narco-pentecostalism,” that is, the rise of narco gangs that are brazenly Evangelical, and that use the narratives about the conquest of the Holy Land, present in the Old Testament, to give shape to their own incursions into enemy territory. In Rio, a break-away of the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP) has taken over several neighborhoods and renamed them “o Complexo de Israel,” or the Israel Complex. So now murals with the silhouette of Old Jerusalem overlaid with quotations from the Book of Psalms dot the streets. A large, blue neon Star of David was erected to shine over the district during the night. Catholic masses have been prohibited, as has been the practice of traditional Afro-Brazilian religions such as Umbanda and Candomblé.

What dynamics are represented by these commonalities? And what does this say about Gaza, and genocide more broadly?

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Circuits of Terror

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Many activists in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro concur that they are victimized by similar strategies of dispossession, occupation, extermination, torture, and sexual violence to those faced by Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military, police, and settler forces.⁷ 

Delving into the substance of these connections, we see that first and foremost, the favelas and Palestine share a similar geography of occupation. The term "favela" generally refers to any kind of working-class neighborhood characterized by informal settlements and precarious access to the utilities grid and other key services. They are densely populated, with houses jostling for space with storefronts, forming a maze of tight streets and alleyways: the urbanity of the favelas echoes that of Gaza. In Rio, the city's topography has favored the formation of favelas along its many hills, undesirable real estate for the better-off citizens of Brazil’s former capital. However, favelas can also be horizontal, and one of Rio’s largest favelas, Maré, is located on the coastal plain that abuts the Guanabara Bay. With over 140,000 inhabitants, Maré is a complex housing 16 distinct favelas, and is one of the largest and most well-known in Rio.⁸ Demarcated on all its sides by essential thorough-fares into the city, Maré poses a key strategic focus within Brazil's militarized campaigns against the favelas, roughly analogous to the position of Gaza within Israeli apartheid. Maré's proximity to Rio's international airport and a Brazilian Air Force military base has imposed brutal consequences on the community it contains. 

The favela is divided by and into “circuits of State terror,” urban spaces in which inhabitants’ circulation is curtailed, controlled, and surveilled by highly-armed personnel at checkpoints that severely restrict the movement of people. In both Palestine and Brazil, these checkpoints carve the territory into "enemy" and "friendly" zones, and pose a dangerous, unavoidable hinderance for many inhabitants as they commute, shop, and seek access to government services. The sectioning of the territory is not, of course, neutral geography: rather, it informs a framework by which to coordinate near-constant police harassment and “operations” (operações), a term that in Brazil means destructive incursions of enforcers armed with machine guns, armored vehicles, and helicopter support. Operations like these started in the 1980s, but became the focus of reconsideration of Brazilian police strategy in the early 2000s, when the “Police Pacifying Unit” (UPP) was introduced as a new model for dealing with organized crime; from now on every favela would have a continuous police presence in the heart of its territory. Permanent occupation, rather than sporadic attempts to dislodge the enemy, guided UPP strategy. More than 15 years later, the UPP has not brought the favelas under the fold of the services and rights offered to the rest of the city’s territory; rather, what it has done has been thoroughly transform them into occupied, military zones.⁹ Meanwhile, Brazilian drug gangs have only expanded their reach, as have the new milícias, rackets of policemen and firefighters, both retired and active, who extort, control, and collaborate with these very same drug gangs across the state of Rio de Janeiro.¹⁰ Regardless of this cooperation, this system operates under the broader logic of territorial occupation and the extermination of a designated enemy: in Rio de Janeiro, narco-trafficking gangs, and in Palestine, resistance organizations like Hamas.¹¹

This does not mean that the State differentiates between civilians and militants or between workers and drug traffickers, and herein lies a key aspect of the ideological drive behind both Zionism and the war on crime in Brazil. In the name of law, order, and stability, the terminology of "terrorism" and "criminality" are ultimately arbitrary conceptions that permit the subjection of entire populations to functional extermination, while the terroristic states responsible are given rhetorical room to disavow that extermination as an intended goal of the campaign. The occupied are divided into fictitious moralized categories: "good" populations accept, collaborate with, and normalize the occupiers, and are thus granted the privileged status of "fellow man"; on the other hand, "bad" populations are characterized by an inhuman barbarity, they constitute a tyrannical minority that must be dealt with like the animals that they are. Occupation becomes "a struggle between children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle", as articulated by the office of Israel's Prime Minister last October. As colonial warfare intensifies, the boundaries of these demarcated populations dissolve and reform on the whim of the occupier, until at last there are no "innocent civilians" left to speak of.¹² Unsurprisingly, a day after the Al-Aqsa Flood, right-wing Brazilian commentators began suggesting that the favelas of Rio be leveled to the ground in the same way the IOF was doing to Gaza. This illustrates the third similarity, one which unites the fascist imagination with the internal colonies and “free-kill zones.” From 2007 to 2022, almost twenty-thousand police operations, 629 massacres, and twenty-five hundred victims were registered in the city of Rio de Janeiro, not the state.¹³

The fourth connection is not so much a similarity as it is an explicit financial and material link between colonial regimes. At times, the diplomatic ties between Brazil and Israel may be strained simply by Brazil’s formal recognition of Palestinian statehood, and its commitment to the fairytale of the two-state solution, the country nonetheless stands among the most consistent clients of Israeli-manufactured arms in Latin America.¹⁴ Additionally, Israel has long played a role in helping Latin American governments strategize repression. Selling its experience fighting low-intensity, asymmetrical warfare non-state actors, Israel's military advisors have trained counter-revolutionary forces in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In 2016, Rio’s elite police battalion, BOPE (short for Batalhão de Operações Especiais, or Special Operations Battalion), trained in Israel; São Paulo’s police forces are supplied with the Israeli Negev NG-5, a light machine gun made by Israel Weapon Industries for desert and urban combat; in 2016, Bahia’s police force — the most lethal in Brazil — acquired 225 Israeli machine guns.¹⁵

These four aspects — geography, military-strategy, ideology, and military-economy — demonstrate the intertwined formations of Palestinian and Black genocide, within the Brazilian context. Their parallels demonstrate the broader historical project of managing “unruly populations,” whereby certain territories — Gaza, in Palestine, or Maré, in Brazil — become laboratories for testing out means of counterinsurgency that are then exported to places far-away from their birthplace.¹⁶ In 2018, the entire state of Rio de Janeiro, plagued by corruption scandals that revealed a government basically run as a criminal syndicate, was placed under federal intervention, another holdover constitutional mechanism from the military dictatorship (1964-1985) that allows the federal government to effectively bypass a governor’s authority. Since police in Brazil are organized at the state level, a federal intervention meant that for about a year and a half, favelas like Maré were patrolled not by regular police, but by Army soldiers and tanks. Entire areas were placed under military jurisdiction. Cases of civilians being tried for petty crimes in military courts were not uncommon. Lessons learned from the trial-and-error of federal militarization and colonial geography in 2018 were then implemented within several other Braziliain urban centers, especially in the Northeast, which is now experiencing a surge of criminal activity as international drug trafficking shipping routes change.¹⁷

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Policing the End of the World

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Jair Bolsonaro made his first visit to the United States as president of Brazil in 2019. He spent his time in Washington D.C. ambling about, making declarations about Brazil's new foreign policy, and showing due reverence to his imperial liege, Donald Trump. Soon after their meeting, amusing rumors of a pathetic encounter between the two men began to circulate, alleging that Bolsonaro had declared an unrequited love and respect for Trump, which the latter flatly ignored. To capstone his visit, Bolsonaro hosted a dinner for numerous Brazilian businessmen.

Generally known for his stumbling, limited vocabularly, we can assume that the suited con-men waiting for Bolsonaro's toast did not expect much sense to exit the former captain's lips. Yet, what escaped Bolsonaro was surprisingly poignant, an elegant maxim reflecting the attitudes held within the budding forms of fascism native to the twenty-first century. With wine glass held high, Bolsonaro proclaimed: “Brazil is not an open plot where we pretend to build things for our people. We have to deconstruct many things, undo many things! ...so that we can rebuild after.”

This ethos of "destroy to rebuild," applied within colonial ideology, is easy to see within the Israeli assault on Gaza. Standing behind the control rooms, cockpits, and cross-hairs, looking into carnage borne of an explosive barrage dwarving that experienced by many often-drawn historical analogies, such as the city of Dresden, is a positively morbid taste for literal deconstruction and massacre. There is no adequate explanation for the surging right-wing of the Zionist entity that excludes an account of their fatal thirst for maximalist vengeance. The ideological monstrosities that rationalize genocide, however, reflect a war in its historical course, and its material underpinnings. Setting aside the thanatophillic fantasies of colonialism, let us plainly consider what this all could mean beyond the favelas of Rio or the refugee camps of Gaza.

It is no wonder that Palestine has been at the front and center of so many movements and protests of the past year, both within and outside college campuses: just as it was no wonder to many of us in the anti-Bolsonaro protests of 2018 and 2019 that the federal intervention in Rio de Janeiro represented both the culmination and litmus test of the five years of repression, privatization, and military meddling in public affairs that marked Brazilian politics after the collapse and cooptation of the mass protests of June 2013.¹⁸ Globally, Gaza mobilizes so many people because of an expanding decolonial solidarity, not just because of the central role that Israel has taken in US domestic politics and foreign policy. The genocide is the consequence of a series of interrelated crises, indicating what the future may hold for an ever-broadening periphery if we fail to obstruct the imperialists' assault. As the global center falls apart, Gaza finds itself at the core of a revolutionary alternative.

In this age of financial expansion, global deindustrialization, stagnating growth and high unemployment rates — the “Long Recession,” per Robert Brenner — the greatest question of governance has become how to keep the flows of investment open while closing all other gates.¹⁹ In other words, how to somehow keep the economy going while pacifying the large segments of the population who will never enter the formal job market, and as such, will never truly be “citizens.” Gaza, locked out of the world economy by a decades-long Israeli embargo, and the favelas of Brazil, home to many descendants of those enslaved by the largest, most lucrative slave economy in history, are extreme examples of this dynamic. Yet, such extreme cases are not merely outliers, rather than terrifying examples of a trend. The development of the fascism we see today is a visceral response to what Marxists have called growing surplus populations, for which it offers the technical and political apparatuses of border walls, apartheid, and mass murder. Cue Fortress Europe’s militarized Mediterranean, Bolsonaro’s wet dreams of a gun in every drawer to shoot the neighborhood thief, the flattening of Gaza, and the accompanying settler pogroms throughout the hills of the West Bank. Calling-back to the affinity young, working-class youth in Brazil feel towards the Muslim world, partially demonstrated by their adoption of resistance iconography, it's clear that a consciousness of a shared predicament is growing — they are aware that they are not the only ones who have been locked out of wealth, rights, and political life. They understand a global order entirely premised on the idea that might is right, and they are not entirely wrong about it either: as such, sympathetic images of the far-away terrorist, the suicide bomber, and Osama with his Kalashnikov on his side, have been captured by cultural imagination. As MC Orelha sings, “In the Gaza Strip, only suicide bombers / In war, it’s all or nothing.”

In 1955, Martinican author Aimé Césaire published his book Discourse on Colonialism, which remains to this day one of the most prescient analyses of fascism ever written. According to Césaire, the post-war capitalist world is mediated by the "two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”²⁰ The vital element here is that Césaire clearly understands fascism as the ideological outgrowth of a broader structural shift: the application of tremendous violence to enforce global accumulation and its accompanying division of labor. Hence he writes: "They talk about civilization, I talk about proletarianization and mystification.”²¹ Colonization transforms "the colonizing man into a class- room monitor, an army sergeant, a prisonguard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.”²² The colonial world had not only created the wealth of Europe and America, but also a vast mass of workers who, regardless of their employment, sat upon its margins and became the objects of their wars. They had become, according to Césaire, mere “instrument[s] of production” on the global factory, and as such, necessary.

Yet their very existence is a problem to the governments that are trying to outrun economic crisis: they are what Marx called the proletarians, desperate enough to take any wage and any sort of life to survive. And it is they – the racialized young unable to afford reliable stability – who form the bulk of many a riot today, from Tunis to Minneapolis. It is they who cross the border, it this they who live in the favelas of Rio, and it is they that fight for Gaza. Abu Obeida's statement, referencing himself and his fighters, that “the orphans have grown up," and now fight back against Israel, points to not only the Zionist regime’s systemic destruction of family lineages in Gaza, but also to an absolute destitution, a severance from any foundation of reasonable life. It is precisely against these “orphans” — these “illegals, “thugs,” “criminals,” “communists” or “terrorists” — that the rising waves of ethnic and religious nationalism swell against. The fascist's worship of the police is reciprocal, both here in the US and in Brazil. Yet as the genocide in Gaza has shown with the utmost clarity, the dying liberalism of the US and its European allies will still pretend that they believe in citizenship, human rights, secularism, or democracy — although these terms apply to an ever-shrinking pool of human beings, even within the imperial core. If there is one lesson in Brazil, or in Gaza, to students in the United States, it is that this tightening is international, and that it encroaches, increasingly, upon the domestic US. As we watch the systems of repression and control approach ever nearer, we would do well to remember the cold arbitrarity with which the lines that dissect Maré, and those that distinguish "good" from "bad" Palestinian, are drawn. Maybe then we’ll have time to prepare for what is to come.

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Citations

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1 Phil Neel, “Crowned Plague,” Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2020, https://brooklynrail.org/2020/07/field- notes/Crowned-Plague/.

2 João H. Costa Vargas, “The Black Diaspora as Genocide: Brazil and the United States — A Supranational Geography of Death and Its Alternatives,” in State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States, ed. Moon-Kie Jung et al. (Stanford University Press, 2011).

3 For a murder rate in Brazil, see Daniel Cerqueira and Samira Bueno, eds, Atlas da Violência 2024 (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada; Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2024), 8, https:// repositorio.ipea.gov.br/handle/11058/14031. For the comparison with Colombia and Venezuela, see InSight Crime, ”Homicide rates in selected Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2023 (in number of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants),” in Statista, February 8, 2024, https://www-statista- com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/statistics/947781/homicide-rates-latin-america-caribbean-country/.

4 Atlas da Violência 2024, 11. 

5 Atlas da Violência 2024, 38.

6 “2023 Police Violence Report,” Police Report, accessed November 16, 2024, https:// policeviolencereport.org/2023/.

7 Eleanore Hughes, “In Brazil’s favelas, activists find common ground with Palestinians in Gaza,” Al Jazeera, November 11, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/20/in-brazils-favelas- activists-find-common-ground-with-palestinians-in-gaza.

8 Gizele Martins and Juliana Farias, “Circuitos urbanos do terror de Estado: uma abordagem antirracista e interseccional da militarização,” Ponto Urbe 32, no. 1 (July 2024): 2-22, https://doi.org/10.11606/ issn.1981-3341.pontourbe.2024.226624.

9 Marielle Franco, UPP - a redução da favela em três letras: uma análise da política de segurança pública do estado do Rio de Janeiro (n-1 Edições, 2018).

10 Tomas Salem, Policing the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and The Far-Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

11 Martins and Farias, “Circuitos urbanos do terror de Estado,” 3.

12 MEE Staff, "Israel social media account declares 'there are no innocent civilians' in Gaza," Middle East Eye (June 2024)

13 Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM), “This is a struggle between children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Twitter (now X), October 16, 2023. The tweet has since been deleted.

14 Kelvin Araújo da Nóbrega Dias and Filipe Reis Melo, “Pensar Palestina, pensar Brasil: imperialismo, colonialismo e militarização,” Tensões Mundiais 20, no. 42 (June 4, 2024), 314.

15 Bruno Huberman and Sabrina Fernandes, “Descolonizar futuros palestinos: o papel da comunidade internacional para a resolução justa da Questão Palestina/Israel,” Revista Marx e o Marxismo – Revista do NIEP-Marx 11, no. 21 (2023), 27.

16 Martins and Farias, “Circuitos urbanos do terror de Estado,” 5.

17 Catherine Lowe Besteman, Militarized Global Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2020).

18 Robert Muggah and Ilona Szabó de Carvalho, “Brazil’s Deadly Prison System,” International New York Times, January 4, 2017, Gale Academic OneFile.

19 It must be noted that the cycle of repression of the 2013-2018 period was strategized and put into practice by none other than the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) itself. After all, it was during the presidency of Dilma Rousseff, and particularly the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, that the notorious Anti-Terrorism Law was drafted and approved. After being impeached in a right-wing parliamentary coup, vice-president Michel Temer stepped to take the reigns of what still stands as Brazil’s most unpopular government ever. Beyond presiding over the 2018 federal intervention in Rio, Temer regularly invoked executive “Guarantees of Law and Order” (Garantias de Ordem e Lei, GLO), short-term suspensions of constitutional rights, in response to protests in Brasília.

20 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso, 2006).

21 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 31.

22 Césaire, Discourse, 44.

23 Césaire, Discourse, 42, my emphasis.