There was a major dispute between the government of Argentina and the farm sector last year over an attempt by the former to increase export tariffs. It dragged on for months and during the course of it a large group of intellectuals got together to draft and publish an open letter in support of the government.

Having found their modest place in the spotlight these intellectuals have since held meetings to draft statements on other matters of import and they have now published their thoughts on recent events in Gaza.

The text is pompous and self-important in tone and I’m not going to try to transmit this in the extracts I translate out of fear of straining the patience of readers. The first paragraph starts by saying that the world first remained silent in the face of events in Gaza before gradually starting to condemn what was going on and concludes with a call to

… avoid the stereotypes which are resorted to judge a situation whose complex history calls for fair, precise and measured words.

Who could disagree with that? The text goes on…

Subjected during a period of eighteen months to a blockade of essential supplies, the Gaza Strip […] was brutally invaded by land, sea and air. The massacre of the defenseless civilian population and the widely documented commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity places the armed forces of Israel and the Israeli government among those principally responsible for this barbarity and liable to be tried for these crimes.

This doesn’t exactly sound fair, precise or measured to me. In fact, it sounds like the one-sided drivel that the media all over the world have been pumping out for the last few weeks. Still, it only says that Israel is principally responsible for what happened in Gaza, so now comes the mumbled, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger critique of Hamas, right? Wrong.

But the heedless savagery inflicted on the Palestinian people isn’t only the responsibility of those directly involved. The interests of the United States in the region, as revealed by its Security Council veto of a ceasefire resolution, demonstrate the close material and intellectual complicity of that country with the carrying out of the massacre.

I should have guessed they’d say this. In Argentina, as in many other countries, hatred of the United States is a commonly used substitute for political thought.

Now things get a bit more interesting, or confusing, I’m not sure which.

The long humanist and libertarian tradition that renowned Arab and Jewish thinkers translated into a worthy vision of a plurinational, democratic and lay state was buried, along with uncountable bodies under tons of cast lead […] It won’t be us who will give up on this ideal which would simultaneously liberate both peoples. It’s exactly these faraway utopias which were born in […] both cultures, with their intrinsic brotherhood, which allow us to vindicate the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to a politically sovereign and economically viable state with a unified territory and free access to the sea. Finding a way to peace is an urgent necessity. The international community […] must immediately guarantee the sovereignty of both countries.

There you have the core of the document’s argument. It seems to start with a paean to the one state “solution”, which it apparently sees as no longer viable post-Gaza (”buried under tons of cast lead…”, a rhetorical flourish worthy of Oscar himself), before endorsing first Palestinian statehood and then the two state solution.

Oh, and if anyone has details of a specifically Jewish or Arab tradition of libertarian thought, I’d be grateful if they’d pass them on.

The document then rambles off into the night of politically convenient self-regard by suggesting that Israelis and Palestinians might have something to learn from political processes currently underway in Latin America (the original text uses the unbearably precious word Suramérica ) and makes agreeable noises about things like “citizen sovereignty” and “a common horizon of peace.” It even talks of having the moral authority to contribute to peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians.

It doesn’t mention that every state in Latin America is built on the extermination of all or a great part of its indigenous population and that all of its authors are descendants of emigrants from European countries and are, therefore, direct beneficiaries of the destruction of the pre-existing societies within the borders of what is now Argentina.

The word “Hamas” is absent from the text.