Miguel Brechner on Perpetual War, the Left, and the Strategy of Peace

This conversation with Miguel Brechner, engineer and former president of Plan Ceibal, diagnoses the conflict after October 7: antisemitism in the Latin American left, the war that perpetuates itself through the regeneration of the adversary, and the orphanhood of a political strategy that would grant military triumph its meaning.

Antisemitism and the Left

Jimmy: Why does the contemporary Latin American left exhibit this level of hostility toward Jews and Israel?

Miguel: Let me tell you something. In Uruguay there is a lot of antisemitism, much more than everyone believes. There is more antisemitism on the left than on the right, make no mistake about it. But it’s not that the bad guys in this movie are the left and the good guys are the right. No. There is a lot of antisemitism. Not long ago, based on surveys done across Latin America, the Jewish Congress published an antisemitism ranking and Uruguay came in first. I think there are sectors of the Uruguayan left that, for various reasons, still believe the national liberation movements of the sixties are still alive today. And they believe Fatah or Hamas are national liberation movements. They don’t make any assessment.

Jimmy: Politics demands a minimum of rigor and reading. A minimum.

Miguel: There are sectors of the left that hold the mistaken view that Russia is still the Soviet Union. A little study tells you that Putin and the Soviet Union have nothing to do with each other. There are people who, for geopolitical interests, sided with the Palestinians at any price. And there are plenty of other people on the left who have held reasonable positions. What’s dangerous is the reasoning that some are good and others are bad, and that liberation is the Palestinians’ struggle without it mattering that they kill Jews. There are a lot of people who think that way.

The Precision of Language

Miguel: You have to understand that the occupation is one of the biggest problems Israel has had since sixty-seven.

Jimmy: The occupation of what?

Miguel: Of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza, by Israel.

Jimmy: But Gaza is not occupied.

Miguel: Gaza is controlled by Israel. There are no soldiers there, but it is controlled: whether taxes get paid or not, whether the money comes in or not, whether transfers happen or not. I want to build a port: I can’t. I want to build an airport: they bomb it. They cut off your power and there’s no electricity.

Jimmy: Fine, but it is not occupied. The precision of terms is the first territory in dispute.

Miguel: Controlled, if you like. It was not militarily occupied. But the West Bank is. The situation in the West Bank is terrible. What they’re doing in the settlements is terrible, on the Israeli side. That generates an oppression and a hatred. Which does not mean that destroying Israel is liberation.

War Without a Political Strategy

Miguel: It’s very hard to accept that there is no political solution. And unfortunately nobody is proposing one today: not Israel, not the Palestinian Authority. My criticisms are very strong because nobody has used the word peace since October 7. And any military strategy has to have a political strategy at the end of the road; otherwise, it’s no use. Wars as wars have never worked.

Jimmy: The Second World War against Hitler worked.

Miguel: Yes, but you know when they had decided what to do: three years earlier they had already said how this was going to go. They had to reach unconditional surrender and turn the country around. And innocents were killed there; the Allies used unnecessary violence at many moments, as strategy. I tell an anecdote: my electrical engineering professor in London had been a Royal Air Force pilot. One day in class he tells me: “Lucky we won, because otherwise they would have taken me to the war crimes trials, because I bombed Dresden.” In Tokyo, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States carried out a bombing of civilians in which they killed a hundred thousand people. Wars are a calamity, but the final objective was to destroy and rebuild. Right now there is no such objective. So the war as war is not going to get anywhere. I hope I’m wrong.

The Hostages and the Trap of the Conflict

Jimmy: Does Israel have any way out other than the destruction of Hamas?

Miguel: Israel’s first option is to get the hostages back. And to get the hostages back, any price is valid. That is not settled in Israel: there is a high percentage of the population that wants that, and the government wants something else for other reasons. As the father of one of the Horn brothers — one of them already freed — told me: “Israel was supposed to protect us. It didn’t protect us. Now it has to bring them back.” This war, if you analyze it, goes back many, many years. Israel let Hamas grow. It let the money in. Do you know how the money got into Gaza? In Israeli cars crossing with suitcases: five or ten million dollars a week. Israel let all of that through.

Jimmy: But October 7 alters the entire sequence.

Miguel: After October 7 you had to beat the you-know-what out of them, and they did. But today I’m talking to you about the war, not October 7. By February, March, the war was already finished.

Jimmy: October 7 was a trap: they planned it two years in advance. And the hostages are the weapon that captures the sequence.

Miguel: It’s the main weapon they have, and it’s not the first time this happens. At some point you say: I want the hostages, I’m going to negotiate. And it’s going to cost Israel: the hostage negotiation ends in the fall of the government, because a lot of Palestinians are going to have to be released in exchange for the hostages. That’s the perverse part! If you say enough, a government falls. So nobody says enough. There’s no win-win there: there’s lose-lose. Israel falls, and Hamas, if it hands everything over, falls too.

The War That Regenerates Itself

Miguel: It’s maddening to watch the perpetuity of a war where the other side always regenerates. There are people sending them money. Iran is weakened, but it’s not knocked out; Iran’s interest is for this to keep going. Israel killed twelve or fifteen thousand fighters, and Hamas has already replaced them. Now there are tunnels again. I can give you a list of all the leaders Israel has already killed. It killed Nasrallah, it killed the one before Nasrallah… and a year later, or six months later, the AMIA blew up. It’s a war, but at some point you have to try to find a solution. With bombing alone, killing Sinwar’s brother, and then Sinwar’s cousin, we achieve nothing.

Jimmy: But the adversary is a radical Islamism willing to sacrifice entire generations. That moral asymmetry blurs the solution.

Miguel: In all of history, this cannot be the only conflict that has never found even a shred of a solution. The internal terror in Gaza is gigantic: you want the Palestinians to rebel, but they shoot you! That’s why I say it’s a tragedy. But you have to be sharper than they are. You have to outsmart them.

The Sequence Restored

Miguel: Do you know how many people there were in Gaza in forty-eight, at the partition? Two hundred thousand people. When Israel expels, and others leave, they go to Gaza. That’s where they start being refugees. In the Camp David negotiation, Israel should have told Egypt: Gaza is yours. Why did it keep it? The worst deal was conquering Gaza all over again.

Jimmy: There were Jewish settlements there until the strategic decision to withdraw.

Miguel: Those were settlements the Israeli government built in Gaza after sixty-seven, as it did in the Sinai. Later Sharon dismantled them.

Jimmy: And that is how Israel emerges: when the UN decides the British Mandate is to be divided into two states, the Arabs decide to wage a war to expel the Jews, and they lost it. Defeat would have meant annihilation.

Miguel: In forty-nine, in the Knesset, Menachem Begin throws it in Ben-Gurion’s face: why didn’t he conquer Hebron. And Ben-Gurion explains why those territories were not to be conquered. Then they conquer them in sixty-seven, and the Arabs say no to land for peace. This thing has had plenty of fools along the way. But the fanaticism that all of it is Israel and the Arabs never existed… We were told: the Arabs ran away, nobody expelled them. It’s not so! In some places they ran away, in others they were expelled. That’s the tragedy of war.

Jimmy: Human history is woven of injustices. The demand for absolute ethical purity is often the mask for denying the right to exist.

Miguel: Obviously.

The Divorce

Miguel: You have to accept that that land has to be divided. Amos Oz wrote it forty years ago: this is like a divorce. There’s no more “you keep a key and come into my house.”

Jimmy: The West Bank and Gaza as a Palestinian state, and Israel as a Jewish state?

Miguel: Israel is Israel. But Judea and Samaria, if it wants to be Palestinian, if it wants to be Jordanian, that’s not my problem. What I shouldn’t be doing is playing policeman there. The Arabs have to accept that Israel has the right to exist as the country of the Jews. In the negotiations of two thousand and two thousand eight, that was the clause over which Arafat, and later Abbas, refused the deal: the Jewish national right. Today that has changed: you have a number of pragmatic Arab countries that already accept it. Iran doesn’t accept it, Hamas doesn’t accept it; the Palestinian Authority accepts it partially. You have to make that the largest minority.

Jimmy: How is a solution founded without a political victory?

Miguel: October 7 is clearly a response to Saudi Arabia’s normalization with Israel. The first thing you have to pursue is normalizing, the way other countries were normalized, and leaving them isolated. There is no easy way out: this is a tragedy wherever you look at it. But at some point the interests have to align. The whole weakening of Iran’s proxy axis makes sense if you come out today with a political solution. If you don’t come out with a political solution, it’s worth nothing.

Jimmy: Exactly. Force without political architecture founds nothing: it administers the future.

Historical Clarifications

The ranking cited by the interviewee corresponds to the Online Antisemitism Report of the Observatorio Web (Latin American Jewish Congress, AMIA, and DAIA), which placed Uruguay first in the region in the proportion of antisemitic messages on social media. Hamas, for its part, was formally founded in December 1987, during the First Intifada.

Errata

On the population of Gaza in 1948: before the war the Strip had some 70,000–80,000 people. The figure of around two hundred thousand mentioned in the dialogue corresponds to the refugees who arrived during and after the war, who nearly quadrupled the Strip’s original population.

On the chronology of the attacks: Abbas al-Musawi, Nasrallah’s predecessor at the head of Hezbollah, was assassinated in February 1992; the attack that followed a month later was the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires (March 1992). The AMIA bombing came more than two years later, in July 1994.