Palestinians Do Not Need to Learn Land Cultivation Elsewhere

“Uruguay aims to ‘bring some young Palestinians from the West Bank’ to train them in agriculture through a FAO program, said Lubetkin” (Channel 12, Uruguay, June 6, 2025)

On Monday, May 12, 1919, the British Minister of War, future Prime Minister and hero of World War II Winston Churchill, referring to his own practice of gassing Arab protesters and rebels, wrote:

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror…

Of the Hindus, he said they were animals who worshipped elephants. Consistent with this, he was directly and knowingly responsible for the famine that killed millions in Bengal in 1943, shortly before he signed an alliance agreement with Stalin in Iran to fight against Nazism.

These words from the British hero and defender of freedom and human rights, these supremacist ideas and actions were not new at the time and did not provoke any scandal. Supremacist and messianic racism, like the “Manifest Destiny” of John O’Sullivan and “The White Man’s Burden” of Rudyard Kipling, which in the 19th century justified and promoted the slaughter of “uncivilized peoples” and “inferior races,” were the precursors to Hitler and Nazism. Hitler plagiarized entire paragraphs from Madison Grant for Mein Kampf and thanked him for the inspiration. The popularity of Nazism in countries like England and the United States was deep and widespread, especially among wealthy businessmen and powerful politicians, until they began to lose World War II, and suddenly the Nazi criminals were just a handful of lunatics, not a complicit and cowardly mass of beautiful and superior civilized people with sudden amnesia.

A hundred years later, the history of suppressing the uncivilized, inferior races and peoples cursed by God is a thousand times worse, and, as then, it seems like it’s not such a big deal. But the real-time information available is also a thousand times greater, so the responsibility and shame (or shamelessness) are multiplied a thousandfold.

Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble.

Currently, Uruguay is one of those examples that do not quite reach the level of tragedy solely due to its military and propagandistic inability to do much harm. Not because we are a superior people, as our government so kindly insists on making clear with its own example. Which does not exempt us from the shame of the cowardice of denial or moral wavering in the face of the most tragic events of contemporary history. Cowardice and denial from which are exempted those Uruguayans who do not bow tremblingly before the fascists of the moment—those fascists who terrorize with total impunity from right to left—in that order.

After Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi refused his party’s (the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio) request to define the massacres in Gaza as genocide, he defended himself by saying that his focus is on actions, not words, and that he prefers not to talk about “the war” and instead offer “concrete solutions,” such as sending powdered milk and rice to Gaza… The Israeli Embassy in Uruguay labeled the Frente Amplio’s criticism of the genocide in Gaza as “expressions of disguised hatred” and warned of “dangerous consequences.” B’nai B’rith called the FA’s brief statement a “grave moral failure.”

Due to prior criticism from artists and left-wing activists regarding the wavering of their own government, the president once again tried to put out the fire with more fuel. In a new statement to the newspapers, he said he condemned the “military escalation” and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensive “fuels antisemitism” and generates “weariness” in “important sectors” of the Israeli people.

It is quite obvious that the Zionist genocide can fuel, among other things, antisemitism, as it has always been the Zionists themselves who, for political, geopolitical, and ideological reasons, have strategically confused and identified Zionism with Judaism (like identifying the KKK with Christianity), which is why even the hundreds of thousands of Jews who actively oppose the massacres of Palestinians and apartheid in Israel can end up being blamed for something they condemn.

But what about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians massacred, mutilated, traumatized, and starved? Are they not the direct victims of the hatred and violence that insists that “in Gaza there are no innocents, not even children,” which justifies exterminating them before they become “terrorists”? Could it be that the European settlers who claim to be descendants of a man named Abraham who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now Iraq are the real antisemites? A man who first had a child with his slave at the request of his infertile wife. But the son of Abraham and the slave produced the lineage of the Arabs. When something went wrong, Sarah had her son at the age of 90 by a miracle of the Lord, the one who produced the lineage of the Israelites (according to the same tradition that identifies those Israelites from 3,000 years ago with the current ones) as an improved version of his brother’s race. But let’s leave this surreal line of reasoning, which is only obvious to fanatics in perpetual trance.

The mere idea of sending milk and rice to Gaza under the slogan of “actions, not words” hides a profound ignorance of what happens with humanitarian aid in Palestine or, more likely, denialism and a well-known fear of criticizing the powerful who are committing genocide—let’s say massacre, so as not to offend the sensitivity of the killers and their apologists.

Of course, if you mention it, the automatic argument is “I haven’t seen you condemn the October 7th attack.” Which is false and paradoxical, since it is always said by those who have never condemned and will never condemn the repeated massacres and systematic violation of human rights against Palestinians and other neighbors since World War II, when the same Zionists proudly identified themselves as terrorists.

Uruguayan Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin (former director of institutional communication for Food and Agriculture Organization in Latin America) has come out to put out the fire (now a blaze) of criticism from his political base by announcing plans to allow “some young Palestinians from the West Bank” to come to the country to train in sustainable agriculture. In another radio program, he stated that the Palestinian youth could “think about the day after” by becoming entrepreneurs and starting their own start-ups.

The day after what? Why do we, the Western masters, have to tell them what they must do to civilize themselves, how to indoctrinate themselves and adapt to progress and submission to Anglo-Saxon capitalism? Of course, to exile them again, far from their land and their own sovereign decisions as individuals and as a people.

Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble. In Israel, they are considered beasts of burden, and in the West, they believe they can teach them how to plant olive trees.

At the beginning of 2024, I met with the International Affairs officers at my university in the United States to propose the creation of “humanitarian scholarships” for students affected by armed conflicts. While the idea was very well received, it sank into the apathy of donors. But what a great idea, that of taking Palestinians out of Palestine to teach them how to cultivate other lands! How had it not occurred to them before? It’s not about giving scholarships to the youth who lost everything under the bombs so they can prepare and wage an international struggle for the sovereignty of their people, but so they can learn to cultivate the land, other lands that have nothing to do with their own, which they know like the back of their hand and have cultivated for thousands of years in a more than sustainable way.

Where is the mantra we Western professors hear with toxic frequency about the need to “train global leaders”? Every time I criticize this colonialist slogan in a meeting, many struggle to understand me.

Displacing Palestinian youth to learn “sustainable agriculture” in Uruguay is such a good idea that it resembles the “Final Solution,” which members of Netanyahu’s cabinet—and the majority of Israelis—talk about so much; according to a survey by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 82% of the population supports the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

At this point, I don’t know what’s worse, having a Trump in Argentina or a Biden in Uruguay.