I’ll start with something that may seem unrelated to the main topic of this column, but it actually is. Marcelo (The President of the Portuguese Republic) came to the Azores and, once again, no one cared about the island of Flores. They complained about São Jorge and Graciosa, and rightly so. And he promised to visit the Western group of islands.
Perhaps it is a promise not to forget the promise he has already made several times since 2019 and never kept. It is a promise for the Azores to see. Words are carried away by the wind. That is how many people understand politics these days. And this is due, first and foremost, to the weakness of our class of supposed professionals in this area.
Starting with Marcelo himself, who waited decades for the bar to be lowered enough to allow him to return from the dungeons where he had been thrown when he failed spectacularly in his bid to become prime minister. It took the country reaching the grim heights of Passos Coelho and Cavaco Silva, in their metaphorically mummified versions, for the government to decide that perhaps Marcelo wasn’t so bad after all. But it was. It was worse. It was a symbol of the times we live in.
All this introduction is to talk to you about Gaza. I know that many people, as soon as they read the first sentence of this paragraph, decided to move on to something else. It’s easier that way, isn’t it? The main power of this brave new world is that it allows us to escape any responsibility without significantly burdening our conscience. After all, all you have to do is turn the page, open a few short videos on social media, and spend three hours watching shirtless young people cooking elaborate dishes that we will never eat in our lives, let alone cook ourselves.
Meanwhile, Gaza continues. Hunger, which has been felt intermittently for decades and decades, has returned with an eager desire to devour those people. Everywhere, phrases and texts of condemnation multiply, timidly interspersed with the voices of people who, without a shred of shame, continue to deny the ongoing genocide. Nothing will remain of humanity there.
Everyone is welcome to criticize and denounce the process of mass destruction taking place in the Gaza Strip. Even though I know, as do those who read me, that not everyone who is now writing about the subject wanted to acknowledge the reality of the facts two years ago. That’s fine. There is always time for another voice to rise up against dictatorships and monsters. However, it is important to remember that it is not enough to say that there is hunger in Gaza. We must explain why it exists.
The systematic destruction of the Palestinian people at the bloody hands of regimes at the behest of the West is nothing more than a test tube for the great warring powers of capital. This has been the case for decades. Giant military companies spring up in the United States and some allied countries and go to Gaza to fuel the conflict, supplying relatively rudimentary weapons to one side and distributing cutting-edge technology to the other. Equipment must be tested. And money must be made from it. Human lives be damned.
Thus, the problem of Gaza is, in its most basic form, the same problem as always. The richest want to remain the most powerful, and to that end, they do not concern themselves with the moral conflict of devouring entire peoples.
Of course, there are many nuances. Israel, as a people, is not made up entirely of monsters. Its current government is clearly fueled by the fascist ideology that carried Trump to the throne and will soon do the same to Ventura, if no one acts in time. On the other side, the infamous Hamas will have a substantial influence on how Palestine continues to exist and how people are treated under a repressive theological regime with deep-rooted dogmas. Still, I cannot forget the many reports that have come to light during Netanyahu’s various terms in office, attesting to Israel’s influence over the functioning of Hamas. Hunger, combined with the desire to eat, to feed companies and kill children.
And so we reach the crucial point of this text. The vast majority of people, whether on the right, left, center, ignorant or informed, are beginning to admit that there is hunger and genocide. A considerable number are even calling for it to stop. But then we come up against the untruth of Trump’s world, post-facts and in favor of feelings and single-minded certainties.
On August 3, a group of people headed to Lajes Air Base to protest the growing weight of the fascist regime of the United States in the genocide in Gaza. Current information points to a private “foundation,” run by Americans, as being primarily responsible for the poor distribution of goods to those most in need. This same company, masquerading as aid, is protected by a paramilitary militia that, it seems, enjoys playing target practice with children.
Our people, right here on Terceira Island, went to protest these truths, mobilized by a spontaneous social movement called “Azores for Gaza.” They carried posters appealing to morality and humanism. And they were met with a barrage of ignorant comments, full of hatred and distortion of reality, inflamed by the propaganda of those ten-second videos that are circulating on social media. Our people who went there to display posters calling for an end to the killing of children were met with harsh blows, told that children deserve to die because they are terrorists, and shown images of well-fed women, taken directly from increasingly less artificial intelligence.
This is how we ended up here. Just as Marcelo waited for a mediocre world to become president, even while sitting on lies, half-truths, and selfies, Netanyahu also waited for his moment to consecrate genocide. With the world glued to the distortions of their screens, with the most incompetent president in US history, and with capitalism entering its final and most dangerous phase, Gaza remains what it has always been. A testing ground. Only now, the test they are conducting is to see how they are going to eat us all. A kind of final solution, promoted by those who should have a memory. And in the end, as Zeca would say, there will be nothing left. Not even our humanity, lost behind the light of our cell phones.


Alexandra Manes is from Flores Island but lives on the island of Terceira in the Azores. She is a regular contributing writer for several Azorean newspapers, a political and cultural activist, and has served in the Azorean Parliament.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with insight into the diverse opinions on some of the archipelago’s key issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).