So, what is the real world of today?
This piece is not about apportioning blame, who did what to whom, etc. Those in the know, the negotiators who think they are in the know, can't yet agree on a solution to the present quagmire, so I am not pretending I know any better. The negotiating team may still be able to devise some compromise, but don't hold your breath. I write this short article centred on mighty Israel, glancing at some historical background, and coming forward to show its geographical and strategic importance today. I do not apportion blame on Israel for the current situation in the Middle East, but attempt to show the sorry state the region has degraded itself, squabbling and recrimination of one side against another.
The Arab Middle East has carved a painful, long chapter in world history. Though richly endowed in resources, the twists and turns, deaths and destruction it has undergone for more than a century have far exceeded its geographical and strategic importance.
Since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the region has experienced many wars. Wars of independence, sectarian wars, mutual destructive civil wars and Wars with Israel on behalf of the displaced Palestinian people and more. Along the way, such multiple crises have given rise to hatred, embitterment and vengeance, all feeding on themselves to create more of the same over the past hundred years.
As is commonly known, since its inception in 1948, Israel has been a thorn in the Arab side. Ever since it gained its recognition at the UN for creating the State of Israel, the world has more or less lent support in its struggle for nation-building. The burgeoning state, engaging in several wars, has gained military and technological strength and territory, ending up today with four times the size it started with at the expense of its Arab foes. Though surrounded by those hostile neighbours, it has, concomitantly, emerged through political turmoil and has conceived superior technological know-how to match anything Europe or Silicon Valley can offer. Along the way, it has overcome formidable odds, gaining alliances and respect from the world.
From a political standoff, Israel's beginning was by routing the people of Palestine from their ancestral homes, and the exodus that followed sowed the seeds of hatred. That event meant that most Palestinians had to live as refugees, the lucky ones as guests in other people's countries. Ever since that fateful event in 1948, there have been cries of return, and the ramifications of this exodus have seen several wars aimed at their restitution. It spawned many articles written by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, journalists, and intellectuals articulating this sorrowful plight. Journalistic efforts meant millions of words, mostly expressing anger and frustration towards an increasingly belligerent and uncompromising Israel. Eighty years later, despite endless protracted negotiation, the beleaguered Palestinian people remain prisoners in their own homeland with no solution in sight.
In the aftermath of WWII, with the help of Western nations, the Jewish people of European descent, after 2500 years of diasporic life, clawed their way to a foreign land as their final refuge, a predestination, the promised land of Israel. That sliver of land, part of the Middle East, was mandated to the British Authority in anticipation of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised Zionists they would establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In a way, exonerating a liability of having so many Jewish immigrants escaping to Britain from the cruel pogroms, which were institutionally and officially accepted by the tsar's Imperial Russia. The prosecution and deprivation of rights and privileges later saw their climax in Nazist genocidal efforts of the Holocaust.
Housing immigrants is as problematic today as it has ever been.
Ever since gaining recognition of the State of Israel in 1947, there have been calls to accommodate the displaced Palestinians and pressure for the neighbouring Arab States to recognise the evolving State of Israel. Unfortunately, wars, deaths, write-ups, political scientific analysis and a plethora of television documentaries have gone the same way—fodder to the Media. In the meantime, Israel has gone from strength to strength, eventually gaining supremacy over all it can survey and beyond.
Israel today is a law unto itself. America, Europe, Asia and above all the Arab world, one way or another, have given it that power. It is now riding roughshod over all who dare to criticise its actions, in what it deems justified in controlling the politics of the Arab world. The IDF is defined as Israel Defence Forces, but has morphed its definition by its latest actions to Offensive forces. Having blunted the thorns around it, it applies a strategy of policing the region according to its own, if not selfish and warped, political ethics.
Neither accusation of Genocide nor crimes against humanity, such as weaponising hunger and other atrocities, nor the International Criminal Court count as significant in its current onslaught on the people of Gaza. Moreover, weaponising anti-Semitism, a shield in the armoury against any condemnation of possible genocidal intentions or criminal disregard for human life, is used to justify the continued bombardment of civilians of Gaza. None, it seems, held any weight in swaying Israel to relax the siege. And most reporting that goes on in Western media is heavily censored in its favour.
With such grandstanding, Israel is doing itself great injustice. It is in danger of undoing the goodwill it has garnered over the years, over its policy on Gaza. Having herded the Gazean population into an area less than a quarter the size of the original size, it has laid a blockade allowing food in on a drip feed basis. Its denial of any food shortage has created a human crisis of outsized proportions. Hunger is taking hold, and people are starving, and some people are dying of starvation and malnutrition. And reports say doctors treating the injured are fainting from hunger and exhaustion. Staffers of the International Committee of the Red Cross reported on the lack of food and clean water caused by the aid crisis.
Endemic wars have taken hold in the region, as well as the extermination of a nation through starvation. Attempts at achieving peace between the antagonists remained the most sublime and most challenging business to deal with. However, the innocent Gaza civilians were not guilty of any part of that uncompromising stance that has now turned their Gaza into an ocean of blood, famine, death and destruction. Indeed, the hunger game has taken a new dimension. In Gaza, the game consists of asking young people to fetch humanitarian aid, with the risk of being killed if they go too far to the right or to the left, in a space whose limits only the occupier knows. How on earth could such a policy expect Hamas to release the remaining poor hostages, after almost two years of captivity, and who must also be starving along with the rest of the population. Dejection, gloom and tensions dig in with no solution in sight.
Still, most people have become emotionally immunised and even empathetically tired from the daily exposure to suffering, killing and maiming of the Palestinian people. World governments, if not the general public, sit in almost silence, have jettisoned their moral principles and ethical values, preferring indivisibility and condemning anonymously if they do at all.
Today, Israel has power well beyond its size. In my history studies, apart from seventeenth-century Holland, I have never encountered a small country that can yield so much power and exert its influence far and wide without borders. Navigating world politics today is as surgical as navigating the Oceans with Mercator Projection. It has created a new order in the Middle East and marshalled all neighbouring countries to its disposition. It ignores all International condemnation of the de facto settlements of further land confiscation, such as the settlements on the West Bank. This illegal action dismisses all ideas for a two-state solution.
No doubt the United States has privileged Israel to that end and strengthened, fortified and sustained its power base since its inception under all incoming and outgoing presidential umbrellas. Power for Israel, not so much as might is right, but might as justified by the United States to be right, and its current existentialist agenda resorted to aggression as a means to that end. In this case, we don't live in a lawless world but in a United States unipolar world, helped by a Zionist world, a prerogative of Zionism.
I can only surmise that aside from whatever conspiracy theories there may be, Israel's right to inflict its venemous firepower is an exaction as of Rights by Zionists on the Christian and Muslim world. History bears testimony; there is no love lost among the three beliefs under the Abrahamic faith. It is a payback for all the suffering the Jewish people had to endure. The hatred, discrimination, and atrocities meted out against their race in Europe and elsewhere over many centuries. To that end, the pacifism shown by the Europeans in response to the indiscriminate killing of innocent Palestinian civilians is a redeeming action. The Palestinians, Muslim and Christian alike, and their sanctified lands, happily today, are at a distance from the lesser religionists Europeans, so though the Gazeans bear no guilt, they conveniently serve as the ideal scapegoats. Despite carrying out a programme of starvation with impunity, Europe and the world look on.
Which means, Israel today is the self-appointed vigilantes with a long reach. It shapes the peace by redrawing the political octogram. It sets rules and its borders per geographical whim and biblical myths. Settles how it wants, where it wants and when it wants, and the submissive Arab governments, having turned turtle, are its modern-day vassals. Rich, politically hollow, militarily weak, perfidious and culturally as shifty as the sands of Arabia, they have no choice but to surrender to Israel and abide by its rules.
In conclusion, I find the region all around is combusting and aflame with multiple conflicts, civil wars, sectarianism and tribal warfare, with Syria leading that dance of death. Millions have died defending a cause, grievance or vengeance. Killing and death are cyclical, and both breed bitterness, fuelling the cycle of killing. Leaving children fatherless and motherless, and wives husbandless, maimed and poor.
The only language of the region is war, strife, killing, death, and famine, but it now finds itself the chief antagonist, gaining a top-tier position to police the area. What then and for how long? Politics is a chameleon concept; it knows no remorse, moral visions, or ethical routes. Hatred and vengeance are the emotional blood that runs through the veins; little can be done to suppress the hydra of war.
Finally, I leave you with an extract from the London Review of Books, a piece written by Selma Debbagh.
"If you track the numbers, there are bad days and worse days, but the daily killings at one of the only permitted food sources in Gaza are proceeding like this: 8, 13, 17, 25, 24, 80, 11, 44, 37, 31, 25, 26, 27. For each murdered son, brother, daughter or mother who volunteered to approach this mechanism of carnage in the hope of returning alive with supplies for those waiting hungry and dependent in a shelled building, in a makeshift tent or under rubble, there are many more who return injured."
That's the real world.
The images are shared with the world by Ahmed al-Arini
The top photo depicts infant Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq in his mother's arms in the bare tent they now share in Gaza City. Aged 18 months, the stark reality of the war is all he has ever known. He is said to have dropped from nine kilograms to just six--half the weight of a healthy child his age - as the civilian population of Gaza wrestles with the threat of starvation.
Mr al-Arini said that Muhammad and his mother had been displaced by the conflict from their home in northern Gaza, and that he found them in a tent entirely bare, 'bar a little oven'. 'It resembles a tomb.'
Muhammad is dressed only in a nappy improvised from a bin bag - a result, the photographer says, of the lack of aid flowing into Gaza. His mother, sallow and gaunt, supports his head with her frail hand.
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