The mutual terrorism of history’s victims

A polarised world today finds itself debating which is the greater evil -- Hamas or Israel? Reflecting and discussing what is the greater good and how to attain it – non-violence, tolerance and acceptance, assimilation, fraternity, equality, equity, justice, freedom, art and culture that enrich life -- is passé. 

An old Chinese curse says “May you live in interesting times”, which ironically means today we are cursed by the ‘measles of nationalism’, religious fanaticism and skewed patriotism, and live in tragic times, fraught with senseless wars, mind-numbing violence, bloodshed and chaos. Peaceful days are uninteresting and dull. “You will never have a quiet world till you knock patriotism out of the human race,” said Bernard Shaw. 

The sudden massive ambush on Israel by Hamas, which rules the Gaza strip of Palestinian territories, which attacked Israeli military bases by breaking through the Israeli barriers in Gaza, and the accompanying horrific and unspeakable massacre of civilians, women and children included, invited fierce retaliation by the Israeli Defence Forces. The unrestrained Israeli aerial blitzkrieg razed whole neighbourhoods in Gaza to rubble, burying more than 2,000 Palestinians – again largely women and children -- under it. Israel has continued the bombings relentlessly, forcing a million and a half people living in northern Gaza to evacuate their homes and move to its southern parts within 24 hours and become refugees in their own land. 

Hamas, a militant organisation that has historically sought an Islamic Palestinian State and does not recognise Israel, took more than a hundred soldiers, civilian men, women and children as hostages and left a ghastly trail of destruction killing some 1,200 Israelis, injuring many more. This can never be condoned or justified. 

The blind Israeli rage and revenge carpet-bombing of the Gaza strip is no less an act of State terrorism.  

The Jews, who have historically suffered unimaginable racial prejudice, and more than six million of whom were exterminated by Hitler and his Nazis. How can they now forget their own persecution and the inhuman atrocities they suffered and treat the Palestinian Arabs likewise as unequals, segregating them and deny them the right to their homeland, practising a brutal apartheid that dehumanises and degrades them. 

While condemning attacks by Hamas or by other militant Palestinians on Israel over the last few decades, can anyone gloss over the cruel and chilling fact that Israel has occupied the Palestine territories for over five decades and has barricaded Gaza, where two and a half million Palestinians live, literally caged, on a narrow strip, for nearly 20 years now, abridging their movement and freedom, reducing them to poverty and destitution? Is it not naive to expect that the Palestinians will suffer such captivity, will watch mutely and passively the Israeli State-sponsored enterprise of settlements in West Bank? Is it not obvious and expected that the invaders would someday pay a price? Can one overlook the context and historical background to the Israel-Palestine conflict?  

As one of the saner Israeli voices, the renowned columnist Gideon Levy of the country’s best-known newspaper, Haaretz, said: “No people in history gave up their dignity, gave up their lands and nation and human rights, and to expect the Palestinians to do so is being disconnected with history and disconnected with reality. We’ll fire at innocent people, take out people’s eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and, of course, continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza strip, and everything will be alright?!”

The Palestinian issue goes back a century, to the days of the First World War, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which held sway over the Arabs. It is a tale of duplicity, double dealing and betrayal of the Arabs by the British and the French who, after enlisting the various tribal lords and sheikhs of the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Jordan, to defeat the Ottoman Empire, after promising Arabs self-government post-war, carved up the Peninsula and adjacent territories amongst themselves. In the words of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who led the Arab revolt against the Ottomans under British Command, “We pay for these things too much in honour and innocent lives. We were casting them by thousands to win the war but that the corn and rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours.” 

Once in control of the allied armies, the British promised Palestinian Arabs a State of their own and the Jews, their homeland. The Jews, of whom less than a few thousand were residing in the Palestine territories in the 1920s, were scattered all over the world. After the rise of fascism and the persecution and killings of Jews in Europe, under the encouragement of the West, many of them fled and took refuge and settled in Palestine. It was a trickle in the beginning. When they started arriving, they were an insignificant minority surrounded by some eight million Palestinian Arabs. If the Arabs had attacked the early Jewish settlers, would there have been Israel as we know it?  

In 1948, after the defeat of Germany in WWII, the wily old leaders of the West created a sovereign State of Israel for Jews and abandoned the Arab Palestinians, leaving them State-less. Britain, France and the US have blood on their hands. The history of the world is replete with marauding colonisers who divided States and their peoples by sowing discord and plundered the natives. Didn’t it happen to India? The Jews suffered genocide in Europe, but equally, the Jewish State of Israel was built on the bodies and lands of Palestinians whose blood has irrigated their kibbutz farms. 

What should India’s stand be on the Israel-Palestine crisis, which is on the brink of a war that may engulf the entire region? Should a narrow view through the prism of realpolitik, hiding underneath it India’s own Hindu-Muslim dynamics, blind us to the injustice to the Palestinians who have become exiles in their own land? Shouldn’t our fealty be to a higher ‘dharma’ of compassion to all humanity? Was not Prime Minister Modi hailed as a statesman when he courageously told Russian President Vladimir Putin that “This is not the
era of wars?”

Standing up for peoples and nations who are pawns and victims of history, standing up for what is right and righteous, is not antithetical to national
interest. 

India must take the lead in bringing about peace and a just settlement for creation of two sovereign States with defined borders between Israelis and Palestinians. 

(The writer is a soldier, farmer and entrepreneur)