Tuesday, November 07, 2023

A fitting metaphor for Gaza
DAWN
Published November 7, 2023 



MADELEINE Albright once appeared for an interview for CBS 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl. She was asked about the tragic effect of US sanctions on Iraqi children. “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright’s answer has inspired the current US response to Israel’s wilful slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza. “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright replied, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” The Biden-Blinken duo would agree. Stopping the daily bloodshed of innocents would help Hamas. That’s the message the secretary of state and his boss have given to anyone urging them to intervene. In other words, the price is worth it.

The world may be revolted by the horrific images coming out of Gaza, but Israel’s crimes are being packaged, not for the first time, as an acceptable response to a Palestinian provocation. That there’s another purpose behind the killing spree is less discussed.

The US is aware of the plan unfolding under the cover of the outrage perpetrated by Hamas last month. But Benjamin Netanyahu has found an opportunity, a godsend, in the Oct 7 tragedy, to carry forward his pending de-linking of Gaza from the West Bank. Israel’s Jewish critics believe it took shape in the 2014 flare-up, over nine years ago, when Hamas had not massacred civilians but was observing a ceasefire both sides had agreed to.

Gaza has been turned into a concentration camp by Israel’s genocidal methods.


Ever since the US and Israel accepted the 1993 Oslo Accords, which declare the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be an inseparable territorial unity, the vivisection has been pursued vigorously, with steady US support. A look at the map explains the quest, says Noam Chomsky.

Gaza provides Palestine its only access to the outside world. If it is shut down, any future autonomy that Israel might deign to grant to Palestinians in the West Bank would leave them effectively imprisoned between a hostile Israel and an unfriendly Jordan. The suffocating prospects of a de facto imprisonment would be even more severe with the likely expulsion of Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and construction of Israeli settlements there.

Presaging the plot, Gaza has been turned into a concentration camp by Israel’s genocidal methods. A 2014 report submitted by Mads Gilbert, a fabled Norwegian doctor working on the Gaza Strip, described the situation there as not different from a concentration camp, perhaps worse.

“At least 57 per cent of Gaza households are food-insecure and about 80pc are now aid recipients,” Gilbert’s report said. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90pc of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption.”

An unintended highlight of the deepening Palestinian trauma is that it has exposed the truth of President Biden’s hallucinatory pitting of democracies against dictatorships. He used the equation to describe Russia and China in the context of Ukraine and Taiwan. And, he has summoned it to pummel Iran as a dictatorship and hail Israel as its democratic challenger.

A cursory look at Biden’s so-called democratic alliance reveals a singularly bizarre truth though. Biden spewed vitriol at the crown prince of Saudi Arabia during the presidential primaries he narrowly won, calling Mohammed bin Salman a diabolic killer of Jamal Khashoggi.

With the Saudi royal on one hand today and the Egyptian military coup leader Gen Sisi holding his other hand, Biden somehow hopes to usher democracy goodness knows where in the Middle East. Basically, the president is poaching Donald Trump’s friends, not excluding Netanyahu, for their possible bit role in the 2024 presidential challenge.

Another myth shattered by the slaughter in Gaza is the spurious construct of Shia-Sunni rivalry cultivated over the years to undermine Iran’s unflinching support for Palestine. There’s a phrase in a Spielberg film used by the Russian spy for the American lawyer who stoutly defends his case: ‘Stoikiy muzhik’, standing man. When the Western media discusses the fear of the Gaza war expanding in the region, who are they referring to? There’s Iran, of course, the perpetual man standing, and possibly an abbreviated Syria and a complicated Turkiye.

As for the Arab rulers, they fear Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood more than they ever mistrusted Israel. The scary part for President Biden’s friends is that both the religiously regressive and politically strident entities ply the Arab streets and were overwhelmingly elected by their Arab constituents. Both, however, saw their election stolen from them.

It’s been airbrushed from public memory that Israel and Iran, seen as implacable adversaries today, were inseparable siblings before the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini. Tehran was a major host for Israeli intelligence, directed largely at leftist Arab neighbours and the Soviet Union, which bordered Iran. The somersault in ties after the Iranian Revolution is not inexplicable either and, despite Western claims, doesn’t seem too deeply rooted in religion or religious sectarianism.

A mostly imagined Shia-Sunni incompatibility was likely a ploy to isolate Khomeini’s Iran from its Sunni Arab neighbours. The miscued myth exploded when stories emerged subsequently of Palestine’s sympathisers nurturing subterranean bonds with Shia clerics in Tehran.

If Shia Iran were really resentful of Jews or if it harboured antisemitic ideas, as is widely advertised in Western cacophony, we should perhaps probe the mandatory seat that Iran keeps in its majlis for an outspoken Jewish deputy, as it does for Iran’s Christian and Zoroastrian minorities. How could people who lived in peace and mingled culturally in Spain and Palestine lunge at each other’s throats?

A likelier fact is that post-Shah Iran threatened the pro-West leanings of Arab potentates rather than their Sunni identity, as indeed Cuba and Venezuela, groomed by Chávez, do in their backyards, as a collective variant of stoikiy muzhik.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.


jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2023

UNHOLY WAR

DAWN
Published November 6, 2023



FOR the third time in the past three weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu — PM minister of a nuclear-armed nation supported and funded by all major Western capitals — has invoked the apocalypse and used religious justifications for waging a genocidal war on Palestinians.

While bombing hospitals, he spoke of the prophecy of Isaiah, which calls for the land to be cleansed of evil. While murdering children in their thousands he referred to the Biblical call to destroy the people of Amalek down to infants and household pets. Now he has invoked the name of Joshua, who destroyed the people of Canaan in near-genocidal campaigns.

All this has been dutifully ignored by the Western media, and think thanks and rights organisations in the West who never fail to lecture the Muslim world on extremism every time a mullah gives a controversial sermon.

Does Netanyahu believe all this? Possibly. Is he using the language of religious extremism to appeal to an Israeli population that is now more radicalised than any nation-state in modern terms, barring possibly Nazi Germany?

Probably. Is he aiming this messaging at his strongest overseas constituency — evangelical Christians who believe that the founding of Israel was the first, but not the final step towards the end of times and the return of the messiah? Absolutely. But why would he want to appeal to those who, as per their own doctrines, don’t consider Jews worthy of salvation?

On Nov 7, 1917 a letter arrived at the home of British Zionist Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild. Written by British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour the letter, later known as the ‘Balfour declaration’, stated that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It is this missive that led to the creation of Israel and all the pain and horror that continues.

The evangelical Christians stand with Israel.


This was the culmination of efforts that began in 1896, when Theodor Herzl, a non-practising Jew who knew little about Jewish culture, wrote a pamphlet titled The Jewish State, which led to the creation of the Zionist congress, which lobbied for a Jewish homeland to be created in the model of the settler colonies that were springing up as European powers divided the world between them.

An antisemite, Balfour had recently blocked a bill allowing Jewish victims of East European pogroms from settling in the UK. So, it wasn’t love for the Jews that motivated him. Political Zionism was a fringe movement then and the greatest opposition to the declaration came from British Jews and the only Jewish member of the cabinet Edward Montague.

Geopolitics had a role but Balfour’s personal religious beliefs were also critical. A Christian Zionist, Balfour, like many in his time, believed that the Kingdom of God could not be established until the Jews had returned to their homeland.

Herzl himself recognised that antisemites in Europe were the natural allies of Zionism, an alliance that has prevailed to this day. So for Balfour, it was not just a question of creating an allied European colonial buttress in the Middle East, he also wanted to play a role in the fulfillment of prophecy.

That belief prevails today, and among the politically powerful, well-funded and religiously extremist evangelical Christians of America, it is what informs their absolute support for Israel; it’s not that they like Jews — quite the contrary.

It is that they need Israel to play its role so that the Rapture can take place, after which all who do not believe as they do —Jews included — will either be converted or killed.

These aren’t fringe movements, even though evangelicals are a minority (albeit a growing one) in the Chris­tian world. This is a group that counts leading political figures among its adherents, including political influential televangelists and pastors of mega churches who play a major role in determining who their flock votes for. All of them stand with Israel in order to, quite literally, bring about the end of the world.

Influential figures like preacher Jerry Falwell declared ‘To stand against Israel is to stand against God’, sentiments that were echoed when the newly elected US Speaker of the House stated that the Bible commands him to support Israel. But Israel’s creation was the first step, and the shifting of the US embassy to Jerusalem, acknowledging it as the ‘eternal capital’ of Israel was taken as another. Now what remains is the birth of the red heifer and the rebuilding of the Third Temple. And then, they believe, the apocalypse will follow.

So, in this worldview, the hundreds of thous­ands — Jews and Christians inclu­ded — calling for an end to these atrocities are ignored in order to fulfil the fantasies of fanatics wearing suits and ties and controlling the levers of the most powerful nation in the world.

The writer is a journalist.
X (formerly Twitter):@zarrarkhuhro


Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2023


WAR, HYPOCRISY AND TRAGEDY
DAWN
Published November 6, 2023 



HOW has the world responded to Israel’s continuing war on Gaza and the humanitarian catastrophe there? Clearly, the UN Security Council failed in its duty to stop hostilities. This from a world body whose primary responsibility is to maintain international peace and security.

Its inability to pass resolutions calling for a truce or humanitarian pause exposed the polarisation among its members which paralysed the Council. The US was the principal stumbling block in efforts to achieve a ceasefire. Its unconditional support for Israel handed Tel Aviv carte blanche to continue its barbaric military campaign in utter disregard for world opinion.

The Security Council’s inaction led to an emergency session of the General Assembly, which approved, by an overwhelming majority, a resolution calling for a truce. Only the US and a handful of countries voted ‘no’. While this resolution has moral and political weight and aimed to mount diplomatic pressure on Israel and its backers, it is non-binding. Therefore, it could do nothing to end Israel’s war on Gaza.

These developments demonstrated America’s increasing diplomatic isolation as several of its Western allies joined most of the international community to back an immediate ceasefire. While some European countries shifted their position to voice concern for the humanitarian crisis and loss of Palestinian lives, Washington refused to ask Israel to cease its bombardments or lift the siege of Gaza, showing indifference to the devastating humanitarian consequences of Israeli actions.

UN officials repeatedly declared that Israeli violence directed at over two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza was collective punishment and violated international humanitarian law. But the US and its Western partners only called out Hamas for the attack on Israel and accepted Israel’s carpet bombing of an entire population as Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’.

They showed no compassion for thousands of Palestinian casualties, who were portrayed as human shields for Hamas — an egregious example of dehumanising Palestinians. President Joe Biden even questioned Palestinian casualty figures saying he had “no confidence in the numbers the Palestinians are using”. When Washington began to voice concern for civilian deaths it was too little, too late especially as it continued to oppose a ceasefire.

These developments laid bare the US-led West’s hypocrisy. While Western leaders denounced Russian military actions and targeting of civilians in Ukraine, they refused to apply the same principle to Gaza.

The EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen once characterised Russia’s “attacks on civilian infrastructure” that aimed to deprive people of water and electricity as “acts of pure terror”. But neither she nor any Western leader chose to describe Israel’s action of cutting off electricity, water, food and fuel supplies to Gaza in a similar way.Nor did Israel’s use of white phosphorous in indiscriminate artillery attacks urge Western governments to denounce this violation of international humanitarian law.

There was no Western condemnation of Israel’s attacks on Jabalia refugee camp in which scores of people were killed and for which Tel Aviv claimed responsibility, justifying civilian deaths as a ‘tragedy of war’.

Public outrage over the humanitarian disaster is in sharp contrast to the position of Western governments.

Western countries who claim to be standard bearers of human rights and constantly lecture other countries on this adopted a deafening silence on Israeli atrocities and genocidal actions. This display of double standards was not new. Western concern for human rights has always been selective, its criticism usually directed at adversaries and opponents, while friendly countries have been shielded from censure.

Germany and France imposed a ban on pro-Palestinian rallies in a bid to criminalise expressions of sympathy for Palestinians. This made a mockery of their democratic credentials and showed the shallowness of their commitment to freedom of expression. In the US, donors threatened to cut off funding to universities where students rallied in solidarity with Palestinians.

The Guardian reported that prominent American figures from magazine editors to Hollywood agents faced sackings or rebuke for supporting Palestinians. Elsewhere in Europe, pro-Palestinian activists were hounded on the pretext of being antisemitic. In the UK, Home Secretary Suella Braverman branded pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “hate marches’, called for curbs on protests and urged criminalising waving the Palestinian flag. All this in so-called democracies who claim civilisational superiority over countries of the Global South.

The Western media’s role has been as one-sided as that of their governments and blind to the suffering of the Palestinian people. Major networks echoed Israeli propaganda and mostly covered the war from the prism of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’. Western TV anchors seemed to read from the same script and disregarding massacres carried out by Israel, kept asking interviewees if they condemned Hamas.

The most flagrant example of disinformation spread by Western channels was of Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas, which had no basis in fact. Only when the scale of killings in Gaza could not be ignored and criticism of their bias mounted did networks such as BBC change course to cover these. Meanwhile, Western social media companies censored Palestinian content, as confirmed by international human rights organisations including Amnesty.

The response from Muslim countries neither matched the catastrophic situation on the ground nor met the expectations of their own people. Other than diplomatic activism at the UN to secure a General Assembly resolution, it did not go beyond issuing denunciations of Israel. While several South American countries cut ties with Israel only Jordan and Bahrain did so from among Arab states who had established diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv.

Does all this mean the Palestinians have been abandoned? Yes and no. Yes, because the international community failed to stop the carnage in Gaza. No, because across the world, from west to east, people came out in unprecedently large numbers to show solidarity with the Palestinians and demand a ceasefire.

Public outrage over the humanitarian disaster expressed in protest rallies was in sharp contrast to the pusillanimous position adopted by their governments. Public opinion in the US was also at sharp variance with the Biden administration’s stance. A Data for Progress poll found 66 per cent of American voters supported a ceasefire.

The consequences of the biggest disaster to befall the Palestinian people since 1948 will be far-reaching for the region and for the world. I will take that up in another column.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2023


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