Terror and Territory
Perhaps I was naïve, believing in goodness, kindness, the essential decency and fairness of humanity and its ability to create great works of art, engage with issues of justice and morality, develop science and medicine, practise love and sacrifice, and be open to the incredible emotions of transcendence in the presence of truth and beauty.
Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, the unqualified support of western powers, the endless supply of bombs and munitions, and above all, the deliberate, evil use of starvation and famine, have shaken my beliefs, raised questions and doubts. I’ve wondered at times whether it would be far better if we humans didn’t exist: bombs wouldn’t be raining down on a helpless population, children wouldn’t be killed as they played, violence and torture would cease. The planet could cleanse itself of our noxious presence, return to its own rhythm and balance.
A genocide is in progress. In our time, in our lives, in our world. Cruelty, savagery and barbarism have been unleashed by Netanyahu’s Israeli government, assisted by the nations of the west. Let me say at this point, that I don’t support Hamas, and in fact believe that humanity has no right to call itself civilised, as long as it continues to deploy force and aggression. As the musician Nitin Sawney wrote in a tweet, ‘ “War” is a word used to disguise the most negligent abuse of power.”’
Neither is it antisemitic to criticise the state of Israel for those actions, for which we would criticise other nations. As of 8th April 2024, over 34,000 people (33,091 Palestinian and 1,410 Israeli) have been reported as killed in the Israel-Hamas war, including 95 journalists (90 Palestinian, 2 Israeli and 3 Lebanese) and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, including 179 employees of UNRWA.
Human Rights Watch has evaluated that ‘(Palestinian) Civilians were targeted, attacked, abused, and killed over the past year at a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine…’
Nonetheless, hope refuses to die, particularly when empathy and action raise their voices across the world, when millions march or when students camp out. When the Israel-Gaza war began, the ferocity of Israel’s attacks on civilians, hospitals, women and children, shocked us into disbelief, horror and pain, the scale of destruction being hard to comprehend. The Nazis burnt books — the Israelis have destroyed entire universities, bringing barbarism into our world. Commenting to a friend that I couldn’t bear to watch the news any more, she replied that she now made it a point to watch it, “The Palestinians are the ones suffering and dying. The least I can do is bear witness.”
History also bears witness, reveals the old power dynamics and tribalism driving the gears in this genocidal war. Pankaj Mishra, in his masterful essay, The Shoah After Gaza, delivered as a London Review of Books (LRB) Winter Lecture, examines the instrumentalization of the Shoah (the Holocaust) as a tool of Zionism, and the mechanics of colonialism and racism underlying the uncritical support of white nations as they send plane loads of armaments to Israel, in full knowledge of the attacks on civilians, children, and its disregard for international law.
“ Why have Western politicians and journalists kept presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage…? … The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and this is the way it was inevitably seen by Gandhi, who pleaded with Zionist leaders not to resort to terrorism against Arabs … What W.E.B. Du Bois called the central problem of international politics — the ‘colour line’ — motivated Nelson Mandela when he said that South Africa’s freedom from apartheid is ‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to end all financial as well as military aid to the country.’
Mishra goes on to relate James Baldwin’s comparison with the holocaust and slavery, when he said “the suffering of Jewish people “is recognised as part of the moral history of the world’ and “this is not true for the blacks.”
“…… In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; … the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. … For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.”
When South Africa brought its case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 thDecember 2023, arguing that Israel was responsible for contravening the Genocide Convention in its war in Gaza, most of us listened in rapt attention, following the logic and evidence of its testimony, and admiring South Africa’s courage in putting its head above the parapet and standing up for the Palestinians. Not so some of the representatives of the American people.
Muhannad Ayyash, professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Canada, writes of America’s threat to punish South Africa for daring to bring this case; in essence to punish a black country for daring to challenge the white countries of Israel, the US, UK, France, Germany and others. Republican Representative John James and Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz introduced in early February the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act in the United States House of Representatives. This legislation would require a full review of the relationship between the US and South Africa on the baseless and spurious grounds that South Africa is supporting “terrorism”.
The world can no longer afford such bullying from powerful nations, particularly those whose histories are stained with the deaths and suffering of colonised people and whose coffers are still lined with the proceeds of plunder and loot. Positing the principle of strength and safety in numbers Ayyash advocates that middle powers form a coalition: Since the US empire is a major obstacle to Palestinian rights, freedom, liberation and sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of middle powers, then middle power states have both a duty and a self-interest to plan and follow a path of action that deals with this problem.
I fear the Israel-Gaza war, will sow a global legacy of greater division and deeper enmity. Young people, particularly those in non-European countries, will view Israel as pursuing a racist, colonial war, massacring the Palestinians, taking over their territory, and starting to build their own towns and cities, ‘ from the river to the sea’. They’ll imagine the bones and bodies of unrecovered Palestinian civilians and children ground into the foundations of sparkling new buildings: homes, schools, shopping malls. And if they feel anger, injustice, inequality, we can only hope they’ll use their force to recalibrate the world’s power structures through political and economic change.
Professor Ayyash proposes a path which could channel the outrage and anger boiling across many parts of the world, developing further the idea of a coalition of middle powers, citing BRICKS (an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates).whose members seek to increase economic ties with each other on the basis of equality and mutual benefit. Thereby decreasing their dependence on western imperial powers, and making it harder for the US to punish them if they decide to sever relations with Israel. Such alliances would spread power more evenly through the world, contributing to the prevention of genocidal onslaughts, weaken the racially prejudiced ‘colour line,’ paving the way to a more egalitarian world.
The planet truly does possess enough for the world, if its resources were managed with reason and fairness, if powerful nations relinquished their constant sabre-rattling and enmity, evolved political patterns of co-operation and dialogue, respected the universal values of peace, freedom, social progress, equal rights and human dignity.
I sit here writing about the nobility of universal values whilst, horrifically, over 300 bodies are discovered in mass graves at Nasser and Al Shifa hospitals, some of them with their hands tied, “…which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations.” Said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN’s Commissioner for Human Rights.
Elsewhere in the Palestinian territories young and old are being starved to death; terrorised and killed by constant bombing; imprisoned, tortured and disappeared. At the same time, the US agrees another mega funding package for Israel of $26.38bn — as if Israel really needs more dumb bombs, bunker busting bombs, white phosphorous, assault rifles and all the other weapons of modern warfare, in their genocidal land grab against a lesser adversary. The colonial and racist patterns are powerful factors in this war.
Dumb bombs are not guided, they’re free to fall and destroy wherever they land. A US intelligence assessment calculates that nearly half of the munitions Israel has used in Gaza have been dumb bombs. CNN reports: Unguided munitions are typically less precise and can pose a greater threat to civilians, especially in such a densely populated area like Gaza. The rate at which Israel is using the dumb bombs may be contributing to the soaring civilian death toll. The use of dumb bombs is a vile and deliberate act. Is this how civilian deaths are avoided — as Israel claims it’s trying to do?
The US financial package to Israel contains $9.1bn for humanitarian purposes, including the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Given the use of famine as a weapon of war, it’s fair to ask if even a dollar of this $9.1bn will ever reach the Palestinians?
Notwithstanding our murky politics and unequal power structures, the planet also possesses people of goodwill and selflessness, morality and humanity: such as the aid workers of WCK (World Central Kitchen), the doctors who still continue to treat the wounded in apocalyptic conditions, the students camping out and being arrested at universities, the millions of demonstrators across the world who’ve been marching for a ceasefire; such as the young Jewish woman, who replied when asked why she was marching: “It’s my solemn duty.” To echo my friend, we must bear witness and we must endeavour to influence our politicians, to continue rejecting violence and war, to continue calling for the rights of Palestinians to be honoured, and to assert our desire for a peaceful, just and equal world. No, I wasn’t naïve to believe in goodness, kindness and universal values of human dignity and worth. These values continue to exist in our violent, suffering world.
Originally published at https://www.ravinderrandhawa.com on April 24, 2024.