The West has had a long love affair with the system of apartheid; South Africa is gone but Palestine remains. The latter has been maintained for 75 years and counting at a cost which only their deranged minds can support. They are the countries whose hearts beat in Jerusalem – they are the baby killers, who have the sadistic pleasure of locking up 2m people in an ‘open prison’ and cluster-bomb them, and truth be told, kill journalists.
In the asymmetrical Middle East war, one knows the outcome in advance: the besieged would lose disproportionate number of casualties given the fact that Israel has an oversupply of the latest arms of mass destruction generously paid for by US tax payers and voted for by “the largest democracy in the world”; and every building, hospital, masjid, school, infrastructure, power plants, water treatment plants, roads and ports and not to forget, all forms of life, have to be indiscriminately razed to the ground and buried in rubble.
Palestine is just one in a long line of stories of destruction by the West. Algeria too figures prominently where10% of the population died fighting for independence – today Algiers airport welcomes you to the “land of a million dead”. There are also the cases of Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and counting.
Jews, and among them the Zionists, were welcome with open arms in Palestine but they turned out to be usurpers. Their appetite seems to be unsatiable as now they want every inch of their hosts’ land.
Israel’s sponsors should pay heed to an old adage: if you push your opponents right against a wall, the reaction of the underdogs could be fatal to the invaders. So it is not just a question of the number of casualties inflicted among the old, the women, the babies and the number of buildings turned into rubble. Palestinians have used the energy of the desperate and developed their own defense strategy; they have become elusive, they have dug themselves into deep tunnels only to emerge from their holes to strike with lightning speed and vanish into thin air.
50 days on, Israel has not made any serious advance inside Gaza. A few attempts were repelled and countless Israeli lives and military vehicles were lost. All that is left to Israel is a repeat of the US scenario in Afghanistan declare victory and vacate. In the meantime, the journalists who have survived will tell the story in detail of the inhumanity of God’s “chosen people”.
To paraphrase a French general after the last 33-day war between Hezbollah and Israel: since Israel did not win the war, it lost. Since Hamas did not lose the war, it won.
Dawood Auleear
