In the eyes of Israel, the “only democracy” in the Middle East, and in the words of an Israeli minister, Palestinians are ‘human animals, terrorists and blood thirsty killers’; they are also deemed to be haters of democracy, jealous of the freedom and the wealth of the “free world”, intent on robbing the lands that God has offered to His chosen people. The thing is: they are human beings. If they were barrels of petrol, they would have been treated with utmost dignity as VIPs. The seven sisters et al would have queued up to make them their best offers sitting in a comfortable office with cigars and whisky.
But these “strangers” in their own lands have the misfortune to have infinite amount of gas in their territorial waters. So, they have to be displaced; in case of refusal to move, they have to be eliminated. And the West have industries to manufacture all kinds of justifications for their genocide. They have endless choices to pick from.
The stand of Western Governments, unlike the Western streets, can be likened to a “diode”, the electronic device that conducts electricity in only one direction. They relay the voice of the Israeli Government and never question it. The Israeli- Palestinian quarrel has become a Jewish-Muslim quarrel, ignoring that the most vocal speakers of the Palestinian cause are Christians with a population of half a million, have names like George Habash and Hanan Ashrawi. They have numerous religious organisations like the Shifa hospital which is targeted by Israel for harbouring not medical staff but Hamas fighters, Kairos Palestine, Christ at the Checkpoint, Bethlehem Bible College, Sabeel Ecumenical Center for Liberation Theology, Dar al-Kalima University, Al-Liqa Center for Religious Heritage and Cultural Studies in the Holy Land, the East Jerusalem YMCA, the YWCA of Palestine, Arab Orthodox Society, Jerusalem, Arab Orthodox Club, Jerusalem’ the Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees of the Middle East Council of Churches and Arab Education Institute Pax Christi, Bethlehem.
To compound the problem, the pro-Israeli propaganda industry is running at full throttle making a toxic mix of Hamas with ISIS, PLO, Hezbollah, Boko-Haram and Jihadis of all sorts to create the picture that Islam is getting ready with Iran to take over the world. With social media, the Ummah has realised the danger of Islamophobia and with support from right thinking Western streets mostly and is prevailing in the battle for public opinion. Incidentally, Timothy McVeigh, Adolph Hitler (the undisputed gold standard of evil), Dr. Baruch Goldstein (an educated man and doctor, who massacred thirty Moslems in a mosque), colonization, the bomb on Hiroshima, have nothing to do with Islam or Muslims.
The mass media is littered with proposals for the solution of the conflict, alas containing no new approach for the solution of a conflict that has been going on for the past 75 years. If states or international organisations, under whose purview falls the onus of establishing a just solution, fail, the only thing left is total war. And Hamas is not losing sleep in face of this eventuality.
Dawood Auleear
