।। Obaidul Hamid।।
THE origin of the Palestine-Israel conflict is nothing short of an armed robbery of an unusual kind and at unimaginable scale. This is how I make sense of it:
‘You have lived in your ancestral home for decades and centuries. On a bad weather day, you find a large part of your home occupied by a group of strangers who are assisted by gangsters. They claim that it is their home/land. You know they are not right, but you don’t have the power or the means to drive them out.
‘The size of the occupying group grows bigger and bigger with every passing day, with their relatives being invited to join from everywhere. They keep building new houses and other structures not only in the area that they initially captured but also on new lands. Consequently, your own bedrooms, living rooms, prayer rooms, children’s study and play areas, and gardens are lost to them. You protest with your modest means and methods, but your actions cannot match their sophisticated killing machines that they have deployed. Killing and brutalising your family members with weapons supplied by their distant friends has become a taken-for-granted exercise; they do it with or without provocation, mornings and evenings, weekdays, and weekends. This has been the state of affairs for decades; this will probably continue for many more decades to come.’
Various metaphors have been used to describe the smuggling of Palestinian land. The age-old problem is the case of an active volcano induced by humans. Those who are in control make it erupt whenever they want, destroying segments of humanity who are denied their humanity, identity, and existence.
We need to ask some basic questions about the not-to-be stopped geopolitical crisis.
Who created the problem in the first place?
Who are the defenders and who are the offenders here?
Who has the right to self-defence?
Who is fighting for their life, identity, and existence?
Who are terrorists, if the word has any meaning left given its wholesale use and abuse?
Regardless of how the larger part of humanity answers these questions, the narrative constructed by the occupying force and its allies invites us to forget our math, morals, ethics, history, and commonsense. It is a discourse of denial of the humanity of those who are killed at regular intervals. Ramzy Baroud illustrated in his October 30 article in New Age how Israeli genocidal language and action have come together in this dehumanising process.
We may not make an appeal to the morality or humanity of those who rob and kill, but what does the blinded and blanket support of such mass killings tell us, especially about the western nations and their civilisation in some sense?
At the centre of their tradition is an invisible, ‘abyssal line’. Humanity exists only on their side of the divide. This is a racially drawn line, and, despite all the tall talk, there is little hope for its blurring, let alone complete erasure. No matter how many Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces, no matter how many more illegal settlements are built by them, and no matter how many Palestinians are driven out of their land, the west will probably keep supporting Israel and its genocidal mission. If history is any evidence, the US is likely to continue exercising its veto power to prevent any attempts to find any reasonable solution to the crisis. It is likely to continue giving money and machines in abundance to Israel so that the latter can ‘finish’ the Palestinians. Israel’s allies will spread the age-old discourse of self-defence using their media. They will not distract Israel from its mission because this is a common agenda. Israel can be seen as the killing arm of the west, separated from its body and geography. The world has seen this bloody arm for ages; we have seen it more recently in the collateral killings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. Children, women, and other vulnerable groups are categories that may make sense only in the west; these may not apply outside the abyssal line.
At the heart of the conflict is the question of religion, which has created a hierarchy of humanity along religious lines. Humanity is attributed to Judeo-Christians only. Other religious communities, including non-believers, may be given some place above the line dividing humanity, if not inconvenient. However, when it comes to Muslims, their place is below the line. Therefore, it matters little how many of them get killed, by whom, or on what grounds. We may not have true records of how many of them have perished since 9/11.
What is happening in the Arab world cannot be replicated in any other region. Those in the west cannot imagine what Israel is doing in Palestine being done in North America or Europe. Imagining an Israel israeling somewhere around Russia or China may also be weird. Israel can be mapped only where it is now.
The centrality of religion means that other societies can decide on their own position in the conflict with ease. The Indian BJP government’s support of Israel is motivated by the religious identity of the Palestinians. On the same grounds, India is supportive of the Myanmar government against the Muslim Rohingyas, despite their ‘epic’ friendship with the Bangladesh government. Not all Palestinians are Muslims, of course. However, non-Muslim Palestinians may not be helped because they have placed themselves on the wrong side of humanity.
At the same time, religion is implicated rather strangely in the conflict. Occasionally, there may have been issues between Muslims and Jews throughout history, but these will be overshadowed by the history of co-existence. Muslims had no part to play in the Holocaust. Shylock claimed his humanity in Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ against Christians, not Muslims: ‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?…’
It may be impossible to rewrite or reread this passionate enunciation of subjugated humanity by replacing the word ‘Jew’ with ‘Muslim’ or ‘Palestinian’. A 21st-century Shakespeare championing the cause of Muslims/Palestinians is unlikely to have access to mainstream western media; such an artist is unlikely to be recognised by the Swedish Academy.
However, the political chemistry in Israel is too complex to be attributed to one variable. Israel and Judaism were co-terminus around the time of the occupation of the Palestinian land. They have since diverged significantly.
Tellingly, it is the oppressed — the victim of the holocaust — who have come to embrace the ‘pious’ role of the oppressor. They have also formed a dangerous alliance with their former oppressor to annihilate a third community. Such a matrix is unprecedented in the modern world.
Obaidul Hamid is an associate professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He researches language, education, and society in the developing world.