October 7th, 2023. Hamas terrorism. National and International condemnation. Israelis-1400 killed and 242 taken as hostages. Complete and absolute extermination, U.S. backing and support… opposition? Anti-Semitic. Global positionality determines importance and relevance.
The media has outdone itself with the manufacturing and production of the inhumane obsession of Hamas with the killing of Israeli women and children. Grave excesses both in arms and speech have taken place. The crisis, which has been going on since the early twentieth century, has been reduced to the events that took place this year. Hamas has been condemned nationally and internationally for its terrorism, but these statements merely touch the surface. Violence has been seen as the only mechanism for acknowledgment. With the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020 and talks mediated by the U.S. regarding a possible arrangement with Saudi Arabia, Israel is living out its intended priorities: to make peace with its neighboring Arab states over the acceptance of gradual peace and compromise with the Palestinians and their right to self-determination and liberty. The insidiousness of this conflict is only getting more and more blatant with every act of violence. Israel, in the words of Pratap Bhanu Mehta, has a dual origin: out of the oppression of the Holocaust that took over Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and the violence inflicted onto the Palestinians in the late 1940s. When the founding moment of a country earlier prosecuted and massacred owing to their racial identity begs the alienation of another racial group from their own land, converts people into stateless, voiceless beings, if not an apartheid state, what other state does it become? The Nakba remains a dark period in the ever-darkening history of Palestinians and Palestine.
The role of international organizations, countries, and our country (India) in particular leaves me wondering as to when this extraction of basic humanity and compassion from the entire face of the Earth took place. The West lies complicit in the spreading of hate and prejudice, be it with the Jews during the Second World War or the Palestinians since 1948. Quoting a tweet from Stanly Johny (Senior Deputy Editor of The Hindu), “[t]he US mobilized the West, supplied arms worth billions, imposed sanctions on Russia, heaped pressure on the developing countries to follow its line. Russia was expelled from the UNHRC. There’s an arrest warrant against Putin. But the US won’t even call for a #ceasefire in Gaza.”
The fact that there wasn’t a unanimous vote calling for a ceasefire in the United Nations General Assembly and the fact that India chose to abstain while the global South were unanimous in their support is alarming. The death count by the Israeli forces has crossed 10,000 people, mostly women and children, in a matter of four weeks. This is more than the total civilian casualties on both sides since Russia invaded Ukraine twenty months ago, as per the UN.
Why is it that sporadic explosions of violence are recognized, but the institutionalized, racialized, and deep-rooted daily violence that is inflicted remains without criticism, without any questioning? Settler colonialism and violence is what is happening: displacement from land, be it in the West Bank or Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoods, deprivation of food, water, and fuel, being treated as second-class citizens. Malcolm X related the notion of being treated as second-class citizens in the context of the black consciousness movement of the 1960s with modern-day colonialism and slavery, and his words remain apt to the occasion! With no international presence or voice without relation to the state of Israel, with no rights, social, economic, or political, with no recognition of being citizens at par with Arab and Jewish Israelis, with nothing but routine and normalized violence that lies in the realm of the familiar, appeals to the complexity of the crisis serve the only function of refusing to see the reality behind the smoke and mirrors, or rather, the Global North narrative and vested interests. Noam Chomsky puts it perfectly when he says, “They (Palestinians) don’t have wealth, they don’t have power, they don’t have rights, it's the way the world works, your rights correspond to your power and wealth.”
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, when he wrote on the violence that resurfaced during May 2021, spoke of the three kinds of responses the violence would have: the indifferent, the imperial, and the humanitarian. When there are talks of proportionate violence to a clearly disproportionate history of violence and terrorism when misinformation and propaganda are used to further already biased perceptions, and when, too many times, the benefit of the doubt is given to the oppressed-turned-very much oppressor, we are embedded in the spheres of the indifferent and imperial. It is time we looked through the facade for what the matter really is about: genocide, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. If it hasn’t already left, then now, more so, are gone the times when the sheer inhumanity and grotesqueness of this conflict be reduced to geo-political opportunism. It remains a question of basic dignity and justice, and this recognition is happening too little too late.
The humanitarian response would appeal to a common history shared by the ethnic communities of the land they hold to be sacred. Acknowledging the external, imperial interests that guided conflicts and replacing the aggression of victimhood with promises of political equality for all citizens. It would mean having democratic sovereignty and autonomy over one’s land, culture, and roots. It would be striving for international recognition and presence, an independent voice. The struggle remains a reality even when the violence subsides, and the papers stop covering events as they return to what has become “normal” for the world and the “unfortunate lot” of the suffering Palestinians; history lies distant and forgotten. With support and solidarity being given to the Palestinian cause by demonstrations across the world, it is our collective will and conscience that can give some hope in the midst of helplessness through powerlessness, and that can drive real change.
Picture Credits: Mohammed Zubair on Twitter now X, Liam O’Hare on Twitter now X
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