By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban
“What Israel has done in Gaza is the most profound desecration of the central idea of the absolute and infinite worth of every human being.” So argued the renowned Jewish columnist and political commentator Peter Beinart in an interview with the Guardian this week.
With a ceasefire in Gaza war coming into effect last week, we heaved a cautious sigh of relief! The most devastating, deadliest war in this region would possibly end; a glimmer of hope that the unprecedented, colossal humanitarian crisis would draw to a close; a deep wound in human conscience would start healing and so would the thorns the war has planted in hearts and souls.
“We want to see the north and smell it”
In an epic scene that sent messages shaking the world to the core, footage showed a stream of thousands of displaced Palestinians walking northwards. “We want to see the north and smell it,” said a displaced child carrying her sister on her shoulders as she returned to the northern Gaza. What an expression! The images of return teem with happiness, attachment, hope, resilience, resistance, loss, and need. Definitely, no one has the right to displace people indigenous to this land. However, it’s greed, one of the deadliest sins in the world, that nudges people and nations to prey on the wealths of others.
Truths uncovered
The war uncovers many truths.
One is that the world is unfortunately on the brink of falling into the black hole of liquid modernity, where political and financial elites tacitly strip people of their innate feelings of empathy and human solidarity; people are made to act indifferently and blindly, and to bury their heads in the sand to brutality, barbarism, genocide, and racial cleansing as long as these acts are justified and legitimated by politicians. Governments supporting the Israeli occupation turn a deaf ear to all the roaring, massive appeals to a ceasefire in Gaza. The message has been: “stop protesting, mind your own business, numb your senses !” The result has been the continuation of bloodshed and utmost destruction. It is the age of “liquid evil” (a term coined by Zygmunt Bauman & Leonidas Donskis ) and its tools such as economy, media, technology, consumerism, shallowness as well as the spread of panic, confusion, inequality, social injustice, selfishness and despair, it’s the hidden evil that turns humans into commodities and push them to voluntarily lose privacy. Such a gloomy, defeatist attitude should not prevail.
What a coincidence!
Second, as the Palestinians are under settler, apartheid occupation, they have every right to resist and have an independent state on their own soil, there ancestral lands. It’s their duty. Being the indigenous people to this land is not a crime to be ruthlessly punished for. The return of the displaced people coincides with the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s libration. What a coincidence! It seems that humanity hasn’t learned lessons from that traumatic past. “The more brutally Israel behaves, the more brutal [the] resistance is likely to be,” Beinart points out. This is why occupation must end.
Third, the western media rhetoric is glaringly unbalanced. For example, the media have given the utmost priority to the release of Israeli hostages. Consider the following headlines:
BBC: Three released hostages back in Israel after being freed in Gaza ceasefire.
CNN: First hostages freed as long-awaited Gaza ceasefire takes force.
Reuters: Ceasefire brings hope in Gaza; freed Israeli hostages reunited with mothers.
CBS News: Israel and Hamas ceasefire deal takes effect as first 3 hostages are released and returned to Israel.
The Guardian: The three female hostages released first by Hamas under the ceasefire deal.
There is an entire focus on the Israeli hostages, while the Palestinian prisoners, who are locked up for decades in captivity are barely mentioned. This loudly says that Palestinians’ lives do not matter.
Fourth, the Palestinians are victims: their land is occupied, their very existence is ignored, and their right to reclaim their independent state is denied. The world should be fair, and blame the aggressors, rather than the victims.
Fifth, there is an urgent need for deconstructing the Zionist-Israeli ideology which revolves around the myth of a land without a people for a people without a land an ideology inherently harboring the inevitability of ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people, the Palestinians.
American-style solution
Fortunately, there is gingerly progressive work in this direction by Jewish intellectuals. Peter Beinart, for instance, indicates that “Israel is moving towards an American-style solution to the Palestinian question. In the 19th century, the American solution to the Native population was to destroy their societies so that they couldn’t function as a political entity.”
This ideology still resonates in the Israeli actions of demonising others, calling them terrorists.
Finally, unless injustice and moral decay end, there would be no possibility for peace to prevail. This is the natural course of things.
By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban Professor of linguistics Faculty of Arts Kafr el-sheikh University
Email: [email protected]
