KUHU SINGH
Ayear of war and butchery and a year since the world has chosen to remain silent, while Israel continues to rain bombs — first in Gaza, then Lebanon and Yemen, all the while teasing Iran into a larger regional war. But first — we live in a time where if one must write about Israel, one needs to make sure one clarifies that it’s the Zionist polities one finds offensive; not the Jewish state or it’s people. Very similar to when one questioned Modiji of India, his braying bhakths would immediately pounce on you with “You hate India and all Hindus” attacks.
Author, activist and social thinker Ta-Nahisi Coates retorted very aptly to his recent CBS interviewer when asked “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?” To which he replied, “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state; I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.” Coates was discussing his new book The Message in which he has penned down his observations on his travels to Israel and what he called Israel’s policies as very similar to the Jim Crow laws of segregation.
I have been reading “The Message” — It’s an eye-opening first-hand account of how very much Israel works on apartheid lines. He goes on to compare Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Jim Crow laws of the American South. How many of us get told in the mainstream media what apartheid policies Israel has imposed on its non-Jewish citizens since 1948? They are issued permits to move around in Israel, they need permits to collect water, even rainwater, their need permits for the littlest thing and big things. Coates describes his own experience of being stopped by a soldier carrying a gun “bigger than a small child” and being asked “what is your religion? If you said Jewish, you could go, if you said Islam, you are highly likely to get turned around.
In Gaza Strip, Israel has heavily fortified border all around the Strip, with only two entry points — in the south with Egypt, the Rafa Crossing, and in the North. When one reads about Gaza Strip being an open-air prison, it is that. Now of course it has been nearly obliterated by bombs for the past one year. Same is true for West Bank. Palestinians cannot fish in the open waters of the Mediterranean off their own coast beyond a certain point. Which in most cases are a few meters, with large military fleet patrolling the waters close to the shores.
As we mourn the innocent lives lost one year on after last year’s Oct. 7th Hamas’ audacious, brutal and simultaneous murderous attacks on an Israeli kibbutz, a military barrack and at a music festival attended by young people, we must also mourn the thousands of Palestinians dead, including infants and children. Hamas was responsible for killing 1,189 people, including 815 civilians, 7,500 wounded and 251 hostages taken back into Gaza. The terrorist attack was brutal and vicious and its victims included men, women, children and the elderly. In retaliation, Israel, with total and complete support of Biden administration as well as other Western states mounted an attack on Gaza, virtually annihilating the tiny Strip, billed the most populous per square feet land in the world, as well as mounting simultaneous bombardment over Beirut, Lebanon and Yemen in recent months.
Since then, over 41,909 Palestinians have been killed, including infants, children (47 children die everyday in Gaza due to bombs) women, elderly, young, the able bodied as well as not so able-bodied. 101 hostages remain somewhere in Gaza, of which 36 have been declared dead. Over 75% of Gaza has been bombarded by Israeli and US-made bombs, annihilating the Gaza Strip into a rubble-grave and displacing nearly 2 million Palestinians into just 11% of inhabitable land, which too gets bombarded time and time again. This is what Palestinians call “running from death, into death” in a clip aired on Al Jazeera.
Who is right? Who is wrong? What constitutes ‘right to self-defense’? Israel has a right to self-defend itself, a right to exist in a region that still has difficulty accepting its very inception. That inception of a Jewish state happened to be in a region called Palestine, then under the British rule, after World War II to atone for the horrors inflicted on Jewish people under Hitler. I by no means am a historian nor an expert on Israel or even Middle East politics. But I do regard myself as a humanist, as someone who can see right from wrong, ethical from immoral. Jewish people have a right to live, a right to exist, a right to be called Israeli citizens. Israel is a country that exists, should exist and will exist. That is never in question.
What is in question are its policy makers, the extreme Zionists like Bibi Netanyahu and his coterie. He is not a politician nor a statesman. He acts like a wannabe dictator who is willing to let the entire Middle East go up in flames so he can stay in power and not be held accountable for his years of mismanagement and more by the people of Israel and the courts. One of his ministers called Hamas and its Palestinian supporters’ “rats” that need to be annihilated. Israel has bombed hospitals, refugee camps, even mosques. Countless aid workers and journalists have been killed – the highest ever since WW II. Is that fair retaliation? You decide.
I have also been dwelling on how media has covered this last one year in the US. Watching CNN and then watching BBC and Al Jazeera about news related to the Middle East seems like alternate reality almost. CNN’s coverage has been so blatantly one sided, I have turned off my TV in disgust more than once. Their coverage is quintessentially – one lost Israeli life doesn’t even equal hundreds of dead Palestinians. One murdered Israeli child’s story is so much more heart wrenching than hundreds of murdered, maimed and buried children in the Gaza Strip. That old man who holds the last member of his family, an infant, shrouded in white, that young woman who is dry eyed over the heap of concrete that was her home, certain her children are dead beneath after days of search. The images are horrifying. But at CNN, it seems their story stopped on October 7th, 2023. What has followed since then is justified outrage and action by Israel – or so it seems to me watching CNN cover Israel-Gaza war.
And this brings me to the end of my initial ask – what constitutes right to self-defense? Hamas is a terrorist outfit. It committed a heinous act on October 7th. There is no denying that. But there must come a “But” somewhere. When a population, not a militant group, has lived under apartheid for over three generations now, do their resilience and their call to be free of oppression be termed treason or “self-defense”?
I leave you with this poignant poem by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer who lost his life in the rubbles that is Gaza – but left behind his acute observations of life in Gaza and the glimmer of hope amidst the daily hopelessness –
If I must die
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made,
flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.
— Refaat Alareer, Palestinian poet
source : americankahani