Features
Acid test for denouncers of violence
In these theatres of carnage, we are up against the fearsome spectacle of runaway, uncontrolled human brutality. That is, man turning against man with unmatched dehumanizing violence.
The world is witnessing ‘Innocents being led to the slaughter’ in the Gaza strip and the West Bank, in coldly calculated military onslaughts inspired by the Israeli state, and this is plain to see, but it was the gross inhumanity of the Hamas militants that was unleashed on October 7th on Israeli soil that ignited the present blood-letting. Accordingly, neither main side to the current butchery could claim innocence and victimhood of any kind. Both sides need to be denounced by all those who take it on themselves to comment on this crisis.
That is, both these erring sides need to be named clearly and unambiguously and shamed. This columnist, for one, has been calling for the adoption of a balanced perspective on the Middle East blood-letting over the past few weeks. If such a fair perspective on the crisis is to prevail, not only the atrocities of the Israeli side but those of the Palestinian side need to be specified, highlighted and denounced. Unless and until such a balanced perspective is made to prevail, the possibility of the world community, led by the UN, containing even to a degree the current barbarism would be slim or even nil.
One time Director of the Office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber, in a lengthy and detailed letter of resignation from his position (Please see page 5 of The Island of Nov. 3rd) has made many a thought-provoking point but one could not help but notice that he falls short of calling for strict accountability on the part of Hamas for its substantial inhuman violence in the Middle East theatre. Accounting for this relative silence on the part of Mokhiber and others of his ilk on Hamas misdeeds has emerged as a challenge for the impartial commentator.
Such soft-peddling is notable even among those sections in Sri Lanka that have undertaken to make pronouncements on the current splurge of violence in the Gaza. It needs to be pointed out that such double standards on violence amounts to manifesting moral cowardice.
Israel is clearly at great fault in some issue areas central to the ongoing violence but so are some Palestinian sections. Being true to one’s conscience should be of the paramount importance to the commentator in this and all the crises that assail humankind. Truth and not ‘political correctness’ needs to matter most.
Among some of the notable and controversial observations made by Mokhiber in his letter is the following: ‘We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity.’
Ample justice is not done to history through pronouncements of the above kind. The stark fact is that land is central to the Middle East problem. It has been so for quite a few centuries. As often pointed out in this column, both the Palestinians and the Jews have been landless or dispossessed communities but they have been native inhabitants of the region that is today described as the Middle East. Biblical accounts of the region and its peoples bear this out, for example.
On-and-off colonizing efforts by the big powers of centuries past, such as the Egyptians and the Assyrians, rendered the Jews a landless people. It was only right for imperial Britain to provide some land to the Jews for the purpose of establishing for themselves a homeland at the beginning of the last century, considering this backdrop.
However, grave mistakes were made by the Israelis and their imperialist backers in the course of implementing these settlement plans. For one, the Jews were settled disproportionately and forcibly in land which was already inhabited by the Palestinians. Secondly, a blind eye was turned on Israel by its external backers when it unconscionably and brutally expanded its settlements on what was seen as Palestinian land. Very soon, the Palestinians were rendered a minority in their areas of habitation. The region continues to be burdened with this tragic legacy.
Reduced to its essentials, the challenge facing the international community, read the UN, is the establishment of two states for the conflicting ethnic groups, who would, hopefully, from then on, coexist peacefully. No doubt, the ‘Two State’ solution has come to be seen as dead, but there is no other rational solution, as matters stand.
It is worthwhile pondering on the fact that identity or ethnicity is foist on communities as a result of the indignities and injustices they are forced to face.
A predominant irony of history is that when social groups are subjected to genocidal and other forms of inhuman violence, they tend to acquire a sharper sense of their separateness and uniqueness as collectivities. For example, the ‘Jewish Holocaust’ fostered in the Jewish people a perception of their singularity.
Likewise, the current violence being perpetrated on the Palestinians by the Israeli state would only greatly enhance the Palestinians’ awareness of their separateness. When such points are reached in the history of communities, fostering in them a sense of identity with other social groups would prove difficult and challenging. This juncture has been reached in the Middle East.
Accordingly, identity cannot be ruled out as a potent force in current Middle Eastern politics. Neither, of course, could land. What aggravated the crisis was the disconcerting tendency on the part of big powers to look the other way when Israel took the law into its own hands, so to speak, and encroached on Palestinian land relentlessly. Meanwhile, the US in particular ensured that Israel grew into a formidable military power, thereby rendering the conflict intractable.
The UN has to be helped by its membership to get a hold on developments in the Middle East and outside. To be sure, it is almost ineffective in the current crisis. But, although botched, there is no alternative at present to the UN experiment.