Washing The Shame Away
The Israeli war on Gaza is the hot topic at the moment. It’s everywhere; in random chats, on TV, in the papers, in blogs, in the background of every daily activity of anyone who has seen the pictures of the bloodshed in Gaza.
A lot of what is being said about the situation is emotional. That’s understandable. It’s hard to restrain your emotions when you see your people being maimed by Israeli bombs, dismembered in the streets and killed in mosques, and when you hear the aggressive occupiers dismissing their crimes as if they were nothing. The damage does not stop at the physical destruction in Gaza, but is carved deep in the minds of everyone who sees it: this lust for blood which our “neighbor” periodically displays both frightens and angers us. The international official silence and our leaders’ utter failure to act burns deeper still.
How can you not be emotional when you experience all the shame and shock in the world; shame because you are part of the problem, and shock because the world is not doing anything to solve it?
For years we have prayed, we have quoted Quranic verses promising us victory or preaching Armageddon as endgame, we have bought the lie our leaders told us that “peace is the only option” and forgot that we are in no position to negotiate, we have signed peace treaties and have kept mum when Israel did not keep its part of the deal, we have shut our eyes blind to the glaringly unbalanced clauses in these treaties, we have let the dream of peace take over the reality of what’s happening on the ground. That’s how bad we wanted this 60-year-old nightmare to end.
“Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”
- Nelson Mandela
No matter what treaties we have with Israel, we should never lose sight of the fact that Palestinians are our priority. They are our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, our people. Western, primarily American, media bias in favor of Israel should not make us forget that Gaza has been under siege for about two years, during which the people in Gaza (Hamas and everyone else) were starved, humiliated, isolated from the outside world, and asked to die silently. Isn’t Israel’s request for the rockets to stop a plea for Palestinians to shut up and die silently? Do Israeli children live in a greater degree of fear from Hamas rockets than Palestinians children do with no access to healthy food, electricity, good education, or contact with the outside world, while being threatened with death, and now literally facing it?
“While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so, too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.
According to the UN, most of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinian refugees subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma.
Medical facilities are critically short of doctors, personnel, equipment, and drugs. Gaza has quite literally become a human garbage dump for all the Arabs that Israel does not want.
Gaza is one of the world’s most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch home-made rockets.
Call it a prison riot, writ large.”
For years we have pretended that the Palestinian people can solve their problem with Israel on their own. We chose to ignore that it is our problem too. We chose to pursue peace individually as separate states and left Palestine under Israeli mercy. We chose to buy defeatist peace rhetoric so we can clear our conscience and live our lives normally while the people next door were being humiliated at every checkpoint. We chose to abandon Palestine, and the onus is on us to wash this shame away.
Change starts right now. It simply cannot come from others to change the situation in Gaza and Palestine, it has to come from us. We are as responsible as Israel for the bloodshed in Gaza, because we let it happen. Praying and lighting candles do nothing, sending aid and donating blood do more but not much in any account, and clinging to blissful defeatism is the worst danger of all.
It’s about time we thought long and hard of what we are doing to alleviate the pain in Palestine. Our roles as classic sympathizers, eager aid-senders, chatty case-defenders, religious doom-preachers, liberal peace-advocates have all proved to be futile in the face of organized, US-backed, propagandist Israeli actions.
When the frustrated people took to the streets in Arab capitals, their governments listened. Their demonstrations were not interrupted. Nobody was prevented from expressing their opinions. This spontaneous anger must turn into organized action to stop Israeli atrocities in Palestine and it must teach us a lesson: our governments have ears, we just need to shout loud enough, maybe squeeze them a little, to get results.
Change starts from within. Our governments must cooperate to exercise leverage on Israel and its supporters, because individually, none of our Arab countries can affect any mentionable pressure. Far from it being a call for unity, a dream long abandoned, it is a call to practice group work for once. It is a simple demand to translate the attitudes of Arab people into collaborative action by their governments. If our governments fail, yet again, to represent us and to speak in our name, the contract that binds us with them, if any other than fear, must be annulled. After all, a monkey can impose taxes if trained.
Take concrete steps today to tell your government that you are not pleased with its reaction to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Form a group to protest official silence over the attacks, in whatever country you live. Email biased media outlets and back your argument with valid evidence. Abandon facebook groups that exploit your justified anger just to boast of large membership numbers. Do something.
Once again, the onus is on us to affect change in our attitude to the Palestinians question, and to make our leaders acknowledge and act upon it. They should understand that we have had enough of them being toyed with by puppet masters and paid big money to sit on the fence, and that for once, we are ready to avenge our true honor and wash the shame away.
Hi. I am a long time reader. I wanted to say that I like your blog and the layout.
Peter Quinn