Unbowed
By Mowahid Hussain Shah

 

The social justice movement sparked by George Floyd’s murder on Memorial Day 2020 has magnified and energized the Palestinian cause, making it even more visible despite attempts over the years to make it invisible. It is at the underlying core of tensions roiling Western-Muslim relations. You can’t skirt around the core, thinking that it will disappear.

The fanciful attempt of the Biden Administration to pivot focus from the Mideast to the Indo-Pacific region has proven farcical. It is significant to decipher the terminology used to describe the showdown there. It is mostly “war” and not “siege” or “occupation” because war implies in this case a false equivalence when, in fact, the two antagonists are grossly mismatched, with the contest being lopsidedly unequal.

Also, the attempts to whittle down the Palestinian dimension by having Arab states on the periphery reach so-called “Abraham Accords” with Israel, such as UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, now looks absurd, with the underlying metastasizing tumor left untreated.

Biden made it a point to visit Jimmy Carter, but perhaps he missed to what extent the upright Carter invested his Presidency and his legacy in seeking justice for the Palestinians, one example being Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006.)

In America today, voices advocating equity for Palestinians are slowly becoming visible, including, but not limited to, Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Rashida Tlaib demonstrated the value of having even a single Palestinian-American in the US Congress. Even a miniscule counterweight voice can generate a ripple effect.

It is one thing to mention the atrocities of yore. It is another to take a stand on the horrors occurring before one’s own eyes in the present. The fact remains that one-sided prejudice against the Palestinians became a part of official policy. Still, the 11-day showdown demonstrates that, without a fight, it is difficult to get anything. It is a lesson for the mostly supine US Muslim community.

For some, the assault on Gaza was reminiscent of the Nazi assault on the Warsaw ghetto. The inhabitants of both went through an inferno. The OIC – whose founding, spearheaded by King Faisal in 1969, was triggered by an arson attack at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on August 21, 1969 – today remains toothless and impotent. The desperation of the besieged Gazans and their undeterred firing of rockets demonstrated the disregard for their own lives and safety. In a way, it recalled the character of Charles Bronson in the franchise “Death Wish” movies, who was pushed on a nihilistic path after his wife and daughter were brutally slain.

The Palestinian issue supposedly fades, then it flares up again. It finishes, then it starts.

So, what was the takeaway after the 11-day Mideast carnage? Holly Williams, reporting for CBS Evening News of May 20, interviewed Gonen Ben-Itzhak, prominent Israeli security expert on Gaza, who blamed Netanyahu for “igniting the crisis” for political gain and for letting the situation worsen in a bid to help his political survival. Ben-Itzhak stated it was a “political conflict” that had “backfired on Israel” and, instead, had helped “strengthen Hamas.” The group remains unbroken. The psychological trajectory of the Israel-Palestinian conflict may have been altered.

Adding to this exponential dynamic is the instant global reach of social media, making it all the more difficult to control the narrative of Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

Meanwhile, the Arab Establishment, rolling with wealth but not armed with knowledge, have few accomplishments to show and the fear of losing it all makes them, in effect, incapable of conquering fear. They remain bystanders to the unfolding humanitarian calamity.

As for the Palestinians, to cite the 1875 poem by W E Henley, “Invictus,” (which had inspired Nelson Mandela during his long imprisonment): they are bloodied but “unbowed.”

Biden is on target when he spoke, on May 20, that the Palestinians equally deserve to live safely and freely. 14 centuries later, the message of Karbala resonates: Might is not Right.