Israel Is Not the Only Enemy of the Palestinians
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
For once PM Nawaz Sharif is right. The ‘naked and brutal’ Israeli aggression against the hapless and incarcerated Palestinians of the Gaza strip is a “genocide” aimed at wiping them out so none should dare to stand in the path of Israeli neo-imperialism.
The ongoing brutal aggression against Gaza is the latest example of the Western world’s criminal complicity with Israel’s blood lust. As of the writing of these lines, the targeting of Gaza—from land, air and sea—with incessant bombing and shelling of civilian targets, including mosques, hospitals and homes of seniors and the disabled—has entered its second week. More than 200 Palestinians—at least half of them women and children—have been killed in the process. Apartment buildings and homes have been flattened. Gaza is being rapidly turned into heaps of rubble. But no murmur of protest has been heard from any Western capital; none at all; period.
It’s not only that a deafening silence reigns in the Western world, which in itself is morally reprehensible. Much more than this—in what could only be summed up as insult heaped on injury—the Western governments and their supine and subservient media sources have been tilting at all the windmills in justifying the predatory aggression.
The Canadian government of Stephen Harper, unsurprisingly, took the lead in standing up as the most reliable votary of Israel in the world. Harper and his Foreign Minister, Baird, justified the aggression as perfectly legitimate in ‘self-defense.’ They took strong exception against those dubbing Israel as aggressor because, in their convoluted logic, Israel was the ‘victim’ of ‘terror.’ Washington, London, Paris, Berlin et al. —with no exception—all latched on to the tune. Israel was the victim, not the aggressor, and whatever terror it was meting out to the Gazans was fully justified in ‘self-defense.’
This mantra of ‘self-defense’ is nothing new; the Western wizards, who think they have the sole lien on wisdom and intelligence, have been harping on this theme for decades. Vietnam was pulverized and millions of Vietnamese were slaughtered only in ‘self-defense’ or else Communism would have swept on the shores of the US. Iraq was invaded, on trumped up charges, because otherwise Saddam Hussain would have decimated the West with his chemical weapons—which were never there. Earlier, 1.5 million Iraqis were fed as fodder into the juggernaut of Western-imposed sanctions on Iraq—from 1991 to 2003—to keep the presumed Iraqi ‘terror’ in check.
The Western news media—which never tires of hawking its presumed credentials of only telling the truth, always—has ended up with a lot of egg on its tarnished face in this episode.
Western newspapers—the most reputed ones including—disingenuously buried news of the carnage in Gaza in their inside pages. Imagine how feverishly they would have spread the news, buttressed with graphic pictures, on their front pages had Israel been the victim. Television channels, too, blacked out the Gaza mayhem, just parroting the Israeli line fed from their tongue-tied reporters in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
ABC Television—one of the largest in US—took the cake when it splashed gory pictures of wanton destruction in Gaza as pictures of Israeli ‘suffering’ because of rockets fired from Gaza. When Twitter and Face Book exploded in activist protest over that daring journalistic banditry, ABC only meekly apologized, as if it were only an error of incorrect reporting.
Western complicity in the crimes has by now been accepted as the risible face of the ‘New International Order’ that the West has been striving to impose on the modern world for years since the demise of the Cold War. Justice and fair-play are most conspicuous by their absence from its script. The dice in the game is loaded, entirely, against the Muslim world. Islamophobia is its defining feature.
There’s no questioning in this ‘new’ world order—the euphemism for neo-imperialism of the West—of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian land. No mention is made of the root cause of Palestinian frustrations and sufferings at the hands of the Israeli army and settlers in a system of naked exploitation and loot which has reduced the Palestinians to the status of lesser human beings in their own land.
Most Western governments have, in fact, stopped referring to the Israeli occupation as ‘occupation.’ The land seized from the Palestinians—and inhabited in government-built settlements by half-a-million pampered settlers—is no longer even called as ‘occupied land’ in the new Western lexicon. But while Western guilt and complicity is as crystal-clear as daylight, much of the Arab world is as guilty as their Western friends and mentors in their shameless neglect of Palestinian suffering.
Imagine the apathy of the oil-rich and affluent Arab sheikhdoms. For years, under Western pressure and arm-twisting, they have been starving the Palestinians—especially those of Gaza—of cash assistance that had been dispensed aplenty before. Unemployment in Gaza is as much as 40 % among its youths; 80 % of Gazan households are basket cases and survive on handouts from UN agencies. Yet, on the very same day that Israel had notched up the Gazan casualty toll to 200, tiny Qatar, brimming with petro-dollars, sealed a deal with Washington for 11 billion dollars in latest weapons and arms. One might be tempted to ask if there was enough room in a cooped-up Qatar to store these weapons.
There couldn’t be a greater insult to the suffering of the people of Gaza than the Arab world’s biggest Western slave, the neo-Pharonic Egypt in military’s clutches, strutting itself on the global stage to come up with a cease-fire proposal. Egypt ruled by a Western puppet like General Sisi flaunting itself as an ‘honest broker’ is a sickening joke.
In his 30 years at the helm of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had served his Western masters to their highest expectations by keeping Gaza under lock and key because that’s what his pay-masters wanted. Sisi has picked up exactly from where the last Pharaoh had left. The Western script against Egypt’s only elected President, Mohammad Morsi, was focused on his espousal of the Palestinian cause. Morsi’s biggest ‘crime’ in the eyes of the West and its client Egyptian army was that he had relaxed the stranglehold against Gaza by opening the Rafah border, which has been closed since his overthrow last year.
Any hands-on political pundit would agree that the plight and misery of the Palestinians of Gaza isn’t going to be over any time soon. The dice is loaded against them. Standing four-squares behind Israel is the Western camp blinded by its Islamophobia. Both have total assurance from a slumbering Arab world—now practically ‘liberated’ from the still-born Arab Spring—that it will move not a finger on behalf of the Palestinians.
But, then, history tells us that there’s an end to every people’s suffering, with the power of truth and justice prevailing in the end. Who could have predicted, three decades ago, that the colored South Africans would soon be masters of their own destiny? Palestinians have hope to hang on to as their ultimate redeemer and equalizer. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
