Eyeless in Gaza
Nobody would dispute that constant rocket attacks from Muslim terrorists in Gaza are intolerable for Israelis who live under their threat nearby. Although these amateurish rockets rarely kill, nevertheless, when they do fall on homes, they are lethal. Consequently, they are a constant source of profound anguish to Israeli civilians, who should not have to live in this way.
On the other hand, it seems difficult to justify in any way the present full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there. Gaza is already an area where some Palestinians have been living in refugee camps for sixty years, victims of what they can only call Jewish terrorism.
Of course, in one sense the source of the problem is that the State of Israel was founded in the first place. This displaced the Palestinians from their ancestral lands and created a whole nation of permanent refugees. Western Europeans are responsible for this. The State of Israel would not have been founded if Western Europeans, led by Nazi Germany, had not committed their genocide of the Jews during the Second World War. (Let us not forget that several envious European peoples were only too willing to co-operate with Nazi Germany in this genocide).
Tragically, both Semitic cousin-peoples, Arabs and Jews, are at war. (This is why the Palestinians can rightly accuse the Israelis of anti-Semitism, as can the Israelis accuse Arab peoples of the same). Both Old Testament peoples, Muslim Arabs and Jews, seem to be committed to the spiral of violence, known as ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. They have not yet accepted – like many so-called Christians also – the New Testament concept of forgiveness.
The tragedy today is that the Israeli State, armed to the teeth by the Bush administration in the USA and anxious to do the maximum of damage before Mr Bush retires in two weeks time, is not even practising the policy of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. It is practising the policy of Nazi Germany in Serbia. This was that if a single German died in the occupation of Serbia, then one hundred Serbs should die. (We should not forget that Hitler’s Slav holocaust killed 30 million Slavs, some five or six times more than the number of victims in the Jewish holocaust). Only this policy of the ratio of 100:1 can explain that this war has so far cost the Palestinians five hundred dead and the Israelis five dead – let alone the tens of thousands of physically maimed and psychologically traumatised.
Two peoples must somehow learn to live together, even if separately. The State of Israel is not going to go away as such – but nor are the native Palestinians. The current Israeli invasion, albeit provoked by Palestinian terrorists (from the democratically-elected Hamas movement), is not going to solve anything. All it will lead to is ever more Arab bitterness and outrage, fanatical and suicidal Palestinian and Muslim hatred for Israeli injustice and for those who arm them and support them, both in the USA and, less overtly, but much more hypocritically, in the EU. The Muslim world is tens of hundreds of millions larger than the Israeli world. This seems to have been forgotten, both by Israel and by those who arm Israel.
The Hindu leader Gandhi once said that, ‘an eye for an eye, and the whole world is blind’. What shall we say of ‘a hundred eyes for an eye?’ In these unseeing, ‘eyeless’ days the world is storing up great trouble for its future.
