3 November 2023 12:47 am Views - 1200
Palestinians run for cover after a strike near the Al-Shifa hopsital in Gaza City on November 1 amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (Photo by Bashar TALEB/AFP)
As Israel kills a child every ten minutes in the Gaza Strip, the world’s biggest open prison, it’s revolting to see that the horror has still not drawn condemnation from the
The slaughter of almost 9,000 Gaza civilians, including 4,000 children, has failed to stir the conscience of US President Joe Biden, who is responsible for aggravating the Ukrainian conflict. Now, the octogenarian president appears to delight in Israeli bombs falling on Gaza’s babies in what is seen as part of his strategy to win next year’s presidential election, where loyalty to Israel matters.
While promoting themselves as human rights champions, Western nations spurn the calls for a ceasefire and endorse Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, where wounded children are being operated on without anaesthetics, because they are in league with Israel in implementing a sinister plan to expel the entire population of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
What is shocking is the impotence of most of the Arab nations. They make powerful speeches and even shed tears for Gaza. But their stance appears to be that letting the Palestinians die in Gaza in their thousands or even millions is better than getting involved in a region-wide war they are not confident of winning. The description that suits them most is what Queen Aisha al-Hurra told her weeping son, Boabdil, the last emir of Islamic Spain, when he lost his kingdom to Castilian forces: “Do not cry as a woman for what you could not defend as a man.”
Gender insensitivities of Aisha’s remark apart, the Arab world is powerless to stop the Gaza carnage. The West Bank will be the next. Egypt is under immense pressure from the US and Israel to settle the 2.3 million Gaza Palestinians in Sinai, a plan President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is seen to be resisting. But for how long can he do this?
This is not the time for a ceasefire, say the ethnic cleansing promoters, the US, the United Kingdom, and their Western allies, giving greenlight to Israel to respond to the October 7 Hamas attack in which 1400 people, mostly Israeli civilians, died. One wonders whether it is due to Islamophobia. Or perhaps the Western leaders, influenced by Sunday-school teaching, believe that Israeli leaders are God’s chosen and therefore cannot do wrong.
Far from it, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which includes Jewish extremists known for their public calls for the annihilation of Palestinians, is acting like a modern-day Pharaoh. Like the Pharaoh of Exodus fame, the Netanyahu government cherishes the killing of Palestinian children and yet quotes scripture to justify its actions.
Amalekites: Yes, that was how Netanyahu described the Palestinians. Who are these Amalekites? They were Canaanites who lived in West Asia. In Samuel 15:3, the Bible commands Saul, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
Like Netanyahu, his predecessors also took advantage of the scripture to justify their massacres of Palestinians; the first was Nakba in 1948, when Zionist terror gangs Hagana, Irgun, and others raided village after village and ethnically cleansed its inhabitants, a quarter of a million Palestinians, after killing hundreds of them in execution style.
In Deuteronomy 20:15–17, it is said: “But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them, namely the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.”
Citing the scripture to justify the murderous expansionist project is Israel’s strategy that helps it win the West’s support for its crimes, which, if any other nation had committed them, could have drawn condemnation and punitive measures. But Israel is different and ‘holy’. After all, the Lord said to Abram in Genesis, “To thy seed will I give this land”.
Patriarch Abram is also known as Abraham, meaning father of many nations. Thus, the holy land cannot exclusively belong to the Zionists. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others can inherit that land. The Ishmaelites, who are Arabs, have more rights to inherit the holy land, for Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn.
Progressive exegetists describe the word ‘seed’ not in terms of bloodline. Whoever fulfils God’s commandment is a seed of Abraham. The Good Samaritan parable in the New Testament explains this correctly. The Samaritans were an outcast Jewish group who had their own version of the Torah. According to Luke 10:29–37, a man going from Jerusalem to Jericho is attacked by robbers who strip him and beat him. A Jewish priest and a Levite (a Jewish religious functionary) pass by without helping him. But a Samaritan stops and cares for him, taking him to an inn where the Samaritan pays for his care.
The moral of the parable is that birth does not make a person the seed of the patriarch, but the good deeds do.
The holy land should be inherited by the righteous seeds of Abraham, whether they are Jews, Christians, or Muslims. Not by the followers of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism and an avowed agnostic. He politicised biblical quotes to sell his expansionist colonial project, a state for European Jews in Palestine. The spiritual Jews, like Neturei Karta, rejected Herzl’s dangerous plan, but the extremists embraced it wholeheartedly and resolved to take it forward by violent means.
Yet the Islamophobic West pays obeisance to the Zionist expansionism that comes with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
WikiLeaks this week posted a document on X, confirming the violent act of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. This is what WikiLeaks said: “Verified document from Israeli Ministry of Intelligence on October 13 suggests forced displacement of Gaza civilians to Egypt would ‘yield positive and long-term strategic results’. The advisory document envisions a three-stage process including the establishment of tent cities in Sinai and opening of a humanitarian corridor, followed by construction of cities in northern Sinai from which there would be no return #Gaza.”
According to the plan, the new Palestine in Sinai would be a demilitarised state with a security buffer zone. It will be dubbed ‘Greater Gaza’. Moreover, the Palestine Authority would be pressurised to give up the right to a state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza is an ongoing project for Eretz Israel or Greater Israel. The plan, which has been put in motion with the West’s backing, envisages a Middle East without Palestine, as was seen on the map Netanyahu outlandishly displayed at the UN General Assembly in September.