21 October 2024 12:21 am Views - 506
Atrocities are reported almost daily from northern Gaza
Photo The Hindu
In the latest atrocities reported from Gaza, a school which was turned into a hospital was attacked where images showed patients with cannulas being burnt alive; it made me think of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and all those Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe where millions of European Jews were incinerated
Anne Ranasinghe, German-born Sri Lankan poet who survived the Holocaust, died a few years ago; but, if she were around today, I can see her protesting strongly about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians
Following the US-led coalition of Iraq, this semblance of sanity disappeared. Some would argue that Saddam Hussein initiated the new world chapter of war and insanity by his invasion of Kuwait. But the Bush-Blair team wasn’t happy simply with driving Saddam Hussein and his army back to Iraq. They wanted to show everyone who’s boss and change the world order.
Everyone knows what happened next. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant with two maniacal, sadistic sons, but he was secular and kept the Islamic radicals out of the region. The US-led coalition bombed Iraq into rubble, killed thousands of civilians including children, and unnecessarily disbanded the Iraqi army after occupation.
These disgruntled, out of work men started an underground war against the occupiers, unleashing a hornet’s nest. When that was over, a whirlwind called Daesh (Islamic State) materialised like an evil Genie from nowhere, capturing half of Iraq in weeks and causing three long years of misery to millions while committing unspeakable atrocities (remember prisoners being beheaded and that captured Jordanian pilot being burnt alive?) before being finally driven out in another frenzy of blood-letting. This wave of horror spread far beyond the Middle East into Europe, with journalists being killed for criticising radical Islam or the Prophet, and lorries ploughing into crowds.
That too, subsided slowly, and the madness that rules the world seemed to be acquiring a method again when, just as Saddam Hussein gave the Bush-Blair team an excuse to change the existing world order, Hamas gave Israeli leaders the excuse it needed to turn the long-awaited ‘Greater Israel’ map into reality by making a cross-border raid into Israel more than a year ago.
During that raid, Hamas committed a number of atrocities. But these are now dwarfed by the number of atrocities committed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) after it moved into Gaza, ostensibly to drive out Hamas, the actual goal being to drive out all Palestinians in this relentless drive to create Greater Israel.
Atrocities are reported almost daily from northern Gaza. In the latest (this may well be overtaken by something even more horrible by the time this column appears in print) was when a school turned into a hospital was attacked. Social media images show patients with cannulas attached to their hands getting burnt alive in tents.
It made me think of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and all those Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe where millions of European Jews were incinerated. That was deliberate – people selected according to a list, lined up, and told they were going to be showered for a medical check up or given some other excuse, and then sent in batches to die horribly in the gas chambers. The bodies were quickly incinerated by teams of Jewish prisoners in ovens. It was slaughter on an industrial scale.
This Holocaust produced a lot of sympathy for Jews, including Israel and its population, worldwide. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel has squandered it. He and his political pals are now accused of genocide.
Israel denies this. It has not admitted to committing any war crimes or atrocities since this war began. But it’s hard to think what else this attack on a hospital can be called. In a way, the Nazis were more honest about their dirty work. From the day Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ was published, the ‘Final Solution’ (Germany for Aryan Germans, excluding the Jews) was very clear. The world did not take notice. Even after the war, there were claims that the Holocaust never happened.
In the same way, except for a few dissenting voices such as outspoken Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, most Israelis pretend that atrocities do not happen in Gaza. This denial of reality is very dangerous for a country which is regarded as a developed nation. The prevailing wisdom is that, if forty two thousand Palestinians including at least 15,000 children have been killed in one year, then that’s because Hamas uses them as shelter. After all, Hamas started this war, didn’t they? Such voices conveniently forget that Hamas wreaked vengeance on settlements built illegally on Palestinian land for the most part.
Anne Ranasinghe, German-born Sri Lankan poet, survived the Holocaust only because she was schooling in England when World War II started. Her whole family was killed by the Nazis, by a method even more gruesome than the gas chambers. They were killed by toxic gas fumes from a fast-revving lorry engine. Others were put in a ditch. The lucky ones were shot, while others were covered with lime and water to die a horrible death.
I couldn’t help thinking about that when looking at those burning tents in Gaza. There is no real difference, since Greater Israel too, looks like a Final Solution. The only difference is that Israeli leaders haven’t made the extermination of Palestinians an official doctrine in print, so that they can’t be indicted as war criminals, which is what happened to the Nazis at Nuremberg after the war. Very clever.
Anne Ranasinghe died a few years ago. But, if she were around today, I can see her protesting strongly about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. When she went back to Germany after the war, she found a German family in her home. It has been expropriated. Today, she would have been sympathetic to those Palestinians whose homes have been destroyed in this brutal war, whose land has been forcibly taken by Israeli settlers. She would have been appalled by images of those incinerated patients. She would have made a telling, harrowing protest in verse.
Such protests are made all over the world – in speeches, song, prose or verse – but they fall on deaf ears.