The world woke up to searing images of human suffering and cruelty today. The grotesque aftermath of a missile strike. Hundreds of bodies charred beyond recognition lay strewn around the lip of a yawning crater, where once a major multi-storied hospital stood in the heart of Gaza.
The Israelis say it wasn’t one of their rockets. Military spokespeople in Tel Aviv pointed to alleged video evidence to blame the ghastly bombing on a stray missile fired by a cohort of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad. But Hamas and its friendly sponsors in the capitals of various Arab nations quickly rejected what they called “Israeli propaganda”, with many Arab states officially slamming Israel for a “dastardly war crime.”
As always, the truth is caught in the crossfire.
The only one to have stuck his neck out, so it dangles precariously far from the Arab version, is U.S. President Joe Biden. He has given Israel a clean chit, agreeing the rocket didn’t belong to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), but was aimed at Israel by Jihadists and somehow lost its way.
In any event, it was only a matter of time before the media would have been called upon to write the chronicle of a massacre foretold.
Gaza is the world’s most densely populated geography. In the face of Israel’s blitzkrieg aimed at eliminating Hamas, there was bound to be collateral damage to life. But in this wasteland wedge of human suffering, is much of the pain self-inflicted?
It does seem heartless and calculating to be indicting ordinary Palestinians on a day when they have suffered unimaginably. But the truth is Palestinians have allowed themselves to become props in someone else’s perversion. A war, it could be argued, they voted for a decade-and-a-half back, when they elected Hamas in 2007 to determine their destiny.
Didn’t they know that Hamas was dedicated to the complete annihilation of Israel? Of course, they did. Because the Hamas plastered this hateful objective on the preamble of its charter of governance that reads rather balefully: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam invalidates it, just as it invalidated others before it.”
Did they think that Israelis would sit by and quietly watch as Hamas implemented its genocidal agenda? The Abrahamic tradition mandates revenge through the invocation of an “eye for an eye.”
If electing a terror group wasn’t bad enough, Palestinians have also never condemned the excesses committed by Hamas upon innocent Israeli citizens. If anything, they have allowed Hamas to enlist them in various stratagems to murder Israelis.
Many say the Palestinians don’t have a choice. That, since its election, Hamas has metamorphosed into a tyrannical organisation that cruelly crushes dissent and that under the circumstances dissenting Gazans would have stood no chance.
But with Hamas losing its military teeth, the Palestinians have a choice. What prevents them from accepting Israel’s appeals to give up Hamas terrorists or even identify locations where hostages are being held?
We don’t know. But what we do know is that it is profoundly diabolic for people to put a gun to their own heads and expect to negotiate a just solution.
And it is just as diabolic on the part of Arab allies to Palestine to be shedding tears for their embattled brethren. History tells us that these Middle-Eastern powers have persecuted Palestinians when they’ve not entirely abandoned them.
Saudi Arabia, for example, has banned imams in mosques from praying for Palestinians. In 2014, the kingdom’s Grand Mufti, Abdul Aziz Al Ash-Sheikh, reportedly claimed that pro-Palestinian demonstrations were “just demagogic actions.” From 2012, Syrian security forces have repeatedly bombed, starved and besieged Sunni Palestinian refugees living on the outskirts of Damascus. Qatar shelters the Hamas leadership that uses Doha’s moral and monetary backing to perpetuate its unholy rule over Gaza. Egypt polices the only escape route that Palestinians can use to get out of Gaza. That border-crossing has remained shut for decades altogether. In Lebanon, some 400,000 Palestinian refugees have been left to languish in refugee camps, where the conditions are nothing short of horrific. They are barred from working in the public sector, from using state medical and education facilities and even from buying property.
So maybe it’s time for the Palestinians to reject Hamas and return to a more pacifist path, which would win them the moral high ground and leave Israel looking for new solutions to one of the world’s most vexing political problems.
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