Why Blame The Beast For Being A Beast?

Why Blame The Beast Of Prey For Being A Beast Of Prey?

By Fawaz Turki,
Special To Gulf News
Published: January 03, 2009, 00:14
Courtesy Of The Gulf News

Why are we shocked by the unspeakable ferocity of Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza's population? Judged by its blood-soaked and messianically intoxicated history, the Zionist entity in Palestine is simply going about its business the only way it knows how - resort to the wanton slaughter of women and children to promote its goals.

Foremost among these is the goal of deploying superior, deadly firepower to break the Palestinian people's resolve, to press the point that their existence will be recognised only as a subjugated people. And have not Israeli leaders, heirs to the terrorist gangs that roamed Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the Stern, the Urgun and the Haganah, shown us over the years, in Lebanon as in Palestine, that brutality is encoded in their archetype, their culture of revenge and violence?

So why blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey? I say blame those who give the beast wide berth to ravage at will. Blame hypocritical Washington, that on the one hand preaches to us about "human rights" - which clearly include in this case the right of Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, to live decent lives as free, independent human beings - and on the other gives Israel the very weapons it uses to kill and maim, and the very green light to launch wars of aggression.

And the Arab governments should forcefully and meaningfully meet the crisis head on, especially crisis of this magnitude, when it erupts in their world.

You've heard the mantra since the mayhem was unleashed last Saturday: Israel is "defending" itself. But who is defending himself against whom? Gaza is under a foreign occupation, a relentless occupation that controls the territory's airspace, maritime approaches and land crossings.

Gaza's very existence is thus a form of terrorism, irrespective that this terrorism is practised by a state. Palestinians have no other means available to them to resist. So is it the case that irregular armies, such as Hamas, are terrorists, and standing armies are legitimate?

Why is it that an Israeli pilot who, from the air-conditioned cockpit of his F-16, drops a tonne of incendiary bombs that kill dozens of civilians is not a terrorist, but a resistance fighter who fires a crude, homemade rocket at his enemy is dismissed as one?

Standing armies, in particular Israel's army, have been guilty of appalling acts that rival anything committed by "terrorists".

Israel's air force had already mounted 500 sorties against a densely populated strip of land the size of Washington, killing 400 people and wounding 1,600. Many of the injured will succumb in the coming days for lack of medicine and adequate clinical care in Gaza's under-staffed, under-equipped hospitals. This is no less than a crime against humanity.

Delusional

Hamas has promised to fight on, to "light a hellish fire under the invaders' feet". If you ask me, that's delusional. Hamas is not Hezbollah, with its sophisticated stockpiles of weapons and support lines. Hezbollah did light a fire under the Israeli invaders' feet two summers ago in Lebanon. Hamas barely possesses a wet match. Israel will think twice, if ever again, about locking horns with Hezbollah, but Hamas is seen as relatively defenceless, low-hanging fruit, as it were, that could be picked on with impressive ease.

Yet, my guess is that, nevertheless, should Israeli forces enter the Strip, they will encounter a people that will fight them tooth and nail. The bottom line is that when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

Israelis have danced to the same tune for the past 40 years. Their explicit intent is to make life so miserable, so unlivable, for Palestinians that somehow they will just go away, or take it all on the chin and live by the occupier's diktat. And if they don't, you deal Hamas a knockout blow, rendering Gaza as pliant a stretch of occupied territory as the West Bank has become.

But this knockout blow will elude Israel there as the one they set out to deal Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. You don't knock out an idea, which is what a resistance movement embodies at its core.

Mark Regev, the Israeli entity's government spokesman, said recently that Israel wants to "teach Hamas a lesson". Judging by this entity's past misadventures, cunning, callous and criminal as they are, it is doubtful that anyone will agree that Israel is a good teacher. Meanwhile the carnage goes on.

Everybody will emerge a loser in this war. Gazans will lose as they grieve over the death and mutilation of their kith and kin. The Arab governments, which could have made a difference had they taken the initiative but opted not to, will lose as their citizens come to see them as ineffectual, marginal players in the destiny of their own world. And Washington will lose as yet more Arabs hold it complicit in aggression.

Except for Israel, which will have gained something here - the implacable, eternal enmity of the populations of the entire Arab world, the entire Muslim world, the entire Third World, the entire European world and soon, very soon, the entire American world.

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.